Month: April 2019

Bookmarked How Google, Microsoft, and Big Tech Are Automating the Climate Crisis by Brian Merchant (Gizmodo)

In a deal that made few ripples outside the energy industry, two very large but relatively obscure companies, Rockwell Automation and Schlumberger Limited, announced a joint venture called Sensia. The new company will “sell equipment and services to advance digital technology and automation in the oilfield,” according to the Houston Chronicle. Yet the partnership has ramifications far beyond Houston’s energy corridor: It’s part of a growing trend that sees major tech companies teaming with oil giants to use automation, AI, and big data services to enhance oil exploration, extraction, and production.

“[…]the traditionally secretive world of diplomacy is now being acted out on social media. The governments of 169 countries (88 per cent of all UN members) are now on Facebook, and Denmark even has an Ambassador to Silicon Valley.”

I understand governments making use of new communications technologies.  But when that channel is in the control of one organisation with no accountability, it is concerning.  And a country having an ambassador to the tech industry shows the disproportionate power it has.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3csy65z

Full Fact is very helpful.

I was listening to a podcast which said around 40,000 EU citizens working as NHS staff had left since the Brexit vote and we’re facing a huge shortfall.

It’s a bit more nuanced than that reading the Full Fact page on it: https://fullfact.org/health/eu-staff-nhs-what-has-happened-referendum/ 

While there does seem to be a slight trend of EU citizens saying fuck this I’m off, I’m not sure the original figure is something I can legit post angrily about.

Bit boring checking facts all the time.  I like social health care and I like Europeans though, don’t need no numbers for that.

Reading more Iain M. Banks. Use of Weapons. It’s good. His writing style has gone from super linear and rip roaring to totally nonlinear and introspective in the space of a couple of books. I’ve enjoyed all of them so far. This one is much more comical too. The Culture is getting more morally ambiguous by the book as well, which I like. Love a bit of moral ambiguity.
Bookmarked Capitalism’s New Clothes by Evgeny Morozov (thebaffler.com)

I.
In a series of remarkably prescient articles, the first of which was published in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in the summer of 2013, Shoshana Zuboff pointed to an alarming phenomenon: the digitization of everything was giving technology firms immense social power. From th…

Went to a talk by Shoshana Zuboff today about surveillance capitalism and her book on it. I would like to read the book. Anyone read it? From the talk I got the impression that she has provided a very rigorous analysis of the problem, but less of a prescription on how to resist and change. But I think that’s acknowledged, as she herself said ‘naming is a first step towards taming’.