Convenience maximalism and robot lawyers
Congratulations on finding Six Signals among all your Cyber Monday emails! In this issue we find conference calls as cultural connectors, an update on the erosion of privacy in public spaces, and robots who read legalese and write jokes.
— Alexis & Matt
1: The destructive art of unbundling
This stunningly incisive piece by Drew Austin on unbundling as a core tactic of tech companies is this week’s must-read. The idea of “disruption” in tech is largely based on the strategy of unbundling: “Inefficient bundles (newspapers, cable TV, shopping malls) are disaggregated by companies that serve consumers better by letting them choose the features they want as stand-alone products, unencumbered of their former baggage.” The rationale for unbundling is began as a way to better serve people’s needs, to offer services freed from the no-longer-necessary infrastructure constraints that technology has obviated.
However, the tech industry has moved beyond unbundling as a method of delivering value to consumers and started to unbundle services in a way that is destructive for everyone except for the company extracting the value from it. Austin uses the disaggregation of the restaurant industry — from meal delivery to ghost kitchens — as an example of this trend. We recommend reading this whole article if you want to really understand some of the underlying issues in tech today. Here’s our favorite excerpt:
“Reducing the world’s accumulated complexity — businesses, institutions, or cities — to sets of discrete tasks or features requires viewing the world as a computer does: quantifying value, weighing costs against benefits, and disregarding ambiguity. As if the messy analog world was code itself, unbundling frames each desirable feature of the world as an independent module that can operate anywhere without a loss of performance quality. The process rests on a faith that technology can isolate the true value of anything useful, removing it from its context without any loss of utility or desirability.”
No goods or services are stand-alone
2: Conference call as endless radio show
At Ethical Futures Lab, we love seeing ways that people use technology in creative and unexpected ways, and this week brings a great story in that vein. The Hmong, an ethnic group from Southeast Asia, have been using free conference call services to create the 2010’s equivalent of pirate radio stations. The coordination around these stations is impressive; each is usually run by someone responsible for programming, recruiting DJs, scheduling the hour blocks, and generally maintaining the experience.
For Hmong living in the US these services have created a cultural connection in a small and diffuse population. There are just under 300,000 Hmong living in the US, and for some, possible to go for days without running into another Hmong person. Conducted in the Hmong language, these stations help callers mourn friends and family, plan for holidays, and share stories.
Like other information platforms, Hmong radio is also prone to disinformation, whether conspiracy theories, false health information, or financial scams. More importantly, however, these stations give members of a small but vibrant culture the opportunity to connect and debate the future of their society.
How the Hmong diaspora uses the world’s most boring technology to make something weird and wonderful
The Asian diaspora is reimagining the conference call line as a radio show for Hmong people, by Hmong people. The Verge explores how these “stations” are run, and talks to the DJs who own them.
3: Robot lawyers
For a couple of years now, DoNotPay, which describes itself as the “world’s first robot lawyer”, has been helping people dispute parking tickets and cancel subscriptions. Now DoNotPay is launching a service called DoNotSign, a new tool that uses machine learning to help users understand license agreements. It highlights important clauses in agreements that you might want to know about, and also helps you to discover any rights you might be owed by these contracts. The impetus for creating the service was when DoNotPay’s founder found himself locked into a gym membership that was impossible to cancel, but discovered a loophole in the contract that helped him find a way out. Given the frequency with which we all have to sign license agreements — and, let’s face it, how infrequently any of us read them — this seems like an opportune space for machine intervention.
This ‘robot lawyer’ can take the mystery out of license agreements
“Robot lawyer” startup DoNotPay is launching a new tool to help customers understand license agreements.
4: Crowdsourced surveillance, brought to you by Amazon
Amazon’s Ring doorbell system is back in the news, and once again, for plans to alter the meaning of privacy in our communities. We’d previously written about Amazon’s relationships with local police departments (see #4, “Maybe use the side door”) to encourage more installations of these connected cameras with lax oversight on how that footage is shared.
Now comes reporting from The Intercept that Amazon has been planning several new features, based primarily on facial recognition technology, to create watch lists of suspicious people and notify neighbors when such people are identified. These documents do not describe a process by which someone is labeled as suspicious, but do hint at connections with law enforcement databases and crowd-sourced “warnings” sent by individual users.
As we’ve seen with the TSA’s travel watch lists, it can be difficult (if not impossible) to know if you have been added to such a list, and harder still to get removed. That difficulty increases significantly when the list is maintained by a corporation without many data disclosure requirements. Further, Ring provides no way to opt out of this data collection, without so much as a warning sign that a camera might be capturing your face. (The UK, arguably one of the most prolific users of CCTV technology, requires a warning sign be placed at eye level wherever a camera is in use.) Without clear protections and a process to appeal one’s labeling in their databases, these systems will quickly codify homeowners’ fears and law enforcement’s biases into unquestioned systems of control.
Amazon’s Ring Planned Neighborhood “Watch Lists” Built on Facial Recognition
Documents hint the data could be shared with police, but Ring denies the features are in use or development.
5: Billboards as digital sensors
Firefly, the company that provides portable advertising screens to ride-sharing drivers, recently announced that their new screens can also act as data-collecting sensors. Available in five major cities, Firefly allows Uber and Lyft drivers to earn extra money (approximately $300/month) by hawking advertisements on top of their vehicles. The new screens can not only display ads, but can also sense temperature and pollution as well as track the acceleration and braking patterns of drivers. The CityLab article below includes a number of interesting quotes from Firefly executives speculating about the potential use of these (and more) sensors, from helping cities combat pollution and traffic congestion to helping police officers figure out where gunshots originated. The speculation highlights that they seem to be taking a typical “let’s collect all the data first and then figure out what to do with it” approach. As Rachel Thomas of the Center for Data Ethics says in the article: “If you start with the problem of what’s the best way to solve traffic congestion, you’re going to get to another answer [than strapping a screen to an Uber].”
The Ad Screens on Ride-Hail Cars Collect Data, Too
A startup called Firefly puts sensor-equipped advertising screens on top of Uber and Lyft vehicles. Now they do more than marketing: They collect data.
6: Writers vs. AI (it's a joke, for now)
This year’s Cards Against Humanity gimmick for Black Friday is, somewhat surprisingly, pretty thoughtful. They’ve pitted human writers against an AI to write the funniest prompts for their game. According to their site, if the humans win they get fat bonuses; if they lose, they’ll be fired.
Before we get too spun up here, CAH is notorious for pointed takes on Black Friday, skewering the consumerism and commerciality of the day. (In 2015, their store allowed you to spend $5 to purchase nothing.) This trope is real for some workers, however, and this stunt can draw attention to the increased automation of jobs and the precarity of knowledge work.
'Cards Against Humanity' stunt has writers battling a comedy AI for their jobs
Writers for ‘Cards Against Humanity’ are competing against an AI to see which side can come up with the best and funniest cards for Black Friday.
One hackable thing: IoT DRM
My dad showed me how his Keurig has what is basically DRM and I immediately thought of @internetofshit. He circumvents it by literarily taking a used lid and placing it over the imposter. https://t.co/nm8WWJqgEF
Six Signals: Emerging futures, 6 links at a time.
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