This week, for you, a roundup of observations about identity.

This is Phil Fish (Jason Kottke):

Robin Sloan connected Persson’s post with a post by Erin Kissane on how she has curtailed her use of Twitter. Here’s one of her problems with Twitter:

“The first is feeling like I’m sitting at a sidewalk cafe, speaking in a conversational voice, but having that voice projected so loudly that strangers many streets away are invited to comment on my most inconsequential statements — especially if something I say gets retweeted beyond my usual circles.”

Many moons ago, I was “subculturally important” in the small pond of web designers, personal publishers, and bloggers that rose from the ashes of the dot com bust, and I was nodding along vigorously with what Danskin, Persson, and Kissane had to say. Luckily for me, I realized fairly early on that me and the Jason Kottke who published online were actually two separate people…or to use Danskin’s formulation, they were a person and a concept. (When you try to explain this to people, BTW, they think you’re a fucking narcissistic crazy person for talking about yourself in the third person. But you’re not actually talking about yourself…you’re talking about a concept the audience has created. Those who think of you as a concept particularly hate this sort of behavior.)

The person-as-concept idea is a powerful one. People ascribe all sorts of crazy stuff to you without knowing anything about the context of your actual life. I even lost real-life friends because my online actions as a person were viewed through a conceptual lens; basically: “you shouldn’t have acted in that way because of what it means for the community” or some crap like that. Eventually (and mostly unconsciously), I distanced myself from my conceptual counterpart and became much less of a presence online.

New Pornographers’ Carl Newman: “I just want to work. I don’t think of myself as some artist” (David Daley, Salon):

I think because I’m such a music fan, I just love the idea of the myth of rock. There’s something not false — but sort of. You know, no rock star is truly themselves. It’s all a myth. From Bob Dylan to Jack White. It might become real, but I’ve always been fascinated with that and I know Dan Bejar has always dabbled in that from the get-go. I think I probably followed his lead from the beginning. I think I loved that he did that and I felt “Yeah, I’m gonna do that too. I should dabble in a lot of rock iconography.

That’s not a celebrity you’re following on Twitter, it’s an assistant (Chris Plante, The Verge):

We’re at this uncomfortable moment in which social media companies masquerade as living, breathing humans. People are companies. Companies are people. And both combine in the most boring Twitter accounts on the internet.

Memes, Selfies, Money: Why the Ice Challenge Worked (Kate Losse):

If the Ice Bucket Challenge had not been invented as a fundraising drive, it would make an excellent social media site engagement driver, because it solves the problem of getting people to post and share personal, visual content. It does so first by providing an excuse to make a video selfie– because in the age of ubiquitous cameras, the biggest hurdle to content production is self-consciousness, which can be overcome by being commanded by friends or philanthropy. Second, the ice bucket meme’s format includes a prompt to friends to create their own video selfies (this is the human equivalent of when Facebook apps used to ask you to invite people to the app before you had used it). The Ice Bucket Challenge is thus a perfect viral storm that, while generating millions of page clicks and new content for Facebook and other sites, happens happily to also generate awareness and donations for a good cause.

Interview with Evan Prodromou, lead developer of pump.io | Opensource.com:

Some people I talk to get all confused when I say you can make your own social network. “Who would want to make their own social network?” And I say, “You smoke your own ham. You built a 14-foot-high velocipede for Burning Man. Why wouldn’t you make your own social network?”

The Humbling of Social Media (Josh Marshall, TPM):

One of the oddest and I think healthiest (but also most frustrating things) things about social media is bumping into strangers with whom little communication seems possible.

I traffic mainly in the world of politics and culture. And there’s little surprising about the kind of intense political disagreement that makes it hard to have any real sort of communication. Other times it’s simple ignorance or even lack of intelligence. You find yourself in a seeming disagreement. But it’s actually not quite a disagreement because the other person doesn’t understand what you’re saying. And the thin straw of social media contact is simply too narrow to overcome the gap.

Other times – and these are maybe the most frustrating but also most important – the person’s no dummy. They’re not uneducated or ignorant in a general sense. But the points of reference, experience, the simple ‘what they’re trying to talk about’ and vice versa, is so different that real communication is very difficult or not really possible. And in any case, ‘Why am I even trying since I just randomly bumped into you in this thread?’ So why bother? What’s the point? It’s frustrating but also humbling in an important way because it brings you face to face with how parochial, limited your own experiences and points of reference are.

Maybe limited and parochial or refined and esoteric. But at the end of the day, these are other people with whom basic exchange, basic communication, is difficult. It’s exacerbated by the faceless and abrupt nature of social media communication. But it’s humbling and a good way to be humbled.

There’s Something Rotten In The State Of Social Media | TechCrunch:

Finally, within the odorous passageways of our modern social media citadels, we stumble upon another theme: enforcement.

Slowly but surely the freedoms that initially drew us into these glittering social spaces are being withdrawn, as barred gates drop into place — limiting our usage options, and controlling and constraining the social content we see.

The walled gardens shrink, getting narrower in outlook as the logic of their underlying content-filtering algorithms becomes evident.

Why the Facebook Experiment is Lousy Social Science (Galen Panger, Medium): This lengthy, deep exploration of the many ways the Facebook mood experiment went wrong and how it could be improved upon also offers lots of insight into how the service is “designed to be habit-forming and addictive.”

Facebook’s hacker culture is truly something to behold, but it also means the company constantly steps in it. Facebook upsets a lot of people, and often. The culture makes the company more impervious to criticism, but in some ways also maladapted and unempathetic. And so Facebook and its culture will seemingly always be a source of tension — for us users, as well as for the people who work there…

While Facebook’s PR paints the service as an intimate portrait of our lives, keep in mind that it’s not. It’s a performance, not a well-rounded view of our friends’ struggles, travails and ups and downs. Catch yourself when you start comparing your life unfavorably to someone on Facebook, and realize it’s not the full picture.

MSR Faculty Summit 2014 Ethics Panel Recap (Mary L. Gray):

Summary of a symposium featuring these comments from Jeff Hancock, one of the authors of the Facebook mood study:

We have a metaphor for the postal service: messages are delivered without tampering from one person to the next. We have a metaphor from the newsroom: editors choose things that we think will be of interest. But there’s no stable metaphor that people hold for what the news feed is. I think this is a really important thing. I’m not sure whether this means we need to bring in an education component to help people understand that their news feeds are altered all the time by Facebook? but the huge number of e-mails about people’s frustration that researchers would change the news feed indicates that there’s just no sense that the news feed was anything other than an objective window into their social world.

Try Googling This: OKCupid founder reveals what Internet searches really say about us (Paul Kilduff, Berkeley Monthly):


PK: You’re quoted as saying you don’t want to put anything on Facebook that you wouldn’t feel comfortable with Facebook sharing with advertisers, right?

CR: Yeah, sort of. I mean, it’s not like I sit around thinking all day about what I am and I’m not going to put on Facebook. I’m not leading a monklike existence here. But I think that’s a totally good rule of thumb. It always kind of amuses me when people get mad that Facebook shares x, y, and z with advertisers. They say they’re going to do it. That’s how they make money. It’s almost like a physical fact of the world that websites share stuff with advertisers, so I’m not that excited about them knowing things about me.

The Next Generations of Facebook’s News Feed (Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic): A great proposal from Nicholas Diakopoulos.

What if, instead of relying on platforms like Facebook to invisibly turn the digital knobs that make each person’s News Feed look different, Facebook users could subscribe to different algorithms — formulas designed by humans who could explain their approach?

News Feed FYI: Click-baiting (Facebook Newsroom): 


When we asked people in an initial survey what type of content they preferred to see in their News Feeds, 80% of the time people preferred headlines that helped them decide if they wanted to read the full article before they had to click through…Over time, stories with “click-bait” headlines can drown out content from friends and Pages that people really care about.

Blogging Redux (Susannah Breslin):

Eventually, I found myself making $100 an hour writing Facebook updates spoken by a bottle of pink medicine manufactured by a multibillion-dollar company obsessed with engagement, branding, and PowerPoint presentations filled with colorful pie charts.

I had become a digital ghost of my former self.

I think if there is a renaissance of blogging it is in reaction to that, the invisibility imposed when you commodify yourself, an attempt to recreate something that was lost, something, one hopes, that’s more about autonomy and freedom than engagement and revenue.

Your Anonymous Posts to Secret Aren’t Anonymous After All (Kevin Poulsen, Wired):

“It’s our job to make sure people feel safe and in control,” he says. “People can’t do that on Facebook. That’s our mission, so people can put this stuff out there and not feel alone. That’s so important.”

Caudill, the hacker, is skeptical that the twin goals of sharing and anonymity can ever be resolved.

“I kind of see where they’re going with it. They’re trying to be kind of the everyman’s WikiLeaks. But at the same time it doesn’t really work that way,” says Caudill. “You can’t both try to connect with all your friends and be really social and network with everything, and that same time try to do all that anonymously. I can’t see a situation where you can have your cake and eat it too.”

waffle → Community Services (Jesper):

People are going to adjust to the vastness of the Internet and implied exposure and it’s going to happen over generations. I’m not saying they won’t. And I’m not saying that “social media” is doing a poor job today in letting people talk to each other. I am saying that there’s a huge gap for solutions and software and ideas that solve problems people actually have today, especially in a way that doesn’t create a new entity in the middle that then has to care about what everyone thinks about it and how it’s relevant, or in a way that creates a standard to avoid those kinds of entities without spending the next two decades in development hell while the world goes on without them.

Social media has come to symbolize, for me, the tyranny of having to appear relevant, visible and clean to everyone else, the inability to define my own boundaries and the uncertainty about what’s going to happen tomorrow to the fundamental structure of this tool that I’m using – all the while someone either makes money off of me or adds to the looming amorphousness trying to stay afloat.

In E-Sports, Video Gamers Draw Real Crowds and Big Money (Nick Wingfield, New York Times):

In Mr. Dager’s view, the physical barriers to becoming an e-sports athlete are far lower than for conventional sports. He lists fingers and a brain as the primary tools people need to get started. What most people lack, he said, is a singular focus on games, a willingness to clear away all other distractions.

His obsession with video games was a sore point with Mr. Dager’s parents during his teenage years, as it was for the parents of many top gamers.

“I, and many players like me, sacrificed everything,” said Mr. Dager, who is almost a senior in college but is not attending school now. “We gave up on sports and friends and school just so we can play more.”

Fighting spam with BotMaker (Raghav Jeyaraman, Twitter Blog): This technical description of Twitter’s realtime spam interception program sounds quite a bit like an unholy cross between the broadcast media’s seven-second delay and a missile defense system. Note, also, that “other groups at Twitter have started using BotMaker for non-spam purposes.” Once you start pre-publication review of tweets, it must just be so tempting to find new applications…

BotMaker has ushered in a new era of fighting spam at Twitter. With BotMaker, Twitter engineers now have the ability to create new models and rules quickly that can prevent spam before it even enters the system. We designed BotMaker to handle the stringent latency requirements of Twitter’s real-time products, while still supporting more computationally intensive spam rules.

BotMaker is already being used in production at Twitter as our main spam-fighting engine. Because of the success we have had handling the massive load of events, and the ease of writing new rules that hit production systems immediately, other groups at Twitter have started using BotMaker for non-spam purposes. BotMaker acts as a fundamental interposition layer in our distributed system.

Secret Users Have Started Hosting Secret Dinner Parties, and They Are Brutal (Nellie Bowles, Re/code): Reporter goes undercover to a dinner party assembled anonymously on an anonymous app and encounters an anonymous host’s musings on authenticity. I think the “I want a place where I can be raw and honest” thing has now officially become a virus — or a soundbite.

“We all end up in these silos of an expected life. I know who I am around the people I know, but anonymously? What can I be anonymously?” Kai said, talking as he finished preparations for dinner (beef stew, black rice, mint and strawberries for muddling with vodka). “I want a place where I can be raw again. Where I can be honest. Where it doesn’t always have to be vacation pictures and ‘Look how great I am.’ “

The death of privacy (Alex Preston, The Observer)

I ask Cohen about the differences between our “real” selves and those we project online…. “I agree that the online persona has become a kind of double,” he says. “But where in Dostoevsky or Poe the protagonist experiences his double as a terrifying embodiment of his own otherness (and especially his own voraciousness and destructiveness), we barely notice the difference between ourselves and our online double. I think most users of social media and YouTube would simply see themselves as creating a partial, perhaps preferred version of themselves.”

…This is the horror of social media – that it gives us the impression we are in control of our virtual identities, putting out messages that chime with our “real” selves (or some idealised version of them). In fact, there is always slippage and leakage, the subconscious asserting its obscure power. The internet can, as Cohen tells me, “provide a way of exploring and playing the multiplicity and complexity of the self”. It can also prove to us just how little control we have over how we appear. As William Boyd put it in Brazzaville Beach: “The last thing we discover in life is our effect.”

The Web is Broken and We Should Fix It (Mike Caulfield, Hapgood): One vote for Ward Cunningham’s Federated Wiki project:

There’s actually a pretty simple alternative to the current web. In federated wiki, when you find a page you like, you curate it to your own server (which may even be running on your laptop). That forms part of a named-content system, and if later that page disappears at the source, the system can find dozens of curated copies across the web. Your curation of a page guarantees the survival of the page. The named-content scheme guarantees it will be findable.

Jennifer Ouellette: The english major who taught herself calculus (Ben Lillie):

One of the wonderful things about relying on computers to help us is that if we’re not careful they’ll tell us who we really are.

PostSecret founder has a few things to say about new anonymous apps (Anne VanderMey, Fortune): Interview with Frank Warren, postcard-loving godfather of the digital confessional:

PostSecret has been around for 10 years and it has a tradition of being community-oriented. It has a certain set of values and part of that is not exploiting people’s secrets for commercial reasons. So because of that, even though the website has had over 600 million visits, I’ve never taken one dollar for a paid advertisement. And so I think that’s the kind of environment that allowed people to really trust me with secrets they wouldn’t share with anyone else.

It was a safe place. It was a non-commercial place. That got infused in the DNA of the project, and so that tradition when we created the app the app also had, kind of, the spirit of that project. It had a soul. This culture that was already there, and maybe if it hadn’t been for kind of outside parties acting maliciously, we could have gotten to a place where we could have taken flight, gotten the wheels up….

One of the things I’ve discovered through PostSecret is that when you keep a secret, it feels like this wall that divides us from others. But that’s just an illusion. If we can find the courage and the vulnerability to share our secrets in the right ways with the right people, we can discover that these walls are actually bridges that don’t just connect us with others but with our true selves.

Where have I been and what have I been doing? Working on a couple of longer pieces you will see shortly! Apologies for this publishing hiatus. In the meantime: all sorts of links for you.

The problem with OKCupid is the problem with the social web (Tim Carmody, kottke.org): Facebook’s (and now OKCupid’s) casual experiments with the information it shows users look different, and worse, when you view them from the perspective of authorship, not just consumption. Carmody explains:

I’m not just a user of your service, somebody who reads the things that you show to me: I’m one of the reasons you have anything that you can show to anyone at all.

…So this is the problem I see not just with Facebook and OKCupid’s experiments, but with most of the arguments about them. They’re all too quick to accept that users of these sites are readers who’ve agreed to let these sites show them things. They don’t recognize or respect that the users are also the ones who’ve made almost everything that those sites show.

Virginia Woolf’s Idea of Privacy (Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker):

Usually, we think of social media as a forum for exhibitionism. But, inevitably, the extroverted cataloguing of everyday minutiae — meals, workouts, thoughts about politics, books, and music — reaches its own limits; it ends up emphasizing what can’t be shared. Talking so freely about your life helps you to know the weight of those feelings which are too vague, or too spiritual, to express — left unspoken and unexplored, they throw your own private existence into relief. “Sharing” is, in fact, the opposite of what we do: like one of Woolf’s hostesses, we rehearse a limited openness so that we can feel the solidity of our own private selves.

People need an online “nest” they own (Dave Winer, Scripting News): Smart people in different places in the tech industry keep circling back to different versions of this idea.

…There is a missing piece in the online mix. And if it existed, and I’m not saying it will, or it can, lots of interesting new software would be possible.

I know people are always tempted to say that these things exist, but the ones that come close are all missing a vital piece or two, or more.

Think of it as a personal nest in the cloud.

It behaves like a disk attached to a desktop computer, but it is virtual, it lives in the cloud.

It’s private, except for a section clearly labeled as public. Much like the Dropbox public folder.

The public space has a name, one for each user. You can use the name assigned to you by the service, something like dave.theservice.com, or you can map a custom domain or sub-domain to it that you purchase or rent.

It’s yours. You pay for it…

Service Drains Competitors’ Online Ad Budget (Brian Krebs, Krebs on Security): So much of the online advertising universe is built on deception, fraud, bots and mirrors. Krebs provides a detailed description of just one of the many outfits making that so.

Facebook’s privacy pivot: Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to win back trust (Will Oremus): On his most recent earnings call, Zuckerberg stepped back from sharing totalitarianism.

Why? “Because,” he said, “at some level, there are only so many photos you’re going to want to share with all your friends.”

…From WhatsApp to Snapchat to bitcoin to Secret and Whisper, privacy is as hot today in the technology industry as “sharing” and “openness” were four years ago. And Facebook intends to capitalize on it — provided it’s not too late.

What tech offices tell us about the future work (Kate Losse, Aeon):

In the first decades of the 21st century, however, the corporate office has been quickly transformed from a predominantly functional space into a more ornate, individualistic environment, dedicated not so much to work as to promoting personality and social status. The tech industry has reimagined the office as a vehicle for conveying workers’ social and professional prestige. Indeed, the well-designed office has become as much an accessory to a high-end, high-tech lifestyle as a luxury car or a fashionable outfit.

In 2014, an invitation to a tech office is the industry’s version of an invitation to the home of a new friend or business partner. To be invited to the office symbolises trust and hospitality, a desire to share one’s culture and good fortune, so that when one enters the tech company as a visitor, one expects to be entertained, dined, and acculturated in the values and tastes of the company.

Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory on A Master Builder (David Edelstein, New York): From an interview with Shawn, Gregory, and Jonathan Demme, whose film of Ibsen’s “The Master Builder” is out.

Edelstein: Jonathan, this is another example of what I said in a profile of you, that you were like the most brilliant publicist of talent in the world. Every time I see one of your movies, I feel like you’re saying, “Look at these amazing actors! Look at these great musicians!”

Demme: I know that if you remove my enthusiasm, I’m not sure I have a whole lot left to offer! But let me quickly try to sum up this. Part of what’s amazing about acting is that we’re taught as kids that it’s wrong to be dishonest. You must always tell the truth … So now, when you get to acting, the idea is to become an exquisite liar and to make us believe that you’re experiencing what you’re showing us! The people that I work with on our side of the camera, we’re all totally in awe of this amazing cosmic leap required to, in a way, break from the demands of honesty that you’ve been raised with in real life and somehow transfer that honesty to a make-believe situation and just thrill us with it. We’re there to create the safest possible atmosphere, the most nurturing possible atmosphere … You could have all the wonderful shots and cuts and music and what have you, but if it ain’t happening in the performance, it just ain’t happening.




Love People, Not Pleasure (Arthur Brooks, New York Times): Arthur Brooks is the president of the American Enterprise Institute, but in his recent writing he’s taken to offering a critique of consumer culture that feels more like the Frankfurt School than the Chicago School.

What do you post to Facebook? Pictures of yourself yelling at your kids, or having a hard time at work? No, you post smiling photos of a hiking trip with friends. You build a fake life — or at least an incomplete one — and share it. Furthermore, you consume almost exclusively the fake lives of your social media “friends.” Unless you are extraordinarily self-aware, how could it not make you feel worse to spend part of your time pretending to be happier than you are, and the other part of your time seeing how much happier others seem to be than you?

Some look for relief from unhappiness in money and material things. This scenario is a little more complicated than fame. The evidence does suggest that money relieves suffering in cases of true material need. (This is a strong argument, in my view, for many safety-net policies for the indigent.) But when money becomes an end in itself, it can bring misery, too.

Google Plus drops its “real name” requirement:

When we launched Google+ over three years ago, we had a lot of restrictions on what name you could use on your profile. This helped create a community made up of real people, but it also excluded a number of people who wanted to be part of it without using their real names.

Over the years, as Google+ grew and its community became established, we steadily opened up this policy, from allowing +Page owners to use any name of their choosing to letting YouTube users bring their usernames into Google+. Today, we are taking the last step: there are no more restrictions on what name you can use.

We know you’ve been calling for this change for a while. We know that our names policy has been unclear, and this has led to some unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users. For this we apologize…

The Strange World of Internet Role-Play Has Gone Mainstream – (Roisin Kiberd, Motherboard): Facebook has always had a “real name” policy, but that has never fully inoculated it against the human desire to play multiple parts.

The fake social media profile is an old joke, but lately it’s evolving. Maintaining a fictional online identity has become a lifestyle, a social pursuit, an act of collaborative fiction. The role-playing universe has migrated from the fringes of the internet to that blandest of social networks, Facebook, where it ticks along in parallel to reality. And as role-playing edges closer to the mainstream, it raises questions about just how ‘real’ any of us are in our everyday online lives.

And Now for a Bit of Good News . . . (Thomas Friedman, New York Times): The founder of AirBnB says identity is now more important than “ownership.”

“There used to be a romanticism about ownership, because it meant you were free, you were empowered,” Chesky answered. “I think now, for the younger generation, ownership is viewed as a burden. Young people will only want to own what they want responsibility for. And a lot of people my age don’t want responsibility for a car and a house and to have a lot of stuff everywhere. What I want to own is my reputation, because in this hyperconnected world, reputation will give you access to all kinds of things now. … Your reputation now is like having a giant key that will allow you to open more and more doors. [Young people] today don’t want to own those doors, but they will want the key that unlocks them” — in order to rent a spare room, teach a skill, drive people or be driven.

Is There Anything You Did as a Writer Starting Out That You Now Regret? (Leslie Jamison, New York Times Book Review):

I’d spent most of my life writing fiction, and it took me a while to accept that even in nonfiction I was still constructing characters — myself included. I began to see how I might owe myself the same things I owed my fictive characters: complexity, interior conflict, strengths and flaws caught in tense tandem. I couldn’t simply dump my worst parts into the narrative and call it due diligence. I couldn’t be all guilt, all selfishness, all disdain — even if these were the parts of myself I wrote most naturally. I was gravitating toward a certain disburdenment, but in this unloading I was also making myself too simple.

Life Hacks: Improving Your Own Shit (Rusty Foster, Adult Mag):

I’m a programmer and “hacking” has a lot of mixed connotations for me. A “hack” is fundamentally a hack because it’s the wrong way to do something. A hack for programmers always comes with some known and acknowledged downside. Maybe it was easy to code, but you know maintaining it in the long term will be a huge pain. Or maybe the code is very fast and efficient but it’s also totally opaque and confusing. I feel like this negative aspect got lost when “life-hacking” moved out from programmer subcultures, and now it’s seen as purely beneficial shortcuts. But the downsides are still there, if you look for them. Calling something a “hack” is supposed to be a warning.

Back from vacation! Lots of ground to cover.

I Left Facebook, And You Can Too (Jessica Ferris):

The cost of being on Facebook, the cost of handing over your connections with the people you love, is real…. What I was taking for granted as just the way things were was actually just the way Facebook wanted things to be….I think we can expect, if we keep trusting Facebook, to keep having our trust abused. We have no reason not to expect this, and yet we’ve been letting Facebook stay in our most intimate relationships. Facebook has so far succeeded in convincing us that we have to let it stay so that we might keep our loved ones close. It does not have to be this way…. What do the platforms we legitimize with our personal and heartfelt work have to do to earn our trust? Right now, not enough. It all feels like a shady bargain.

Could you free yourself of Facebook? (Mary Elizabeth Williams):

The challenge – one that close to 9,000 people have already taken – is simple. Change your FB avatar to the “99 Days of Freedom” one to let friends know you’re not checking in for the next few months.

This Social Network Changed How News Works. But Then It Made Some News Of Its Own (John Herrman): The Facebook “emotional contagion” study was just the kind of story that Facebook users would find contagious, Herrman explains: “If News Feed could dream, it would dream of stories like this.”

Facebook Will Use Your Browsing and Apps History For Ads (Despite Saying It Wouldn’t 3 Years Ago) (Kashmir Hill): “That’s the thing about data collection. Once you collect it, it’s like a pint of ice cream sitting in the freezer, impossible to resist.”

Here’s the Facebook spokesperson in 2011: “No information we receive when you see social plugins is used to target ads; we delete or anonymize this information within 90 days, and we never sell your information.”

Facebook in 2014: Information we receive when you see social plugins in mobile apps will be used to target ads, and it’s in the works for the same thing to happen when you see them when you’re browsing on your computer.

Why you can no longer expect that the news will find you (Tom Krazit): Five years on, in a world where Google and Facebook “control the relevancy of digital information,” the notion that “the news will find us” (Jeff Jarvis in 2008) is a recipe for passivity and ignorance.

This Japanese Television Conspiracy Has Familiar Faces (Brian Ashcraft): We’ve spent 20 years now worrying about how easily people can fake themselves online, and we’ve become thoroughly accustomed to thinking that the Web is full of doppelgangers and deceptions — unlike older media, where we can easily detect what’s real. In this report of the way Japanese TV news shows stage “man on the street” interviews with actors who keep turning up, Zelig-style, it’s the old-school medium that’s confronting us with sockpuppet fakery — and ironically the only reason we know about it is that online video archives allow us to double-check.

You Should Learn to Trust Robots. It’s for Your Own Good (Emily Anthes): Demonstrating vulnerability — sharing information that shows we’re human and that we can and do hurt — is a powerful way to connect with other people. The same thing works for robots!

We need machines that cop to their own vulnerabilities. In fact, robots should tell us not only that they might fail but also explain why — letting us know, for instance, that certain conditions cause their sensors to be less reliable or that certain situations cause their decision-making models to break down. In the end, establishing trust and building productive relationships with robots won’t be all that different from doing so with people. After all, a good colleague wouldn’t just bail out on a group presentation. Instead, they’d warn you that they tend to stammer and sweat when speaking in front of an audience and then offer to pick up the slack somewhere else.

Tiny Letters to the Web We Miss (Joanne McNeil): Email newsletters are back! Oh, right, they never went away. Email, McNeil points out, offers the intimacy of the in-box but lacks the community-building opportunity of comments:

It is one-way communication. No one sees the replies but the sender. This is great for avoiding trolls, not so good if you miss the days that the comments section might be as worthwhile as the original post.

I Sent All My Text Messages in Calligraphy for a Week (Cristina Vanko): Here’s another way to create a sense of intimacy. (People with handwriting like mine will not choose it.)

(Fake) friends with (Real) benefits (Gilad Lotan) – Data scientist Lotan spent five bucks to buy 4000 fake followers on Twitter. (You can analyze what percent of your Twitter following is real or fake using this tool.)

Even more interesting, at least to me, was what my fake followers did for me. My Klout score almost instantly shot up. I was not impressed by that until I realized that Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, collaborates with Klout, so that a higher Klout score put me higher on Bing’s search results.My completely fake numbers on one platform had a very real effect on a completely different service.

Inside the Mirrortocracy (Carlos Bueno): Sharp analysis of how tech startups use “culture” and “fit” as code to justify a diversity-limiting (and self-defeating) approach to hiring only “people like us.”

The Culture can’t really be written about; it has to be experienced. You are expected to conform to the rules of The Culture before you are allowed to demonstrate your actual worth. What wearing a suit really indicates is — I am not making this up — non-conformity, one of the gravest of sins. For extra excitement, the rules are unwritten and ever-changing, and you will never be told how you screwed up….If spam filters sorted messages the way Silicon Valley sorts people, you’d only get email from your college roommate.

The music industry is still screwed: Why Spotify, Amazon and iTunes can’t save musical artists (Andrew Leonard): Nearly 20 years into the digital music revolution, we still haven’t really figured out how to properly support creative artists. But we’re working on it!

But $2 million in 12 months for Patreon artists is nothing to sneeze at. Clearly, as a society, we do want to support the creation of art and music. So we are faced with a terrific, inspiring challenge: finding ways to use technology to build connection and community even as the old world disintegrates around us. Michael St. James is right to worry about what will happen around the corner, but probably wrong to fret about music itself being doomed. Because we’ll still need it to free our souls. And if people stop making it because they can’t make a living from their streaming royalties, then we’ll be forced to flock to places like Patreon, to keep music alive.

Pay it forward (Karen McGrane): A New York Post feature described how some professionals, particularly time-starved freelancers, are beginning to tell youngsters who approach them for “informational interviews” that they’re going to have to pay. McGrane, like me, thinks that’s a mistake.

Not everything in our professional lives is a transaction, scrutinized and evaluated against how much it costs us, how much someone should pay. Not every teaching relationship must be formalized—a mentoring opportunity, a coach, an internship. Not every investment of time has to be “worth it.”

Our Incredible Journey: You know when a big company gobbles up a little one and the founders of the little one announce how excited they are and how unfortunately the service that they built must now be shut down, but thanks for joining them on their incredible journey? This Tumblr gathers instances — where “acquihire” means users lose. [Via Lane Becker @monstro]

Sex and Silicon Valley: the veritable arms race of the dating app industry (The Guardian): What lengths will people go to dress up their online dating profile pictures? Long lengths indeed. The following quote is remarkable not only for the metaphor overload but for the plastic surgeon’s bluntness about about the nature of his work.

Before taking their profile picture, some trek to dermatologists like Seth Matarasso, who runs an upscale clinic, for Botox injections. “It can backfire, almost like false advertising,” he said. “You put up a facade, eventually it’ll bite you on the butt.”

Is there such a thing as the self? (Jim Holt): The invaluable Holt reviews two books on identity, one by philosopher Barry Dainton and the other by science journalist Jennifer Ouellette.

According to neuroscientists, there is no single place in the brain that generates a self. According to psychologists, there is no little commander-in-chief in our heads directing our behaviour. According to philosophers, there is no “Cartesian ego” unifying our consciousness, no unchanging core of identity that makes us the same person from day to day; there is only an ever-shifting bundle of thoughts, feelings and memories… The basic question about the self is: what, in essence, am I? Is my identity rooted in something physical (my body/brain) or something psychological (my memories/personality)? Normally, physical and mental go together, so we are not compelled to think of ourselves as primarily one or the other. But thought experiments can vex our intuitions about personal identity.

On Taxis and Rainbows (Vijay Pandurangan): Anonymity is hard! Fascinating description by a developer of how simple it was (for him, with a little help from Amazon cloud services, elastic mapreduce and other tools) to de-anonymize a year’s worth of New York City taxi data.

To digital marketers, “Onboarding” means loading your offline self into your browser’s cookie: An FTC report fascinatingly defines the marketers’ process of connecting your offline identity with your online profile and delves into the mechanics. [via Alexis Madrigal’s Five Intriguing Things email]

Maybe it’s time to build a new internet (Mehan Jayasuriya): After the NSA and Comcast and all, “might we be approaching the point at which the internet’s centralization begs for a technological solution?” I say: yeah.

The thought of building a new global network from scratch might seem herculean but similarly ambitious projects have been successfully undertaken in the past by hobbyists…. Remarkably, both FidoNet and Usenet were crafted using technology that now seems downright antediluvian: phone lines, dial-up-modems and computers less powerful than modern calculators. The situation today is, of course, very different. Powerful, WiFi-enabled devices can be found in the majority of American homes, be they laptops, smartphones, tablets or routers. This provides massive potential for so-called “mesh networks”—networks that connect devices directly to each other, forming a sort of daisy-chained connection that requires no central access point.

Twitter: It’s bots vs. brands, we’re just caught in the middle

Twitter seems to be becoming a giant unstructured experiment in blurring boundaries — like a massively distributed Turing Test. Who’s a human, who’s a bot? Who’s a person, who’s a company?

Kate Losse’s New Inquiry essay on “Weird Corporate Twitter” explores the latter question:

Now, a Denny’s tweet can sound more casual and on meme than any individual’s Twitter account…Just as corporations have become “persons” in law, they have also become “persons” on social media, bearing all the fruits of personhood while retaining all the massive advantages of being an entity that defies individual personhood. At the end of the day, @Dennysdiner is just a legal structuring entity housed somewhere in Delaware, formed to serve mediocre diner food in cities across America. And yet in spite of — or maybe even because of — this uncanny act of assuming personhood, we like it. Corporations can’t be lonely, but with their newfound “cute” voices they are becoming more popular than people….It isn’t enough for Denny’s to own the diners, it wants in on our alienation from power, capital, and adulthood too.

It’s a great piece — and also a perfect case study in how the authenticity bind works.

Meanwhile, MIT Technology Review tells us that Advanced Socialbots Have Infiltrated Twitter:

A significant proportion of the socialbots…not only infiltrated social groups on Twitter but became influential among them as well. What’s more, Freitas and co have identified the characteristics that make socialbots most likely to succeed…. The socialbots that generated synthetic tweets (rather than just reposting) performed better too. That suggests that Twitter users are unable to distinguish between posts generated by humans and by bots. “This is possibly because a large fraction of tweets in Twitter are written in an informal, grammatically incoherent style, so that even simple statistical models can produce tweets with quality similar to those posted by humans in Twitter,” suggest Freitas and co.

Bots might fool human Twitter users, but they’re a more serious business for the ad industry, which is finding it more and more difficult to distinguish between real human views and clicks and fake bot-generated traffic designed to inflate ad payments. The Internet Advertising Bureau trade association now has a Trustworthy Digital Supply Chain Initiative, and first on its list of imperatives is this: “We must identify bot-generated, non-human traffic and remove it from the supply chain.” (Link courtesy Alexis Madrigal’s delightful 5 Intriguing Things.)

Finally, NPR put a person at the helm of one of its automated Twitter accounts, Nieman Lab reports, and the network won more click-throughs and more new followers as a result. But human employees cost more than bots, and NPR’s budget is tight, so the bots may win on a cost-per-click basis.

Facebook extends its ad-tracking eye

Not content to mine the likes and posts you enter directly into its system to figure out what ads to show you, Facebook has announced it will also track your forays elsewhere online. But hey — you can also look behind the ads to see exactly why Facebook is targeting you a certain way. And if you want to take the time to twiddle with your preferences, you can even volunteer more info to help Facebook refine its targeting. You can do the algorithm’s work yourself!

According to Facebook this is all part of “Making Ads Better And Giving You More Control.” I’ll believe that if the preferences option — when it finally rolls out, which isn’t yet — also lets me just turn the ads off. Not counting on that one.

Of course, it could be worse. Instead of just looking at your online activity to determine what ads to show you, companies could review your social activity to make decisions about, say, whether to offer you a loan. Surely that sort of crazy thing will never come to pass? Oh, wait:

Rather than rely on FICO credit scores, Affirm calculates the risk of borrowers based on a range of personal data including information gleaned from social-media profiles as well as the cost of the items being purchased. It then determines what rate and structured payment makes sense to offer the customer.

We’re all superheroes now

Secret Identities – Online Privacy & Invisible Disease | Comics Should Be Good:

The superhero secret identity is a powerful metaphor on many levels, and one which ought to become an important device again soon. Primarily, the secret identity is an excellent metaphor for our own dual lives on and offline. There is increasing interest in reserving our privacy as we lose more and more of it to voluntarily to social networks, to (hopefully benign) NSA information mining, and to smartphone location-sharing…. When social networks first popped up it was generally assumed that (as in our real-space social lives) it would be possible to maintain a level of separation between them and our professional lives. Over time that has become increasingly difficult and it has generally accepted that most of us can no longer maintain a separation…. After years of embracing social networks people are becoming more careful about which aspects of their lives are publicly shared online in order to maintain a degree of privacy. Having everything out in the open might have felt liberating at first, it has spiraled into a sort of trap and the concept of a secret identity is starting to sound appealing again.

Update link: In Salon, Andrew Leonard is tired of Silicon Valley’s hubris in promising to deliver “superpowers” with every new app. I guess if we’re all going to need secret identities, we might as well get the x-ray vision, too.

Decentralization everywhere

Jon Udell has begun mapping the decentralization movement in a tag bucket on Pinboard. There are lots of interesting projects and ideas to explore there.

Here’s one broad concept worth including: the growth of grassroots mesh networks as a return to the Internet’s roots in the idea of a truly distributed network. The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance offers a great overview and explainer:

the idea behind mesh networking is to skip those checkpoints and cut out the middleman service provider whenever possible. This can work when each device in a network connects to the other devices, rather than each device connecting to the ISP….

“The original vision of the Internet was in fact a mesh,” said Michael Liebhold, a fellow at the Institute for the Future. “Unfortunately, what has happened over the 20 or 30 years we’ve been working on the Internet, all the traffic ends up handled by a very small number of network carriers or cloud or service operators. There’s a very small number of connection points… but they’re highly vulnerable and they’re being attacked from all directions now.”

For Liebhold, who uses a mesh network to connect to the Internet at home, mesh networking isn’t a way to “reinvent the web,” but the natural next step toward reclaiming the kind of Internet people want. It’s a way of “connecting everybody in the world and bypassing the original Internet, which is struggling in governance, cyber crime, data mining, pervasive passive surveillance, and massive hacks.”

Not everyone is trying to boost their Klout score

Invisibles by David Zweig is a new book about people in skilled but backstage or behind-the-scenes roles. The New Republic has an interview with Zweig:

In a culture that values attention above nearly everything else, who are these people who choose to go into lines of work in which, when they do their job perfectly, they’re completely invisible? What motivates them? What makes them feel fulfilled? In a culture where everyone strives for recognition both personally and professionally, what can we possibly learn from these people?

I spoke with a number of career recruiters, and they see more and more people who want careers in high-profile fields and fewer and fewer pursuing the careers of craftsmen or people who are behind-the-scenes. The larger culture has a very powerful ethos that attention equals success. In the fabric of social media, the metric for value is attention. The number of “likes” you get on a post, the number of followers you have. These are the metrics by which we’re guiding ourselves.