Ethics: moral principles that govern a person’s behavior or the conducting of an activity. I went to school with people who ended up on the wrong side of the law. I knew more of them when I used to DJ which was my hobby since before I went to college.
I probably still have some post-it notes around the place that I used as bookmarks from when I used to work at a call centre but that was about the extent of my ethical transgressions.
My business experience meant that I dealt with a lot of unpleasant unprofessional clients, but didn’t necessarily see anything unethical in nature. When I started writing this blog I was thinking about culture rather than ethics and the most part still do.
But business and work changed. Ethics became more important:
When I started in social and digital campaigns I didn’t think about ethics as a standalone thing. It was just part of doing a good job. It went without saying.
I don’t think any of us back then would have foreseen slut shaming, trolling, online bullying, dark patterns and misinformation
Now things are different. The lack of ethics is impacting all parts of business life.
How ad tech data is used
How content is created
How services are designed
How products are made
I think that much of the problems with ethics is cultural and generational in nature. The current generation of entrepreneurs have perverted knowledge in the quest of growth hacking and continual improvement and change for its own sake. Its a sickness at the centre of technology
WSJ City | Gig work may stifle some startups – a gig work firm’s entry into a given area caused a decline in the number of unfunded and underfunded Kickstarter campaigns launched locally a year later
Google Translate: Telefonini e patenti | L’Espresso – Umberto Eco making the valid point that communications by phone are often less circumspect because of the immediacy of the medium. Writing a letter allows more time for consideration and weight in the communications
Red Bull Content Pool – interesting that Red Bull has its own inhouse picture agency
Wadds came up with 13 theses about the media of me with more than a nod and a wink to The Cluetrain Manifesto. The main thrust of it is that the media model is broken, technology has a lot of the blame at its door.
Picking through it are some worthy aspirations, but it was diagnosing symptoms rather than causes. I believe that the main problems in the media of me are wetware, not software. People and civil society rather than networks and servers.
Technology has its own momentum
As with many things, the reality and where we are going is much more complex. Kevin Kelly posited that technological progress is a natural force of its own. He called this force the ‘technium’. It is not moral, it doesn’t understand good or bad. It can be slowed down for a time, but never stopped.
Even during the European dark ages, the golden age in Muslim countries saw Arab scholars:
Collate classical knowledge
Translate it into their own language
Build upon the body of knowledge
This knowledge came back into Europe. It helped provide a foundation for the renaissance.
We’re not going to be able to stop bots or algorithms. As they improve; their impact will be harder to discern. There will be a tension in online platforms; shareholder value versus good citizenship.
Digital is a winner takes all world
As with many previous technology markets such as the PC and smartphone operating systems online is an oligopoly of two. Digital media provides a disproportionate amount of benefit to very few platforms.
Facebook and Google count for 85-90% of online advertising growth.
In China, online media is dominated by Tencent and Baidu. We could ‘Balkanise’ the media landscape. But that would mean a poorer experience for users outside the US and China. The technology sector does not have:
Commercial scale in funding
Sufficient talent
Comparable addressable markets
Timms & Heimans hypothesis of ‘new power vs. old power’ rubs up against technology as an uncomfortable vector.
This all means that the tensions in society, civic society and societal discourse is accelerated and amplified.
From the perspective of technology platforms this isn’t their problem. They are only tackling it with reluctance, they don’t have a silver bullet solution. In their eyes:
‘Online’ isn’t a problem, it is the breakdown in social norms, which are then amplified and gamed online
In the real world we’re insulated from views unless we chose to explore alternatives. Algorithms have amplified this process further to create a filter bubble. Algorithms are only mimicing our natural desires. This is mirrored in the lack real-world discourse and polarisation of views
Algorithms are accused of having a reductive effect on an individuals breadth of media consumption. News feed algorithms jobs are to make platforms money. Before their widespread use netizens widely flocked to chatrooms and forums with a similar narrow focus. News readers using RSS which would allow individuals to read widely have proved to be only a niche interest
Reading widely is important to be being well informed, but its a conscious choice that people have to make. But in order to read widely one has to be:
Sufficiently educated to be confident in their reading ability
Confident enough to ignore any scorn that might come from ‘books, learning and being an expert’
Sufficiently curious to have the motivation to read
Having sufficient time to be able to read
These bullets are affected by quality of education, social norms and income. If you are just getting by with a series of side hustle jobs you might too time poor to read widely.
These are not universal traits in society. In the UK the idea of the self-educated literate working-man who goes to classes at the Mechanics Institute is long dead. That wasn’t done by Facebook or Google.
The notion of an easily swayed populus wasn’t an invention of Cambridge Analytica, Google or Facebook. The Roman poet Juvenal famous for the concept of ‘bread and circuses’ would see something similar in populist politics. From Brexit, to Germany’s AfD the focus on diversion, distraction and immediate satisfaction ‘palliative’. A significant amount of common people are selfish in nature and often pay little attention to wider concerns.
A quote from near the end of Jean-Paul Satre’s play No Exit sums it up quite well
“All those eyes intent on me. Devouring me. What? Only two of you? I thought there were more; many more. So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the “burning marl.” Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE!”
Whilst in a democracy, all opinions should have the opportunity to be voiced; should they have a right to be heard? Should politicians really reflect the will of the people? I think there is a strong argument to be made against it. I am not advocating authoritarian rule, but that we need leaders who reflect on the greater good. Edmund Burke – one of the founding fathers of British conservatism is a widely cited example of a politician who didn’t reflect the will of the people. Burke recognised that democracy can create a tyranny over unpopular minorities. He didn’t consider politicians to be delegates; conduits for votes without moral responsibility.
He is widely cited as being a better man for it:
Burke viewed the British conduct in India under the East India Company immoral
He advocated representation for American colonists
Acknowledgement of wrongdoing by the Crown in America and an appropriate apology
Facts versus Emotion
Facts and emotion have always duelled and facts have frequently come off the worse for it. Western politicians from Adolf Hitler to Barrack Obama have little in common except being successful exponents of rhetoric and emotion in their speeches. Technical skills and knowledge don’t make the cut. A classic example of this is the dissonance between the advice of John Redwood as a strategist with Charles Stanley versus his political stance on Brexit. Mr Redwood knows what works as a politician.
Those that wield emotion now, have a greater understanding of how it works. It is why populist organisations win. It is why experts fail to persuade voters to act in their own interest. That won’t change with technology but with stonger, harsher electoral commission powers.
Fact versus Fiction
Yellow journalism and fiction has been with us for as long as civilisation existed. It’s modern roots are in the American media industry of the late 19th century, as publishers battled for circulation. They work because audiences love ‘good stories’. A good story is one that:
Surprises
Entertains
Reinforces our own beliefs
American journalist Frank Mott listed the following characteristics of :
Scare headlines
Lavish use of images
Faked expertise: misleading headlines pseudo-science and false learnings
All of Mott’s points sound like a thoroughly modern media playbook. Yellow journalism pioneers Hearst & Pulitzer were only stopped by public vilification and shame. The Pullitzer Price, like the Nobel Prize was a penitent act at the end of a successful commercial career in media. Hearst & Pullitzer were owner-proprietors, it is a lot harder (though not impossible) to shame a public company today. The bigger issue is that a century of mass-media practice has lowered the bar in standards for ‘new media’ companies. A brutal legislative machine that would replace compliance through guilt with compliance through fear is a possible solution. However the legislative executive by its nature tends to favour the wealthy.
How Adform discovered HyphBot – one of the largest botnets to ever hit digital advertising. The full HyphBot impact on all Adform’s platforms was extremely limited, costing less than $1,000 USD per month, the impact of HyphBot may have more extensive on other online advertising platforms (PDF)
Consumer behaviour
Have we reached peak smartphone? – Kantar – ‘Younger mobile users aren’t simply listening to less music or reading fewer books; instead, the way in which they are engaging with entertainment and the devices they are choosing is evolving. For example, we have seen a decline in younger mobile users listening to music on their mobiles, but the purchasing of vinyl and streaming music through home virtual assistants is on the rise. Social networking has held steady, with 87.8% of 16-24-year-olds using their phones for this purpose (87% in 2016), so as new (or retro) technologies come onto the market the role of the mobile device for younger users will continue to change.’ – a certain amount of this is BS
What does small business really contribute to economic growth? | Aeon Essays – not as much as politicians etc would have you believe. Probably the most emblematic example of ‘small business’ contributing to economic growth was Margaret Thatcher. Small business and financial services were supposed to replace the manufacturing sector which had been devastated.
No, of that I’m innocent. – Scobleizer – I was reading this and had my fingers covering my eyes. I am just thankful not to be counselling Scoble as a PR person or a lawyer
Marketing
Trump Data Guru: I Tried to Team Up With Julian Assange – A Republican digital strategist who worked with Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 campaign told The Daily Beast that Nix should not be viewed as a reliable narrator. “Alexander Nix is not credible at all,” the strategist said. “He is a consummate salesman, and there are numerous instances already out in the public record where he made claims that were not just factually wrong—they were total fabrications.” – we’re still no closer to the truth
About Amazon – Working at Amazon – Dogs of Amazon – interesting page on the Dogs of Amazon. I worked at Yahoo! which tried to have the nanny dot com culture coupled with the work hard but laid back Silicon Valley vibe – it wasn’t pet friendly like Amazon proports to be. I can’t work out if Dogs of Amazon is a relic from when Amazon was a small dot com era startup.
Dogs of Amazon is that at odds with the narrative about Amazon being a hellish white collar employer. I know friends who described their Amazon middle management experience in very negative terms. I also couldn’t reconcile this dog friendly culture with their warehouse and logistics operating conditions for employees.
Origins of PowerPoint
The Improbable Origins of PowerPoint – IEEE Spectrum – built by a couple of former Apple employees and sold to Microsoft. Microsoft also bought MS-DOS (which was a hacked together clone of CP/L, which in turn tried to copy the experience of the PDP-11 mini-computer)
Carhartt
There was a great talk at Google from Carhartt about their brand and approach to products
The Soviet internet that never happened
InterNyet: why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network – (PDF) – it is interesting how the discourse on the networked country moved from being extremely positive for communism in the early 1960s due to its ability for economic control. The rise of ‘economic cybernetics’ sprang out of the end of the Stalin era as there were shortages and production distortions as central planning was failing to control the economy. Decentralising solutions built a massive bureaucratic infrastructure which affected things further. The Soviet Academy of Sciences suggested advocated for the use of computers for statistics and planning. You can see some of the influence of this now in the uptake of networking, machine learning and technology by the Chinese government over the past few decades.
