Logic Magazine

"YouTube. It has users who love conspiracy videos, and YouTube takes that love as a sign that more and more people would love those videos, too."

Not exactly. YouTube sends everybody down rabbit holes, because it adores sticky topics and video sources (more views, more $), and so rewards those who create a bit of an information monopoly by simply lying; after which, one of their videos leads you to another one of their videos. Nobody else is making videos on that, 'cause you made it up. You win. Novel "information" is more likely to be viewed through, and then followed up on with searches for more on the topic. So make up, and YouTube is all about you, thrilled to facilitate the niche info-market you've created out of thin air or wildly exaggerated.

Merely having your own misleading phrases to refer to your bent views will be heavily rewarded by search engines including Google's and YouTube's. For example:

"I wrote about this in my new book, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. In it, I discuss Dylann Roof, the Charleston mass murderer, who said he Googled the phrase “black on white crime” after the Trayvon Martin shooting. He has talked about how important that experience was in forming his white supremacist views. He noted in his online diary that when he Googled the phrase “black on white crime,” the search engine gave him information that shocked him—and helped him come to a different understanding about the so-called truth about race and…

excuse the long quote, i'm hoping to engage you in some of its critiques.

"The failure of the open-source movement is ultimately a failure of imagination.

Let’s back up a bit. When I talk about the “failure” of the open-source movement, I don’t simply mean that systemic underfunding of crucial open-source projects has led to incidents like the Heartbleed saga, whereby a vulnerability in an important software library called OpenSSL undermined the integrity of a large part of the internet. [...] Open source’s biggest failure is philosophical.

Free as in Freedom

For me, the best parts of the open-source movement were always the remnants of the “free software movement” from which it evolved. During the early days of the movement in the 1980s, best captured by Richard Stallman’s book Free Software, Free Society, there were no corporate conferences featuring branded lanyards and sponsored lunches. Instead, it was all about challenging the property rights that had granted software companies so much power in the first place. Stallman himself was possibly the movement’s best-known evangelist, traveling around the world to preach about software freedom and the evils of applying patent law to code.

Stallman framed the argument for free software in moral terms, positioning it as not only technically but ethically superior to proprietary software, which he saw as a “social problem.” And he practiced what he preached: in his personal life, Stallman went to great lengths to avoid…

Wendy: "I recently [wrote] an article on the failures of the free software movement for Logic Magazine, in a piece called Freedom Isn’t Free [2]. I agree that free software is useful as a political rallying point. As it is now, though, it doesn’t present a challenge to capital.

If we want to reclaim the radical roots of the free software movement, there needs to be a larger political project mobilising around what free software originally meant and extending that to challenge the dominance of the tech giants. It’s not easy, but there is value in the ideas behind free software. I first came across the movement when I was really young and I loved it - like, “yeah, intellectual property sucks!” The challenge is getting people who feel that way to to understand why intellectual property exists in the first place - how capitalism works, and why it needs intellectual property. From there, you have a bridge to a more radical politics."

Jason: "I see free software as one of the reasons we should unionise. I recently gave a talk at a Ruby conference on the Lucas Plan, which was well-received - everyone liked the idea of producing socially useful things. But then I shot myself in the foot by saying that the MIT license needs to die, which didn’t go over well. If you use a license like that to release software, you have no control over how your software is used. You can have all the moral codes you want, but then it’s being used 10 companies down the line by someone you don’t…

> Psycho-Pass, is a really good anime in terms of society and crime

At it's core it's an exploration in Bentham, Mill's view of Society, warped into some dystopian technocratic utopian ideal of what it should be.

Sadly, to appeal to the masses and get it on screen it had to be tied into some cop-drama, the first seasons were good, with good philosophical examination, but the movie in Netflix and following seasons were utter garbage. I've tried re-watching them, and other than re-hashing the cop plot it was pretty lame.

I highly recommend to first 2 seasons to techno utopians who have a very shallow and superficial understanding o the Human psyche and think that 'AI solves that' type hand wringing doesn't always end up like this. We Humans are the apex predator for a reason, and people who don't examine the Human condition and try to engineer society from an ivy tower always forget that.

The CCP is the best example of a Psycho-pass analogue and the mere fact that this latest hack reveals they are a more advanced Stasi-like police state with poor OPSEC shows just how feckless these things are in practice. Sadly, the consequences are real: Tibet, Xinjiang, Hongkong various African countries.

With that said, read this [0] as a primer and stick to the first 2 seasons in Japanese sub if you do give it a watch and end it with the movie if you MUST in order to spare yourself the disappointment of the latter parts.

0:…

Please think hard about the design decisions of your game. I grew up with SimCity and later SimCity 2000. It informed many of my young opinions about government policy. But I later came to find out that SimCity wasn't nearly as objective as it looks. There are a lot of conservative politics baked into the design of the game that I'd argue were potentially damaging to the kids who played it back in the 90s.

This article from 1992's LA Times quotes Maxis president Jeff Braun saying how they're pushing a political agenda. Specifically pro-mass transit and anti-nuclear power.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-10-02-vw-391-story.html

What really opened my eyes, though, was this excellent article from LOGIC magazine about how Will Wright based the entire simulation on the work of Jay Wright Forrester. I don't know if it was a conscious choice to adopt Forrester's extremely conservative social policies, or if Will Wright just happened upon a bunch of ready-made algorithms he could use. But the result is the same. SimCity teaches us many fallacies about urban planning and finance that Republicans have historically used to justify certain policy choices.

https://logicmag.io/06-model-metropolis/

My point is just to be very conscious of the biases you're encoding into the logic of your game. What may just be a game to you may be someone's first lessons in politics.

After having read the article Built to Last[1] from the latest issue of Logic Magazine over my morning coffee, and spending breakfast pondering my coming day of figuring out if we can disentangle some stuff I'm working on from the increasingly complex and inscrutable Big Data ecosystem, and if it's even going to be possible to get management to approve it when the requests to stick RSS feeds into DBMSes are forever piling up, and generally thinking about my own mid-career situation, and, this comment really hit me like a punch in the gut.

This quote from Built to Last is going to stick with me for a while: "... many people don’t even see the preference for complex languages for what it is: an attempt to protect one’s status by favoring tools that gate-keep rather than those that assist newcomers."

I'm not leaving the industry any time soon. At least in the abstract, I do like what I do for a living, and believe that there are still some habitable spaces left in the field of informatics. But there's a part of me that is beginning to wonder if the best and most comprehensive literary (sort of) analogy for modern software engineering culture isn't the Orks from Warhammer 40,000.

[1]:https://logicmag.io/care/built-to-last/