My pudding is the most precious boy. Even though the focus on this photo is a little off I still love all of the emotion that my boy is expressing with his face.
Side note: I’m experimenting with posting photos on this blog. I might end up removing this feature but want to see how it might work.
Now I’m consumed by the worst of it. The grief and sorrow of it. How Facebook is helping some of the worst people in the world do terrible things. How it’s an astonishingly effective machine to turn people against each other. And monitor people at a scale that was never possible before. And manipulate them. It’s an incredibly valuable tool for the most autocratic, oppressive regimes, because it gives them exactly what those regimes need: direct access into what people are saying from the top to bottom of society.
Remarkable book that I didn’t want to put down.
The story of Facebook and this author’s experience there is unbelievable. The sheer amount of disinterest the company has shown over the years and the resulting harm the company has done to its employees, its users, and society is unfathomable.
I’d recommend this book to most people interested in this topic. Beyond an incredible story, the writing and structure are also top tier.
This is a book about the industrialisation of decision-making – the methods by which, over the last century, the developed world has arranged its society and economy so that important institutions are run by processes and systems, operating on standardised sets of information, rather than by individual human beings reacting to individual circumstances. This has led to a fundamental change in the relationship between decision makers and those affected by their decisions, the vast population of what might be called ‘the decided-upon’. That relationship used to be what we called ‘accountability’, and this book is about the ways in which accountability has atrophied.
The premise of this book looked super interesting. I had high hopes going in to this book but was ultimately left a little disappointed. I went back and forth between a two and a three for this book.
The book felt like it slowly ambled towards its apex/conclusion but it felt like there was a bunch of set up for little pay off. The ratio of background to connective points and evidence to conclusion felt off. Don’t get me wrong. There were some neat points and it was fun learning a bit about the language of cybernetics but I’m not sure what I take away from this book outside of an interest in learning more. I think the book could have especially used more case studies and evidence that back up the author’s point.
The problem here is that unless a lot of effort is expended, it’s easy to create an information system that will always give a particular answer, whatever the truth is. And that answer will appear to be an objective fact, even though it’s actually the result of a lot of implicit assumptions. Once more, we see that important actions can end up being the consequence of decisions nobody made – or, even worse, decisions that people made without realising they were doing so. An accounting system is an almost perfect accountability sink – even the people responsible for constructing it don’t necessarily understand what they’re doing.
Ah, I think I’ve seen this before!
Would I recommend this? I’m not sure. Once I read more in this space I suspect there might be other options.
We are the irreversible foam of free energy that was trapped in the disequilibrium between hydrogen and helium, freed by the Sun.
This, in the end, is a Planck star: a shortcut to the future. A way to hide safely for a moment, while outside eons of time flow slowly by.
I read this book after being reminded of the author’s work by a Perimeter Institute video.
Overall the ideas contained within White Holes are super interesting but I found myself disappointed by the structure and information density within the book. Even with this book being relatively quite short it felt like it was thin and repetitive, an unfortunate combination.
Ultimately I was looking for more.
The technologies unleashed by Silicon Valley are not neutral. They contain within them the worldviews of the people who develop them; and when they go unquestioned, we allow those very people to make important decisions about how and for whom our society should operate without any democratic deliberation. When we assume that technology can only develop in one way, we accept the power of the people who control that process, but there is no guarantee that their ideal world is one that truly works for everyone. They champion ideas that would ensure that automobiles continue to dominate our transportation system, that active mobility becomes a rentier service as its adoption grows, and that sidewalks are converted into a space for robots instead of people. Such a future would be hostile to the goal of more egalitarian cities and would make us more dependent on commercial interests rather than trying to free us from their control. The futures suggested by the technologies profiled so far are not the kind of world we should be striving toward.
Not a bad overview of how the incentives of corporations and society often do not align. The book is a straightforward and well-structured/argued read. If you have more than a cursory understanding of the recent going-ons in the tech industry, much of the book will not be new to you, and might not be a great use of time. However, the conclusions the author draws and arguments they make were great. Perhaps skimming the histories one is familiar with is the way to go on this book.
While I enjoyed the book it also make me feel a little more disillusioned with the current state of United States infrastructure. The book did give examples of cities and nations that have done iterative things to improve their infrastructure to make it more human-centric. But it’s unclear to me how exactly we could achieve similar things in the United States. Unfortunately.
Ultimately, building better cities and improving people’s lives requires challenging the very structures of capitalism itself, structures that are designed to serve profit before people. We can build transportation systems that empower people, facilitate social connections, and reduce the environmental footprint of mobility. But that requires altering social and economic relations to ensure the planning of those systems is based in community needs, not delivering financial returns.