Issue #5: What did we do before the internet? Teletext! Also, I hate AI
Welcome to a few new recruits since my last edition of this very infrequent newsletter, in which I wished everyone a happy new year, which should give you some idea of how regularly I'm managing to get stuff out. Better to leave 'em wanting more (is almost nobody's online content strategy these days)! Speaking of content strategies, what kind of fool sends out a tech newsletter on a Saturday night? This one. Onwards.
SOMETHING OLD
I think it is safe to say that the signs were always there with me. Even before we had the internet I still found a way to be terminally online. I refer, nostalgically and with a fond little smile, to Teletext.
Looking at my subscriber list and the names I recognise, I am fairly confident that I don't have to explain what Teletext is to most of you. If you are unfamiliar due to age (we are talking about the mid to late 1980s here) or geographic persuasion, you could search to find out what it is. But even better, and I think you are all going to like this, you can actually have a go https://zxnet.co.uk/teletext/viewer/.
The feeling of being connected to a big network of information and being able to choose where to go within it was really quite intoxicating and obviously a precursor to the power of the world wide web. But it was much more basic, in the early days you just entered the number of an page on your TV remote to get taken to that page and read whatever was there. It majored on news, sports and weather.
However, more interactive and entertainment elements crept in over time (I haven't researched the exact timeline, partly because I don't want to end up cramming this full of facts about Ceefax and ORACLE and who did what when etc because that info is all out there, this is more about how I remember it). There was Bamboozle!, an interactive quiz, with a pixelated version of Bamber Gascoigne as host. It was quite surreal, often. I loved it (I was also a nascent quiz nerd, too), and would look forward to a new quiz arriving every week.
On the Channel 4 system, ORACLE, there were more fun pages branded as 4-Tel; of which I have only dim memories, but I do have a story, below. I wish I remembered more about it, there was a mascot dog called 4-Tel who had a friend called Wiggly, so I guess it was aimed at kids. But I don't remember what they did or anything much about them. Do you remember more? Please tell me! Internet searches are not bringing up much of use.
I must have been a fan, though. One day in the late-ish 1980s, a huge box turned up on our door step addressed to me. I was delighted on opening it to find it jam packed with all sorts of 4-Tel branded goodies. Of these, I still have a 4-Tel, Rusty and Wiggly mug that used to reveal an image when heated (a function that did not survive the microwave, IIRC). I have posted it on my Twitter and BlueSky so you can see it in all its glory. There were also sweatbands (it was the 80s after all!), a t-shirt, and more things that I have forgotten. I wish I had kept them all but only the mug remains.
My parents were very confused by the delivery, but the letter inside said it was for me because I'd entered a 4-Tel competition where you had to write in and say who your favourite hero was and why. I'm sure they expected answers such as "Superman" or perhaps real life examples like Nelson Mandela from the more serious children. I'd written a letter stating my hero of choice, put it in an envelope and sent it off with no stamp (because I didn't know about stamps), and somehow it still got there. I'm not sure if I actually won officially, or they were just charmed by/took pity upon this pretentious child nerd. My chosen hero was: Odysseus.
What can I say, I loved the Greek myths at that age, mostly from reading the Tanglewood Tales, and was clearly heavily influenced by Tony Robinson's 1986 series Odysseus The Greatest Hero Of Them All (however I had not, nor have I yet, read the Odyssey, I was not quite that precocious/pretentious. I more recently enjoyed a different perspective on the behaviour of errant husband Odysseus as seen through eyes of Penelope, the wife he left behind for those long years, in Natalie Haynes' A Thousand Ships).
Now the interactivity had a new layer, IRL outputs! Thrilling. Anyway, obviously with my teletext obsession I was EXTREMELY primed for the arrival of the internet a few years later. Perhaps this also foreshadows my enthusiasm for Planet Trivia in around 2000, an online quiz website that also resulted in exciting real life prizes (a pack of Creme Eggs, champagne!) arriving in my university mailbox. I'll write about that another time...
UPDATE! After my twitter post got picked up by some teletext art fan accounts, one of them shared this podcast interview with Ian Irving, "one the medium's first ever recognised artist.. cited as a contemporary of many pixel artists who used the format."
SOMETHING NEW
Ugh. AI. I don't, as yet, have it in me to write a nuanced take on the apparently unstoppable juggernaut of LLMs such as ChatGPT and other so-called AI-based tools. I am already weary of hearing about it, weary of the hype and nonsense and misunderstanding, weary at being professionally required to have a sophisticated understanding of it in order to continue to be a useful digital consultant.
I am forced to engage, reluctantly (aside from some initial enthusiasm for creating stupid satirical images on DALL-E and the like). And mostly, what I see are problems. There are clear ethical issues from IP theft to reliance on digital sweatshops and the perpetuation of societal bias and discrimination, environmental costs such as carbon emissions and water usage that are rarely being factored in, and already a big problem with reliability of information and the dilution of the overall usefulness of the internet. I am convinced that search results are being swamped by LLM-created content-farmed flannel and guff, and loathe the over-padded woolly blandness of generated text which is starting to proliferate.
Thankfully, others are rolling up their sleeves and doing a much better job of considering the challenges as well as the opportunities with more detailed and insightful approaches. I (as Tech Works For Us) was very glad to be able to support the brilliant Promising Trouble team on the digital production side as they pulled together an incredible programme for the AI and Society Forum this week at breakneck speed. Their conference was a response to the total lack of civil society representation and over-focus on existential risk and "Frontier AI" in the government's AI Safety Summit that also took place this week. Take a look at the line up for an insight into the great work and thinking that people are doing in this area.
I believe there will be various outputs from the event (since it included collaborative notes and an alternative agenda for the government's summit, I imagine some of this will make its way into the public domain). So I highly recommend signing up for their newsletter to keep informed about this (and their other awesome work in eg. Community Tech) at https://www.careful.industries/newsletter (their sister company is Careful Industries).
I also watched a really good session on how non profits can use AI responsibly that considered some of the above, and it is now available for others to watch online too. I wrote about some of my takeaways from it on twitter. Particularly the urgent need to get ahead of potential harms for your organisation by developing a policy on AI that fits your own values. People are probably already using AI tools in your company or organisation, almost certainly without much consideration, and that has the potential to backfire in multiple ways so don't wait to start tackling this issue.
Something Borrowed
Things that I have been reading and thinking about. Inclusion doesn’t necessarily mean full endorsement. I try to credit where I saw these shared originally but don't always remember, apologies.
Why not read these links whilst enjoying this Mix of the Week #466: Louis Largo by Dream Chimney which includes a Twin Peaks theme tune dub remix somewhere around 20 minutes (via the ever brilliant Web Curios).
An online museum of the early internet! Obviously this is very much my bag. H/T Trevor Klein.
"The Greatest Map Of English Counties You Will Ever See" according to autocomplete. My home of the Isle of Wight comes out of this comparatively well.
The Prodigal TechBro by Maria Farrell. "The tech executive turned data justice warrior is celebrated as a truth-telling hero, but there’s something a bit too smooth about this narrative arc..."
What do we do about the fact that all communication is lossy? Habits you can adopt to reduce the loss rate from Mandy Brown.
Tom Stafford is somewhat reassuring about the actual impact of microtargetting adverts on behaviour. "People are not irrational fools, and any model of political advertising that assumes they can be easily duped or otherwise mind controlled is a dangerous distraction. At the same time, problems of trust and legitimacy are very real, and it is obvious that people's perception of targeted political advertising will feed into this."
Was Vine "The last, greatest, totally harmless social network?" from Hugh Wallace's newsletter.
A list of climate friendly browser extensions and scripts that can help you reduce the carbon footprint of your internet consumption from the Adora Foundation.
Twitter is about 12 hours slower than Reddit: Timing the Speed of an Algorithm by Ryan Broderick.
The Garden of Forking Memes by Aaron Z Lewis. "Thanks to the ghosts in the digital graveyard, our selves are strung out across extremely long stretches of time. The internet allows one body to ingest the memories of thousands, creating a new kind of interiority that’s almost superhuman in its scope."
Playing the Future by Scott Smith, on "a little-known board game of forecasting and the futures that might have been." Ever since playing the Institute for the Future's Signtific Lab long ago, I've been interested in using game mechanics for future forecasting. I'd like to have a go at this!
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed it, please do share it with others. And if you didn’t, I welcome constructive feedback!