The following article from The Economist China’s aversion to encryption technologies — which would make mass surveillance more difficult — makes the country’s networks vulnerable to foreign spying:
Weak security is the rule, not the exception, in digital services for the Chinese public. Email and social media must all facilitate state access, as must industrial net works used to run factories and offices, even if the extent to which the government uses that access varies. In August it banned the most up to date version of a protocol used to encrypt web traffic, known as TLS, from the Chinese internet, because it makes online surveillance harder.
A quote from Geoffrey Bowker in a recent article at STS Italia journal Technoscienza reflecting on our relationships with viruses:
The general point for me here about stuckness and knowledge is that we look at the world wrongly from the beginning if we break it up into separate entities. The theory of evolution is just wrong if it only accounts for the origin of species. What is much more interesting is the development of relationships – as in Michel Serres’ discussion of the parasite form as central. In a related context, Martin Buber argued that the relationship — to thou or that — was always prior. We murder to dissect… at any level… within or without the organism. There are reasons why many biologists say the species concept is unreal: there is no singular slicing apart of a set of entities. We interpenetrate.
The Register reports on a paper that aims to show how Big Tech has adopted similar strategies similar to Big Tobacco to influence AI ethics research, policy, and generally spreading doubts about the harms of AI:
An article from The Economist mentions how drone technology gets transported from the battlefields of Iraq to American cities:
The notion of putting cameras on orbiting drones to catch malefactors was born on the battlefields of Iraq, where American armed forces wanted to nab people leaving bombs on roadsides. Ross McNutt, a former airforce engineer, founded Persistent Surveillance Systems (pss) to offer the same service to American cities (and others, such as Juárez) struggling with high murder rates. PSS drones flew over parts of Baltimore, most recently in May-October 2020. St Louis, among America’s most violent cities, also considered but is poised to reject PSS’s services, which raise difficult questions about how much surveillance Americans are willing to tolerate in exchange for the promise of safer streets.
A quote from an article by David Grazian titled “The Production of Popular Music as a Confidence Game: The Case of the Chicago Blues” about the creation of authenticity:
A curious set of concerns develops in settings where patrons seek out cultural forms deemed “authentic,” or naturally indigenous to their locale. In these settings, consumers expect to be entertained by performances that conform to dominant stereotypes of the setting, with attention given to local dialect, styles of interaction, dress and so forth. But in addition, they also expect that these performances will be real, as genuine expressions of self rather than a charade performed merely for the audience’s benefit. As a result, producers face the arduous challenge of meeting a predetermined set of expectations without appearing as though such a feat requires any effort. While few contemporary consumers would be shocked by the revelation that motion pictures rely on tricky camerawork and special effects, or that their favorite actor routinely opts for plastic surgery, audiences rarely suspect that authentic culture and art—populist music, exotic handicrafts, ethnic cuisine—depend on similarly performative strategies of manipulation and impression management.
The article from MIT Technology Review mentioned in my previous post referenced a paper from Nick Yee & Jeremy Bailenson titled “The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior”. The researchers found that appearance of avatars shapes the behaviour of users:
In a brilliant article at MIT Technology Review, Tate Ryan-Mosley gives an overview of the history and challenges of face and beauty filters that are popular on social media apps and platforms:
In an article at The Atlantic Ian Bogost comments on a recent episode of Amazon’s use of social media in a campaign to influence opinion regarding criticisms of the company’s exploitative labour and business practices. Interestingly, he notes a change in the corporations communicate: