This week…
The time changed again. I will be confused for a while but reaffirms how arbitrary clock-time is. Anyway, here’s selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
Can data die?
Jennifer Ding with Jan Diehm and Michelle McGhee on one of the Internet’s oldest image lives on without its subject’s consent, on The Pudding:
Having known Lenna for almost a decade, I have struggled to understand what the story of the image means for what tech culture is and what it is becoming.
To me, the crux of the Lenna story is how little power we have over our data and how it is used and abused. This threat seems disproportionately higher for women who are often overrepresented in internet content, but underrepresented in internet company leadership and decision making. Given this reality, engineering and product decisions will continue to consciously (and unconsciously) exclude our needs and concerns.
Elon Musk is building a sci-fi world, and the rest of us are trapped in it ($)
Jill Lepore, professor of history, for The New York Times:
The metaverse is at once an illustration of and a distraction from a broader and more troubling turn in the history of capitalism. The world’s techno-billionaires are forging a new kind of capitalism: Muskism. Mr. Musk, who likes to troll his rivals, mocked Mr. Zuckerberg’s metaverse. But from missions to Mars and the moon to the metaverse, it’s all Muskism: extreme, extraterrestrial capitalism, where stock prices are driven less by earnings than by fantasies from science fiction.
Metaverse, the term, comes from a 1992 science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson, but the idea is much older. There’s a version of it, the holodeck, in the “Star Trek” franchise, which Mr. Bezos was obsessed with as a kid; last month, he sent William Shatner, the actor who played Captain Kirk in the original series, into space. Billionaires, having read stories of world-building as boys, are now rich enough, as men, to build worlds. The rest of us are trapped in them.
Weirdly, Muskism, an extravagant form of capitalism, is inspired by stories that indict … capitalism.
Facebook rebrand reflects a dangerous trend in growing power of tech monopolies
Peter Bloom, professor of management, for The Conversation:
In his video announcement, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed this dawning of the metaverse as signalling a new technological age, providing viewers with a glimpse of it in a virtual world where people could use avatars to live out their wildest imagination in real-time with others around the world.
The backlash has ranged from moral outrage over Facebook itself, to ridiculing Zuckerberg’s new vision for technology. What is overlooked is how this represents the desire to create metacapitalism – which uses technology to shape, exploit and profit from human interaction. It is a completely marketised virtual reality world fuelled by the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, unjust global working conditions and the constant invasion of users’ data privacy for private financial gain.
Corporate and social rebranding are fundamental to the spread of metacapitalism. Google’s 2015 name change to “Alphabet” reflected its desire to be more than just a search engine and expand into other areas such as driverless cars, medical devices, smart home appliances and drone delivery.
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid.
I’m watching Succession. The Rogers boardroom drama made me do it.
I’m making a vegan and gluten-free meal.
Chart of the week
“In 2005, the list of the world's most valuable listed companies was rather diverse,” writes Martin Armstrong for Statista. Today: