The Splintered Mind: The Black Hole Objection to Longtermism and Consequentialism
Stick a singularity in your “effective altruism” pipe and smoke it.
Stick a singularity in your “effective altruism” pipe and smoke it.
This is an excellent framing for minimal viable products—what would the black box theatre production be?
Forget about all the production and complexity you could build. What’s the purpose you want to convey at the core?
This is an excellent new tool for showing exactly what kind of tracking a site is doing:
Who is peeking over your shoulder while you work, watch videos, learn, explore, and shop on the internet? Enter the address of any website, and Blacklight will scan it and reveal the specific user-tracking technologies on the site—and who’s getting your data. You may be surprised at what you learn.
Best of all, you can inspect the raw data and analyse the methodology.
There are some accompanying explainers:
Well, this is timely! Cassie mentioned recently that she was reading—and enjoying—the Earthsea books, which I had never got around to reading. So I’m reading them now. Then Craig mentioned in one of his newsletters that he’s also reading them. Now there’s this article…
To white protestors and accomplices, who say that they want to listen but are fearful of giving up some power so that we can all heal, I suggest you read the Earthsea cycle. You will need to learn to step away from the center to build a new world, and the Black majority in this fantasy series offers a better model than any white history.
I sometimes watch programmes on TG4, the Irish language broadcaster that posts most shows online. Even though I’m watching with subtitles on, I figure it can’t be bad for keeping my very rudimentary Irish from atrophying completely.
I’m usually watching music programmes but occassionally I’ll catch a bit of the news (or “nuacht”). Their coverage of the protests in America reminded me of a peculiar quirk of the Irish language. The Black community would be described as “daoine gorm” (pronunced “deenee gurum”), which literally translated would mean “blue people”. In Irish, the skin colour is referred to as “gorm”—blue.
This isn’t one of those linguistic colour differences like the way the Japanese word ao means blue and green. Irish has a perfectly serviceable word for the colour black, “dubh” (pronounced “duv”). But the term “fear dubh” (“far duv”) which literally means “black man” was already taken. It’s used to describe the devil. Not ideal.
In any case, this blue/black confusion in Irish reminded me of a delicious tale of schadenfreude. When I was writing about the difference between intentions and actions, I said:
Sometimes bad outcomes are the result of good intentions. Less often, good outcomes can be the result of bad intentions.
Back in 2017, the Geeky Gaeilgeoir wrote a post called Even Racists Got the Blues. In it, she disects the terrible translation job done by an Irish-American racist sporting a T-shirt that reads:
Gorm Chónaí Ábhar.
That’s completely nonsensical in Irish, but the intent behind the words was to say “Blue Lives Matter.” Except… even if it made grammatical sense, what this idiot actually wrote would translate as:
Black Lives Matter.
What a wonderful chef’s kiss of an own goal!
If only it were a tattoo.
There are intentions and there are outcomes. Sometimes bad outcomes are the result of good intentions. Less often, good outcomes can be the result of bad intentions. But generally we associate the two: we expect good outcomes to come from good intentions and we expect bad outcomes to come from bad intentions.
Perhaps it’s because of this conflation that we place too much emphasis on intentions. If, for example, someone is called out for causing a bad outcome, their first response is often to defend their intentions. That’s understandable. When someone says “you have created a bad outcome”, I understand why the person on the receiving end would receive that feedback as “you intended to create this bad outcome.” Cue a non-apology that clarifies the (good) intention without acknowledging the reality of the outcome (“It was never my intention to…”).
I get it. Intentions do matter …just not as much as we give them credit for. I mean, in general, I’d prefer bad outcomes to be the inadvertent result of good intentions. But in some ways, it really doesn’t matter: a bad outcome is a bad outcome.
Anyway, all of this is just to preface something I’m going to say about myself:
I am almost certainly racist.
I don’t intend to be racist, but like I said, intentions aren’t really what matter. Outcomes are.
Note, for example, the cliché of the gormless close-minded goon who begins a sentence with “I’m not racist, but…” before going on to say something clearly racist. It’s as though the racism could be defanged by disavowing bad intent.
The same defence mechanism is used to defend racist traditions. “Oh, it’s not racist—that’s just something we’ve always done.” Again, the defence is for the intention, not the outcome. And again, outcomes matter far, far more than intentions.
I really don’t intend to be racist. But how could I not be? I grew up in a small town in Ireland where literally everyone else looked like me. By the same token, I’m also almost certainly sexist. Growing up as a cisgender male in a patriarchal society guarantees that my mind has been shaped in ways I now wish it weren’t.
Acknowledging my racism—and sexism—doesn’t mean I’m okay with it. On the contrary. It’s a source of shame. But acknowledging my racism is a necessary step to changing it.
In any case, it doesn’t really matter how I feel about any of this. This isn’t meant to be a confessional. What matters are outcomes. Outcomes aren’t really the direct result of intentions—outcomes are the direct result of actions.
Most of my actions lately have been very passive. Listening. Watching. Because my actions are passive, they are indistinguishable from silence. That’s not good. Silence can be interpreted as acquiescence, acceptance. That’s not what I intend …but my intentions don’t matter.
So, even though this isn’t about me or my voice or my intentions, and even though this is something that is so self-evident that it shouldn’t need to be said, I want to say:
Black lives matter.
How design fiction was co-opted. A piece by Tim Maughan with soundbites from Julian Bleecker, Anab Jain, and Scott Smith.
There was a time, circa 2009, when no home design story could do without a reference to Mad Men. There is a time, circa 2018, when no personal tech story should do without a Black Mirror reference.
Black Mirror Home. It’s all fun and games until the screaming starts.
When these products go haywire—as they inevitably do—the Black Mirror tweets won’t seem so funny, just as Mad Men curdled, eventually, from ha-ha how far we’ve come to, oh-no we haven’t come far enough.
I’m all in favour of HTTPS everywhere, but this kind of strong-arming just feels like blackmail to me.
All new CSS properties won’t work without HTTPS‽ Come on!
I thought Mozilla was better than this.
Nosedive is the first episode of season three of Black Mirror.
It’s fairly light-hearted by the standards of Black Mirror, but all the more chilling for that. It depicts a dysutopia where people rate one another for points that unlock preferential treatment. It’s like a twisted version of the whuffie from Cory Doctorow’s Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom. Cory himself points out that reputation economies are a terrible idea.
Nosedive has become a handy shortcut for pointing to the dangers of social media (in the same way that Minority Report was a handy shortcut for gestural interfaces and Her is a handy shortcut for voice interfaces).
“Social media is bad, m’kay?” is an understandable but, I think, fairly shallow reading of Nosedive. The problem isn’t with the apps, it’s with the system. A world in which we desperately need to keep our score up if we want to have any hope of advancing? That’s a nightmare scenario.
The thing is …that system exists today. Credit scores are literally a means of applying a numeric value to human beings.
Nosedive depicts a world where your score determines which seats you get in a restaurant, or which model of car you can rent. Meanwhile, in our world, your score determines whether or not you can get a mortgage.
Nosedive depicts a world in which you know your own score. Meanwhile, in our world, good luck with that:
It is very difficult for a consumer to know in advance whether they have a high enough credit score to be accepted for credit with a given lender. This situation is due to the complexity and structure of credit scoring, which differs from one lender to another.
Lenders need not reveal their credit score head, nor need they reveal the minimum credit score required for the applicant to be accepted. Owing only to this lack of information to the consumer, it is impossible for him or her to know in advance if they will pass a lender’s credit scoring requirements.
Black Mirror has a good track record of exposing what’s unsavoury about our current time and place. On the surface, Nosedive seems to be an exposé on the dangers of going to far with the presentation of self in everyday life. Scratch a little deeper though, and it reveals an even more uncomfortable truth: that we’re living in a world driven by systems even worse than what’s depicted in this dystopia.
How about this for a nightmare scenario:
Two years ago Douglas Rushkoff had an unpleasant encounter outside his Brooklyn home. Taking out the rubbish on Christmas Eve, he was mugged — held at knife-point by an assailant who took his money, his phone and his bank cards. Shaken, he went back indoors and sent an email to his local residents’ group to warn them about what had happened.
“I got two emails back within the hour,” he says. “Not from people asking if I was OK, but complaining that I’d posted the exact spot where the mugging had taken place — because it might adversely affect their property values.”
Building a planet-sized telescope suggests all sorts of practical difficulties.
An oldie but a goodie: this Bagcheck blog post contains a whole bunch of useful links to lists of mobile device testing suites.
What happens when your SR-71 Blackbird falls apart at 3.18 times the speed of sounds at 78,800 feet?
Brad is on a roll. He knocks it out of the park again, this time talking about the difference between supporting the huge range of mobile browsers out there compared to trying to optimise for them.
Possibly the least imaginative concept video ever made, this piece commissioned by Blackberry shows a dystopian near-future ruled by security departments run by people with very, very tired arms.
Celebrating pornographers who go the extra mile when set dressing classroom porn and actually write something on the blackboard. What do they write, and is it correct?
Here’s a video of the mobile browser panel I moderated at Mobilism in Amsterdam today. It gets fairly technical for a while but it was mostly a lot of fun.
"But who the hell is Jeremy Keith anyway?" No, I have no idea either.
The heartening story of a mother who allows her child some independence instead of living in fear of a Black Swan.
It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.