April 5, 2022

s11e26: Arrrgh, bees!

0.0 Context setting

Well this has been a terrible, no-good day of staring at a screen and desperately trying to make words and thoughts come out. And also, Tuesday, April 5, 2022 and sunny in Portland, Oregon.

Not much today. I did not go outside for my mental health walk!

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1.0 Some things that caught my attention

Arrrgh, bees!

A tweet about TEDxMidAtlantic popped up in my feed this morning, and the way my brain works is that it reminded me of TEDxSummerIsle¹, a fictional TEDx from March 2013 that took place on Twitter and Tumblr, two social networking sites that were in use during the early days of the internet.

It just hit all the right spots for me: gentle lampooning of TED’s brand expansion, Sokal-esque² plausible word salad in the style of earnest TED talks as well as, well, bees. And it was fun.

Deb Chachra remembered TEDxSummerIsle and reminded me about continuous partial attention, coined by Linda Stone in the late 1990s…

… and from there I got to continuous partial threat scanning, continuous partial existential dread and continuous partial anxiety.

(There is a whole continued thing here, riffing off the TEDxSummerIsle thing, about alternate reality games still and, say, a show about innies and outies called Severance. I have not written it here.)

Labels

Cash App suffered a security breach (oh, so passive) and sent an email to users about it. It is a terrible email because, as pointed out by Lucky225:

I hate when there’s a bunch of word salad about what was NOT included in a breach. This tells me absolutely nothing about what WAS included in it. – @lucky225

… which was interesting to me because Why Not FDA Nutrition Labels, But For Security Breach Disclosures? I already have a thing going on for California Prop 65-style warnings on things (“This app is known to the State of California to contain Algorithms”).

The Drones Did It

So yadda yadda on April Fool’s Day the sky above Dallas was tuned to the color of a QR code linking to Never Gonna Give You Up Rickroll, but what I thought was interesting this one time was the headline construction in the Dallas Observer: 300 Drones Formed a QR Code That Rick Rolled Dallas on April Fools’ Day.

I’m not singling out the Observer here, it’s just that the headline reads as if 300 drones spontaneously formed a QR code. But… they didn’t? I suppose what’s sticking here is that this headline is setting off my People Blame An Algorithm detector when really, The Algorithm Didn’t Spring Into Existence From Nowhere, It Was The People, Stupid. I suppose that’s what’s mildly offensive here: that the drones didn’t do it, some guy (it was a guy) did it. Drones don’t rickroll people, uh, people rickroll people.

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Yes, it was very short today. How are you? I’ve been better.

Best,

Dan