Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
#121    "You can already create phony audio if you have 20 minutes
of real audio to work from.  None of this technology is flawless
yet, but in
the current polarized political environment, it will work well
enough to be a problem."

Yup...one of the reasons we teach seniors not to answer and respond
to robo calls...they only need a few snippets of force fed
responses, and it's "Bob's your Uncle".
  

    
To David Gray, #89

I like to avoid the word "truth" in the is discussion, as it can
have a moral component.  How about "fact" as an alternative?  

I am so thankful for journalists today.  I wish all editors were as
conscientious.  
  

    
To Ted, re: #88

"I think that Facebook is more like a cult or religion than a
government.  It connects people through their emotions, which is
very powerful.  It cuts across borders and languages, reducing the
ability of any constituency to place limits on it."

Yes, if they wish to remodel they will have to lose the cargo cult
of personality. That can be tough for some of these Silicon
Oligarchs.
  

    
To Gary and Virtual Sea Monkey, #92 and 93

Medium has some wonderful essays on it.  Like a newspaper, the great
stuff is sometimes hidden in a sea of vanity pieces.  That doesn't
bother me, as people I trust find good things and share them, which
means I don't have to plow through Medium myself.  
  

    
to Craig, #96.

I strongly agree that an understanding of addiction is really
important to this discussion.  FB (and other ad-driven internet
platforms) prey on instinctive human behaviors to create
psychological addiction.  There are ten or twelve triggers that they
exploit to get users in an emotional state that increases engagement
and makes ads more valuable.  The entire user experience is
programmed to push emotional buttons FOR PROFIT.  There is no one
inside FB with authority who is telling the team, "enough."  I hope
that Unilever's message -- if you keep harming our customers, we
won't advertise -- will be picked up by other advertisers.  
  

    
I need to go to work.

I will be back this evening to respond to whatever questions or
ideas you guys raise.

Thank you for a wonderful conversation.

Roger
  

    
Roger, I think Facebook is morphing into a Medieval marketplace --
stalls, jugglers, magicians, etc. And I have the choice of mixing
and mingling or just walking on by to the next booth. Very much like
life I see around me here in Phoenix...strip mall after strip mall,
and then the big malls...do I make a short, quick trip for a single
item or should I wait and go once a week to get it all done in a one
stop shopping setting? 
  

    
How we spend our time online is not all that different from how we
spend it on the ground...it is just that cyberspace is more easily
addictive to grabbing our headspace and time.

This is all to say that some of this is on us as users...we have to
educate ourselves and get some digital skills as well as discipline
ourselves to the amount of time and places we spend online. I don't
fault FB from the standpoint of my "time suck". And, like
Washington, D.C., I don't expect them to do all that much for me. 

It is still the mix of the Cathedral and the Bazaar and where I
choose to spend my time and energy - online and in my community.
And, tribalism, as Andrew and others point out is a common
denominator...something to be recognized and reckoned with.

What I do fault FB, and the rest of the stacks for, is their
ruthless economic and algorithmic model. They purposelessly herd the
sheep with feed back loops and are intrusive to every aspect of
online behavior. So I fault them for most excellent use of all the
data at their disposal and fault them for a most excellent
capitalistic model. It is free, and always will be...at the expense
of me. The nature of the beast.

Aargh! Can this kind of model all the sudden become benign? Maybe,
they are supposedly trying. I kind of think this is all reflective
of us as a society...we ARE tribal to the point where Washington has
become a quagmire. 

What unnerves me about FB is the amount of power it has to social
engineer. At a time when we need to become more open, agile and
flexible FB seems to be reinforcing just the opposite values. And,
social media in general seems to be easily gamed by more evil
players.

There be dragons. Lions, and tigers and bears, oh my...That's life
in the big city...I really don't want Big Brother in any set of
clothes - Federal, State, or Social. We have had to add 'Social' now
as a new category....it's all new, so growing pains are to be
expected.

Inherent in our American values is the fundamental starting point of
the Individual first and sacred (however you wish to define that).
It is not my way or the highway, but it IS my way, it is YOUR
way....I'm cool with that....where it gets tough is when we have to
determine what is OUR way.  
  

    
And to all you lurkers...feel free to jump in the water and comment
or ask a question.

inkwell@well.com
  

    
Appreciate seeing your individual addressed responses <rmcnamee>
  

    
"There is no one
inside FB with authority who is telling the team, "enough."  I hope
that Unilever's message -- if you keep harming our customers, we
won't advertise -- will be picked up by other advertisers."

And that's happening now....Walmart, Dick's, and soon, hopefully,
Cabella's...policing themselves and taking an ethical stand....bound
to increase sales 
  

    
to Mike Godwin, #100

I have never used the term walled garden in reference to FB or any
other internet platform of the current generation.  

re: isn't this just another new platform?  This is precisely what I
thought until the evidence of addiction and its consequences became
inescapable.  Relative to FB, the combination of an advertising
model with 2.1 billion personalized Truman Shows on the ubiquitous
smartphone is wildly more engaging than any previous platform ...
and the ads have unprecedented effectiveness.  Giving everyone a
personalized channel on a ubiquitous device would not necessarily be
a problem, except that social networks reveal the emotional state
and triggers of each user.  The ad model creates perverse incentives
... to use those emotional triggers to increase engagement to make
ads more valuable.  The most valuable triggers are those that appeal
to fear and anger.  

In the context of an election, this creates a serious problem:
campaigns based on fear and anger have a huge advantage over those
that are unemotional or positive.  The relative advantage appears to
be between 10x and 20x.  Effectively, this is encourages the worst
kind of political speech.
  

    
To Ted, #107

I believe FB can be fixed, but only by changing the business from
advertising to subscriptions.  This would allow them to abandon the
tech that causes addiction and leaves users vulnerable to bad
actors, like the Russians.  You have to change the incentives.  

FB could also grow by monetizing Marketplace and Messenger's money
transfer business.  
  

    
I am a fan of letting the market determine the design and
model....but accept sometimes a good design and/or model finds or
creates a market...that gets scarier now with the power of Bad
RoBOTS. 

But, yes, I agree, subscriptions are the solution. Just don't know
if FB can generate the kind of money they would need to offset
current model...
  

    
I wonder if some kind of 'pivot' strategy would work....allow users
to opt in to a pay model which offers certain protections and tools
- bells and whistles. And then see if it increases revenue to the
point that they could steer the ship in a new direction?
  

    
what would happen if FB had to pay us for our information? In
addition to all the other problems, it just seems unjust for them to
monetize it when we can't. (And I mean this we in the abstract. I'm
not on FB, for reasons that this discussion makes all too obvious.)

Also, can't the system be monkey-wrenched? Some way of creating so
much noise that the algorithms can't make sense of it? 
  

    

Roger wrote:

> people I trust find good things and share them, which means I don't have to
> plow through Medium myself.

That is another of the things that makes The WELL so valiuable to the likes
of me: it's an information nexus filtered by lots of smart people - people I
know. I rarely browese the NYT for stories ( although I am a paid
subscriber), because I get plenty of links here (and on FB, to be sure).

And I have made myself one of those information agents, curating links
(gathered from the WELL and elsewhere).

I encourage people to validate their sourcesand beg people not to propagate
bullshit.
  

    
#141 It's kind of the old EULA issue with Gamers, we lost those
rights when we accepted "free, and it always will be"...that's the
price of entry.

There is a workaround tho...export your history to your own
drive....then you can post it anywhere you like and edit it.
  

    
My biggest take away from all of this conversation, so far, is that
it is my stream, and I need to keep the pollutants out of it. 
Slashdot, Github, et. al, tools please!!!
  

    
David's post pretty much sums up the role of the Well for me and my
approach to the likes of NYT and WaPo (I subscribe to both). And
when it comes to science reporting I nearly always try to dig up the
journal(s) the stories are based upon. Peer reviewed journals, while
not perfect, are a relative safe haven in this era. Old fashioned
aspects like good library access matter. Science journals cannot
substitute for news of course, but provide information that endures
past many news cycles. 

For the record I will never, ever have a FB account.
  

    
Roger writes:

"This is precisely what I
thought until the evidence of addiction and its consequences became
inescapable."

Do you think reading is an addiction? Certainly the pleasures of
reading things one likes generate changes in one's brain. And the
newspapers I subscribe to are supported mainly by
advertising--perhaps the Times and Post should avoid advertising
(which, after all, is designed to get my attention and keep me
coming back) and operate on a pure subscription model?

Roger writes:

> people I trust find good things and share them, which means I
don't have to
> plow through Medium myself.

I trust people all over the place to do this. Including people on
Facebook.

I guess I'm just startled at the presumption that no adult would
ever willingly seek out or expose herself to content she disagrees
with. That's the kind of thing a zillionaire might say, I guess
(because when you're insulated by money you have the freedom to see
how everyone else is a victim of information cocoons) but out here
in the streets I find lots of people talking about lots of things,
engaging in disagreements, including *civil* disagreements, and not
just seeking affirmation or validation. 

Roger writes: "Relative to FB, the combination of an advertising
model with 2.1 billion personalized Truman Shows on the ubiquitous
smartphone is wildly more engaging than any previous platform ...
and the ads have unprecedented effectiveness."

There's a lot to make fun of here--the presumption that 2.1 billion
FB users are just creating "personalized Truman Shows," for example.
Only someone who fancies himself part of an elite would presume to
draw that conclusion about the hoi polloi. But let me focus instead
on the second part--the bit about the ads with "unprecedented
effectiveness." Here the idea is, obviously, that advertising is
better when it's less effective. Well, you know, maybe that's true.
But advertising has played a central role in Western commerce for at
least a couple of centuries, and in world commerce for at least a
century, and the idea that we need to make advertising less
effective is, I think fairly clearly, a criticism of capitalism
generally. Now, capitalism *may very well deserve that sort of
criticism*, but it seems like an odd critique coming from someone
who's already profited immensely from it. And it also seems odd that
it's focused particularly on social media when, as we have the
helpful example of Vance Packard's THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS to remind
us, we've been theoretically aware of the manipulations of
advertising for all of this century and at least half of the
previous one. If you're going to go after commercialism and
capitalism and advertising, you need to go big--you can't just say
that advertising suddenly became a threat to us because it's more
clearly targeted to us based on our actual interests. 

As for the addictiveness of smartphone-enhanced social media, I
can't help thinking that every single would-be media critic who
thinks Facebook is squashing our brains hasn't learned how to turn
off FB and Twitter notifications on their iPhones. 

Honestly, I liked it better when suddenly-enlightened media critics
focused on comic books or TV (two media that demonstrably have grown
more sophisticated and complex over a couple of generations).
They're descendants of the Puritans who occasionally closed the
Elizabethan theaters. But the idea that we're too addictively
connected to one another, that we don't have the wisdom to turn off
intrusive notifications, that we choose only to hear from people we
agree with is one of the most elitist and anti-democratic notions to
surface in these days of social-media moral panic.
  

    
https://www.amazon.com/Silo-Effect-Expertise-Breaking-Barriers/dp/1451644744

“Highly intelligent, enjoyable, and enlivened by a string of vivid
case studies….The Silo Effect is also genuinely important, because
Tett’s prescription for curing the pathological silo-isation of
business and government is refreshingly unorthodox and, in my view,
convincing” (Financial Times). This is “an enjoyable call to action
for better integration within organizations” (Publishers Weekly).

Walled Gardens:
https://www.techopedia.com/definition/2541/walled-garden-technology
  

    
To Gary Greenberg, #141

I am very focused on this issue of personal privacy and data rights.

The platforms offer a "free" service in exchange for your data, then
they assert ownership forever.  It is past time to reconsider this.

In the US, there is no law to protect consumer privacy or data
rights.  The recent news about what platforms are doing is creating
some interest in the topic in Washington, but so far the interest is
only on the Democratic side of the aisle.

My view is that there should be at least a statute of limitations on
how long platforms may use data, after which there must be a
renegotiation.  A second idea is characterize the use/platform
relationship as a lease of data.  I would also like to see data
portability, such that consumers can port their social graph from
any platform to any other.  We are in the earliest stages of getting
these policy ideas into the conversation.  

Europe has a new law -- Global Data Protection Regulation -- going
into effect in May that will restore consumer rights with respect to
privacy and personal data.  Check it out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation
  

    
To Ted, #133

For me, one of the problems is that life online is different from
life in the real world.  In the online environment, people are free
to do things that are not socially (or legally) permissible in the
real world.  As a result, the public square of the online world has
been overrun by bullies.  The scale of online is so great that
online bullying is overflowing into real life. It is now damaging
democracy.

There was a time when I was intensely optimistic about the public
square online. It is hard to be optimistic today.
  

    
to Mike Godwin, #146

I appreciate your taking the time to respond.  That said, it appears
you misunderstand me. 

I have no interest in telling people how to live or what products to
use.  My focus is on two things: protecting the innocent (e.g.,
children) from technology that harms their emotion development and
protecting democracy from interference.  I do not believe that tech
companies should have the right to undermine public health and
democracy in the pursuit of profits.

If you disagree, so be it.