Techno-politics

Addressing some of the recent "headwinds" facing Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "Good faith criticism helps us get better, but my view is that we are seeing a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company." Continue Reading →

The interviewer asked, "Is that image real"? There's no way to tell. "What about this video?" It's hard to say. "You can't tell if that's real or fake either." No. Not without analyzing it. "Well, what about the prose? Did a human write this sentence?" It's possible, but it would not surprise me to learn that it was machine generated. "What about the voice in the video?" It's sonically perfect. I'd say 60/40 it's a machine, but I'd need to hear a few more sentences to be sure. "So, what you're saying is that I can't trust my eyes or my ears?" Yes. That's what I'm saying. "Is this the end of truth?" Continue Reading →

Facebook AI has announced Ego4D, a project that is trying to give AI the ability to understand and interact with the world from a first-person perspective (the way that humans do). AI typically learns from photos and videos captured in third-person, but next-generation AI will need to learn from videos that show the world from the center of action. Continue Reading →

Facebook is proposing a new cryptocurrency called Diem. Backed by U.S. Dollars, Euros, and other hard currencies, Diem will be a stablecoin tied to a permissioned blockchain (that one day may become permissionless). Continue Reading →

If you were Mark Zuckerberg and you wanted to get ahead of potential government regulation of your business, what would you fix first? Would you try to curtail social media addiction, protect privacy, reduce mental health risks, reduce weaponized information, eliminate hate speech, flag misinformation, deal with data governance, or address some other seemingly intractable problem? Here's what I'd fix first. Continue Reading →

Today, you are a regulator. Your job is to regulate social media. What is the first thing you would regulate? Continue Reading →

Let me get this straight. I'm about to get into a Twitter war on a topic such as women's reproductive rights, politics, taxes, music, sports, race relations, #MeToo, or any other topic that might inspire me to comment or state my case, and Twitter thinks that letting me know that there are very strong feelings on display will be news to me or be helpful in any way? Perhaps the people at Twitter missed that day at Twitter school. Continue Reading →

In the face of overwhelming evidence that "something must be done," my fear is that they are going to do something. It will be a political knee-jerk reaction to a problem so complex that the most informed people in the world cannot come to a consensus about a regulatory strategy, let alone a tactical regulatory roadmap. Continue Reading →

60 Minutes ran one of its typical one-sided hit pieces last night as it featured the “big reveal” of the Facebook whistleblower. This time, they have “hard evidence” that Facebook works as designed. How is any of this a surprise? Continue Reading →

During an upgrade to the Compound platform, a bug caused the system to transfer close to $90 million in COMP (their cryptocurrency) to random users. In a desperate tweet, Compound’s CEO begged the users to give the money back. He threatened to dox the users. (That’s a slang term for making user identities public or, in this case, reporting them to the IRS.) Then offered a 10 percent reward for “doing the right thing.” Continue Reading →