They are doomed conceptual band-aids. Let’s unpack why. Plus: the flaw they share with Higher Education
First, a 30 second primer.
Twitter’s Birdwatch and Facebook’s Oversight Board
Twitter and Facebook (and every other online platform) are grappling with how to handle moderation as the activity on their platforms grows increasingly out of control, with real world ramifications. Birdwatch is Twitter’s answer, Facebook’s is their Oversight Board.
People have been likening Twitter’s Birdwatch to Wikipedia’s approach: it relies on community moderation. However it’s actually quite different: all Twitter is enabling is adding notes/warnings to others’ Twitter posts from members of the Birdwatch community. The visibility of those notes would be based on how helpful they are, as voted by others.
Facebook’s Oversight Board…
3 reasons for America’s crazed reality, and Trump isn’t one of them
“The Storm is coming.”
If you’ve heard of QAnon, the mainstream conspiracy theory movement tied to Donald Trump, you’ve probably heard about “the storm”. It’s a supposed sudden wave of arrests and revelations that would prove Trump’s heroic efforts to save the world from a cabal of satanic baby-eating globalists.
Another economic shockwave is going to hit its stride in 2 years or less. 12 examples of jobs that will be affected, and 12 questions we should be asking. We need an AI plan as badly and urgently as we needed a pandemic plan.
Five years ago, Tim Urban published The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence. Two images have always stuck with me from that post.
BLM. Clubhouse. Stepchickens. Meta-memes. VC thirst traps. The explosive rise of the 👁👄👁 app is the culture of 2020 rolled into one. And here’s why and how. Driven by the philosophy of one of its apparent founders.
If you weren’t on Twitter — especially tech/startup Twitter — on June 25th or 26th, you may have missed a wild, fascinating ride.
ICYMI
Yesterday a new site/ app/ enigma appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, with the name 👁👄👁 / Eye Mouth Eye / It Is What It Is / IIWII. It’s at the URL 👁👄👁.fm. (Yes, you can have emoji domains. Sort of…
This is America.
An experiment in liberty, co-opted for control
And the raw purchasing power of hypnotism.
It’s “the invisible hand” making marionettes dance
lurching and insidious.
It’s a psychotic trip, loving itself perversely.
America is a violent addiction to consumption and entitlement.
A Gucci
Gang
United -by more guns than war-torn- States.
It’s defending the right to violence more than humanity
And cradling power instead of youth
With Every Child Left Behind
For the most incarcerated people on earth.
America is a history that won’t be acknowledged,
Falling into a blind rage against itself.
It’s patriotism that is…
The bad news: the largest advertisers in the world are pulling their budgets. The world’s biggest publishers have declared an ad-free future. Facebook is punishing traffic that doesn’t generate discussion. EU regulation will soon massively limit data collection. And much more. The online attention economy is collapsing in on itself.
The good news: a new, audience-first model is emerging that benefits everyone involved, whether you’re a publisher, blogger, advertiser, or network.
How you keep up will make or break your business.
I’ll walk you through both sides.
/// THE BAD NEWS ///
Bubbles seem large and solid, but are fragile and hollow. It’s the perfect…
What I think about, when I think about creation. Press play and read on.
Playing with toys evolved into playing with ideas. Reflection became imagination.
Ejected from the the mold, we were dropped into systems and structures, like finely forged insects suddenly trapped in resin.
Bureaucracy, rules, definitions.
Our destiny is to break them. Smashing everything we’ve ever known into millions of infinitesimal fragments that recombine into the unknown. We take what is, to make what isn’t.
We begin to see the vastness of negative space. We begin to dream.
The world’s greatest choose to drop from the sky…
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I remember when I saw a total eclipse as a kid in 1999, in Bucharest. The vivid memory is of all the stray dogs, and birds in the trees, suddenly erupting into a cacophony of howls and anxious song, as day seemed to become an out of place evening.
—
When I see the sliver of darkness eaten out of the sun, it’s not an abstraction.
It’s not just an aesthetic spectacle.
It’s me standing with my two feet planted on the Earth, and watching the moon, over three hundred thousand kilometres away, slowly cut across the sun that…
Just like any other person these days, I’ve been dragged into countless conversations about The Donald. When it comes to his conflicts of interest, I find it strange that everyone obsesses about the micro, rather than the macro. Trump’s personality, history, and actual statements paint a pretty clear, consistent, end-to-end picture. Here’s the little thought experiment I have in mind. Hyperlinks summarized at bottom.
Let’s pretend you’re Trump for a second.
You’re a businessman with a global network that relies significantly on the cachet and recognition of your name. TRUMP. You’re also notorious for how much you enjoy the attention that brings you. The future of your…
Startup/Life Diaries. Something challenging, something learned, something listened, something heard.
I returned from Europe in September, and it feels like I’ve barely had time to come up for air. The double-edged sword of an overflowing funnel.
Something Challenging:
Pride | One of the necessities of bootstrapping a startup is a relentless, self-sacrificing approach to getting things done. Most people are familiar with the advice of separating yourself from your product, i.e. extracting the ego.
“Don’t get married to your idea or your solution. Only the problem.”
What is less spoken about is the more subtle ego of tackling all the work yourself. You need to set that aside, too. We…
Mario Vasilescu
Rethinking the attention economy and wonder wandering.
