Fun Things Are Better

If ever William Gibson's adage about the future not being evenly distributed is true, it's been so this week. In the midst of a torrent of horrible news comes a watershed event in the form of Pokémon Go, a genuine phenomenon unlike anything I can remember. Suddenly, everyone was playing this game, to the point where I went from checking every passerby on the street to see if they were playing to just assuming they are.

It’s easy and cynical and true but also a little hollow to juxtapose the agony and the frivolity of these two dominating news stories. Maybe walking around town hunting virtual monsters is the kind of diversion we need to stay sane (it’s also, apparently, fraught). Maybe it’s a Huxley-esque distraction. It’s also, best I can tell, incredibly fun.

Fun beats out servers melting down under the load of tens of millions of players, inscrutable interfaces, even your privacy or social taboos.

Let’s acknowledge right now that this phenomenon could not really have been built by anyone else. The combination of twenty years of fandom plus the zeitgeist of mobile computers plus a map company led by a guy who really just wanted to build a video game that got people outside. It’s that rare combination of years and years of work and setback and waiting for the world to be ready then being in the right place at the right time when it was.

And still, watching as folks run around town, noses in their camera/computers, I’m reminded of these games we call social networks. What is Pokémon Go but a more directly monetized version of Instagram, which we play for the steady dopamine drip of hearts? (Here’s where I come clean about not actually having played much Pokémon Go, not because it doesn’t look fun, but because I recognize the limitations of my own addictive personality and by God I’ve got a newsletter to write. Fortunately, my wife is keeping me in the know.)

All of which made me realize our social network games aren’t all that fun any more. Facebook is rearranging a spreadsheet of your friends. On Twitter we’re all too busy yelling and arguing and being harassed and griefing and tone policing and worried about being tone policed. Instagram’s constant pressure to show off how A. MAZING. your life is just seems exhausting.

So it’s no wonder that Snapchat is dominating as the social network that’s still fun (those of us who prefer words to stickers-on-pictures have found some solace in private friend-Slacks that feel like Twitter circa 2009). Oh, and hey, Snapchat has top notch augmented reality and even a geocaching game of its own. The smirking ghost just may be the social network that stays fun.

Watching and Watching Over

Live streaming video, in the form of Periscope and Facebook Live, is having an “Arab Spring” moment in the U.S. When Republicans shut off C-SPAN over a sit-on about gun control, Democrats turned to Periscope. The world knows about the shameful murder of Philando Castile because his girlfriend broadcast the immediate aftermath on Facebook live. Less than a week later, another shooting was captured on Facebook Live.

Just as authoritarian regimes have sought to shut down these seemingly democratized, but centralized, platforms, algorithms and automatic content filtering may smother the fire of the live video revolution.

Facebook temporarily took down the Philando Castile video, later reinstating it and blaming the original error on a “technical glitch”, though without providing any details what that glitch actually was. Was it the police? A poorly trained algorithm? A human moderator tasked with keeping graphic violence off the site but unaware of its newsworthiness (unsurprising, given how much of that moderation happens on the other side of the world).

Facebook isn’t saying, nor have they given any substantive accounting for how they’ll avoid this in the future. Mark Zuckerberg commented on the video briefly, but it reads like an emotionless Markov bot programmed to mention Facebook’s ostensible mission to “build a more open and connected world”.

I’ve said for years that, as tech has completely subsumed media, they need mechanisms in place to ensure some accountability. And those mechanisms can’t just be algorithms or community policing, they need actual people raising these issues and applying real pressure. And we need to demand better, not just as Facebook users but as citizens.

Drone Warfare Comes Home

As the tumult and terror of last week settled and we took stock, a new disturbing story emerged: having cornered the man who killed 5 of their fellow officers, Dallas police used a surveillance robot loaded with C4 explosives to kill the gunman.

This, as far as I can tell, is the first time police have used a robot to kill a civilian. Much like drone warfare being fought remotely from thousands of miles, using a robot to kill a suspect abstracts so much responsibility and dehumanizes us all.

The facts of this particular case are no doubt grim, but we have protections and precedents for a reason. I don’t have an answer to the question of what the police should have done, but I’m fairly certain remotely detonating an explosive placed by a robot is setting us on a dangerous path.

Sidebar

• Season 2 of Mr. Robot premiered all over the internet, starting on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat. The thing about this show is, I feel like every atom of it was custom tailored for me, or maybe a 10 year younger version of me. From the Chuck Palahniuk nihilism to the hackery details they get mostly right to the fact that it’s set in NY not Silicon fucking Valley. The soundtrack even feels like a bullseye. And yet. I can’t quite escape the fact that I don’t think this show is actually … good. I mean, I watch it, but with a nagging sense that it’s just not living up to its potential. Still, hard to deny their marketing is on point.

• More social media “influencers” are actually being required to, ya know, influence.

•Every phone sold on Japanese telecom KDDI. Back to 1988!

• The source code for the Apollo 11 command and lunar modules is now up on Github, posted by a former NASA intern. There are some fun easter eggs, if jokes in 50-year-old computer code is fun (it is).

• Did you know that Twitter’s designers added a “delightful” birthday feature? Anyone who visits your profile on your birthday is greeted with balloons! Plenty of people discovered this when they visited activist DeRay McKesson’s page on the news that he’d been arrested. On his birthday. I’m sure the design team that thought was a good idea was only thinking of how magical this would be for Twitter’s users. Bret Victor shames this mightily.

• It’s the history of the URL!

• Just an incredible piece of data journalism and reporting from FiveThirtyEight on gun deaths in America.

Thank you so much for reading.