Bandcamp will waive all fees in an effort to help indie artists and labels during the COVID-19 crisis. The first Friday of every month promotion, which will last through the end of the year, has sold well over $75 million in music and merch to date.
Source: Hyperbot
What if you took a video game with an obsessively cultish following and made it the basis for a reality TV show? That’s what Electronic Arts, the video game publishing behemoth, recently did with one of its most popular titles, The Sims, a game that first became a phenomenon over 20 years ago when it gave players the ability to build and personalize worlds and populate them with characters who act and behave much like we do.
The result was The Sims Spark’d, which debuted on TBS’s Eleague Friday night lineup and BuzzFeed‘s Multiplayer YouTube channel last month in a four-episode series. The show felt much like Lego Masters or The Great British Baking Show, complete with a host—American Idol finalist Rayvon Owen—a set of judges, and Sims fanatics and YouTube influencers (an ethnically diverse mix of mostly females) who were divvied up into groups and forced to come up with story lines and create characters and worlds under extreme time constraints and other limitations. (And, of course, get along with each other.)
Source: Fast Company
IN JULY 2015, two founders of DeepMind, a division of Alphabet with a reputation for pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence, were among the first to sign an open letter urging the world’s governments to ban work on lethal AI weapons. Notable signatories included Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Jack Dorsey. Last week, a technique popularized by DeepMind was adapted to control an autonomous F-16 fighter plane in a Pentagon-funded contest to show off the capabilities of AI systems. In the final stage of the event, a similar algorithm went head-to-head with a real F-16 pilot using a VR headset and simulator controls. The AI pilot won, 5-0.
Source: Wired
TikTok is taking its fight against the Trump administration to the courts, saying it will file a legal challenge Monday against the government’s order to ban the video app effective mid-September. TikTok alleges that President Trump’s executive order is “not rooted in bona fide national security concerns,” according to excerpts of the complaint the company detailed in a blog post. It also alleges the U.S. government did not conduct a fair process in deciding that the app needed to be banned in the country and that its Chinese owner ByteDance must divest its assets in the United States.
Source: The Washington Post
Moore’s Law, the observation that the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles every 24 months, has taken a beating as progress miniaturizing circuitry falters. But chip giant Intel has plotted a course to keep the idea alive with a plan to pack 50 times as many transistors onto processors than is possible today.
Source: CNET
Does time spent using digital technology and social media have an adverse effect on mental health, especially that of adolescents? Here, two scientists discuss the question, and how digital devices might be used to improve well-being.
Source: Nature
Fifteen years ago this week, Google Maps launched on the web. It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that Google Maps transformed both the way we think about maps and the way we move around in the world. Over time, the application has evolved from a fairly static online representation of an atlas to a GPS-powered navigation tool to a platform for reviews—and, of course, for ads.
Source: Wired
At more than $150 billion in annual revenue, the global game industry is now more than twice the combined size of the worldwide film box office ($42.5 billion in 2019) and the planet’s recorded music business ($19.1 billion in 2018, including streaming). Roughly 2.5 billion people play games, even if many don’t think of themselves as “gamers” (yes, Candy Crush counts). Big tech has taken notice. Over the last few years, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have each joined Microsoft in making gaming a strategic priority. In 2020, games will become even more important to their bottom lines.
Source: Protocol
There is something both thrilling and reassuring in following the story of a star who rises, falls, and then rises anew. It’s a narrative template recognizable to even the most casual viewer of documentary shows such as VH1’s “Behind the Music” or the E! network’s “True Hollywood Story.” Just last week, both Taylor Swift and Jessica Simpson—Swift in her new feature-length documentary, “Miss Americana,” and Simpson in her new memoir, “Open Book”—revealed their struggles with, and triumphs over, personal demons: an eating disorder in the case of the former, an addiction to alcohol and pills in the case of the latter.
Source: The New Yorker
Seven years ago, MIT debuted a landmark project, which allowed everyday people to photograph and rate their streets like a Hot or Not for cities. It was a powerful showcase of how crowdsourcing opinions from citizens could help quantify a city’s appeal and, in theory, help urban designers plan better cities.
Less than a decade later, artificial intelligence is taking this idea so much further. FaceLift is a new AI system developed by Nokia Bell Labs Cambridge that allows scientists and urban planners to use a crowd’s aggregated sensibility to actually redesign the look of city streets. FaceLift AI can take any Google Street View scene and beautify it instantly—but at what cost?
Source: Fast Company
Experts in the explosively growing field of political digital technologies have developed an innovative terminology to describe what they do — a lexicon that is virtually incomprehensible to ordinary voters. This language provides an inkling of the extraordinarily arcane universe politics has entered:
Geofencing and other emerging digital technologies derive from microtargeting marketing initiatives that use consumer and other demographic data to identify the interests of specific voters or very small groups of like-minded individuals to influence their thoughts or actions. Microtargeting first had a significant impact on American politics in state level campaign work by Alec Gage, a Republican, and his firm TargetPoint in 2002.
Source: The New York Times
Startups are creating unsettling human-like avatars to take over customer service jobs—or even act as a stand-in for celebrities.
Source: Fast Company
Online privacy is not dead, but you have to be angry enough to demand it.
Source: The Washington Post
The city is home to a land rush of “collab houses,” where the content creators are getting younger and younger.
Source: The New York Times
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As antitrust investigations into Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook ramp up, execs from Sonos, PopSockets, and Tile testified before Congress.
Source: Vox
A.I., most people in the tech industry would tell you, is the future of their industry, and it is improving fast thanks to something called machine learning. But tech executives rarely discuss the labor-intensive process that goes into its creation. A.I. is learning from humans. Lots and lots of humans.
Source: The New York Times
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Dark patterns are the often unseen web-design choices that trick users into handing over more time, money, or attention than they realize. A team of Princeton researchers is cataloging these deceptive techniques, using data pulled from 11,000 shopping sites, to identify 15 ways sites subtly game our cognition to control us. The research builds on the work of Harry Brignull, a London-based cognitive scientist who coined the term dark pattern in 2010, and the authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, whose work on “nudges” explores how default options influence behavior. Just over one in 10 websites contain at least one type of dark pattern, the Princeton research finds. The more popular the site, the more likely it has at least one.
Source: The Atlantic
Almost 1 in 4 US consumers (which equates to 32.6 million households) are unbanked or underbanked. That means these people either have no access to banking products like credit and debit cards, or must pay exorbitant fees to use instruments like prepaid debit cards. (It seems counterintuitive, but the highest fees in the banking and credit industries are charged to those who can least afford them.) Denying these individuals access to basic products and services based solely on payment method borders on discriminatory. It’s one thing for luxury brands to self-select their customers on the basis of price point, but it’s another for a retailer to deny access to a person trying to buy a pack of gum.
Source: Wired
The dream of starting a company in your dorm room to solve the world’s problems and make billions in the process is still thriving on campus. But a competing dream, perhaps just as old, appears to be growing in fervor now, too: to use technical skills as an insurance policy against dystopia. Students have not failed to notice the unflattering headlines that have dogged Silicon Valley over the past several years—the seemingly unending scandals in which the biggest technology companies in the world have mishandled user data, facilitated the spread of misinformation, and sold software to the agencies enforcing the Trump administration’s harsh immigration agenda. All of this has sparked new conversations inside and outside the classroom, and there are signs that the once-reliable pipeline between Stanford and Silicon Valley is narrowing—at least a tiny bit.
Source: Slate
TikTok can feel, to an American audience, a bit like a greatest hits compilation, featuring only the most engaging elements and experiences of its predecessors. This is true, to a point. But TikTok — known as Douyin in China, where its parent company is based — must also be understood as one of the most popular of many short-video-sharing apps in that country. This is a landscape that evolved both alongside and at arm’s length from the American tech industry — Instagram, for example, is banned in China.
Under the hood, TikTok is a fundamentally different app than American users have used before. It may look and feel like its friend-feed-centric peers, and you can follow and be followed; of course there are hugely popular “stars,” many cultivated by the company itself. There’s messaging. Users can and do use it like any other social app. But the various aesthetic and functional similarities to Vine or Snapchat or Instagram belie a core difference: TikTok is more machine than man. In this way, it’s from the future — or at least a future. And it has some messages for us.
