s08e01: Learning the world
0.0 Context
It’s Friday 3 January 2020 on the West Coast of America where I’ve been studiously ignoring all the froth of Are We At War Yet because I just cannot deal. I feel slightly worse for being less aware of Australia Is Burning. Today is one of those in-between days because I decided it was my first day back at work.
It’s been a case of slowly looking at things and thinking about what to do next and how.
On with the new season and on with the show:
1.0 Some things that caught my attention
1.1 Learning the world
Via erica robles-anderson, this tweet documenting “several v popular videos with tiktok users trying to map out exactly how content is algorithmically promoted”.
Why is this interesting, and why did it catch my attention? I think I saw this yesterday and bookmarked it, because it prompted this thought:
imagine you’re living in a world governed by algorithmic timelines and you’re trying to figure out how it works from first principles, like trying to figure out gravity.
At first, it feels like a science fictional concept, but if that turns you off, then just think of it as a thought experiment. The connection I’m making here is this is pretty much like if you were a farmer and your livelihood and income depends on how good your harvest is. At some point, you or some other farmer is going to want to understand how your crops work. (Flashback to GCSE history, the Norfolk four-course crop rotation system and discovering nitrogen fixing).
I’m not an anthropologist or a sociologist (but I’m a fan, I guess?) so I’m not going to pretend that this is some new behavior, clearly it’s not. But it’s new to me!
One of my points of reference for this is someone like Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land, which I remember from the beforetimes. Sullivan’s website was one of many that tried to understand how Google’s search ranking algorithms worked because, well, if your livelihood is dependent upon income from search advertising and pay-per-click ads then you want to understand how the underlying system works. Otherwise you might end up like Metafilter.
I’m not making the live-by-Google-die-by-Google point here, that’s a whole other topic. I’m grabbing on to the behavior.
It feels different—unique?—to me because TikTok isn’t an SEO blog, and my gut instinct is that the TikTok explainers aren’t aimed at the same people the early SEO and PPC income blogs were aimed at. Bluntly and grossly, they were aimed at Older People, whereas TikTok is, well, forgive the phrase: a more internet native, younger platform.
Downthread from the original tweet, Paddy Leerssen also points to YouTube content creators “starting their own data collection to test the hypothesis” of bias in YouTube’s trending algorithm toward mainstream media.
The kids aren’t dumb. They’re doing experiments to figure out how their world runs.
Now I can shift to the platform side of things and why I (and some other people?) are worried about opacity and transparency in the world.
People want to, I think, understand what the rules are so they can play the game. I’d make the argument that weather is fair in that it’s subject to the same underlying principles everywhere. Figuring out how weather works is kind of fair in that you just need to run a bunch of experiments, depending on of course whether you’re in the privileged position to do so. So, maybe not fair, I guess.
But figuring out how crops work might not be fair if Monsanto doesn’t let you. Or if the only crops that you can use in your environment are ones you’re not allowed to reverse engineer.
It’s even okay if the rules change, I think. Although that’s something that physicists are terrified of, because our Standard Model of the universe rests on (currently well-tested?) assumptions that a) universal and b) constants exist.
Like I said, I understand the behavior isn’t new, and it’s more a reflection of what I’m exposed to that this felt new and interesting to me. Stephan Somogyi reminded me of Gibson’s observation that the street finds it own uses for things. Of which step one is: understand the things on the street.
So on the one hand, a worry from a 40-year old that the world is Too Complicated and will change Too Much, Too Quickly for the younger people enmeshed in it to understand. But on the other hand, maybe I shouldn’t underestimate the kids. They’re smart. Maybe they’ll figure it out? Doesn’t mean they couldn’t do with some help.
Another connection: I just remembered the story of the little black books used by ticketing agents dealing with airline ticketing applications, full of shortcuts and hacks to get a purportedly inflexible system to do what you want it to do. People deconstructing systems, figuring out how they work, figuring out ways to get things done.
That tingly exciting feeling I have I think is because this looks like bits of the scientific method are breaking through. They’re being document. Shared eagerly, collaboratively.
And on the third day of 2020, if that’s not something to be optimistic about, I don’t know what to tell you.
1.2 Shorter things
Via Pavel A. Samsonov, software continues to be terrible because the embedded computers in parking meter computers were end-of-lifed for January 1, 2020 and don’t work any more. In an aside, the phrase “Department of Transportation” is hyperlinked on the CBS Local news story, but it does not lead to the NYC Department of Transportation, instead to articles about the Department of Transportation on the news website. This annoys me, because I think it is wrong.
“Mysterious drones fly over Colorado and Nebraska, prompting a Federal Aviation Administration investigation” sounds like it could be really interesting but is much more likely to be something like an ad agency practicing something in our horrible Hubertus Bigend Blue Ant universe.
The Canadian military reacted really well to Pokemon Go, all things considered. Yes, they asked for PokeStops to be removed from military installations, but they also asked for another PokeStop (to increase museum attendance) and to “upgrade the museum PokeStop to a Pokemon gym to increase traffic”. I remember being overly harsh on John Hanke and his team when I was on a Niantic partner pitch meeting a long time ago, but I have to admit that he’s totally achieved his goal of getting people to Go Outside.
Alexa Answers is a new-to-me service from Amazon that gamifies question answering to build a knowledge base for its smart assistant. It feels like it’s a sort of Cyc for “stuff about the world” only instead of being run by an esoteric group of academics it’s being run by one of the biggest data miners who have a business plan that involves sticking as many microphones and cameras on things as possible. I bring Alexa Answers up with a heavy sigh (here’s its FAQ) because it’s got all the tropes of gamification, and I use that word in the mean sense. There’s leaderboards and prizes and community/peer-rating of answers and in one way, yes, we know that works for crowdsourced/community-generated content, but it also kind of doesn’t? Because of the last ten years of internet? And because those mechanisms are seen as allowing you to create something at scale without having to deal with the fact that you are working at scale. Anyway, it’s not like it’s a hard thing for me to set out my curmudegeon stall, but I am starting the timer for how long until Alexa Answers is involved in something dumb right now.
I was negotiating with my 6 year old kid about how much screen time / television he could watch the other day and asked him how long he wanted. His answer: “The whole bar”. Because he meant the progress bar. Because that’s how we measure time now. In progress bars. He is not entirely wrong.
Well! Before the jump that was exactly 1,337 words which is kind of disgusting to be honest.
Best,
Dan