Hacking trademarks, antibiotics, and the future itself
This issue covers a LOT of ground, as we consider making tech for our own purposes, unpronounceable brands emblazoned on our housewares, and the possibility of virtual strikes. Each is another example of code affecting our lived environment in new and weird ways.
If you work in technology, we’d also encourage you to complete this tech ethics survey, part of a study about ethics awareness being conducted by researchers at Fordham University. We’re not affiliated with the project but thought it compelling enough to share.
— Alexis & Matt
1: I'm still not sure how to pronounce "Adidas"...
For years now, digital economies of scale have been transforming how business works, but the unexpected consequences of those transformations continue to get weirder and weirder. On one hand, digital infrastructure has leveled the playing field for entrepreneurs in radical ways. Software can be developed, shipped, and maintained for dramatically low costs using cloud servers and open source technologies. Physical objects are increasingly following suit, as on-demand manufacturing becomes more widely accessible. The latter has led to an influx of pseudo-products — algorithmically generated versions of objects that don’t actually exist until someone buys them. Tim Maly characterized this landscape several years ago as “Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel twisted through the logic of SEO and commerce”.
This week, The New York Times described how this weird commerce landscape has evolved from pseudo-products to pseudo-brands. These brands, with meaningless names like Pvendor, RIVMOUNT, FRETREE and MAJCF, often operate out of Shenzhen and utilize Amazon as a channel for selling to international customers. For commodity goods, or products where there’s little brand loyalty, the brand is simply a lightweight container — the fact that it’s on Amazon, has good reviews, and will arrive at your house in 48 hours is more important than name recognition. This means that pseudo-brands can be spun up or discarded easily and can move quickly to capitalize on consumer trends. A pseudo-brand might jump on the massage-gun bandwagon until the market is saturated, and then move on to selling a different product, perhaps even under a different brand name. As we forecast in our final issue of 2019, one of the growing trends for 2020 is “the playground between fake and real”, and this just one of many ways we will continue to see that line become increasingly blurred.
All Your Favorite Brands, From BSTOEM to ZGGCD
How Amazon is causing us to drown in trademarks.
2: How do you fix a problem you can't see?
Zeynep Tufekci has written a great analysis of what may have gone wrong in China’s response to the early days of the coronavirus (now #COVID19). While it’s natural to assume that a widespread network of surveillance technology would help a central government acquire all kinds of intelligence signals, she argues the opposite: since residents knew they were being listened to, and could be punished for speaking out about things that embarrass the government, they kept quiet. A similar event under Mao Zedong provides an illustrative and extreme example of this phenomenon.
This story was one we wanted to highlight this week for two reasons. First, it speaks directly to our mission of identifying the unintended side-effects of decisions — by taking human behavior and motivation into account, we can ensure a solution doesn’t end up accelerating the problem it’s intended to solve. Second, this lesson is one that doesn’t just come up in authoritarian regimes, but also in companies with toxic cultures. If people are unwilling to step forward and point out issues, then leaders won’t know things are going wrong until the problem is too large to grapple with effectively. By creating safe spaces for dissent and debate, by protecting whistleblowers, and by being honest about failures and their causes, we hope companies and cultures around the world can better communicate their issues to collaboratively solve problems.
Coronavirus and the Blindness of Authoritarianism
China’s use of surveillance and censorship makes it harder for Xi Jinping to know what’s going on in his own country.
3: Workers' rights and the push-button job
Shipt, a former startup akin to Postmates or Instacart, was purchased by Target in 2017 and quickly scaled to over 100,000 workers who use their platform to accept jobs. These gig workers have recently been noticing a significant drop in their pay due to an “algorithmic model” that recently rolled out. What’s worse, when workers complained about these changes, some saw their comments removed from moderated discussion boards, others were blocked from posting, and still others were “deactivated” from the platform, denying them future work.
Sadly this is another example of how gig work platforms continue to separate worker from manager, turning an assignment or a professional relationship into a simple transaction, and one from which every last penny of value must be extracted. It’s also another example of the vanishing rights to protest these decisions, a common thread in gig economy platforms like Uber, Doordash, and others. Until there are better regulations about how gig workers are managed and compensated, there are few avenues available to workers to push back. This is one reason why we see a growing movement among tech workers to unionize; just this week, workers at Kickstarter voted to approve a union to protect the rights of engineers and others within the company. Can virtual strikes targeting these gig platforms be far behind?
Target's Shipt Delivery App Workers Describe Culture of Retaliation, Fear
The Target-owned grocery delivery company Shipt is rolling out a new algorithmic pay model that is already draining paychecks. And workers are terrified to speak out.
4: Inventing the future in order to explain it
In this excellent MIT Tech Review piece, Tim Maughan thoughtfully reflects on the evolution of design fiction as a field of critical practice over the past decade or so. We’ve talked about design fiction a lot in this newsletter, but for our newer readers (hi there! 👋), it is the practice of designing objects or software that aren’t real, but could be. As Julian Bleecker notes in the article, the products of design fiction are diegetic prototypes, or “props that help focus the imagination and speculate about possible near future worlds”.
However, while the practice began as a critical one, often meant to help us reflect on our technological choices and their social impact, Tim recounts how the techniques (and practitioners) of design fiction have been appropriated by big tech companies for marketing purposes. From Amazon Echo ads to corporate “future vision” videos, we see the language of design fiction used as “corporate whitewashing”, reduced to its formal elements but stripped of its criticality. Check out the full article for more thoughts on this trend from some of our favorite speculative futurists, including Tobias Revell, Scott Smith, Anab Jain, and Julian Bleecker.
How big tech hijacked its sharpest, funniest critics
Without design fiction, critical hits like Black Mirror would look very different.
www.technologyreview.com • Share
5: Simulating antibiotics to find new cures
Over the past decades, there has been a dearth of development in the world of antibiotics. Most new antibiotics are only modestly different variants from existing drugs, and there is a growing issue with antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Recently, MIT researchers have used a machine learning algorithm to invent a new antibiotic that is surprisingly effective, even against drug-resistant bacteria. The neural network optimized across multiple dimensions of data, including information about how different chemicals interact with bacteria, how dissimilar a chemical compound is from existing antibiotics, and how likely it is to be harmful to humans. The antibiotics that are being developed as a result of this work are incredibly promising: “In laboratory tests, the drug killed many of the world’s most problematic disease-causing bacteria, including some strains that are resistant to all known antibiotics.”
The techniques applied in this work allow machine learning models to explore “in silico”, large chemical landscapes that would be prohibitively expensive to research through traditional methods. What we find particularly compelling here is that this research is effectively applying computation to a kind of problem that computers are very good at solving in a way that humans are not. Alexis has written about the computational gaze as a creative affordance, where we value machines for their ability to see the world in strange and often beautiful ways. The same value holds true in the realm of science and medicine, where rather than using machines to replace human efforts, we can use their innate abilities to complement our own.
Artificial intelligence yields new antibiotic
MIT researchers have identified a powerful antibiotic that can kill a wide range of species of pathogenic bacteria, including some that are resistant to all known antibiotics.
6: Code, craft, and connection
Connecting with friends, colleagues, and like-minded strangers has long been a huge benefit of our increasingly connected world. It’s also been a source of increased stress and anxiety, stemming from harassment, the performance of being our best selves online, and the disappointment of feeling left out or forgotten when those notifications slow down.
Enter a whole slew of “pro-social” applications that seek to make online connections a more supportive and positive prospect. Ikaria, a messaging-focused app that’s not yet public, boasts that they’re working with psychologists to ensure their products promote a more positive sense of well-being. They’re seeking to undo the disconnectedness research shows we’re feeling — despite being hyper-connected through social media — by leaning on what they call “mindful relational practices”. We’ll see more about what that means once the product is public.
We also wanted to highlight a piece by Robin Sloan that describes a “social network” app he set up for his immediate family. His analogy of “learning to code” as being more akin to “learning to cook” (i.e. something that lots of people do all the time but very few do professionally) is a fantastic one, and one we hope takes hold as the tools to learn become simpler and more distributed. We also loved the do-it-yourself quality that we usually think of around woodworking, home renovation, gardening, or other physical tasks being applied to building apps. Like these manual pursuits, building an app to give to your friends and loved ones sounds like a great way to build strong, meaningful social connections.
A new generation of social apps is trying to make you feel better about yourself
Can Ikaria, from a co-founder of Secret, succeed where Facebook and Instagram seem to have failed?
One accessible thing: Control your computer with your face
Hawkeye is a new app that allows anyone to control their Mac using head movements and facial expressions. What started as an eye-tracking app for analytics purposes is now being expanded to power a seemingly intuitive platform for hands-free control of your computer. We love to see design thinking being applied to accessible tools — this seems like an exciting piece of software, and one that particularly expands interaction possibilities for people with motor impairments.
Hawkeye Access for Mac: Control your Mac using head movements
Six Signals: Emerging futures, 6 links at a time.
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