‘The Zuck’, CEO of Facebook, shows the inside of his Facebook hoodie at the All Things Digital conference in 2010. Facebook's mission, “Making The World More Open And Connected” is printed on the inside.

siliconmaps.com is a commercial party that maps out the tech climate. Pay them to put your company on the map.

02009 brought the first corporate cultural code of Silicon Valley. The slideshow (in jargon called a ‘slide deck’) has been viewed over 15 million times and outlines Netflix's culture, which is focused on High Performance.

Video still from Silvio Lorusso's Fake It Till You Make It that shows footage of two start-up founders that both were driven entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and both committed suicide while leading their tech startup.

“By placing an order via this web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 02010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul.” (painting: Dark Night of the Soul by Vincent van Gogh)

Make room for some new ideas about nutrition

Never run out of energy.

Gonzo could see himself doing a TED talk in these smart pants

The Kiva robots are a good example of how software has shaped the physical world. These robots are an essential part of the Amazon delivery chain and boost delivery speed.

The warehouses no longer store items sorted for humans. Instead, the objects are placed on the shelves according to what is fastest. The system knows what shelves carries which item, the robots carry those shelves to ‘pick-workers’ that take the items out of the shelves and pack them for sending. The robot finds its own way through the warehouse. They can do this without bumping into other robots or human beings.

This way they can process an order from click to send sometimes in less than 15 minutes. Amazon has 21 million different items for sale. The warehouse needs less walking space, because humans don't need to walk through aisles anymore. This operation is scalable as hell.

You'll see the worker doesn't have to do much of anything anymore. The entire system is developed to make human work as simple as possible.

“Pick, scan, pack. We try to simplify their life and hide the technology. All Kiva Pick workers are happy pick workers.” Mick Mountz, CEO of Kiva Systems

In this image, the effect of the robotic system on the job of an Amazon pick worker is shown. Effectively, the employee only has to reach an arm out, and the robot has brought the item ready for retrieval.

REN:
Wow, I wouldn't want to be one of those. Let me play with the code of those bots, though.

GON:
Amazing about this is the system itself. It's impressive how they got all of this to run so smoothly. Even though the pick workers have a bit of a boring job, the comparison is easily made with picking stuff from trees. Was that a much better job? And this means less hard work. Less bending over, reaching. Easy money, no?

CUBES OR COBWEBS

REN:
In June 02013, Edward Snowden, who worked for the NSA-affiliated defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton leaked a great amount of files of the USA's National Security Agency's massive surveillance practices. The NSA can spy and did spy on innocent citizens as well as criminals all around the world using back doors to big service providers on the internet.

This is a dark side of a big centralized internet. One part of that darkness is the strong influence of the United States' secret service. Another thing is their access to Silicon Valley's major servers where personal data is stored. Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Skype, you name it. Governments like this centralized power because it's easy access for them.

The structure of the internet hasn't changed much since the beginning. Files are stored on a central server, for instance one from Google. When using Google, all traffic runs through that server and all information is in one place, ready to be intercepted.

One of the slides of the NSA that Ed Snowden released. Here we see which companies provided data to the NSA

The root of the problem is the centralized network. The NSA's concentrated power comes in the form of big, cubical server facilities.

An alternative could be a distributed network. A centralized network has a big, centralized server infrastructure where all the data and files are stored. A decentralized system doesn't have that. There, files are stored on parts of the network.

I've been following the developments of Bitcoin - a cryptocurrency - and with that, the Blockchain. The Blockchain is a technology that offers a new kind of server infrastructure. There are different possibilities, but one example could be: All nodes in the network store a full copy of all transactions on that network while all relevant files and data can stay on individual drives. This allows a distributed network. One without a middle man.

It allows for new beginnings, and a new type of internet which is more distributed is harder to control centrally by one or a handful of parties.

GON:
Alright, all this is fine and dandy, but what if I know that the technical stuff is very complicated, but I don't care. I just want them to not snoop in?

REN:
This is exactly why setting up things like distributed networks is so important. When ugly things are happening online, we need safe places where activists, journalist, dissidents, whistleblowers and such can have free discussion online. And that should not be so complex that you need to be a coding wizard to understand, because anybody could be stuck in that position and anyone should be able to defend themselves online.

MONKEYS AND MESSINESS

GON:
I still have no idea how the internet works exactly, but I'm starting to recognize some patterns. I have the idea not one person really knows how the entire thing actually works. By the way, if you triple click on my head at the slot machine, you can unlock all the character's biographies at once!

REN:
I think for the internet itself, there are some experts that probably know exactly how the protocols work and so on. But we shouldn't always rely on others for understanding the things we use. It's one thing to say that there is an expert somewhere that knows what's going on and we let them do the understanding. But more and more there is no such expert.

A good example is when a big service is being built there is this thing called The Change Review Board. It can be 12 people there, who all have their specialty. One for the network part of things, one for storage, one for application development, et cetera. When they make changes to their parts, they have to state them out loud to the other 11 people in the room to see if that does not interfere with something in their ‘worlds’. They simply don't know! The same people come together when something fails, to find the problem. Can you imagine that? Optimo?

OPT:
Is it okay for me to freak out a little bit over that? I like to be in charge of my own. Is there no hope anymore for control by yourself?

REN:
I think not. A lot of programming is now what we call procedural. That means the programmer has to predict enough states so the computer can do the calculation. If this happens, do that. That's fairly straightforward. But with deep learning or Artificial Intelligence comes another, probabilistic reasoning system. If I see this input, I think I should do that. The computer starts learning and guessing by itself.

Computers were exact precise things, but now we have huge, often messy systems. People have a low tolerance for error for anything that comes out of a computer. That should change when we start to see that they are also biological. Humans are already conditioned to accept complexity that's unavoidable. If a doctor tells you that weird itch won't go away, you learn to accept it, at least a bit. I wonder if we get to the same point with computers.

I think we should go towards a biological thinking approach. These things are very complex. They've evolved over time and have this organic messiness. We need to focus much more on the details of the subsystems (like studying cells in biology). The details of a component in the hope of creating a broader picture. The details really matter.

This is where it also gets interesting for users. We're talking about the back end, but I think it's time for people to learn more about the biological forces behind their devices and entertainment. After all, they must be wondering how this all can be. Now, luckily people are usually much smarter than I think and do they have an idea. But it's not often that we hear more detailed accounts of back end services.

Google pioneered 'continuous failure'. It is not a question if the system will fail, but when. They are one of the first to design their back end in a biological way because of this.

One favorite example which mimics biological life is The Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey randomly takes pieces of the server down and sees how it responds. The idea is to lower the gap between how Netflix expects the system to work and how the system actually works. In biology this is how you learn about a living thing. Actively trying to mutate it is a biological technique.

The Simian Army

There seem to be a couple of ways of dealing with big computing. We can either freak out or say this is so complicated and are amazed to a point where we can only watch. But both of those cut off questioning.

We need to recognize that it is okay not to always understand. We have to constantly keep trying to understand and should be excited by trying to understand. We can realize things are messy but also that it's something we created.

Regular users should also know that all of our technology can fail. The world is a beta test, no technology is ever fully finished. We are in a way the problem of the tech because of our impatience. In order to help ourselves, we should have a better understanding of technology in society. These should move towards each other instead of keeping users in the dark about what happens behind the screen. That way, we can have useful discussion.

* * *

Filter Troubles

Optimo and the Renegade discuss the politics of filtering content on social media. Gonzo dreams of exploring new horizons.

REN:
A community is usually something that forms over time. Friendships grow, relationships are built up and broken down in smooth motions. There can be a kind of natural organization. In online communities there is a whole deal of building, guiding and optimizing. That's fundamentally different. It means we have influence from the bottom up. Me personally, I'm a big fan of Reddit. It's a social news platform spanning about every topic you can imagine.

OPT:
I never got around to using Reddit. The interface isn't comfortable for me.

REN:
It takes some patience to get into it. Reddit has an interesting history. When you say Reddit, you have to say Aaron Swartz, who was one of its founders. As a teenager he was already involved in developing internet technologies like the web feed format RSS and the Markdown publishing format. He cared deeply about the impact the internet has on society and the freedoms it could support. Swartz set up the Creative Commons License together with law professor Lawrence Lessig and wrote the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.

While studying at MIT, Swartz had access to the JSTOR database. Swartz believed this knowledge should be available for everyone. He went into the server room of the institute and copied the data on a hard drive.

The FBI knew Swartz from another case where he published legal documents of PACER. When they suspected him of wanting to publish JSTOR documents the FBI installed a camera in the server room and caught him red handed. He then got overcharged for his crime: 35 years of jail time awaited him. He hung himself under the pressure, leaving no note.

The first line of Swartz's Manifesto reads “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.” This is the FBI video evidence of Swartz inside the JSTOR server room.

Aaron Swartz called himself a sociologist. In one of many blog posts he writes that criticizing culture is too superficial. Instead you have to look at the institutes that shape culture. So let's take Reddit and compare that to Facebook, the platform become institute. The one nearly everyone seems to use.

The Front Page of the Internet or the Social Utility That Connects You With Other People Around You

REN:
Almost all of Reddit's posted content comes directly from users. A subbreddit is a community that is dedicated to one particular interest. You decide which subreddits you subscribe to. There are human moderators looking over their subreddits to keep order. Content can be up- or downvoted by users. The order of content in your feed is sorted by explicit votes from users. There is a special feed for controversy, where posts with a close up and down ratio are shown.

OPT:
So how does Facebook filter their content?

REN:
Where Reddit's content is filtered by people in a fairly direct way, Facebook uses algorithms. Facebook's feed works with an algorithm called EdgeRank. Every story, post, or interaction on Facebook is a so called Edge. Each Edge gets a value that is based on three things. Affinity score, weight and time. In practice, this means that each post is competing for a spot in your news feed. Already in 02007, 60 out of 30,000 possible stories were shown daily to users of Facebook.

Facebook specialized this personalization process over the years. It's so good they had to start randomizing the process more because people were creeped out by the precision of the feed. The company furthermore is very keen on personalizing more than just the feed. Advertisements, location based content, third parties' apps, they all work with pre-knowledge of your behaviours as user.

From a design point of view, the following is key: While Facebook boasts that it is people-centric, Reddit does a much better job at involving people. Facebook is comfortable, slick, personalized. Reddit less so, but it the user has more personal influence on what he/she sees. That influence makes the user feel like an explorer, not a spectator.

Boldly put, Facebook trusts technology while Reddit trusts in people. As a designer these trust issues come up when developing digital media. Designers are always working for someone. The goal should not be to always please the people with the money, but to empower those who have vision, and to be a part of making something meaningful to people on a personal, not corporate scale.

In the end, Reddit does a much better job at connecting people and building an online community in the sense that the people using it aren't left feeling trapped or tricked by their own browsing behaviour, which happens more often in Facebook's community. The old design credo “Less is more” is applicable here in the way that less influence from above gives people more freedom to explore. Ironically, our close friends are connected via Facebook while we meet unknown people by common interest on Reddit.

The Dérive

GON:
This reminds me of something great. Guy Debord, an artist from the international Situationist movement from the '50s on, defined the action of the dérive. Literally translating to drift, the dérive is a method of getting lost, wandering aimlessly for periods ranging from several hours to several days or even weeks, only guided by urban space and observing the psychological states it invokes. It is a way of studying the emotional effects the city has. He called this psychogeography.

A number of findings from the dérive were bundled into an anti-book in collaboration with Asger Jorn. The anti-book covers were made out of sandpaper, destroying every book that came in contact with it.

REN:
If you would dérive on Facebook, wouldn't it be infinitely less interesting than in the city? There is no way of escaping your own influence, unlike the city where you can be anonymous. You would get stuck in loops of familiar people, familiar stories and links.

GON:
Not entirely. I think the dérive could get new life in the digital context. Debord mentions the narrow experience citizens have of the city of Paris. The dérive is used to escape exactly that. Scrolling down the news feed is a type of wandering that is guided by Facebook's intentions. This is the narrow experience that needs escaping. Imagine ‘going out’ online like you would IRL. Not to another party, but to another social media service. Your Instagram gang visiting the world of Reddit.

And it is getting easier to change the behaviour of your personal Facebook experience. I'm using this tool recently for Facebook called F.B. Purity. I like the idea of it. You can block certain keywords from your newsfeed and customize how Facebook looks. It looks very old school though, and Facebook's interface is always changing so the tool can be pretty buggy.

REN:
Yeah, but it does what you want. You can't always judge a tool just on the looks or user-friendliness. The people making that stuff usually do it on their own time and without any payment from anyone! This developer is focussing on the essentials for it to keep it working. If you think about it, it's kind of amazing. He's like a little David against Facebook Goliath.

OPT:
No, I think I'd never use that. User experience is key. It takes me too much time to manually add the list items. I want someone or something to do that for me. I use another tool called Detox when I want to work. It fills my feed with news from selected sources so when I do flip over to Facebook, I won't get distracted by the daily food-shot of my neighbour.

GON:
You gotta love these efforts, right? Hail the clumsy solutions, the hacks and stooges.

REN:
I like the F.B. Purity more than Detox. Detox seems cool but only works as a replacement. Purity let's you customize the entire feed. Good to see that while a lot of parties try to make a profit online, there are so many free solutions to the problems that come with that. And the design solutions that used to be clumsy have become much more professional. As the corporate internet grows more professional, so do its counter-movements.

* * *

The Parable of Sweating Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg outsmarted his private coding tutors since the '90s without breaking a sweat. In high school Mark Zuckerberg was the captain of his fencing team. Sweating was something you did behind the mask, faceless, or after the action. Mark Zuckerberg sat cool and dry in his dormitory in 2004 when he launched TheFacebook. Early summer 2007 and Mark Zuckerberg still kept his cool even as he sat in court weighed on by accusations of stealing the idea for Facebook.

But at the All Things Digital conference in 2010, Mark Zuckerbergs armpits were sweating in his hoodie. Sat in the hot seat, he answered questions about Facebook’s privacy issues.

“Why don’t you take off the hoodie?” — Facebook started out as so much fun, he thought, but it just got so big, and now he was responsible for so many people. He didn’t know where to look. “But I never take off the hoodie.” — “Well, can you explain what this instant personalization thing is about?” — Making the world more open and connected, sweating Mark Zuckerberg thought. How naïve, he thought. “Maybe I should take off the hoodie.”

It’s okay, sweating Mark Zuckerberg. Take it off. We all sweat sometimes.

Fleeting Time

The cast wonders if their use of online media is an addiction. How to deal with life online?

REN:
What do you think, can you call social media an addiction?

OPT:
Yes, I think so.

GON:
I don't know, it's not in the official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) yet, but I would say some media have been made so tempting to use that it's almost impossible not to.

OPT:
I've been reading about machine gambling in Las Vegas in this book called Addiction by Design. Natasha Dow Schüll spent more than 10 years in Las Vegas to explore all kinds of aspects of machine gambling and I keep seeing lots of parallels to the internet. Check it out: developers of machine gambling are always trying to optimize the time people stay on the devices. It doesn't even matter how much they win or lose. As long as they keep coming and come for long amounts of time, the casinos keep making money.

The crazy thing is that it does not stop there. They are all-inclusive strategies. Using the architecture of the casinos, the layout of the city, everything inside works together to keep people inside. It's a total design.

Later on I learned Dow Schüll felt the same. She saw the parallel between her gambling research in Las Vegas and the digital world. A lot is built into the design of user interfaces. The slot machine comparison can be seen almost literally in some apps. What prize is behind this button? How many likes do I get when I post this? Everything is gamified.

This is a map a gambling addict called Mollie drew for Dow Schüll in 01998. It shows her daily routine. A closed loop. In the middle herself on the machine.

REN:
I've actually heard doubts being raised if students that use laptops can actually learn something. Joelle Renstrom, an English literature teacher at jhgjhg wrote about her experiences with technology in the classroom. Though her question is a bit dramatic: “Is there any hope left for learning?” I think it's a pretty legitimate thing to worry about. She describes the tendency of technology to distract as a very strong power.

OPT:
I think you should see this. It's called Time Well Spent This is a design movement that want to align our technology with our humanity. These people recognize the problem that our tech is constantly trying to claim our attention and they offer some solutions.

They make an important division between attention companies and platform companies. The attention companies are for instance Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and Netflix and the platformers are companies such as Google and Apple. The former needs to maximize attention to make money, the latter are builders of the interfaces that sit between the applications and us.

The attention companies profit from our screentime, so they won't change by themselves. And the platformers should be the party that benefits users more than companies since they are the moderators of the interactions we have with technologies.

All the time we are being distracted we have the feeling that it's our own mistake, but it's easy to forget that attention companies have loads of marketing employees working for them called 'Growth Hackers.' Their job is to maximize Time On Device.

Addicts of slot machines often report a feeling of being in “the Zone”. They describe the feeling as ‘becoming one’ with the machine. Almost everyone that ever touched a smartphone has had at least a glimpse of that Zone.

There are a lot of strategies they use to maximize your attention, which will gain them profits. One very simple and common hook is the Intermittent Variable Reward. This means sometimes you get a nice reward, and other times you don't. A very convenient plug for this is in the notifications of your phone.

This kind of behaviour is easy to program because you already receive messages. How they hook people in, is by making sure there are enough notifications to keep you tapping and clicking. These strategies are very invasive, and make very conscious abuse of some concepts from psychology and science behind addiction and distraction.

GON:
If you come to see it from this perspective, the whole internet seems pretty awful. All big services are using these kind of techniques. But I have to say there is also a kind of dark pleasure in binging out on things like Netflix or Youtube. I have to go in sometimes and not come out for a while.

REN:
Well, in my early days I would also spend entire days messing with a PC and a program, trying to hook all things up. That took most of my time and I could get lost in it, but there was still a personal responsibility, I had to cooperate with the computer to get where i wanted to get.

If you ask me there is not enough diversity and too much diversion. we've put the responsibility to answer all of our questions with GAFAM even though we've always known they're big corporations. We should get over the fact that their services hook us in. Of course they're annoying, they are trying to sell us something.

Life is pain, princess, anyone trying to tell you differently is trying to sell you something
— Farmboy in The Princess Bride

OPT:
Sure, that may be the case. But the point is not if an individual makes that choice or not. The point here is that everyone has to deal with these media. And they're not based on the best interests of their users. When we might transition to some new kind of media, it would be best if we keep in mind these destructive patterns for people. The new architecture of systems should be free of these disgusting addiction hooks.

I'm just pleading for Time Well Spent because they make a good point. Their aim is to develop a more intentional relationship to our devices, meaning that our intentions should be honored more. The solutions put forward by Time Well Spent are pretty straightforward. Time Well Spent is going towards design that does 'well' to people. They use their knowledge of Google and other companies to make a suggestion for improvement.

REN:
Well, looking at their site, they offer apps to solve problems with apps. Semi-solutions to real problems. Relying on tech for tech. That does not solve the original problem, it is a way out.

OPT:
I think that's too easy to say. The hard thing is how to deal with these things while still using them. I'm using an app called Selfcontrol sometimes. It blocks access to webpages I enter in my blacklist.

GON:
Moment is the mobile version of that.

OPT:
😂. I love these. Have you seen the Distractagone? That one might actually work. The Distractagone is just a cube-shaped vault with a timer on it. It allows you to keep your phone locked inside for an X period of time. And during that time you are undistracted! It sounds like a great idea.

REN:
But isn't this a forced solution? It's like hiding candy from children. That's never stopped them from taking the candy if they really wanted it.

GON:
Yeah, I think that's a very important thing to stress. No matter how many tools and thingamajingeys you use, if you are sensitive to these impulses you don't stand a chance against yourself. I mean, I'm using this Selfcontrol thing on a schedule. That means I can never go on Facebook but hell, I also installed a proxy so I can go there anytime anyways. I also have an iPhone laying on my desk, which has another blocking app installed but for that one I also know how to break it.

OPT:
I talked to Charlie Stigler, the guy that programmed Selfcontrol. It seems fitting that he himself does not have any problems dealing with the problems a lot of people report from the attention companies. He mentioned it himself: he doesn't have problems with self-control, he just has self-control. He also mentioned in our interview that

REN:
This seems to be a bottom line in many of the problems we've discussed. I think no matter how sophisticated our technologies get, we can get carried away with trying to change our human nature. Everyone reacts to tech in their own way, and it does have its victims. And we'll always have to remain skeptical.

GON:
Yeah, let's not be John Cleese. Allow me to explain.

In a skit from John Cleese’s training videos called Why do people work? he portrays a typical sixties factory worker in the UK. While explaining how boring and repetitive his job at the factory is (all he does all day is pull on a lever) he complains about job satisfaction (none) and salary, which is the only good thing about the job. The money is his only reward, because he can at least use that to have a good time. The end of the video shows us that that good time means pulling on a lever at a slot machine. It goes to show in a very clever way that he claims not to like the repetition but he actually loves it and doesn't really want to do anything else.

Are you living the life you've always wanted to live?

Leaves me with the question, what do we want to do? We might be clueless, actually. But let's make sure that we never let these machines take over what we really want to do, whatever that may be. Let's not forget, we're all here to enjoy life, make something good out of it.

REN:
Agreed! Let's not be John Cleese!

OPT:
Ditto! Bye bye John Cleese!

* * *

EPILOGUE

Dear reader,

Thanks for reading. Now I know I am not the only one with my obsession, my obsession with the internet. It's an obsession and for good reason. The technological advancements are big, the consequences for human beings have been far-reaching. Sometimes harmful, sometimes helpful.

I want to give some general comments I've picked up while writing.

I think there are a lot of people who feel stuck with the internet. At least I felt stuck with it. And after that think art and design should always be something that makes that feeling go away, may that be on- or offline.

It's a divisive technology, but it's best used for sharing.

I am not cynical about technological advancement. I still think there's a lot of good to be done with it. Reading and learning about the powers behind it has however made me a lot less gullible about the impact of technology. Like in the case of NSA spying, or when it is used to make insane profits over people's hard work.

We'll keep coming up with ways of demystifying technology. Design as immunisation.

And we'll keep being subversive towards big systems and we'll learn from them. It can be useful to see Google as the enemy from time to time but it doesn't make sense to blame them for all the problems in the world.

Avoid oversimplification. It's very handy in programming to make things as simple as possible, but it's just not so interesting in real life. Trust your audience, they have an imagination. They don't read barcodes, they read stories, ideas, and jokes.

Approach new services with skepsis and keep checking in on the ones you use. Some things are not made in your best interest.

Publish stuff! Where you feel fit.

Where to look for the future? First of all to the institutes of this world, because their culture makes society. It's been a very USA-centric research, so I also hope to learn more in the coming times about other industries, such as the Asian influence in technology.

Secondly I'm curious about this coming year. Right-winged politics took the USA, where Trump took a country by surprise. The biggest party in the Netherlands is racist and will take a lion's share in next February's election. Public threats were made to the Morrocan community, the biggest islamophobe of NL literally said he would CLEAN SHIP without specifiying what. This is harmful. These kind of empty words make nothing better. What's the alternative for this politics of anger?

The internet's distracted me for a nice run. It was fun on there, but we should also really spend some time with people around us. See what they're up to. See what you can do together to have fun, or to help.

At a societal level, the bottom line is that if we invest in things that make us feel good but which don't work, don't invest in things which don't make us feel good, but which may solve problems, then our fate is that in the long run it will just get harder and harder to feel good about not solving problems.
– Benjamin Bratton

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

Logged out:

Optimo (OPT), Gonzo (GON), The Renegade (REN)