Tag: internet

WeChat

So why should people outside of China even care about WeChat? The first and most obvious reason is that it points to where Facebook and other messaging apps could head. Second, WeChat indicates where the future of mobile commerce may lie. Third, WeChat shows what it’s like to be both a platform and a mobile portal (what Yahoo could have been). Ultimately, however, WeChat should matter to all of us because it shows what’s possible when an entire country — which currently has a smartphone penetration of 62% (that’s 33% of its population) — “leapfrogs” over the PC era directly to mobile. WeChat was not a product that started as a website and then was adapted for mobile, it was (to paraphrase a certain movie) born into it, molded by it.

Trolling confederates

It turns out that people on Confederate Facebook are not very good at the internet. Our friend Lowen dialed Chris to investigate. He claimed to be a guy named Roger who’d heard Chris was a Northerner who’d joined the group to troll. Understandably, Chris was upset about this, and claimed to have never left the state of Texas. “Roger” told Chris he’d heard that he had the state flag of “Maine or New York” on his truck, that he worked at Dunkin’ Donuts, and that he’d voted for Obama “both times from a polling station in Brooklyn, New York.” Chris was very upset that people were spreading these vicious rumors about him, and told “Roger” that his “friends in high places” would slap the trolls with prison time for their actions.

Once I was in charge of the group I decided to take it in a new direction. The Confederate flag, I felt, had become a toxic brand. And all this South-rising-again business was a sure loser with swing voters. A top-down rebranding was in order. After rigorous focus-group testing, I decided to align the group with LGBT rights, Michelle Obama, Judaism, miscegenation, and the victorious Juche ideology. And that is how “confederate pride, heritage not hate” became “LGBT Southerners for Michelle Obama and Judaism.”

trolling for a good cause, the best kind of trolling.

Content Farms

Dumb people are ruining everything

The highbrow internet is based upon the misguided idea that there is a certain consumer who turns to the internet for well-written, informative content in the form of thinkpieces, #longform, podcasts and ‘well thought out glorified blog posts.’ Eventually, an authority in the niche provides a website with the ability to perform sustainable day to day farming. Based on an audience of ‘educated’ people who ‘spend money,’ you would think that the relative scale of these niche content farms with ‘an interesting take’ on culture + niche would be sustainable. They aren’t. They’re all going to die because of the toxic byproducts of viral supernova sites.

CSI Cyber

cop shows are some of the dumbest material tv has to offer, and this one is among the worst.

I only 2 short months, CSI: Cyber has quickly become one of the most magnificently absurd police procedurals being aired by a major television network. To be fair, its problems are mostly a matter of circumstance: It’s actually just about as brain-dead as any other CSI series, but this go-round comes off especially bad since it was ostensibly designed specifically to follow technology-related fictional crimes. As a result, the gap between the content of the show and the knowledge it is supposedly built upon is much more dramatic than any other major Jerry Bruckheimer undertaking of the past few decades.

Censorship Theme Song

China has just released a tremendous rousing tribute to its clean, clear and incorruptible internet. The song is performed by the Cyberspace Administration of China choral group. Called Cyberspace Spirit, the tune features a large mixed choir and 4 solo singers who regale an audience while informing them that they are also keeping a close eye on everything they view and type. “Keeping faithful watch under this sky, the Sun and the Moon,” they sing. “Creating, embracing everyday clarity and brightness; Like a beam of incorruptible sunlight, touching our hearts.” The chorus exclaims: “Internet power! The web is where glorious dreams are; Internet power! From the distant cosmos to the home we long for.”

The Cobweb

The Wayback Machine is humongous, and getting humongouser. You can’t search it the way you can search the Web, because it’s too big and what’s in there isn’t sorted, or indexed, or catalogued in any of the many ways in which a paper archive is organized; it’s not ordered in any way at all, except by URL and by date. To use it, all you can do is type in a URL, and choose the date for it that you’d like to look at. It’s more like a phone book than like an archive. Also, it’s riddled with errors. One kind is created when the dead Web grabs content from the live Web, sometimes because Web archives often crawl different parts of the same page at different times: text in one year, photographs in another. In October, 2012, if you asked the Wayback Machine to show you what cnn.com looked like on September 3, 2008, it would have shown you a page featuring stories about the 2008 McCain-Obama Presidential race, but the advertisement alongside it would have been for the 2012 Romney-Obama debate. Another problem is that there is no equivalent to what, in a physical archive, is a perfect provenance. Last July, when the computer scientist Michael Nelson tweeted the archived screenshots of Strelkov’s page, a man in St. Petersburg tweeted back, “Yep. Perfect tool to produce ‘evidence’ of any kind.” Kahle is careful on this point. “We can say, ‘This is what we know. This is what our records say. This is how we received this information, from which apparent Web site, at this IP address.’ That this happened in the past is something that we can’t say, in an ontological way.” Nevertheless, screenshots from Web archives have held up in court, repeatedly. And, as Kahle points out, “They turn out to be much more trustworthy than most of what people try to base court decisions on.”

Eurotechnopanic

I wrote a 3000-word essay about Eurotechnopanic — or, Google and the German Problem — that just appeared on Zeit Online. A small backstory:

Zeit is my favorite German publication by far. But I did first approach the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung with this piece because the paper has been at the forefront of Germany’s antitechnology movement and I thought they would welcome discussion … and also because the FAZ had published an 8000-word attack on me and I figured 3000 words was a downpayment on equal time. But the FAZ refused to publish it.

So I went to my favorite newspaper, Die Zeit, and its online editor-in-chief, Jochen Wegner, agreed immediately to publish it. I’m honored to be there. These are important issues in Europe that require more balanced discussion.

Here is the start of the essay in English:

I worry about Germany and technology. I fear that protectionism from institutions that have been threatened by the internet — mainly media giants and government — and the perception of a rising tide of technopanic in the culture will lead to bad law, unnecessary regulation, dangerous precedents, and a hostile environment that will make technologists, investors, and partners wary of investing and working in Germany.

I worry, too, about Europe and technology. Germany’s antiprogress movement is spreading to the EU — see its court’s decision creating a so-called right to be forgotten — as well as to members of the EU — see Spain’s link tax.

I worry mostly about damage to the internet, its freedoms and its future, limiting the opportunities an open net presents to anyone anywhere. 3 forces are at work endangering the net: control, protectionism, and technopanic.