Wayforward: Big tech shaping the global order, and the next wave of social apps (Spam Mail #39)

💩 Cool shit

Hocus:Focus - A “keyboard accessibility horror game”. A short game showing what it’s like to navigate a site with poor keyboard accessibility.

DOOM via Checkboxes - Last week I shared Doom via Twitter, this week it’s Doom with checkboxes.

Racer Trash - A “freeform collective of artists br0adcasting reinterpreted:media.etc for charitable causes // your viewing pleasure” with a really cool retro PC interface.

Stolen Stories - Another case for believe nothing you see online. Download Instagram stories of “rich people’s expensive food” to use on your own account.

Moontruth - Discover the secrets of the dark side of the moon. I thought this was a clever satire of conspiracy theories but turns out it’s a marketing campaign for the movie Moonfall.

Reddit show discussions - A handy shortcut to look up discussions on Reddit about your fav shows.

Tip of my tongue - For when you just can’t quite think of the word you’re thinking. I know this is me a lot of the time.

Wayforward Machine - To mark the Internet Archive’s 25th anniversary it’s a spin on the Wayback Machine. Instead, take a peek into 2046 to see a future without trustworthy information online.

💎 Word gems

The Technopolar Moment: How Digital Powers Will Reshape the Global Order (Foreign Affairs / Ian Bremmer)

This article examines three possible futures; nations remain the “dominant provider of security, regulation, and public goods”, global companies come to dominate, and lastly a web3 techno-utopia. I find this take too techno-centric and the likely scenario is similar to today - a mix of all 3. I’m not convinced big tech encroaching on the role of the government is a new phenomenon. There’s been large companies before, but the difference today is the speed internet companies can act.

Most of the analysis of U.S.-Chinese technological competition, however, is stuck in a statist paradigm. It depicts technology companies as foot soldiers in a conflict between hostile countries. But technology companies are not mere tools in the hands of governments. None of their actions in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol insurrection, for instance, came at the behest of the government or law enforcement. These were private decisions made by for-profit companies exercising power over code, servers, and regulations under their control. These companies are increasingly shaping the global environment in which governments operate. They have huge influence over the technologies and services that will drive the next industrial revolution, determine how countries project economic and military power, shape the future of work, and redefine social contracts.

It’s Not Misinformation. It’s Amplified Propaganda (The Atlantic / Renée DiResta)

There’s no mincing words here, and the whole article is worth reading. Propaganda isn’t new, but social network apps act as behavior change machines as much as (mis)information distributors.

Today there is simply a rhetorical war of all against all: a maelstrom of viral hashtags competing for attention, hopping from community to community, amplified by crowds of true believers for whom sharing and retweeting is akin to a religious calling—even if the narrative they’re propagating is a ludicrous conspiracy theory about stolen ballots or Wayfair-trafficked children. Ampliganda engenders a constellation of mutually reinforcing arguments targeted at, and internalized by, niche communities, rather than a single, monolithic narrative fed to the full citizenry. It has facilitated a fragmentation of reality with profound implications. Each individual act of clicking or resharing may not feel like a propagandistic act, but in the aggregate, those acts shape conversations, beliefs, realities.

And You Will Know Us by the Company We Keep (Remains of the Day / Eugene Wei)

Wei shares one of the sharpest takes on imagining a different type of social media in the future. The core insight is all western social apps directly tie your social graph (who you follow) to the content you see. By comparison, you don’t need to follow anyone to see content on TikTok.

With the WSJ report that the 2018 algorithm change to show more content from friends and family amplified outrage, and the NYT report that Facebook’s like & share buttons are core to the issues on the platform, Wei’s focus on the social graph part of social media is pertinent.

The fundamental attribution error has always been one of my cautionary mental models. The social media version of this is over-attributing how people behave on a social app to their innate nature and under-attributing it to the social context the app places them in. Perhaps the single most important contextual influence in social media is one's social graph. Who they follow and who follows them.

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