Attention at all costs (Spam Mail #10)

Hi there. I took an unexpected hiatus for a few weeks but I’m back with more regular emailing.

Enjoy the links.

💩 Cool Shit

Symphosizer - Font that is responsive to sound! This really blew my mind.

Never Been Seen - I love this. This microsite randomly lets you view objects from the Science Museum Group collection that have never been seen before.

Jazz Keys - Play some jazz while you type.

Same Energy - A visual search engine. Find similar images without any keywords. There’s something very satisfying about seeing the search results.

2020 The Game - A whimsical side scroller where you play through all of the events of last year.

Paint.wtf - One for my more creatively gifted subscribers. Convince an AI that you're the best artist.

💎 Word gems

Camera Obscura: Beyond the lens of user-centered design (Medium / Alexis Lloyd, Diana Sonis, Devin Mancuso, Lis Hubert)

A thoughtful criticism of design thinking that sharply highlights how putting the individual user first is at the detriment of a collective of many other groups.

Let’s take a look at Airbnb. It was designed with two sets of users in mind: guests and hosts. The experience of each was deeply considered, they were interviewed and observed, the product was designed in response to their needs. But as we’ve seen, Airbnb also has an impact on a much wider set of participants, including neighbors, service workers, city planners, local legislators, hotel owners, and more. If we consider Airbnb as a system with a complex network of actors, we can start to better see and understand the potential impact of various choices and how they play out in the system as a whole.

A Vast Web of Vengeance (New York Times / Kashmir Hill)

If you needed a strong argument for holding websites and social platforms accountable for the information they host, this is it.

The Babcock family had been targeted by a super-spreader, dragged into an internet cesspool where people’s reputations are held for ransom.

Mr. Babcock was sure there was a way to have lies about him wiped from the internet. Many of the slanderous posts appeared on a website called Ripoff Report, which describes itself as a forum for exposing “complaints, reviews, scams, lawsuits, frauds.” (Its tagline: “consumers educating consumers.”)

He started clicking around and eventually found a part of the site where Ripoff Report offered “arbitration services,” which cost up to $2,000, to get rid of “substantially false” information. That sounded like extortion; Mr. Babcock wasn’t about to pay to have lies removed.

Attention Shoppers! (Wired / Michael H. Goldhaber)

This article is from 1997. Yes, it’s old. But it’s shockingly accurate and gives insightful context to the previous two articles.

By definition, economics is the study of how a society uses its scarce resources. And information is not scarce - especially on the Net, where it is not only abundant, but overflowing. We are drowning in information, yet constantly increasing our generation of it. So a key question arises: Is there something else that flows through cyberspace, something that is scarce and desirable? There is. No one would put anything on the Internet without the hope of obtaining some. It's called attention. And the economy of attention - not information - is the natural economy of cyberspace.

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