Innovation (Spam Mail #15)

💩 Cool Shit

Ever Given Ever Ywhere - The Ever Given is free from the Suez Canal. World commerce is healing. Celebrate by dropping the Ever Given anywhere on a map.

Steer through the Suez Canal - If the first link wasn’t enough, CNN have an interactive story as a game. Try steer through the Suez.

Worn on TV - Search fashion you see from TV.

Remember the internet - A book series aiming to capture the feeling of the internet by going deep on micro communities.

Groove Pizza - Create grooves using math concepts like shapes, angles, and patterns.

808303 Studio - A virtual simulator of a TR-808 drum machine and TB-303 bass synthesizer.

💎 Word gems

Your Face Is Not Your Own (New York Times / Kashmir Hill)

With the lens that tech changes social dynamics, this piece considers how a Shazam-like facial recognition app could change those passing encounters we have today with strangers.

The more society-changing aspect of facial recognition in the United States may be how private companies deploy it: Americans’ right to privacy is relatively strong when it comes to the federal government but very weak when it comes to what corporations can do. While Clearview has said it doesn’t want to make its app available to the public, a copycat company could. Facebook has already discussed putting facial recognition into augmented-reality glasses. Within the last year, a mysterious new site called PimEyes has popped up with a face search that works surprisingly well.

The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It? (Tim O’Reilly)

Silicon Valley is a mirror of what is wrong with our economy and corporate governance, not the cause of it.

O’Reilly has a great piece analyzing how the nature of the tech giant’s ecosystems reframes how we think about economics, and what that means for the future of silicon valley.

The US theory of antitrust has largely been based on the question of consumer harm, which is difficult to prove in marketplaces where services are provided to consumers at zero cost and where the marginal cost of experimenting on those consumers is also close to zero. The emerging European regulatory effort is properly focused on the role of dominant tech firms as “gatekeepers.” It aims to systematically limit their ability to shape the market for their own advantage. Its remedies, though, are blunt, and the processes for assessing harms will most likely proceed more slowly than the harms themselves.

Hail the Maintainers (Aeon / Andrew Russell & Lee Vinsel)

A challenge to the obsession with innovation. One quote stood out to me, “regions of intense innovation also have systemic problems with inequality”. Just one of part of a compelling argument for thinking about the broader labor market.

Focusing on infrastructure or on old, existing things rather than novel ones reminds us of the absolute centrality of the work that goes into keeping the entire world going. Despite recurring fantasies about the end of work or the automation of everything, the central fact of our industrial civilisation is labour, and most of this work falls far outside the realm of innovation. Inventors and innovators are a small slice – perhaps somewhere around one per cent – of this workforce. If gadgets are to be profitable, corporations need people to manufacture, sell, and distribute them. Another important facet of technological labour comes when people actually use a product. In some cases, the image of the ‘user’ could be an individual like you, sitting at your computer, but in other cases, end users are institutions – companies, governments, or universities that struggle to make technologies work in ways that their inventors and makers never envisioned.

Share this email with a friend because your chance hasarrived!