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This website was archived on July 20, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.
Exolymph creator Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.

December 13, 2016

Thumbs Up for Pandering

What fresh hell is this, San Francisco?

You are entering… Emoji Reaction Land. Tread carefully lest ye be streamed!

I don’t actually object to Facebook Live, but the Luddite in me finds this corporate skin of a local train station somewhat unsettling. It’s not a new form factor in terms of advertising, but Facebook as a company is a little different from a department store, no? Stepping into Macy’s involves subjecting myself to surveillance, yes, but they don’t try to subsume every moment of my day.

The Facebook-ified corridor felt like a satirical theme park. But all those “omg!” and “lol!” faces were completely earnest. Facebook is papering San Francisco with this campaign outside the train stations as well, and it’s borderline /r/FellowKids-worthy.

Facebook, you’re old. Stop trying to copy Snapchat. It’s giving me secondhand embarrassment. Make do with being the identity system for a large chunk of the world and indexing copious information about our relationships. Yeesh.

September 25, 2016

Personalities, Bought and Sold

Sara Watson wrote about the contradictory selves that each of us scatters around on the internet:

I catch glimpses of her in sidebars and banners, in the branded ads creeping into my infinite scrolls. She surfaces in recommendations and personalized results — fleeting encounters unless captured by screenshot.

She is a pixelated, automated portrait of myself. She is fragments, an amalgamation I see in the digital mirror. She’s me, now through a glass darkly.

She is a pastiche of my patched-together digital detritus. She is my browsing history, my status updates, my GPS locations, my responses to marketing mail, my credit card transactions, and my public records.

Artwork by Matt Lyon.

As a pretty public person who makes a living writing (or at least tries to), I struggle with this. I don’t care about the personal effect that ~surveillance capitalism~ has on me (I do care about the political effects, don’t worry!) because let’s be real, the personal effect is nil. I just get advertised to a little more effectively. But it does frustrate me that my public persona is so fractured.

There’s cyberpunk me, which you get exposed to via this newsletter, and which also comes out in the chat group, on Twitter, and on Hacker News. There’s business-y me on Twitter, my website, and occasionally Facebook. But I have a whole separate sphere of interests centered on makeup and other “girly” stuff, expressed via Instagram and Reddit.

I feel really weird when I “cross the streams” by talking about makeup on Twitter or whatever. I’m not presenting something cohesive, from a branding perspective. And since clients come from everywhere, that potentially threatens my livelihood, or at least de-optimizes it.

There are always tradeoffs. The internet and social media have been such a boon to me, especially since I do not function well in normal office environments, but constantly pitching myself to anyone who drops by is exhausting.

March 5, 2016

Personality Piracy

Let’s play with a hypothetical. Imagine that personality traits are akin to software, and you can download them into your brain. They’re like WordPress plugins — you search through a marketplace of both free and paid options, then install and activate them. Congrats! You’re now smarter, or you have a sardonic sense of humor, or you’re more cautious when evaluating risks.

How would this system be monetized? I assume the hardware for interfacing with your brain would be purchased outright, or maybe you’d sign a two-year contract and make monthly payments. Perhaps the government would subsidize your purchase, as long as you promised to modify your personality in ways that they favored, such as boosting your docility. (Prisoners, needless to say, would have “healing” modules forced on them, developed at the taxpayers’ expense.)

Photo by Cory Doctorow.

Some of the personality plugins would be available for an upfront payment or a recurring subscription. Others would be open-source, free to anyone and audited by the community. The most popular ones would be nominally free but monetized by advertising. For example, maybe you can gain eight IQ points, but in exchange you have to love Coca-Cola. You know why you love Coca-Cola, but it doesn’t make a difference — you still love it. Not only do you personally buy lots of Coke, but you also evangelize the drink to your friends. If you want to go back to having your original soda preferences, you have to give up your augmented intelligence.

Cracked versions of the Coca-Cola-type plugins are available, but they’re not always trustworthy, and installing them invalidates your hardware warranty. Eventually airports routinely scan your brain as well as your body, and if copyrighted patterns are detected in your gray matter, you’ll be pulled aside and stripped. As in, the TSA engineers will yank out that new part of your mind.

This post was inspired by the “Jedi SpongeBob” episode of Terrifying Robot Dog and based on a conversation with Alex Irwin, who contributed the Coca-Cola/advertising example.

March 1, 2016

Amagooglezon

Amazon has a whim machine bolted onto their ecommerce system. The recommendation engine is a combination of practical — “Other people who bought X also bought Y” — and bemusingly enthusiastic: “You clicked on X before so I bet you’d really like ALSDJFLKSAJF too! Wow, look at all those letters! Notice how they’re in the same alphabet as X? Pretty impressive, huh?” It’s bad at nuance but it’s good at throwing out options. There are so many options for it to scan and suggest.

This stock photo amuses me. Image via Robbert Noordzij.

Businesses need to solve hard problems in order to be successful. Shopping on Amazon is cheap and convenient and they have a vast array of goods. Selling things cheaply without collapsing is a hard problem, and so is convenience, and so is being stocked with lots of products. Amazon conquered all three challenges. Now the benefits feed into each other. Customers love the cheapness and convenience, so sellers must stock their storefronts. Sellers are much easier to aggregate than customers, so once you figure out the customer bit, you’re golden.

Superstar internet businesses — and I guess most high-value companies in general — are all about positive feedback loops. Circular incentives that channel energy from initial success to intermediate success to dominance.

When you search for something on Google, you make Google better by feeding data into their algorithm, and your presence incentivizes both websites and advertisers to cater to this particular search engine. You come back because the algorithm is so good at presenting the information you want. Websites worry about SEO and advertisers drop $$$$$ because that excellent algorithm keeps pulling you back. The incentive structure is great for Google. That ingenious feedback loop made them dominant and it keeps them dominant.

Fast forward to 2037 when we’re surfing Amagooglezon (or whatever supplants them) with our heads swimming in VR buckets. We’ll bounce from product to product, purchasing and appraising and reviewing and returning and diving into on-demand experiences. I wonder how recommendation systems will work then — maybe they’ll have personalities. Maybe we’ll fall in love with them. Maybe we’ll hate them. Maybe our wallets will be managed by AI assistants and none of this will matter.

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