by
Kai Brach
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What generally happens when people in tech have made lots and lots of money? They often escape. If they're young, they go to South America and do ayahuasca rituals - they try to find the meaning of life by repurposing somebody else's culture for quick 'insight'. If they're older, maybe they buy a farm. They work on the programming that comes out of the ground: plants and animals. They try to spend the real time it takes to rediscover a sense of identity.
interview with Amber Case. zing
A lot of your work has to do with design as a solution to human and technical problems. Can better design solve inherently unethical business practices?
I don't think so. I've seen this happening in major companies: you'll work on a design that will be better for users or communities. But then it bubbles up the chain of command someone higher up sees that it's negatively impacting their KPI. And so it gets deprioritised.
Corporations are a kind of AI, in the sense that no one individual directs them, and they just operate on their objective function of maximising share price through the proxy of engagement metrics. And it's hard to push up against that.
One of the original sins of the internet was not having a good business model in mind, which meant that it defaulted to the advertising business model, which has led to surveillance capitalism, and now persuasion capitalism.
So I think that we as designers can no longer get away with living in a sort of Eden where we get to ignore business models. If we do so, our designs will always be subverted.
good answer, tho i would argue that it would have been hard to imagine an alternative trajectory given the larger political/economic trends
As designers, how can we convince business minds that what works isn't always what's right?
[...]
[...] Companies are made out of people and we are their most valuable assets. They can't operate without us. So, because Uber was no longer a cool place to work and people were leaving, that changed who ran that company.
As humans, we feel small sometimes against something the size of Google. By voting with our feet, and refusing to work for companies that are exploitative, we can make really big differences. You refuse to do things that you believe have gone too far down the path of giving up what's right for what works.
cool. though, tbh, idk if it's possible to refuse to work for all companies that are exploitative ...
[...] Section 2030 from the 1996 Communications Act is a piece of deregulation that says that a platform isn't responsible for the content that a user posts.
I'd like to see it amended in one specific way. There are a lot of people posting content for which you can't necessarily make the platform responsible. But if the platforms were to make the curatorial choice to promote that content in a recommendation engine, and it reached a certain number of people, they would then have to be responsible for it. I think that would have the effect of curtailing, for example, YouTube's pushing of conspiracy theories by placing certain videos in their 'top trending' boxes. [...]
it's an algorithm, sure, but it's an algorithm that has at least some human curation, and could probably have more. have simple guidelines: dont promote it if it could be construed as hate speech or sth similar acc to some guidelines. it might not be perfect but it would sure as hell be better than now
and ofc the human curators should be paid very well, given lots of employment security and authority and guidelines and report to someone high up
something to think about: the dream is to get rid of human action entirely, but maybe that's a dumb dream? an impractical one? there'll always be human curation needed as long as human society and culture and interaction cannot be described/generated by a finite algorithm
Is there any way to give ourselves antibodies versus targeted persuasion?
To me this is about using everything we know about design and human psychology to fight back. For example, Amazon famously found that for every hundred milliseconds more slowly their page loads, they lose one percent of revenue. So we know that attention is directly correlated to how fast apps or pages load. Why not just turn that back around and design it whereby the more you use something you know you don't want to use, you insert a longer and longer delay, and soon you'll just ask 'why am I here anyway?' It would give your brain the chance to catch up with its impulses.
[...]
As a non-profit social enterprise, ReDI's sponsors provide donations of money or equipment in exchange for tax deductions. But for the likes of Cisco, Salesforce.org, The Coca-Cola Foundation, Deloitte, and German steel-distribution company Klöckner & Co., there's an additional incentive to supporting ReDI: talent. The schools' inventory of skilled junior programmers is a goldmine for HR departments - ReDI's students are often fluent in multiple languages, well-educated, and hungry for opportunities.
yeeep, there it is. "hungry for opportunities" how useful
also, the coca-cola foundation!!! fuck me!!!
There can be no question that Marx saw far beyond the horizon of his century and that Capital, as the Economist (which Marx read faithfully) pointed out a few years back, remains startlingly contemporary even in the age of Walmart and Google. But in other cases Marx’s vision was limited by the anomalous character of his chronological niche: arguably the most peaceful period of European history in a thousand years. Colonial interventions aside, liberal London-centered capitalism did not seem structurally to require large-scale inter-state warfare as a condition of its reproduction or as the inevitable result of its contradictions. He died, of course, before the new imperialism of the late 1880s and 1890s led to zero-sum conflicts amongst the major powers for shares of the world market. Nor could Marx, even after the massacre of the Communards, have possibly foreseen the horrific price that counter-revolution in the next century, including Thermidorean Stalinism, would exact from rank-and-file anarchists, socialists, and communists: at least 7–8 million dead.7 Since the youngest and most politically conscious tended always to be in the front lines, these repeated decimations of the vanguard entailed incalculable consequences—ones that have been almost entirely ignored by historians.
In the epilogue to my 2006 book Planet of Slums, I asked: To what extent does the informal proletariat, the most rapidly growing global class, possess that most potent of Marxist talismans, “historical agency”? Although I was not aware of it at the time, Eric Hobsbawm had asked exactly the same question in an interview given in 1995. (He is quoted at the beginning of the next chapter.) Neoliberal globalization over the last generation has recharged the meaning of the “wretched of the earth.” Hobsbawm’s “gray area of the informal economy” has expanded by almost 1 billion people since his interview, and we should probably subsume the “informal proletariat” within a broader category that includes all of those who eke out survival by day labor, “micro-entrepreneurship,” and subsistence crime; who toil unprotected by laws, unions, or job contracts; who work outside of socialized complexes such as factories, hospitals, schools, ports, and the like; or simply wander lost in the desert of structural unemployment. There are three crucial questions: (1) What are the possibilities for class consciousness in these informal or peripheral sectors of economies? (2) How can movements, say, of slum-dwellers, the technologically deskilled, or the unemployed find power resources—equivalent, for example, to the ability of formal workers to shut down large units of production—that might allow them to struggle successfully for social transformation? and (3) What kinds of united action are possible between traditional working-class organization and the diverse humanity of the “gray area”? [...]
At a high level of abstraction, the current period of globalization is defined by a trilogy of ideal-typical economies: super-industrial (coastal East Asia), financial/tertiary (North Atlantic), and hyper-urbanizing/extractive (West Africa). “Jobless growth” is incipient in the first, chronic in the second, and virtually absolute in the third. We might add a fourth ideal-type of disintegrating societies, caught in a vice of war and climate change, whose chief trend is the export of refugees and migrant labor. In any event, we can no longer rely on a single paradigmatic society or class to model the critical vectors of historical development. Imprudent coronations of abstractions like “the multitude” as historical subjects simply dramatize a poverty of empirical research. Contemporary Marxism must be able to scan the future from the simultaneous perspectives of Shenzhen, Los Angeles, and Lagos if it wants to solve the puzzle of how heterodox social categories might be fitted together in a single resistance to capitalism.
Even the most preliminary tasks are daunting. A new theory of revolution, to begin with, begs benchmarks in the old, starting with clarification of “proletarian agency” in classical socialist thought. In the first instance, of course, self-consciousness of agency preceded theory. The faith that “labor will inherit the earth” and that “the International will be the human race” did not rest on doctrine but arose volcanically from struggles for bread and dignity. Workers’ belief in their collective power to effect radical change, whose deep roots were located in the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century, was amply ratified by the fears and nightmares of the Victorian bourgeoisie. (Although this is an obvious fact, not a small number of Marx’s critics have charged at one time or another that revolutionary agency was nothing more than a metaphysical invention, a Hegelian hobgoblin, foisted upon working masses whose actions were actually dictated by simple utilitarian calculation.)