Twitteretter

Something pretty disturbing is happening with my Twitter feed and maybe with Twitter’s artificial intelligence altogether. Twitter recommends posts to its users, at least to me, but I like to think they did not introduce that feature just for my benefit. Lately, the majority of tweets which appear in my recommendation notifications are tweets of users sharing a bereavement in their family. People opening their heart to tell the wider World that their father, mother, brother, sister or child has died. These are random people I don’t know or follow. I am not going to write here about the wisdom of sharing such private news on an open media platform, but why does Twitter keep recommending this content to me? Did I, at some point, inadvertently click on a coffin advert? Do I have a fascination with death that I am unaware of but which Twitter’s AI, knowing me, by now, better than I do, is trying to satisfy? It’s not pleasant, but it’s indeed curious, and gives me something to write about L...

This is a latin expression, attributed to a I Century Roman poet, Juvenal, referring to how easily the crowds were appeased by ensuring that they had enough to eat and could go to the circus. Marx made the same observation about religion, another means of appeasement, when he coined the phrase, ‘Religion, the opium of the people’. Today, these have been replaced by sports and social media, still fulfilling the same purpose. Can you imagine the power our citizens would have to improve society if they deployed the same passion to say, fixing climate change, or homelessness, than they do to a Real Madrid – Barcelona or a Liverpool – Man United derby? Or if great social reformers like Rutger Bregman, Noam Chomsky or Freada Kapor Klein had the same number of followers on Instagram as Cristiano Ronaldo, Ariana Grande or The Rock? Alas, we are still more passionate about entertainment and distraction than about improving our lot, and I am afraid our lot will not improve whilst this is the cas...

Those of you who know their family history will have heard stories of how our parents and grandparents, as post war children, were targeted by unregulated tobacco companies, as new consumers easy to get addicted to their products. This targeting, as we saw later on, had catastrophic consequences on public health. Tobacco corporations resisted, for years, attempts to regulate them, offering to self-regulate and casting doubt on the reported danger of their products, until they were eventually brought in line by society through extensive regulation. Today’s children are being targeted by social media companies, with ever more sophisticated Artificial Intelligence algorithms to compete for their attention at a time when they have not developed the tools to defend themselves. We are already starting to see the consequences, but they will only be fully clear, as happened with tobacco, years ahead. It is not your purse or your life, but rather your lungs or your time, but it is still crimina...

Monopoly. When you are a child, this is a board game, in which you greedily strive to become a property tycoon, accumulate land and build houses and hotels on it, to crash your opponents by taking all their money, ultimately winning the game. When nobody secures dominance, the game goes on forever, as monies you take when others land on your property, you return when you land on theirs, so nobody’s wealth runs out. This is a very apt analogy for how monopolies work. Once you establish one, as Peter Thiel, the mega successful Silicon Valley investor tells us, you guarantee maximum profits by negating the possibility of competition. One winner and every one else losing is fun in a board game but, when the game is real life and the board is society, this is a problem, from many perspectives. We are seeing this with the tech giants today, Google, Amazon and Facebook, behemoths which own their markets, increasing inequality and stifling entrepreneurship. Time to change the rules of the game...

I’ve started paying attention to the Screen Time functionality on my smart phone. In case you don’t know, this feature tells you how much you are using it, and what doing. It is enlightening and I highly recommend you start reviewing it to understand your own usage. For me, currently 2h31m per day, 225 notifications and 122 pickups. Disappointingly for the tech industry, I don’t use social media very much. 12m on Twitter, under a minute on Facebook, Instagram and any others. A lot of my time is spent reading news. The one weakness is WhatsApp, responsible for nearly 4 hours and 350 pickups per week, most of which, I guess, a complete waste of time. Time, you see, is becoming for many of us, at least for those lucky enough to be doing well financially, our most scarce resource. Our smart devices are aggressively focused on stealing it, outsmarting us, not a hard thing to do as we are not aware and conscious a lot of the time. I’m going to war against my pickups. You should do the same L...

I am watching Jeff Orlowski’s brilliant documentary about how the tech industry is using behavioural psychology and a deep understanding of our biochemistry to develop an addiction to their tools in our young people, driven by their aim to grow advertising revenue and improve behaviour predicting models and akin to pushing drugs at the school gate. I highly recommend it. An all out assault on the mental stability of our young is taking place in the face of indifference from our governments, and it can’t be permitted. It may seem difficult to solve, but it isn’t, if the political will is there. Solutions could be articulated around making the industry responsible for the welfare of their underage users. For example, a significant fine, shared between social media companies, every time someone under 20’s screen time on social media exceeds 1 and a half hours per day would soon put pay to this antisocial corporate behaviour. One thing is clear. This is a problem we must solve. And quickly...

I’ve gone on Youtube this morning to find myself greeted by an ad in which Nigel Farage is trying to sell me some financial product. I am not sure exactly what, since I did not stay to watch the full advert. Since my observation is that Farage seems to have an aversion for truth and has in my opinion failed to ever communicate honestly, I would by default stay well clear of any financial products he associates with. I am however regretting my haste now, hoping the ad will appear again on a future visit. I failed to understand that it is important, for my future protection, to indeed know which brand thinks it a good idea to use Farage as their front man. This choice, I think, speaks clearly to their values and is a stark warning to anyone considering their products. Having come to this realisation, I am no longer offended by Youtube’s choice of advert, but rather grateful for their convoluted attempt to protect me from entering into the wrong financial relationships Length: 981 charact...

A process of extraordinary importance is taking place in Canberra, ignored by most of humanity. The Australian state, a traditional superpower, is engaging in battle with Facebook, a new supranational superpower, over payment for editorial content shared on its platform. Facebook acts, for many, as a news and content hub, a one stop shop which presents content from many sources, shared by their network. The snug is, whilst it makes huge advertising revenues, it does not pay for this content, and the Australian legislature is considering whether this is appropriate, after a claim by NewsCorp. Facebook is retaliating, not by building a Death Star, but by withdrawing news from its platform in Australia and by removing news about Australia from its global platform. When watching this dispute ensue, it is important to remember that the Australian legislature has a democratic mandate, it represents the interest of its people, whilst Facebook does not, it represents its shareholders Length: 9...

Donald Trump has been banned from Facebook. All he had to do to get to this outcome is engage in a ten year campaign of overt racism, inciting to hate and violence against foreigners, blacks, women and Muslims, insult a wide range of public figures, attempt to delegitimise American democracy, apologise for white supremacism, excuse a number of murders and lie to the public over 20,000 times in under 4 years. My 17 year old son has also been permanently banned from Facebook, after two innocuous posts and the grand crime of attempting to create a business page for his first, minor entrepreneurial project. All requests for reinstatement so far have been cast aside by Artificial Stupidity Systems (their performance doesn’t grant the more common AI moniker) and we have to date not managed to reach a human intelligence which may take a more sympathetic view. I hope the only thing Samuel ever has in common with Trump is the complete inability of Facebook to treat both of them commensurately...

As Donald Trump was finally permanently banned by Twitter, after four years of testing the boundaries with the gusto of a rebellious teenager with over-permissive parents, a parody profile appeared with his photo on the handle, tweeting what the owner of the profile, in satiric tone, imagined an out of work Trump may be tweeting. Within one hour, the profile had over 7,000 followers and 66,000 retweets. Comedy is good, it can even be a tool for sanity and survival in these crazy times, but the fact that all it took was this imaginative impersonation to gain more followers than those accumulated over years of effort by people and organisations with serious, worthwhile messages and stories of import to tell reminds us of the opportunities we are losing with social media. They could be a forum for real debate, democratic engagement, information or even education, but the substance is completely lost in the cacophony of inconsequential nonsense that many, in their escapism, seem to prefer...

I am at times preoccupied with how to increase the Twitteretter readership and, at those times, I am relieved that I am not trying to do the same on Twitter. It seems to me that, to find resonance in social media, to achieve that holy grail of virality, the most effective tactic is to be aggressive or offensive against an idea or person respected and despised by equal portions of the population. This tactic has the best chance to generate engagement (here is the English language showing its ability to evolve with technological evolution for the third time in just a few lines) and to attract platform (fourth) users, some of whom may stick (fifth).   I should probably try it, at least at some point, to see how it transfers to longer content and, should I decide to do so, there are plenty of people and ideas which would fit the above target specification and who I would have no logical trouble or moral qualms in attacking.   If you have a favourite, leave me a comment and I will ...

The XXI century has witnessed the birth and spread of a series of computer programs and environments for unmediated, simple communication which have self-abrogated the common moniker ‘social media’. Few appellatives are as inept to describe their subject. The name implies, for a start, that other media, whether it is traditional printed media, broadcasting, literature, etc., are somehow not social. Further, it ignores the fact that these technologies are used as much for asocial or antisocial behaviour as they are for social behaviour. Social media, or social networks, may have been, as a name, an aspiration. But it is one that not only has not been fulfilled, but that is unlikely by its design, by its innate briefness and the ease with which messaging can be uncritically repeated and amplified. I do understand that, from a marketing view point, the much more apt ‘dumb media’ or ‘lazy media’ would not have quite the same effect, but they would at least show honesty and self-awareness L...

Don’t get excited, this is not a post about a fabulous land where inequality crushing solidarity rules. It refers, on the other hand, to the rule of audience share above all else in media, driven by a need to sell advertising to finance the production, or acquisition, of content. The loss of reputation Donald Trump has suffered during his presidency, racking up a set of criminal and corruption accusations that would have made Bugsy Siegel proud, would, in other times, make him untouchable, turn him into a pariah, compel him to abandon public life and adopt a low profile. Not today. I expect that, soon after he leaves the presidency, which he will ultimately do, and regardless of the outcome of the barrage of lawsuits which may closely follow his stepping down, Trump will have his own TV program in one of the main networks, likely Fox, or even his own network, from where his divisive, dishonest message will continue to be amplified to a large, loyal following. Share above all else  ...

There is a new video based social media trend. Pranking. A section of users of channels such as Tik Tok and Youtube are intent on growing their following, with the ultimate objective of monetising their media presence (if this language is unintelligible to you, don’t worry, this is normal, it is tech speak designed to find new, industry specific ways to say things that can be perfectly said in normal English). One of their strategies is to publish videos pranking others, designed to elicit easy laughs from voyeuristic, lazy observers amused by seeing others ridiculed in public. Ridiculing others to gain following is not new, this is just the medieval square on modern social media. The pranksters, and their followers, demonstrate that, on average, little progress has been made since the Middle Ages and that the additional education we receive succeeds only at adding a layer of cheap sophistication to the same basic, deplorable instincts that have ballasted humanity through its history...

When considering the climate change denial campaign I covered in entry 169, one of the most salient practices of the strategy orchestrated by the oil industry is the use of pseudoscientists, either in the oil industry’s payroll, or ideologically motivated, to plausibly introduce doubt. This practice is enabled, even supported, by the media’s misunderstanding of balance. Editors seem to think balance consists of allowing both sides of an argument to be presented in equal terms, to eliminate bias. This is eminently right when dealing with ideology and opinion, and in these cases the practice should be supported. But it should not extend to dealing with verifiable facts. When those presenting verifiable facts and those fighting them with demonstrable lies and confusion (read Brexit, climate change denial or hydroxicloroquine peddling, for example) are given equal airtime, this is not balanced reporting, but a dereliction of duty by our media and a betrayal of the confidence placed on it...

Great social, political and philosophical ideas used to be brewed at meeting venues where intellectually engaged people would gather regularly to debate and discuss. My father, a philosophy teacher and political activist, used to have one such group, where philosophy, ethics and sociology would be discussed, providing fuel for the books and articles that several members were regularly publishing. Ideas are developed, shaped and tuned by debate and presentation, even hearing yourself present your own thinking to others allows you to further it. These environments are fertile ground on which the Marxist understanding of capitalism, neoliberalism and many philosophical and ethical currents were sowed and harvested. I am missing this custom with our generation, and certainly with millennials, more used to communicating and dialogue via apps. They may exist, and I may just not be aware. If they do not, we will struggle to develop new thinking with a potential to change the society we live i...

As you can see from the number at the beginning of this post’s title, I have been writing and publishing Twitteretter for a good while. Getting an established readership is proving extremely hard work. In fact, quite often I cannot even get my friends and family to read it. The Twitteretter format is designed to make it very easy to read and follow, as it is daily, very short and predictably so, due to its character limit. Are we really that busy that we cannot spare the time for one or two minutes of reading a day? I fear the answer is yes. There is huge competition for our attention nowadays, and it is very difficult to focus it on what is worthwhile (I am not implying Twitteretter is, that is for you to decide). It is not uncommon to finish a day feeling you have not stopped but you have not done much. Your smartphone is full of apps armed with functionality designed to catch your attention and keep you engaged. And when you engage with your phone, you disengage from all else  L...