Here is Douglas Rushkoff’s closing talk at this weekend’s Platform Cooperativism conference. And Astra Taylor gave a follow-up response.
There are also a bunch more videos linked from the conference video page.
On faves, likes, and hearts
This week’s On the Media includes a discussion with the Tow Center’s Emily Bell, talking about a piece she wrote in The Guardian.
Yes, it’s about Twitter faves/likes/hearts. And yes, website design choices do influence user behavior!
I found myself not bookmarking, as I would have done a day earlier, a horrifying image retweeted by journalists depicting men using phones to film a woman being stoned to death for adultery. I did not “like” let alone “love” the image but wanted to note it as important. We must have a system which allows for capturing the significant as well as the appealing.
NUDGIN’ (PUPPIES)
Yeah, I have no idea how to introduce this. It’s a video about how you shouldn’t nudge the puppies.
Platform Cooperativism + Creative Time Summit
There are two conferences happening in NYC this weekend that I’m planning on going to. Platform Cooperativism just got started this morning and runs through tomorrow at The New School. The Creative Time Summit is happening Saturday/Sunday, at a high school in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I’m not sure how I’ll juggle both events tomorrow, but Platform Cooperativism has a livestream going if you want to follow along from home.
I was an undercover Uber driver
Related to yesterday’s post about the tyranny of customer ratings, here’s Emily Guendelsberger writing about her experience driving for Uber.
The Uberpeople forum exists in a state of quivering rage I usually associate with cable-news talk shows. Drivers are furious about everything. Spoiled passengers. Fare cuts. Living in fear of arbitrary ratings. The dumb Spotify thing streaming over the driver’s data plan rather than the passenger’s. A bunch of drivers are even using the forum as a home base to try to unionize in several cities.
But I also find some useful numbers to fill in the vagaries of the training video. For example, I should accept 90% of pings to avoid trouble. I’m also surprised to learn that Uber’s cutoff for driver ratings “below rider expectations” is generally agreed to be only 4.6 stars—I’d had no idea when using Uber as a passenger that rating someone four stars was kind of a big deal.
So what does a 4-star ride look like?
I’ve had a perfect rating for almost a week when I get a ride that I can tell is going to screw it up. I pull up, blocking a one-way street, and throw on my blinkers. After waiting the requisite few minutes, I text the guy. He opens the front door, makes a “one minute!” gesture, then shuts it again. Several more minutes tick by. I finally call, and the guy picks up, giggling. “We’ll be right out!”
When the couple finally gets in, nearly 10 unpaid minutes after I showed up, a cloud of weed stank follows them into my car. I try to hide my irritation. They’re headed to a restaurant in Chinatown I’ve been to a bunch of times, so we chat about that as I drive. Despite this, the stoned guy insists on giving me inefficient directions. When he directs me to turn the wrong way down a one-way street, I tell him not to worry, I’ve got this, and just drive them to the restaurant. The guy sulks.
The next day, my five-star rating has updated to a 4.8.
It’s a good article, and I’m slightly worried that it’s published in a publication that’s been shut down recently.
The website remains accessible for now, but if it were to go offline archive.org won’t have a copy: “Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt.”
Rating systems in the on-demand economy
The Verge’s Josh Dzieza on how Uber and its peers “turned us into horrible bosses.”
The rating systems used by these companies have turned customers into unwitting and sometimes unwittingly ruthless middle managers, more efficient than any boss a company could hope to hire. They’re always there, working for free, hypersensitive to the smallest error. All the algorithm has to do is tally up their judgments and deactivate accordingly.
Ratings help these companies to achieve enormous scale, managing large pools of untrained contract workers without having to hire supervisors. It’s a nice arrangement for customers too, who get cheap service with a smile—even if it’s an anxious one. But for the workers, already in the precarious position of contract labor, making every customer a boss is a terrifying prospect. After all, they—we—can be entitled jerks.
See also: The Trouble with the “uber for…” Economy and part 2 of Enchanting by Numbers
The Whale is dead, long live Linky (updated)
I recently got this email about my project The Whale:
I am not a web developer or anything like that, but I am a person who has struggled with OCD and dyslexia for decades. A work like Moby Dick is normally not accessible to me because of the way I read. Your way of organizing it into small bitesize, all caps chunks has allowed me to enjoy this great literary work.
I know this is probably not what you had in mind when you wrote the code, but I wanted to thank you all the same.
I was floored. This is the most rewarding kind of feedback to get about a project.
And while that’s certainly not what I had in mind when I wrote the code, there is a part of me that enjoys the constant fidgeting with the text. All the clicking (or tapping) eases some part of my brain that might otherwise have me go impulsively check for new social media notifications.
I asked if there were any other texts that he might enjoy in this format, and then decided to generalize my project to show additional novels beyond Moby Dick. And so was born the project I’m now calling Linky. The current selection includes:
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
- Le Morte D’Arthur by Thomas Malory
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
- A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
- The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
Update: Added three more titles to the list.
If you have any ideas for other titles that might benefit from the Linky treatment, please let me know.
The brutal ratio
New York magazine’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells identifies the key political fact that has emerged from the Intercept’s Drone Papers:
One question—maybe the most pressing question—is how the public feels about that brutal ratio of one targeted death to five or six unintended. The evidence so far is that the public is more or less okay with it.
iTunes Terms and Conditions: The Graphic Novel
Behold: an amazing cultural artifact drawn by R. Sikoryak, each page in the style of a different comics artist. On page 12 we learn that underage users must be read the Terms and Conditions by a parent or guardian, in the style of R. Crumb.
Feral Landscape Love
Ellie wrote an essay that was recently published in the Brooklyn Rail. She makes a case for weeds, in urban spaces that are lacking in green spaces.
Based on growing evidence for the role of greenspace in mental health and the importance of plant life for a slew of environmental services (including temperature regulation, air quality improvement, and soil stabilization), the plant community I work with is beneficial and should be embraced. A small but growing cadre of defenders respectfully refer to these plants as “spontaneous urban plants” that inhabit “novel ecosystems” which are in urgent need of further study.
To the average city-dweller, and compared to their cultivated counterparts, the species I advocate for can appear “messy” and unrefined: flowers that are too small, seed pods that are too big, thorns that tear clothing, roots that reach into brick and asphalt. They may seem indicative of disrepair, of indolence, of a community down on its luck or still climbing towards peak gentrification. It is perhaps this sensibility that drives building superintendents and maintenance crews out into the streets to “clean up” (massacre) these plants on a regular basis.
As the Weedy Species Alliance motto goes: “Let the Dandelions Live!”
See also: Feral Landscape Typologies and The Next Epoch Seed Library