https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/kzc5o3/are_gene_hackman_characters_in_the_conversation/<br /> Are Gene Hackman characters in The Conversation (1974) and Enemy of the State (1998 ) connected?

I want to circle back to this as I've had this idea since I saw Enemy of the State as a rough cut.

Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire by [[Jason Del Rey]]

Reordtemperaturen Ende Jänner haben in Frankreich südlich einer Linie von etwa Bordeaux bis Lyon zu einem sogenannten falschen Frühling geführt. Darauf folgende Frost-Einbrüche könnten wie in den vergangenen Jahren die Obst Ernte gefährden. Auch für auch für viele Insekten, z.b Bienen, sind negative Folgen zu befürchten. https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/biodiversite/ours-insectes-pollen-la-nature-en-plein-reveil-precoce-20240203_EBUVD6HKXRHBPGU2CP5VH6725E/disr

Ongweso Jr., Edward. “The Miseducation of Kara Swisher: Soul-Searching with the Tech ‘Journalist.’” The Baffler, March 29, 2024. https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-miseducation-of-kara-swisher-ongweso.

ᔥ[[Pete Brown]] in Exploding Comma

Things I Never Knew about my Father by Lisa Jardine<br /> https://soundcloud.com/conwayhall/things-i-never-knew-about-my

See also: https://web.archive.org/web/20141216103656/http://www.conwayhall.org.uk/lisa-jardine

Client-side scanning is a bulk surveillance technology

Wells attempts in this essay to help mankind "pull it's mind together" for the betterment of people and the planet. How is this supposed to happen in a modern media environment which is designed to pull our minds apart as rapidly as possible?

How might the strength of capitalism be leveraged to push people back toward a common middle rather than split them apart?

“Capable of identifying nearly every person in the U.S.”

So you have nothing to hide?

blah. this surveillance system is one big personality test.<br /> the problem is, they do not want a balance of all personality types or "natural order",<br /> but they do a one-sided selection by personality type.<br /> aka socialdarwinism, socialism, survival of the social, social credit score, civilization, high culture, progress, "made order", human laws, human rights, humanism, ...

Advertising industry schemes considered an attack

Stephen Farrell's perspective.

How constant surveillance changes a person

Bruce Schneier's perspective.

Technology is valuable and empowering, but at what end direct cost? Consumers don't have available data for the actual costs of the options they're choosing in many contexts.

What if that reprocessing costs the equivalent of three glasses of waters? Is it worth it for our environment, especially when the direct costs to the "consumer" are hidden into advertising models.

(via Brenna)

Surveillance Capitalism by Accident

Vladeck Opinion

What sort of influence did these sorts of philosophy have on educational practices of their day and how do they reflect on our current educational milieu?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMD7r1poVUU

!- surveillance capitalism : key insight -mass behavioral modification takes away autonomy

!- surveillance capitalism : key insight - knowledge assymetry between corporations and government bodies vs individuals

!- surveillance capitalism : example- - Propublica reported breathing machines for sleep apnea secretly send data to insurance companies

!- surveillance capitalism : metaphor - one way mirror

!- Definition : Surveillance Capitalism - as defined by Shoshana Zuboff

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/12/more-news-organizations-will-realize-they-are-in-the-business-of-impact-not-eyeballs/

Journalistic outlets should be in the business of creating impact and not scrounging merely for eyeballs and exposure.

Exposure may be useful for advertising revenue with respect to surveillance capitalism, but if you're not informing along the way, not making a measurable impact, then you're not living, not making a change.

Social media should be comprised of people from end to end. Corporate interests inserted into the process can only serve to dehumanize the system.

Robin Sloan is in the same camp as Greg McVerry and I.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1589700721121058817.html

Government officials are urging citizens to adopt the official digital currency in a bid to gain more control over the economy.

I've been told since the first day I started working at the Division of Hospital Medicine at @UCSF that my work doesn't bring in $ to cover my salary. It's a narrative of manufactured scarcity, a common tactic in capitalism. The CEO is making $1.85 million plus bonuses.

— Rupa Marya, MD (@DrRupaMarya) November 4, 2022

A Hospitalist’s economic value is in what we *save* the system in terms of quality-driven care and patient throughput (DC/unit time), not in how much we bring in through profees. Because of how the system is structured, you’ll only see our value when we aren’t there.

— Rupa Marya, MD (@DrRupaMarya) November 4, 2022

This sounds a lot like hospitalists fall under David Graeber's thesis in Bullshit Jobs that the more necessary and useful you are the less you're likely to get paid and be valued.

I suspect the ability to track an employees' direct level of productivity also fits into this thesis. One can track the productivity of an Amazon warehouse worker or driver, but it's much more difficult to track the CEOs direct productivity.

DHS pivots as "war on terror" winds down

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security pivots from externally-focused terrorism to domestic social media monitoring.

https://www.engadget.com/amazon-attrition-leadership-ctsmd-201800110.html?src=rss

Amazon tracking their hourly workers and not their middle management's efficiency.

Originally read on Tue [[2022-10-18]] 1:25 PM

Een mooie beschrijving voor wat advertenties en trackingpixels eigenlijk zijn

Substitute “library” for “hospital”

In an alternate universe: “A Midwestern library system is treating its use of Google and Facebook web tracking technologies as a data breach, notifying 3 million individuals that the computing giants may have obtained search and borrowing histories.”

A "TopView" advertisement runs $3 million a day

ReconfigBehSci. (2021, November 26). RT @mvankerkhove: Following the meeting of the @WHO TAG-VE today, WHO classifies B.1.1.529 as a variant of concern named Omicron. We call… [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1464302372100976650

Prof. Christina Pagel. (2021, December 23). UKHSA surveillance report shows reinfections rising sharply as Omicron takes hold https://t.co/UGArY4sbOA [Tweet]. @chrischirp. https://twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1474041921249189896

It's nice to have some evidence of progress, but I know very few students who appreciated this sort of grading practice. I know I hated it as a kid, so it's particularly pernicious and almost triggering to see it in print going back to 1908, 1911, and subsequently up to 1931.

The algorithm’s role in surveillance capitalism

reply to: https://ariadne.space/2022/07/01/a-silo-can-never-provide-digital-autonomy-to-its-users/

Matt Ridley indicates in The Rational Optimist that markets for goods and services "work so well that it is hard to design them so they fail to deliver efficiency and innovation" while assets markets are nearly doomed to failure and require close and careful regulation.

If we view the social media landscape from this perspective, an IndieWeb world in which people are purchasing services like easy import/export of their data; the ability to move their domain name and URL permalinks from one web host to another; and CMS (content management system) services/platforms/functionalities, represents the successful market mode for our personal data and online identities. Here competition for these sorts of services will not only improve the landscape, but generally increased competition will tend to drive the costs to consumers down. The internet landscape is developed and sophisticated enough and broadly based on shared standards that this mode of service market should easily be able to not only thrive, but innovate.

At the other end of the spectrum, if our data are viewed as assets in an asset market between Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, et al., it is easy to see that the market has already failed so miserably that one cannot even easily move ones' assets from one silo to another. Social media services don't compete to export or import data because the goal is to trap you and your data and attention there, otherwise they lose. The market corporate social media is really operating in is one for eyeballs and attention to sell advertising, so one will notice a very health, thriving, and innovating market for advertisers. Social media users will easily notice that there is absolutely no regulation in the service portion of the space at all. This only allows the system to continue failing to provide improved or even innovative service to people on their "service". The only real competition in the corporate silo social media space is for eyeballs and participation because the people and their attention are the real product.

As a result, new players whose goal is to improve the health of the social media space, like the recent entrant Cohost, are far better off creating a standards based service that allows users to register their own domain names and provide a content management service that has easy import and export of their data. This will play into the services market mode which improves outcomes for people. Aligning in any other competition mode that silos off these functions will force them into competition with the existing corporate social services and we already know where those roads lead.

Those looking for ethical and healthy models of this sort of social media service might look at Manton Reece's micro.blog platform which provides a wide variety of these sorts of data services including data export and taking your domain name with you. If you're unhappy with his service, then it's relatively easy to export your data and move it to another host using WordPress or some other CMS. On the flip side, if you're unhappy with your host and CMS, then it's also easy to move over to micro.blog and continue along just as you had before. Best of all, micro.blog is offering lots of the newest and most innovative web standards including webmention notificatons which enable website-to-website conversations, micropub, and even portions of microsub not to mention some great customer service.

I like to analogize the internet and social media to competition in the telecom/cellular phone space In America, you have a phone number (domain name) and can then have your choice of service provider (hosting), and a choice of telephone (CMS). Somehow instead of adopting a social media common carrier model, we have trapped ourselves inside of a model that doesn't provide the users any sort of real service or options. It's easy to imagine what it would be like to need your own AT&T account to talk to family on AT&T and a separate T-Mobile account to talk to your friends on T-Mobile because that's exactly what you're doing with social media despite the fact that you're all still using the same internet. Part of the draw was that services like Facebook appeared to be "free" and it's only years later that we're seeing the all too real costs emerge.

This sort of competition and service provision also goes down to subsidiary layers of the ecosystem. Take for example the idea of writing interface and text editing. There are (paid) services like iA Writer, Ulysses, and Typora which people use to compose their writing. Many people use these specifically for writing blog posts. Companies can charge for these products because of their beauty, simplicity, and excellent user interfaces. Some of them either do or could support the micropub and IndieAuth web standards which allow their users the ability to log into their websites and directly post their saved content from the editor directly to their website. Sure there are also a dozen or so other free micropub clients that also allow this, but why not have and allow competition for beauty and ease of use? Let's say you like WordPress enough, but aren't a fan of the Gutenberg editor. Should you need to change to Drupal or some unfamiliar static site generator to exchange a better composing experience for a dramatically different and unfamiliar back end experience? No, you could simply change your editor client and continue on without missing a beat. Of course the opposite also applies—WordPress could split out Gutenberg as a standalone (possibly paid) micropub client and users could then easily use it to post to Drupal, micro.blog, or other CMSs that support the micropub spec, and many already do.

Social media should be a service to and for people all the way down to its core. The more companies there are that provide these sorts of services means more competition which will also tend to lure people away from silos where they're trapped for lack of options. Further, if your friends are on services that interoperate and can cross communicate with standards like Webmention from site to site, you no longer need to be on Facebook because "that's where your friends and family all are."

I have no doubt that we can all get to a healthier place online, but it's going to take companies and startups like Cohost to make better choices in how they frame their business models. Co-ops and non-profits can help here too. I can easily see a co-op adding webmention to their Mastodon site to allow users to see and moderate their own interactions instead of forcing local or global timelines on their constituencies. Perhaps Garon didn't think Webmention was a fit for Mastodon, but this doesn't mean that others couldn't support it. I personally think that Darius Kazemi's Hometown fork of Mastodon which allows "local only" posting a fabulous little innovation while still allowing interaction with a wider readership, including me who reads him in a microsub enabled social reader. Perhaps someone forks Mastodon to use as a social feed reader, but builds in micropub so that instead of posting the reply to a Mastodon account, it's posted to one's IndieWeb capable website which sends a webmention notification to the original post? Opening up competition this way makes lots of new avenues for every day social tools.

Continuing the same old siloing of our data and online connections is not the way forward. We'll see who stands by their ethics and morals by serving people's interests and not the advertising industry.

I can't help but wonder at the direct link here to Amazon with an affiliate link. I won't fault them completely for it, but for a site that is so critical of the ills of educational technology, and care for their students and community, the exposure to surveillance capitalism expressed here seems to go beyond their own pale. I would have expected more care here.

Surely there are other platforms that this volume is available from?

Oft repeated phrase and one I wouldn't have expected in this article.

The "real enemy" of the internet

Governments would want to use the internet to "invade our privacy." Starting in the 1990s with the Clipper Chip.

An important logical point. Listing what they don't keep isn't as good as saying what they actually do with one's data.

Nuanced "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product"

Is your demographic and/or activity data being sold? Then you are still the product even if you are paying for something.

I worry about things like Google Workspace sometimes. Am I paying enough for the product to cover the cost of supplying the product to me, or is Google having to raise additional revenue to cover the cost of serving me? Is Google raising additional revenue even though they don't have to in order to cover my cost?

How We Got Here: Concentration of Reach, Surveillance Capitalism, and Venture Capital

These three things combined drove the internet's trajectory. Without these three components, we wouldn't have seen the concentration of private social spaces and the problems that came with them.

So often learning technologies emphasize metrics of engagement that easily become metrics of surveillance. Maybe instead of focusing on "time on page" they might flower out to "connections made" to other people, texts, writing, and ideas.

Home | AusVaxSafety. (n.d.). Retrieved 23 March 2022, from https://ausvaxsafety.org.au/

Refinement is a social process. Sadly it can also be accelerated, often negatively, by unintended socio-economic forces.

The dominance and ills created by surveillance capitalism within social media is one such result driven by capitalism.

Apparently Persuall was embarrassed about their pro-surveillance capitalism stance and perhaps not so much for its lack of kindness and care for the basic humanity of students.

Sad that they haven't explained or apologized for their misstep.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220222022208/https://twitter.com/perusall/status/1495945680002719751

Additional context: https://twitter.com/search?q=(%40perusall)%20until%3A2022-02-23%20since%3A2022-02-21&src=typed_query

Original tweet thread archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20220222025045/https://twitter.com/perusall/status/1495945680002719751

What about a standard of care for students?

Bragging about students not knowing how the surveillance technology works is unethical.<br><br>Students using accessibility software or open educational resources shouldn't be punished for accidentally avoiding surveillance. pic.twitter.com/Uv7fiAm0a3

— Ian Linkletter (@Linkletter) February 22, 2022

#annotation https://t.co/wVemEk2yao

— Remi Kalir (@remikalir) February 23, 2022

Academics: Viral Evolution Scenarios, 10 February 2022. (n.d.). GOV.UK. Retrieved February 14, 2022, from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/academics-viral-evolution-scenarios-10-february-2022

Grubaugh, N. D., Hodcroft, E. B., Fauver, J. R., Phelan, A. L., & Cevik, M. (2021). Public health actions to control new SARS-CoV-2 variants. Cell, 184(5), 1127–1132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2021.01.044

Tulio de Oliveira. (2022, February 9). As expected, Omicron BA.2 takes over in South Africa, close to 100% of the new genomes. What does it mean? Https://t.co/SAb9mGYSjN [Tweet]. @Tuliodna. https://twitter.com/Tuliodna/status/1491483399265075202

Jetelina, K. (2022, January 13). State of Affairs: Pediatrics and Omicron [Substack newsletter]. Your Local Epidemiologist. https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/state-of-affairs-pediatrics-and-omicron

This is some really troubling developments for all first world people, especially educators

Torjesen, I. (2022). Covid-19: Peak of viral shedding is later with omicron variant, Japanese data suggest. BMJ, 376, o89. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.o89

Mrigank Shail, MD. (2022, January 11). Update on Omicron by Dr @mvankerkhove from @WHO’s Q&A https://t.co/NqCOvs59Tl [Tweet]. @mrigankshail. https://twitter.com/mrigankshail/status/1481006646826577925

Tom Peacock. (2022, January 19). As its been getting increasing attention recently, I’m going to write a short thread on what we currently know about BA.2. -What is BA.2? -What is BA.2 doing currently? -Should we be concerned about it? [Tweet]. @PeacockFlu. https://twitter.com/PeacockFlu/status/1483768659420094464

Geddes, L., & correspondent, L. G. S. (2022, January 11). Will Covid-19 become less dangerous as it evolves? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/11/will-covid-19-become-less-dangerous-as-it-evolves

An early notice of the rise of consumerism on the web and potentially prefiguring the rise of surveillance capitalism.

Diseases, T. L. I. (2021). Emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants: Shooting the messenger. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(21)00770-2

Cauchemez, S., & Bosetti, P. (2021). A reconstruction of early cryptic COVID spread. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02989-3

I love the phrase "a web that your read instead of one that tries so very hard to read you."

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1450474094357532672.html

COVID-19 | European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. (n.d.). Retrieved March 1, 2021, from https://qap.ecdc.europa.eu/public/extensions/COVID-19/COVID-19.html#global-overview-tab

Most of the advanced researchers I seen on these topics are almost all women: Safiya Umoja Noble, Meredith Broussard, Ruha Benjamin, Cathy O'Neil, Shoshana Zuboff, Joan Donovan, danah boyd,Tressie McMillan Cottom, to name but a few.

The tougher part is that they are all fighting against problems created primarily by privileged, cis-gender, white men.

Kevin Marks talks about the bridging of new people into one's in-group by Twitter's retweet functionality from a positive perspective.

He doesn't foresee the deleterious effects of algorithms for engagement doing just the opposite of increasing the volume of noise based on one's in-group hating and interacting with "bad" content in the other direction. Some of these effects may also be bad from a slow brainwashing perspective if not protected for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h6INV91bXQ

O’Toole, Á., Scher, E., Underwood, A., Jackson, B., Hill, V., McCrone, J. T., Colquhoun, R., Ruis, C., Abu-Dahab, K., Taylor, B., Yeats, C., du Plessis, L., Maloney, D., Medd, N., Attwood, S. W., Aanensen, D. M., Holmes, E. C., Pybus, O. G., & Rambaut, A. (2021). Assignment of epidemiological lineages in an emerging pandemic using the pangolin tool. Virus Evolution, veab064. https://doi.org/10.1093/ve/veab064

Already I can see too many companies relying on artificial intelligence to sort and filter this material and it has the ability to cause even worse nth degree level problems.

Allowing the end user to easily control the content curation and filtering will be absolutely necessary, and even then, customer desire to do this will likely loose out to the automaticity of AI. Customer laziness will likely win the day on this, so the design around it must be robust.

This is a solid example of the sort of rose colored glasses too many had for technology in the early 2000s.

Was this instance just before the tech bubble collapsed too?

What was the state of surveillance capitalism at this point?

Adam Kucharski on Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved 29 July 2021, from https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/1397118932356669442

Tada, Takuya, Hao Zhou, Marie I. Samanovic, Belinda M. Dcosta, Amber Cornelius, Mark J. Mulligan, and Nathaniel R. Landau. “Comparison of Neutralizing Antibody Titers Elicited by MRNA and Adenoviral Vector Vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 Variants.” BioRxiv, July 19, 2021, 2021.07.19.452771. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.07.19.452771.

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/lifting-the-mask

The idea of a bat coughing and infecting the world is a powerful one in relation to our interconnectedness.

I'm enamored of how he transitions this from the pandemic and masking for protection against virus to using masks as a symbol for protecting ourselves, our data, and our identity in a surveillance state.

Even Heraclitus knew that one couldn't stand in the same river twice.

I agree. I think companies that allow their users to take their data and run when they want to just create trust. Gone are the days when users automatically thought companies had their best interests at heart, as compared with current-day surveillance capitalists.

Sad that this is the case.

Good tip for espionage though...

Broad recycle of Tim Bray's article https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/01/15/Google-is-losing-its-memory with an example of the same effect for their site.

DuckDuckGo has a better index that doesn't prioritize for "right now" or currency.

This piece definitely makes an interesting point about the use of index cards (a knowledge management tool) and power.

Things have only accelerated dramatically with the rise of computers and the creation of data lakes and the leverage of power over people by Facebook, Google, Amazon, et al.

I love that he uses this print of Pablo Picasso's Don Quixote to visually underline this post in which he must feel as if he's "tilting at windmills".

And worse, typically humans are third-class citizens in the ed-tech world.