Uber considers its drivers to be everything but employees. They are simultaneously customers of Uber’s proprietary software and private contractors providing the company a service (they also provide a service to another group of Uber’s customers, the riders). If this seems confusing, uroboric, or like a contortionist’s exercise in semantics, it is.
Silicon Valley’s Phoenix-like resurrection is a story of ingenuity and initiative. It is also a story of callousness, predation, and deceit. Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise — what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.
Source: Thieves of Experience: How Google and Facebook Corrupted Capitalism – Los Angeles Review of Books
Giant travel search engines such as TripAdvisor, Expedia, Kayak, and Google Flights have all but replaced travel agents as most consumers’ travel advisors. Soon, independent curating engines like these could trigger the next wave of disruption in retail. The first stage of the digital shopping revolution saved consumers time and money by letting them buy things they already wanted without having to go to a traditional retail store. A major part of the second stage will likely be a dramatic refinement of technologies that tailor recommendations and then scour the internet for the best deal.
Source: How Retail Changes When Algorithms Curate Everything We Buy
As the world’s biggest consumer tech show wraps up, here’s what Apple, Google, and other giants who made news tell us about tech in 2019.
- Google and Amazon continued duking it out for title of most virtual assistants listening to the most people on the most devices. It’s been a multi-year battle, once led by Amazon, quickly matched by Google, and now escalating between these two companies like a new cold war.
- The biggest news is that Apple–fresh off devastating quarterly earnings that showed iPhone growth has tanked–is making a bigger effort to be interoperable with third-party products, and make its services accessible without using Apple devices themselves.
- When I took a ride in Waymo’s first driverless taxi last year, I noticed something interesting: The app interface doesn’t show your route–it just shows the start point and end point. I joked to one of Waymo’s product developers that it had already designed its interface for flying cars. They laughed, but only a little. Perhaps because that’s exactly the kind of thinking that the mobility industry is doing, now that self-driving technologies are maturing and digital ride hailing has been figured out. The way we move is only going to keep changing.
Source: The 3 biggest trends at CES 2019
Garrett Hardin’s Science article “The Tragedy of the Commons” 50 years ago focused on a physical world where common goods are finite and rivalrous. By contrast, this paper explores the digital commons, calling for better understanding of its long-term impact and for government policies supporting benefits while mitigating costs.
In Stockholm, the advertising company Clear Channel owns more than 1,000 digital kiosks serving an endless loop of ads to citizens. It’s the sort of high-tech urban installation we wish might do more than just sell us things. And beginning in November of last year, Clear Channel partnered with the city to give these signs new purpose: to offer homeless people directions to the nearest shelter on particularly cold nights.
Source: Clear Channel’s digital billboards help keep homeless people warm
2018 was an unprecedented bad year for technology that has eroded consumer trust. But you won’t see any mention of that this week. Because it’s the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. It’s the time of year when gadget manufacturers everywhere line up to dazzle us with their latest takes on thin and shiny. It’s one long “This Is Fine!” cartoon, playing out in the stale cigarette-scented air of the Hilton Las Vegas–with canapés!
Privacy and security are the two things we need out of CES that we most certainly won’t get (despite Apple’s giant ad). Instead? I’ve gotten pitches for $15,000 massage chairs, delivery robots, and, as always, more TVs than I can count. It’s like the industry is telling us, kick back, binge on a show, and stuff your face until this nightmare has come to an end.
The last big innovation explosion — the proliferation of the smartphone — is clearly ending. There is no question that Apple was the center of that, with its app-centric, photo-forward and feature-laden phone that gave everyone the first platform for what was to create so many products and so much wealth. It was the debut of the iPhone in 2007 that spurred what some in tech call a “Cambrian explosion,” a reference to the era when the first complex animals appeared. There would be no Uber and Lyft without the iPhone (and later the Android version), no Tinder, no Spotify.
Source: Opinion | Is This the End of the Age of Apple? – The New York Times
Everybody, I’d like to announce that the retail apocalypse has been officially cancelled. It turns out, humans do occasionally like putting down their smartphones, leaving their sofas, and going to a real brick and mortar store to make a purchase.
Source: Retail predictions for 2019
From TVs you can roll up like a poster to 5G networks that are finally getting real, these are the biggest trends we expect to see at CES 2019.
One year ago, I described the media apocalypse coming for both digital upstarts and legacy brands. Vice and BuzzFeed had slashed their revenue projections by hundreds of millions of dollars, while The New York Times had announced a steep decline in advertising.
Twelve months later, it’s end times all over again. There have been layoffs across Vox Media, Vice, and BuzzFeed (and dubious talk of an emergency merger). Mic, once valued at $100 million, fired most of its staff and sold for $5 million. Verizon took a nearly $5 billion write-down on its digital media unit, which includes AOL and Yahoo. Reuters announced plans to lay off more than 3,000 people in the next two years. The disease seems widespread, affecting venture-capital darlings and legacy brands, flattening local news while punishing international wires. Almost no one is safe, and almost everyone is for sale.
Source: The Post-Advertising Future of the Media – The Atlantic
Clearly we’ve reached a saturation point with tech overload. Many of us have found ourselves falling into reward-center feedback loops, craving the dopamine hits that likes and comments give to the brain or the instant gratification of one-click shopping. We’re not exploring and learning anymore — we’re zombie scrolling, buying things we don’t want, and spending precious hours staring at pictures we don’t care about.
We already know Alexa had a good Christmas — the app shot to the top of the App Store over the holidays, and the Alexa service even briefly crashed from all the new users. But Alexa, along with other smart speaker devices like Google Home, didn’t just have a good holiday — they had a great year, too. The smart speaker market reached critical mass in 2018, with around 41 percent of U.S. consumers now owning a voice-activated speaker, up from 21.5 percent in 2017.
Source: Smart speakers hit critical mass in 2018 | TechCrunch
A single design studio is responsible for branding a slew of mega-successful startups like Casper and Allbirds. Here’s how it took over the world–or at least your feed.
Source: Red Antler on why blanding dominates instagram branding
What to expect from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and more
Growth in smartphone sales stopped surging years ago. In the next decade, they’re likely to decline. What does that world look like?
Source: Global, U.S. Growth in Smartphone Growth Starts to Decline
Teens credit social media for helping to build stronger friendships and exposing them to a more diverse world, but they express concern that these sites lead to drama and social pressure.
Source: Teens’ Social Media Habits and Experiences | Pew Research Center
African American and Asian job applicants who mask their race on resumes seem to have better success getting job interviews, according to research by Katherine DeCelles and colleagues.
Source: Minorities Who ‘Whiten’ Job Resumes Get More Interviews
Game streaming is a long-held dream, but with Project xCloud, Xbox is harnessing the power of Microsoft to make it happen—for real this time.
Source: With Project xCloud, Xbox Wants to Bring Gaming Anywhere You Are | WIRED
JARON LANIER IS ONE of the leading philosophers of the digital age, as well as a computer scientist and avant-garde composer. His previous books include Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality, Who Owns the Future?, and the seminal You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. His latest book bears a self-explanatory title: Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.
Source: Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier – Los Angeles Review of Books
