Surveilled No. 87 - Enter the Fediverse
It seems there are two big overarching story arcs in tech right now. One of them is the Twitter saga. Blow-by-blow accounts of Musk’s careening takeover may exert a morbid fascination, but the most interesting aspect of the story is the meteoric rise of the Fediverse, and Mastodon in particular. While on the surface the latter seems like a replacement for Twitter, it’s actually developed with a completely different philosophy, a throwback to the open web of the late 1990s and early 2000s, before most of our interactions moved to walled gardens with a profit motive, like Facebook and Twitter.
This fundamental difference has pros and cons. There is no incentive for Mastodon as a business to push features and content that promote “engagement”, unlike Facebook and Twitter, and hence it should be able to avoid degenerating into the cesspool that most for-profit social media has become. On the other hand, absent this pressure, the service may only ever attract genuine enthusiasts, and never achieve the kind of cultural relevance Twitter in particular achieved. Of course, that is only a loss depending on your point of view, and if it is the price to pay for a more civilised online forum, it’s probably worth paying.
What is certain is that the chaos at Twitter yanked Mastodon into the limelight after years or relative obscurity, and that has triggered a new cycle of intense experimentation and innovation, across services, protocols and apps. The last such cycle was when the launch of Twitter coincided with the launch of the iPhone, and it ended up defining how we interacted with our devices and services for the ensuing ten years. From that angle alone it’s worth paying attention to. Second, the current frenzy around Mastodon and its distributed protocols feels like an emerging second chance for social media, which is exciting.
The second big story arc is AI, triggered by the release a few weeks ago of ChatGPT. The general tone of the headlines is of the “we’re doomed” variety, but in the end, ChatGPT along with similar ML models, will not be able to articulate novel thoughts of their own. So rather than ushering in the apocalypse, for the foreseeable future AI is more likely to add to the mediocrity and grift that already permeate our lives, as this story about CNET’s use of it illustrates all too well. Link (The Verge)
Other items of note for this week:
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Bitcoin miners are experiencing a bit of a reprieve with a recent rise in prices, but many are looking for other income sources, including reselling electricity they are able to buy at long-ago agreed low rates. Link (FT $)
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Some interesting speculation here on Apple’s next moves in services to compete with Google, including building its own search engine (to be the default on iOS) and advertising platform. No mention of antitrust concerns though, oddly. Link (FT $)
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The first S&P500 exchange-traded fund (ETF) launched thirty years ago, launching an entirely new investing paradigm. Link (FT $)
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The World Surf League will be handing out Apple Watches with a custom app to competitors in its events, to streamline communications. I’d love to know more about how this came about. Link (The Verge)