Bots we listen to, people we ignore, & spaces to play
Our promise to you this week: as little COVID-19 discussion as we could manage, since we’re sure you’ve had your fill. Instead, we ponder our mediated interactions with each other, how viruses could also power our tech, and when to rethink preconceptions of what a house or a car can do.
— Alexis & Matt
1: On the internet, nobody knows you're a person
In many of our issues, we have wrestled, in one way or another, with the question “What does it mean to be a person on the Internet?” This week we encountered a few different stories that brought this question to the fore in explicit ways:
First, we have Ian Bogost’s essay in The Atlantic. You should absolutely read the whole thing, but in short, it forces the reader to consider all the interactions they have with real and not-real people, on and offline. In some cases, we are inundated with a cacophony of bots and brands, stealing our attention from friends or colleagues. Sometimes the platforms we use make it difficult to even perceive who is real and who isn’t (and sometimes that distinction isn’t the most important one). But in other situations, we engage with apps that obscure real people, without whom the experiences we rely on wouldn’t exist. From Amazon to Uber to Instacart, the services we use increasingly make the workers who perform the labor invisible. Who is visible, who is real, and how do the interfaces we use frame our experience of those relationships?
If the Internet is going to be filled with bots, why not use them to feel better about yourself? Botnet is a busy-box of a “social network”, a self-contained experience where any post you make is immediately flooded with supportive responses, positive feedback, and weirdly awkward praise, all from bot accounts. Your posts aren’t shared with other people, and (according to the service’s privacy policy) aren’t mined for any information, so the service promises to be a place to share your deepest secrets and bask in the validation.
If you have an army of fake people making you feel great about yourself, why bother interacting with anything that takes away from that? Richard Godwin wrote in The Guardian last summer about Uber’s trial of a “Quiet preferred” feature which would alert your driver that you preferred not to have a conversation. He draws parallels to social networks like Twitter and Instagram, whose “mute” features allow you to stop hearing from someone without alerting them that you’ve shut them out. In both cases, technologies are giving us the option to block out information that we find annoying, objectionable, or just when we’d prefer quiet.
In all of these stories, we see how visibility and respect butt up against comfort and safety, and how technology and commerce are increasingly mediating that conflict. What will our discourse sound like if all speech is paid, and only those with money can be heard? What does it say about us when we prefer to hear from automated sycophants over human critics? What does it mean to engage in a society when you can freely silence other members of it?
How to Generate Infinite Fake Humans
What a website that generates infinite fake humans tells us about modern life
2: FigmaTown, and pockets of internet joy
Over the course of the past couple of decades, the overall tone of the internet has shifted dramatically, from one of optimism and creativity to one of distrust and exploitation. Some of this transformation is inevitable: early technologies are new frontiers for exploration while mature ones (in a capitalist economy) become more narrow, with a few big players who have figured out how to extract value from the system.
But there’s still room for play, and we’re always excited to see those cracks where the OG internet weirdness can shine through. A few days ago, @noturswamp tweeted this:
so since everyone is wfh.... anyone want to build a town in Figma and hangout Online???
For those unfamiliar, Figma is browser-based design software that allows for real-time collaboration. Within 24 hours, the empty Figma file she had created was filled (and continues to be expanded) with a bonkers internet town, replete with baroque graphics, jokes, messages, animals, and more. It was the happiest thing we had seen on the internet in a long time. There’s even a FigmaTown Discord server for chatting about the town! What FigmaTown most reminds me of is the holiday party John Maeda put on for our design team at Automattic in 2018. The team consisted of about 80 folks who were fully distributed across many states and countries, so we had to approach a holiday party in a slightly different way. Instead of meeting up in person, we poured our own drinks, got together on a Zoom call, John DJ-ed the music, and we used an Invision Freehand board to visually create a party in a completely improvisational way. You can get a glimpse of the experience here.
It’s fascinating to see how some of the newer tools we have for remote collaboration at work are spawning a new wave of the kind of creativity we saw with the early web. Slack, Figma, and more have become not just productivity tools, but spaces for experimentation and we can’t wait to see how they evolve for these purposes.
WFH Town!
3: The lost promise of the "sharing economy"
Jay Owens’s latest opinion piece in The Guardian tackles several key themes at once, beginning with the increasing commercialization and standardization of what began as a collective vision. Airbnb began as a way for real people to earn money from their unused space while meeting new people, and for travelers to share space with locals when visiting new places. The increased scale and commercialization of these concepts has, instead, led to a generic (or even dangerous) experience at many of Airbnb’s listings and an increased distance between traveler and host. Airbnb is now filled with entrepreneurs packaging dozens of listings as “authentic” places to stay, when they may in fact be “Airbnb landlords” leasing out entire apartment blocks for profit. This has also had blowback effects on communities, where these fake-real apartments for transient visitors have an impact on the quality of life in neighborhoods.
Jay also touches on a thread we pluck quite a lot, namely the death of the hobby as free time becomes optimized.
“ ‘Does my home really need a living room or could I Airbnb it for £50 a night? Do I really need a weekend or could I do some extra work on Fiverr or Deliveroo?’ It financialises our souls.”
Underlying these themes is a tension inherent in all kinds of physical/digital interactions: the vast differences in the cycles of innovation online and offline. Apps, sites and digital experiences can be tweaked and optimized multiple times a day, and personalized for a single user’s needs. When these digital services are used to mediate the built environment, they must contend with a far more static innovation cycle. If increased sharing and flexibility of space is a goal, services like Airbnb provide a new interaction layer over existing spaces that can help improve our experiences of those spaces, but real change won’t come until we rethink how we live and build new spaces accordingly.
AirBnb hasn’t lived up to its utopian claims
Housing doesn’t fit the way people live any more – but the current models of sharing are not working
4: Non-conformist mobility objects
We’ve written before about the ways that cars may evolve, and how technological advances have the potential to reshape our assumptions about these objects. We’ve looked at how self-driving capabilities create the opportunity to think of cars simply as “spaces that happen to be mobile”, which opens up many new possibilities for both design and function.
The growing viability of electric vehicles is yet another avenue for innovation and creative design, as evidenced by the recent launch of the Ami, a tiny electric vehicle from Citroën. It’s a tiny two-seater whose top speed is about 28 mph and costs approximately $6,000. To keep prices low, the Ami was designed with a rigorously minimalist approach: It uses as many duplicate parts as possible, so the two doors are identical as are the front and back body. (Yes, this means the doors open in opposite directions!) It also has almost no displays on the dashboard, instead relying heavily on paired smartphones to display common heads-up data like driving range and navigation.
Oh, and please don’t call it a car. The automaker instead refers to it as a “non-conformist mobility object”, a move which reflects how the world of automobiles is starting to expand and fragment into categories we can’t even anticipate yet. The coming years are likely to see an explosion of vehicles in this in-between space of personal mobility that’s not-quite-a-car, as well as strange new kinds of mobile spaces that may be made possible by self-driving technologies.
Citroën unveils the Ami, a super-cheap electric car you can buy for $6,600
French automaker Citroën has unveiled the Ami, a tiny electric car that’s designed from the outset to be as cheap as possible.
5: Blurring lines between organisms and technology
For years now, scientist Angela Belcher has been working with viruses to build batteries. Her technique is straightforward enough: adjust the DNA of a virus such that it attracts certain chemical compounds, and string those viruses together into tiny strands of metals that act as electrodes. While this technique requires more refinement to work at industrial scales, it already is a significant improvement over current techniques. In addition to creating smaller and more efficient devices, it’s also far more environmentally friendly.
For decades, pharmaceutical companies have used engineered bacteria to create medicines and other organic compounds. (Famously, most insulin is created from bacteria that have had human DNA implanted in them.) In a previous issue, we covered artificial intelligence-driven innovation in antibiotics, where diseases and their cures could be simulated in silico. What emerges is a compelling symbiosis: computation, powered by viruses, simulating and inventing new microscopic lifeforms. It’s not farfetched to imagine an AI, powered by viruses, improving on the life that powers it.
The Next Generation of Batteries Could Be Built by Viruses
Angela Belcher found a way to turn nature’s zombies into a tiny assembly line. But creating a new power cell might be just the beginning.
6: Toasters for Trump
We’ve all heard a lot about election interference on the internet, primarily in the context of social media, disinformation, and voting machine security. But in this article, Laura DeNardis explores how internet-connected appliances could be used to hack elections, often in unexpected ways. The more straightforward methods include some strategies we’ve already seen, like hijacking IoT devices to perform distributed denial of service attacks and block access to specific websites. This could be used to take down candidate’s sites or government sites that provide voting information. But the more oblique strategies described here are surprising. A number of IoT hacks could be used to suppress voter turnout, from disrupting power systems to generating false weather or traffic reports that keep people from the polls. Hacked alarm systems or water systems in people’s homes could create “politically micro-targeted local emergencies” in swing districts, interference that would be much more difficult to detect or track than direct attacks on voting machines or tally systems.
“It is not necessary to hack into voting systems themselves but merely co-opt internet-connected objects to attack political information sites, stop people from voting, or exploit the intimate personal data these devices capture to manipulate voters.”
One "kids are the ultimate hackers" thing
The word from Wuhan https://t.co/4R5Fwwd26Z https://t.co/pi5iDwRUsX
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