71–80 of 244 posts
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None of those are AI-generated (therefore don't have the potential massive automated scale) or auto-play.
Max Headroom was a human powered simulation of such a future. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom
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This is a really silly point frankly, and can be applied to any product people have ever gravitated towards. You might claim to not like tv but it still became the most used entertainment product for decades. Same goes for the newsfeed. Any social network or product with a newsfeed will easily beat one without for users using it. Whether utopians like yourself think people like it or not is irrelevant. It’s about sur…
Crack seems to be a product people gravitate towards, but that doesn't mean it's a good product or beneficial for the user.
The Three Trends (according to the article): 1. Medium: text -> images -> video -> 3D graphics -> VR 2. AI: time -> rank -> recommend -> generate 3. UI: click -> scroll -> tap -> swipe -> autoplay By this definition, the end of the line is a totally passive consumption of endorphin-inducing pablum that blots out the real world. (I may be exaggerating a touch.) It might stop short of a wire into the pleasure centers o…
Reminds me of the Pixar movie Wall-E
The Three Trends (according to the article): 1. Medium: text -> images -> video -> 3D graphics -> VR 2. AI: time -> rank -> recommend -> generate 3. UI: click -> scroll -> tap -> swipe -> autoplay By this definition, the end of the line is a totally passive consumption of endorphin-inducing pablum that blots out the real world. (I may be exaggerating a touch.) It might stop short of a wire into the pleasure centers o…
That’s because the company correctly intuited a significant gap between its users stated preference — no News Feed — and their revealed preference, which was that they liked News Feed quite a bit. The next fifteen years would prove the company right. That is also why you don't rely solely on your own preferences and behaviors for deciding what product features to build. Also interesting: 1. The Pre-Internet ‘People M…
At the risk of being overly optimistic: Number 4 is an interesting inflection point that could potentially (hopefully) sow the seeds of it's own destruction (or at least radical transformation?) Which is to say, the move from 3 to 4 strikes me as a move toward "real human interaction," owing to the fact that the "content" there is much less prepackaged Kardashianism and much more "real person sharing real thing." Hen…
I believe we are well into number 4 and let me tell you, neither the "person" or the "thing" feels "real". Everything is so contrived, scripted, architected, and manufactured that the entirety of social media feels like The Truman Show at this point.
The Three Trends (according to the article): 1. Medium: text -> images -> video -> 3D graphics -> VR 2. AI: time -> rank -> recommend -> generate 3. UI: click -> scroll -> tap -> swipe -> autoplay By this definition, the end of the line is a totally passive consumption of endorphin-inducing pablum that blots out the real world. (I may be exaggerating a touch.) It might stop short of a wire into the pleasure centers o…
One interesting bit is if you’re making vegetables when everyone else is giving away heroin it’s not enough to just to make great vegetables, you really need to offer something that can’t exist outside of what you’ve built because your core technology does something different.
I think Urbit’s distribution and handling of auth could be that for distributed DevEx and building collaborative apps in a way that’s way simpler than on the current web stack. It’s not quite there yet but there’s a path to this reality and success is among the potential outcomes.
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yeah that's basically describing broadcast tv & radio
None of those are AI-generated (therefore don't have the potential massive automated scale) or auto-play.
I digress, the scalability point is fair and this is an irrelevant sidebar
The Three Trends (according to the article): 1. Medium: text -> images -> video -> 3D graphics -> VR 2. AI: time -> rank -> recommend -> generate 3. UI: click -> scroll -> tap -> swipe -> autoplay By this definition, the end of the line is a totally passive consumption of endorphin-inducing pablum that blots out the real world. (I may be exaggerating a touch.) It might stop short of a wire into the pleasure centers o…
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> Isn't the whole premise of modern social media to get you to engage in stuff you would not normally engage in I think "whole premise" is a bit of an exaggeration, but there is only so much "organic" engagement to be had. Some social media (e.g. Tumblr) don't try to reach too far beyond that. They're content in their niche. Facebook and TikTok, on the other hand, have infinite ambition and infinite appetite for enga…
> Facebook and TikTok, on the other hand, have infinite ambition and infinite appetite for engagement. They're well beyond the point where they need to employ manipulative dark patterns (and keep inventing new ones!) to keep those numbers up. Mind elaborating here? I'm interested in your perspective regarding social media not employing newly discovered dark patterns (infinite video feeds, shorter content, targeted ad…
Personally I find my time on Tumblr much more gratifying than my time on Facebook (yes I still actively use both) but that's more cultural rather than technical. Is the relative lack of vapid "influencer" types a function of culture or format? I think Reddit is at approximately the same "evolutionary level" but I hardly hang out there so I could be wrong. Reddit might also be the main counterexample to the general rule that sheer size and the OP's three axes all go together.
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He touches on this idea a lot, but most deeply in Infinite Jest where the parallels between between addiction to media and addiction to drugs is a major theme. In that story people have developed 'Entertainments,' basically video segments. Someone makes an Entertainment so unbelievably good that anyone who watches it is immediately stupefied and has no will to do anything but watch the Entertainment over and over. Th…
see also Neil Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death (fantastic title) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death they were calling this out since 1984 - hard to distinguish between luddism and genuine problems
Literacy requires effort, and protected time to acquire analytical skills that are not natural to humans. Childhood was, then, embraced, because it's the way to get literacy.
All-encompassing technologies that require no effort, e.g. TV or, as it appears to be the case, AR, might end the need for childhood, hence the book title. Among the novel technologies, the computer would be the one to "save" childhood, but only if society requires active (as opposed to passive) competency with computer technology. Quoting Postman:
"The only technology that has this capacity is the computer. In order to program a computer, one must, in essence, learn a language. This means that one must have control over complex analytical skills similar to those required of a fully literate person, and for which special training is required. Should it be deemed necessary that everyone must know how computers work, how they impose their special world-view, how they alter our definition of judgment—that is, should it be deemed necessary that there be universal computer literacy—it is conceivable that the schooling of the young will increase in importance and a youth culture different from adult culture might be sustained. But such a development would depend on many different factors. The potential effects of a medium can be rendered impotent by the uses to which the medium is put. For example, radio, by its nature, has the potential to amplify and celebrate the power and poetry of human speech, and there are parts of the world in which radio is used to do this. In America, partly as a result of competition with television, radio has become merely an adjunct of the music industry. And, as a consequence, sustained, articulate, and mature speech is almost entirely absent from the airwaves \(with the magnificent exception of National Public Radio\). Thus, it is not inevitable that the computer will be used to promote sequential, logical, and complex thought among the mass of people. There are, for example, economic and political interests that would be better served by allowing the bulk of a semiliterate population to entertain itself with the magic of visual computer games, to use and be used by computers without understanding. In this way the computer would remain mysterious and under the control of a bureaucratic elite. There would be no need to educate the young, and childhood could, without obstruction, continue on its journey to oblivion."