The web today, the web tomorrow (Spam Mail #33)

💩 Cool shit

How I experience web today - A useful demo showing how all those popups make visiting websites an awful experience.

Talk to God virtual - Join a Zoom meeting with God.

Jazz Up Your Passwords - We all should have unique, strong passwords. This is a password generator that turns those passwords into Jazz Chords.

Hogwarts Class Catalog - eLearning, Hogwarts style. Sign up for History, Transfiguration, Potions and more.

Marvel Character or Font? - How well do you know your fonts or your Marvel characters? I did shockingly bad at this quiz.

Eternal Fight - An everlasting click battle between left and right.

4 minute creativity test - This divergent association task is a 4 minute test that apparently tells you how creative you are.

Do nothing for 2 minutes - Amongst the rush of doing stuff, this website forces you to stop and pause.

💎 Word gems

Luxury Surveillance (Real Life Mag / Chris Gilliard and David Golumbia)

The authors use the term luxury surveillance for the phenomenon that many of us pay to be tracked by buying devices like Fitbits, Ring doorbells, Alexas and Apple watches. They contrast this with the parallel model of imposed surveillance, such as the ankle monitor. Their takeaway: we need to be more nuanced in how we understand and think about privacy and surveillance.

Both the Apple Watch and the FitBit can be understood as examples of luxury surveillance: surveillance that people pay for and whose tracking, monitoring, and quantification features are understood by the user as benefits they are likely to celebrate.

Tech Epochs and the App Store Trap (Stratechery / Ben Thompson)

Ben Thompson continues his analysis of tech epochs, and looks to the loosening of app store controls as a major shift forward in crypto as the next tech paradigm, and what the web could look like tomorrow.

[I]t’s worth noting that there is one additional reason beyond greed or control of the customer experience why Apple and Google might not be motivated to loosen their control of apps: if crypto is tech’s fifth epoch — and there is a very good chance that is the case — then it is very much in the crypto-industry’s interest to pay attention to and weigh in on these App Store battles. Remember that the Internet provided the bridge from the PC to mobile; in a well-functioning market apps and platform-level APIs would provide the bridge from mobile to crypto. Just think about all of the obstacles there are in making crypto applications user-friendly and accessible to general users, and how much more would be possible if mobile were as open and configurable as the PC.

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