I am very late to the Magic Keyboard game, but holy moly! This makes more of a difference than I expected. I have been using the Surface Pro X for a few months almost exclusively. Its hardware felt much like the iPad Pro does, with a kickstand and the keyboard cover attached. Major advantages are software support for real desktop apps and a minor advantage is that the front facing camera is in the perfect spot for landscape use.
With the Magic Keyboard, the iPad Pro gets much closer to the Mac. The trackpad lets you keep your hands on the keyboard, much more than a mouse in my previous tests suggested. Two finger scrolls in web pages is the one thing I missed most. Two finger pinch was second. Three finger swipes to change programs as well.
Now I am off to unlearn the Windows shortcuts for @, copy, insert etc. I have worked on iPad as my main machine before and now I shall try again. I jumped right into iOS 14 beta 2. We test so you don't have to. :-)
There’s a new paper out, “Gender Classification and Bias Mitigation in Facial Images”, which tries to make non-binary-inclusive gender recognition software. To me, that’s not what the work does; what it does is instead legitimise fundamentally unjust systems, through a highly dangerous (and inconsistent) model of gender. So I figured I’d do a sort of post-publication review to summarise my concerns.
The researchers behind this paper have clearly put a lot of work in, and have the best of intentions, I’m sure. But the project is fundamentally flawed in both theory and execution, in ways that make me both doubt the degree to which they’ve thought their work through and engaged with the communities they see fit to computationally classify, and whether the end outcome of this is a net positive at all.
The morality of facial recognition
Over the last year or so we’ve seen a lot of concerns about facial recognition - some of which have been about systems’ implementation and some of which have been about whether we want to build it at all. As well as concerns about bias, there are concerns about the implications of designing systems that are fundamentally about surveillance and securitisation - processes that are deeply, structurally racist and transphobic, even if the system’s abstract design is “neutral”.
Now: strictly speaking, gender recognition is not the same as facial recognition; it’s trying to map a photo of someone to a gender category, not to a specific identity or another photo. But some of the same concerns apply; it’s about surveillance, it’s about control, and queer people’s experiences of either are (to be understated in the most British of ways) not good. As far as I can tell, the authors don’t engage with abolitionist critiques at all, which is a pity, because if they did they would (at the very least) have written a very different paper. They don’t address the fact that, as Zoé eloquently puts it, “the tech industry is enthusiastically supporting the state’s mandate to surveil. Any facilitation in improving its accuracy and efficiency in that support is, at best, a pyrrhic victory”. And enthusiastic support is precisely what they’re providing - they note that law enforcement is a primary user and customer in the first sentence of the paper.
And, well, they don’t address the fact that, even setting aside the direct surveillance aspect - you can’t really have trans-inclusive gender recognition. Gender recognition is about rigidly determining how to treat and classify someone, based on what they look like. In such a system, there’s no space for queerness. And as I wrote two years ago “a trans-inclusive system for non-consensually defining someone’s gender is a contradiction in terms”. It’s an argument they should’ve addressed, and definitely knew about, given that they cited my paper.
In the absence of that - what does this kind of project do? Answer: just as Zoé says, it facilitates injustice. It whitewashes (or in this case, queerwashes?) surveillance infrastructure, and by taking a position of “the problem is inaccuracy, not the premise” legitimises more widespread data collection and tracking as the solution. Which is actually how the authors end - noting that their model is still inaccurate for non-binary people, they suggest “the importance of assembling more inclusive databases for facial recognition”. Speaking on behalf of myself, but also, I’m guessing, on behalf of a hell of a lot of other people captured by “inclusive”: I Would Rather You Did Not.
Biased representations in debiasing representations
Even if the consequences of this kind of work weren’t a massive red flag, though, the actual execution has its own limitations. The authors gathered two datasets; one of queer people overall (more on that later), and one specifically of non-binary people. The construction of this database of non-binary faces started with grabbing photos of non-binary people from Wikipedia.
Of course: not every non-binary person is on Wikipedia. Most of the non-binary people on Wikipedia (indeed, most of the people full stop) are celebrities. And celebrity isn’t an equal opportunity status - for the most part, no disabled people, people of colour and/or poor people need apply. Which means that even the non-binary people you do get are going to have a pretty narrow range of appearances and presentations. I’d love to look like Cara Delevingne, but that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t. Representing non-binary people through “people with Wikipedia articles” is about as robust as representing women through “women with braids”; strictly speaking it’s more accurate than nothing, but not by much.
(As an aside; while searching for that example I found Wikimedia Commons has the category “nude or partially nude women in libraries” which: way to validate the stereotypes)
Gender itself
So, okay, it might be a bad idea and it probably doesnt work - but could it? The answer, ultimately, is no; you can’t model people’s gender consistently and exclusively from how they present, and the authors sometimes sort of acknowledge this. But much more frequently, there’s a weird (and sometimes biological) essentialism to how non-binary people in particular and gender and sexuality in general are treated.
The authors acknowledge that non-binary people frequently use different, more specific labels and identities - but assume that this inherently reflects differences in presentation or treatment, which isn’t always the case. Whether someone is “genderqueer” or “non-binary” could indicate different senses of gender or desired perceptions or treatment, or could literally just indicate that they articulated their gender in different contexts, with different language available. Inversely, the assumption is that non-binary people overall have something in common in presentation or trajectory - but this, too, isn’t the case. Some non-binary people are androgynous; some are not; what “androgynous” means varies in different contexts, for different people; what options are available to people differ from person to person and trajectory to trajectory, and all of this (yet again) problematises the presentation-to-identity link that this software tries to make. And as Amy Davis beautifully writes, talking about legal recognition, the reduction to and clumping of all these different paths and possibilities to a single X marker presupposes that non-binary is a way of articulating not just a difference, but the same difference, whoever is deploying it as a term. That isn’t the case.
And speaking of difference and presentation - the reason for the assessment of queer faces overall is Wang & Kozinski’s infamous “gay face” study, which the authors very politely describe as “controversial” and rely on as the exclusive evidence of the claim that gay and lesbian people just look different from the heterosexuals. Now, this isn’t actually the claim that Wang & Kozinski made explicitly, but the claims they made didn’t come from a neutral place. Instead, they were building on some hyper creepy evolutionary biology and sexology spitballing over the last few decades which does things like measure people’s ring finger length to test the hypothesis that queerness comes from deviant testosterone exposure in the womb; literally, that gay men were mutated to be deviantly feminine, and lesbians deviantly masculine. It’s been taken down time after time (I recommend “Reinventing the Sexes” and “An American Obsession” as really good books on the science, politics and history there), and it’s rather concerning to see it glibly resurrected in a work that aims to reduce discrimination.
Alternate futures
To summarise, then; this can’t work in theory. It definitely doesn’t work in practice. And most worryingly, attempts to make it work enable and legitimise a whole host of violences - violences at a time when we’re seeing a massive backlash against trans existences. In the face of that, the authors - however well intentioned - help a lot less than they mean to.
I don’t know the authors’ backgrounds, and I don’t want to assume. There are a lot of hints in the paper that the authors do not come at this heavily rooted in the internal nuances and complexities of trans and queer community. Misgendering is defined as “structural violence”; queer and gender non-conforming are seen as subcategories of “non-binary”; at one point the authors confuse cisgender people for transgender. And I’m sympathetic to people growing and learning through writing; I learned a lot through writing my paper, which is partially why I wrote it. I’ve learned a lot since that has added nuance and depth and uncertainty to how I think about these questions, in a lot of different ways. We are always becoming ourselves.
But ultimately, we have a responsibility - as designers and anthropologists learn and relearn and never quite learn enough - to ensure that our attempts to help, might. That doesn’t just mean trying to make things inclusive: it means taking the time to meaningfully engage with and center the people who are Being Helped. As Tagonist put it both more eloquently and obscenely:
And I suspect that if the authors had done that more substantively, they would’ve learned not just different language to use or ways to think about gender, but that we neither need nor want inclusive facial recognition. What we want is better healthcare, better education, better jobs. What we want is an end to policing, an end to rigid conceptions of gender, and this study is premised on the neutrality, or benificence, of both.
My talk at ACM Hypertext 2020: Bad Character: who do we want our hypertexts to be? Paper and slides now available.
^do(image,BadCharacter.jpg)
Update: Thanks to the ACM and to the Computing Community Consortium for the 2020 Blue Skies paper award!
Several months ago, the City of Vancouver launched
Vancouver Plan, the first city plan in 100 years. It asks Vancouverites big, broad questions on what they want the city to look like in 2050 and beyond.
The City is now encouraging children and youth to get involved in shaping the plan. They can share their ideas via a short survey on the website, submit ideas creatively (TikToks, drawings, videos etc.), or email the city to hold a classroom/group discussion (Email stina.hanson@vancouver.ca or call 604-786-2078 to book a time).
It’s a great summer activity to get the kids involved in shaping Vancouver’s future. Learn more here.
Uber has released its second annual Uber Eats Cravings Report, revealing new details about Canadian eaters’ food ordering habits.
Specifically, the report breaks down some statistics on ordering trends during the COVID-19 pandemic, such as what special instructions eaters are leaving.
For instance, the company says Alberta seems to have the “pickiest” eaters in Canada, as they add special instructions to their orders more than any other province. Conversely, Nova Scotians “hardly ever” add special instructions, according to Uber.
Meanwhile, Quebec and Manitoba eaters say “please” and “‘thank you” the most in their instructions.
Additionally, more than 50 percent of overall Canadian Uber Eats orders contain these words, versus 40 percent in the U.S.
In terms of specific requests, here are most popular in Canada:
Extra sauce
No onion
No tomato
Spicy
No cheese
Extra spicy
Well done
Sauce on the side
Extra mayo
In particular, “extra sauce,” “extra cheese,” “extra onion,” and “no lettuce” requests have increased the most, while requests for “gluten free,” “sauce on side” and “dressing on the side” have decreased. Further, the most common items that eaters wanted removed from their orders were onions, tomatoes, ice, cheese and bacon. On the other hand, the most popular “extra” items include sauce, spice, pickles, mayo and cheese.
Here’s a breakdown of popular delivery requests province and/or key markets:
Popular delivery request by province and/or key markets (Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto, Halifax, Winnipeg and Montreal)
Calgary — no onion
Edmonton — no onion
Halifax — no tomato
Montreal — no onion
Ottawa — no onion
Quebec City — plus de sauce
Toronto — extra sauce
Vancouver — extra sauce
Winnipeg — extra sauce
Meanwhile, here are daily request trends:
Monday — fewest requests for “no onions”
Tuesday — spike in requests for “no ice”
Wednesday — no orders for “extra cheese”
Thursday — more “no tomatoes” requests
Friday — most “extra sauce” requests and an increase in “no onions” requests
Saturday — most popular day to request “well-done”
Sunday — most requests for “spicy” or “extra spicy”
It’s scary to start a new job managing a community in a topic you’re not very familiar with.
What if you say something dumb or incorrect? Members might lose respect for you and never regain it.
What if you say something which contradicts what the previous community manager said?
What if you don’t participate in exactly the right way and form the same strength of relationships as your predecessor?
You need a few things here.
First, you need a boss or mentor. You need someone who can show examples of what great participation looks like and what standards or guidelines are key. You also need a boss who encourages you to go out there, make mistakes, learn from them, and not pressure you to be perfect.
Second, you need to be honest with yourself and your members. Don’t pretend to be an expert if you’re not. When you introduce yourself to the community tell them they have far more expertise than you do and you’re hoping to learn from them and ensure the community serves their needs. When they have problems, tell them you’ll do your best to solve it.
Third, you need to see this as an opportunity. You’re in the same position (new to a topic and to a community) that countless other future members will be. This is a gift. You can see what resources people like yourself most need. You can quickly identify what things in the community could be improved for newcomers.
Working from home was an ideal that many strived for. For many, it still is, but for those with kids who have to learn from home, the schedule change is less than ideal. Read More
Tom Chritchlow is starting his own Discord space, as part of experimenting with different spaces to operate in, and where possible host your own. Thinking in terms of spaces you use is one of the factors you can tweak when it comes to building and maintaining a healthy community (of practice), as Etienne Wenger established and I experience in practice. So I recognise Tom’s urge to experiment with more and less public spaces for interaction.
So if my blog is one “space” and twitter is another “space” – what new spaces might exist?
Looking forward to reading more of his experiences. As he says he’s not starting a completely new room, anyone with a generic Discord account could join, but to fill a space, make it inhabited it needs some sort of pre-existing group for whom the space is intended and an answer to an existing need in that group. (Tom avoids ‘building community’ , maybe because of the negative overtones in tech when that is said?) So questions around who is it for, and how do they experience this new space, will they explore it together or will they end up in an empty space on their own, etc. are important.
Having said all that, I think it is a shame that Discord the tool has conflict and lack of harmony as its name, and has been host to a wide range of interaction that lives up to that name and much worse. Even if they now aim to be there for anyone, the name itself seems to counteract Tom’s ‘realtime cozy chat space’ intention, as the neon-sign on the door signals the opposite. Words matter, and this one does a disservice.
A turning point came in June 2019. That was when more than half of searches kept users on Google for the first time, rather than sending people to other sites through a free web link or an ad, according to data from digital marketing company Jumpshot.
Social media has a conflict problem. Spending even a few minutes on public social media can expose us to dozens of people we know little about, talking about…
All too often I see a lot of time and energy expended by people on social media on topics they obviously care a lot about. If the purpose of this energy is advocacy and bringing about real change, then it’s hard to think of a less effective way toward reaching the widest audience one can aim to reach.
At its best, content on social media can truly be enlightening, educational, inspirational and more. A lot of this content should be easy to find even five or ten years from now. In the current day and age, to an increasingly degree, the real, lived experience of folks is captured on social media in higher fidelity and with a greater level of urgency than any think piece or newspaper article I’ve seen. It’d be a pity if most of this content doesn’t enjoy any longevity other than its “15 minutes of fame”.
At its worst, what drives “engagement” on social media is often completely antithetical to reasoned, nuanced arguments. Shades of grey are harder to capture succinctly in 280 characters, which often leads to people making absolutist statements. Mediums like Twitter are fundamentally unsuited to preserving any scrap of context or nuance. Most of the tweets that seem “impactful” (as measured by metrics like likes or retweets) often play to the gallery. Furthermore, the nature of social media makes it incredibly easy to garner what I call “drive-by consensus” or “drive-by outrage”, where people can cleave to arguments without having to invest or engage with the content in any meaningful manner. While this can seem affirming, it does very little to build real consensus or even reach a wider audience.
Long form writing, on the other hand, requires more effort and can be fairly tedious. It won’t (immediately) reach as many people as a well-constructed/inflammatory/provocative/funny/moving tweet will, since engaging intellectually with a topic at length takes far more effort than the few seconds it takes to read a tweet and hit a like button on an app. The reality is that I can consume about 500 (often half-baked) ideas (er, tweets) in the time it takes me to read a piece of long(er) form writing.
However, long form writing still has several benefits. Most people who are not super keyed into social media often try to seek information on a topic they’re trying to educate themselves about from the internet. Search engines fail to even surface “viral” tweets (let alone the plethora of non-viral tweets) when I search for specific keywords; instead, what a search often does surface is news paper articles or opinion pieces or lacklustre Medium posts or anodyne corporate blog posts or a host of other forms of long form writing. It’s this (oftentimes milquetoast) content that most new people are exposed to.
On social media, I find my opinions affirmed by the people I follow who hold views similar to mine on a host of topics. While this is certainly very intellectually comfortable, it does very little to broaden my horizons or even reflect on my own biases. In my own experience, writing down my thoughts about a topic or reading a well-argued piece of long form writing often requires me to think deeper about the various consequences, tradeoffs and complexities of the topic in question in ways consuming social media rarely does. My opinions have only ever truly changed when I set out to think deeper or more at length about the topic.
I hope more folks are encouraged to write more, or at least convert their tweet threads into a blog post for posterity’s sake. It’d be an absolute shame if a treasure trove of information and a wealth of opinions are lost to the sands of time for the want of being captured somewhere less ephemeral.
Google Chrome has a well-earned reputation for gobbling up computer RAM. However, Google has been working hard to remedy some of the problems.
A recent report from the Wall Street Journaloutlines why Chrome can be so resource intensive while also sharing tips to improve the situation. In short, computer programs run ‘processes’ in RAM. Chrome, by design, runs separate processes for each tab and extension, which can protect users’ security and privacy while also preventing a tab crash from taking down the whole browser. Unfortunately, it also means that running lots of tabs or extensions can quickly take up significant amounts of RAM and slow down a computer.
WSJ notes that Chrome is working on ways to limit how much power resource-heavy ads can use. More significantly, Chrome’s director of browser engineering, Max Christoff, told the WSJ that Chrome would improve ‘tab throttling’ in the coming months. This means the browser will do a better job of prioritizing active tabs while limiting the number of resources background tabs can eat up.
Testing different browsers could help
Ultimately, the WSJ suggests people try switching to other browsers that are less resource-intensive, such as Apple’s Safari or Microsoft’s new Edge browser. Interestingly, Microsoft rebuilt Edge on Chromium, the same open-source foundation used by Google for Chrome. The WSJ says that Edge used about five percent fewer resources in its testing than Chrome did, while Safari on macOS used 10 percent less.
Some big Chrome news inside my column. Google’s finally addressing the longtime battery life issues and releasing fixes in next couple of months, including improvements for tab throttling. https://t.co/CDYqm7Jj8wpic.twitter.com/djgMpq7ZTx
MobileSyrup’s managing editor Patrick O’Rourke, a die-hard Chrome user, recently switched to Edge on his MacBook and also found it performed much better.
Google putting one memory-saving option on the back burner for now
Edge can outperform Chrome on Windows as well. In the Windows 10 May 2020 Update, Microsoft made the ‘Segment Heap’ technology previously available in its UWP platform to Win32. Edge is among the first Win32 apps to adopt the technology. Microsoft says it saw up to a 27 percent reduction in Edge’s memory use in internal tests.
Google got Segment Heap ready to go for Chrome version 85, but reportedly disabled and delayed the feature.
As spotted by TechDows, a Google engineer posted on the Chromium Bugs page that Segment Heap caused performance issues. Specifically, Segment Heap traded reduced RAM use for increased CPU use. Engineers felt the trade wasn’t worth the cost.
For now, Segment Heap will remain off in Chrome 85 while the Chrome team gathers more test and telemetry data. The engineer suggests the Chrome team will reconsider Segment Heap in the future.
Over the last week, as the idea of banning TikTok in the U.S. has shifted from a fringe idea to a seeming inevitability (thanks in no small part to India’s decision to do just that), those opposed to the idea and those in support seem to be talking past each other. The reasons for this disconnect go beyond the usual divisions in tech, culture, and national security: what makes TikTok so unique is that it is the culmination of two trends: one about humans and the Internet, and the other about China and ideology.
The Analog World
It is always tricky to look at the analog world if you are trying to understand the digital one. When it comes to designing products, a pattern you see repeatedly is copying what came before, poorly, and only later creating something native to the medium.
Consider text: given that newspapers monetized by placing advertisements next to news stories, the first websites tried to monetize by — you guessed it — placing advertisements next to news stories. This worked, but not particularly well; publishers talked about print dollars and digital dimes, and later mobile pennies. Sure, the Internet drew attention, but it just didn’t monetize well.
What changed was the feed, something uniquely enabled by digital. Whereas a newspaper had to be defined up-front, such that it could be printed and distributed at scale, a feed is tailored to the individual in real-time — and so are the advertisements. Suddenly it was print that was worth pennies, while the Internet generally and mobile especially were worth more than newspapers ever were.
At the same time, while mediums change, humans remain the same, and here analog history is helpful; last month I pointed out that while newspaper revenue grew throughout the latter half of the 20th century, circulation actually fell. It’s the same story when it comes to newspapers’ overall share of advertising:
Assuming that advertising revenue is a reasonable proxy for attention, it turns out that humans like pictures more than text, and moving pictures most of all; so it has gone on the Internet. Once Facebook introduced the news feed the company quickly figured out that photos drove much more engagement; that meant that Instagram, a fledgling social network made of nothing but photos, was a tremendous threat and, once acquired, a tremendous opportunity.
Four years later, it was Instagram that Facebook used to counter Snapchat’s Stories feature, an even more immersive way of interacting with content than the feed. The point was not to win users back from Snapchat, but to prevent Instagram users from even trying Snapchat out; the gambit succeeded beautifully.
The Rise of TikTok
The rise of TikTok, though, suggests that Facebook didn’t learn the correct lesson from the Snapchat threat: while part of Snapchat’s allure was the possibility of creating a new network in an app predicated on chat and disappearing media, what made Stories particularly compelling is that the experience was closer to video. That meant there was an opportunity to focus on specifically that.
Of course Facebook had spent plenty of time trying to get video to work in its feed; flush with money from its targeted feed-based advertising the company lurched from initiative to initiative predicated on encouraging professional video makers to focus on Facebook instead of YouTube. The error the company made is obvious in retrospect: what has always made Facebook powerful is that its most valuable content is generated by its own users, yet the company was counting on 3rd-parties to make compelling videos.
You can understand Facebook’s thinking: while it is easy for users to create text updates, and, with the rise of smartphones, even easier to create pictures, producing video is difficult. Until recently, phone cameras were even worse at video than they were photos, but more importantly, compelling video takes some degree of planning and skill. The chances of your typical Facebook user having a network full of accomplished videographers is slim, and remember, when it comes to showing user-generated content, Facebook is constrained by who your friends are (the company got busted by the FTC for trying to switch posts from private to public).
All of this explains what makes TikTok such a breakthrough product. First, humans like video. Second, TikTok’s video creation tools were far more accessible and inspiring for non-professional videographers. The crucial missing piece, though, is that TikTok isn’t really a social network.
ByteDance and the Algorithm
This is where it is important to understand the history of ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner. ByteDance’s breakthrough product was a news app called TouTiao; whereas Facebook evolved from being primarily a social network to an algorithmic feed, TouTiao was about the feed and the algorithm from the beginning. The first time a user opened TouTiao, the news might be rather generic, but every scroll, every linger over a story, every click, was fed into a feedback loop that refined what it was the user saw.
Meanwhile all of that data fed back into TouTiao’s larger machine learning processes, which effectively ran billions of A/B tests a day on content of all types, cross-referenced against all of the user data it could collect. Soon the app was indispensable to its users, able to anticipate the news they cared about with nary a friend recommendation in sight. That was definitely more of a feature than a bug in China, where any information service was subject to not just overt government censorship, but also an expectation of self-censorship; all the better to control everything that end users saw, without the messiness of users explicitly recommending content themselves (although that didn’t prevent ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming from having to give a groveling apology for giving users too much low-brow content).
ByteDance’s 2016 launch of Douyin — the Chinese version of TikTok — revealed another, even more important benefit to relying purely on the algorithm: by expanding the library of available video from those made by your network to any video made by anyone on the service, Douyin/TikTok leverages the sheer scale of user-generated content to generate far more compelling content than professionals could ever generate, and relies on its algorithms to ensure that users are only seeing the cream of the crop. I noted while explaining what Quibi got wrong:
The single most important fact about both movies and television is that they were defined by scarcity: there were only so many movies that would ever be made to fill only so many theater slots, and in the case of TV, there were only 24 hours in a day. That meant that there was significant value in being someone who could figure out what was going to be a hit before it was ever created, and then investing to make it so. That sort of selection and production is what Katzenberg and the rest of Hollywood have been doing for decades, and it’s understandable that Katzenberg thought he could apply the same formula to mobile.
Mobile, though, is defined by the Internet, which is to say it is defined by abundance…So it is on TikTok, or any other app with user-generated content. The goal is not to pick out the hits, but rather to attract as much content as possible, and then algorithmically boost whatever turns out to be good…The truth is that Katzenberg got a lot right: YouTube did have a vulnerability in terms of video content on mobile, in part because it was a product built for the desktop; TikTok, like Quibi, is unequivocally a mobile application. Unlike Quibi, though, it is also an entertainment entity predicated on Internet assumptions about abundance, not Hollywood assumptions about scarcity.
To summarize:
Humans prefer video to photos to text
TikTok makes it easy to create videos, ensuring a massive supply of content (even if most of the supply is low quality)
TikTok relies on the algorithm to surface compelling content, and is not constrained by your social network
This both explains why TikTok succeeds, and why it is an app the United States ought to be concerned about.
This is where I take the biggest issue with labeling this past week’s actions as the start of a tech cold war: China took the first shots, and they took them a long time ago. For over a decade U.S. services companies have been unilaterally shut out of the China market, even as Chinese alternatives had full reign, running on servers built with U.S. components (and likely using U.S. intellectual property).
To be sure, China’s motivation was not necessarily protectionism, at least in the economic sense: what mattered most to the country’s ruling Communist Party was control of the flow of information. At the same time, from a narrow economic perspective, the truth is that China has been limiting the economic upside of U.S. companies far longer than the U.S. has tried to limit China’s.
I can’t emphasize this point enough: one of the gravest errors made by far too many people in the U.S. is taking an exceptionally self-centered view of U.S.-China relations, where everything is about what the U.S. says and does, while China is treated like an NPC. Indeed, it is quite insulting to China, a great nation with a history far longer than that of the United States.
To that end, this long history looms large in how China thinks about its relationship to the U.S. specifically, and the West generally. China is driven to reverse its “century of humiliation”, and to retake what it sees as its rightful place as a dominant force in the world. What few in the West seem to realize, though, is that the Chinese Communist Party very much believes that Marxism is the means by which that must be accomplished, and that Western liberal values are actively hostile to that goal. Tanner Greer wrote in Tablet:
Xi Jinping endorsed this explanation for the Soviet collapse in a 2013 address to party cadres. “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?” he asked his audience. “An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce!” The party leadership is determined to avoid the Soviet mistake. A leaked internal party directive from 2013 describes “the very real threat of Western anti-China forces and their attempt at carrying out westernization” within China. The directive describes the party as being in the midst of an “intense, ideological struggle” for survival. According to the directive, the ideas that threaten China with “major disorder” include concepts such as “separation of powers,” “independent judiciaries,” “universal human rights,” “Western freedom,” “civil society,” “economic liberalism,” “total privatization,” “freedom of the press,” and “free flow of information on the internet.” To allow the Chinese people to contemplate these concepts would “dismantle [our] party’s social foundation” and jeopardize the party’s aim to build a modern, socialist future.
Westerners asked to think about competition with China — a minority until fairly recently, as many envisioned a China liberalized by economic integration — tend to see it through a geopolitical or military lens. But Chinese communists believe that the greatest threat to the security of their party, the stability of their country, and China’s return to its rightful place at the center of human civilization, is ideological. They are not fond of the military machines United States Pacific Command has arrayed against them, but what spooks them more than American weapons and soldiers are ideas—hostile ideas they believe America has embedded in the discourse and institutions of the existing global order. “International hostile forces [seek to] westernize and divide China” warned former CPC General Secretary Jiang Zemin more than a decade ago, and that means that, as Jiang argued in a second speech, the “old international political and economic order” created by these forces “has to be changed fundamentally” to safeguard China’s rejuvenation. Xi Jinping has endorsed this view, arguing that “since the end of the Cold War countries affected by Western values have been torn apart by war or afflicted with chaos. If we tailor our practices to Western values … The consequences will be devastating.”
The problem from a Western perspective is that the links Clinton was so sure would push in only one direction — towards political freedom — turned out to be two-way streets: China is not simply resisting Western ideals of freedom, but seeking to impose their own.
This understanding of China’s belief that it is fighting an ideological war explains why the severe curtailing of freedom that happened in Hong Kong this month was inevitable; if the Party’s ideology is ultimately opposed to liberalism anywhere, “one country-two systems” were always empty words in service of China’s rejuvenation, and Marxism’s triumph. To see that reality, though, means taking China seriously, and believing what they say.
TikTok and Data
In that light, the latest TikTok news missed the mark, and ultimately, missed the point; from the New York Times:
Amazon on Friday asked its employees to delete the Chinese-owned video app TikTok from their cellphones, putting the tech giant at the center of growing suspicion and paranoia about the app. Almost five hours later, Amazon reversed course, saying the email to workers was sent in error.
In the initial email, which was obtained by The New York Times, Amazon officials said that because of “security risks,” employees must delete the app from any devices that “access Amazon email.” Employees had to remove the app by Friday to remain able to obtain mobile access to their Amazon email, the note said.
While traditional applications on Macs or PCs had full access to your computer — including your email — on modern smartphones apps exist in “sandboxes”, which, as John Gruber and I discussed on Dithering, are much more akin to a vault or a prison; apps can only access their own data, and a limited set of external data to which they are explicitly granted permission. In other words, banning TikTok because it is surreptitiously stealing your email doesn’t make technical sense.
That is not to say that TikTok is not capturing data: it is vacuuming up as much as it can, from your usage to your IP address to your contacts and location (if you gave the app permission). This, as many TikTok advocates note, is similar to what Facebook does.
This, to be clear, is absolutely true. It is also at this point where important differences emerge. First, Facebook is a U.S. company, and while TikTok claims that it is independent from ByteDance and stores data in the U.S. and Singapore, its privacy policy is clear:
We may share your information with a parent, subsidiary, or other affiliate of our corporate group.
That means that TikTok data absolutely can be sent to China, and, it is important to note, this would be the case even if the privacy policy were not so honest. All Chinese Internet companies are compelled by the country’s National Intelligence Law to turn over any and all data that the government demands, and that power is not limited by China’s borders. Moreover, this requisition of data is not subject to warrants or courts, as is the case with U.S. government requests for data from Facebook or any other entity; the Chinese government absolutely could be running a learning algorithms in parallel to ByteDance’s on all TikTok data.
If anything it would be a something of a surprise were it not; an important piece of China’s thousands of years of history is the presence of a bureaucracy focused on collecting data on, well, everyone and everything. I see examples of it here in Taiwan, where my household is registered, cameras are everywhere (and routinely accessed), and cellphone data is a pandemic fighting tool, and this is a democratic country based on liberal values. China, which combines this tradition with a totalitarian government, takes data collection to the max. Facial recognition is omnipresent, nearly all transactions, even in the real world, are digital, and social networks like WeChat are completely open to censors, both from Tencent and the government; the government even hacks your computers as a matter of policy. Given this reality it is completely reasonable to be concerned about TikTok data!
That, though, is not the primary risk: what should truly concern Americans is the algorithm.
TikTok’s Algorithm
Last month, after President Trump held a rally in Tulsa with a far-smaller crowd than he anticipated, the New York Times suggested that TikTok might be responsible:
President Trump’s campaign promised huge crowds at his rally in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday, but it failed to deliver. Hundreds of teenage TikTok users and K-pop fans say they’re at least partially responsible…
TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music groups claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for Mr. Trump’s campaign rally as a prank. After the Trump campaign’s official account @TeamTrump posted a tweet asking supporters to register for free tickets using their phones on June 11, K-pop fan accounts began sharing the information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally — and then not show.
Leaving aside whether or not the TikTok campaign or coronavirus concerns were responsible for the low turnout, I actually am inclined to believe that this movement on the video service was genuine. It is important to note, though, that there is no way we can know for sure, and, to the extent that TikTok actually did have an impact on the rally, that should frighten people of all political persuasions.
The point, though, is not just censorship, but its inverse: propaganda. TikTok’s algorithm, unmoored from the constraints of your social network or professional content creators, is free to promote whatever videos it likes, without anyone knowing the difference. TikTok could promote a particular candidate or a particular issue in a particular geography, without anyone — except perhaps the candidate, now indebted to a Chinese company — knowing. You may be skeptical this might happen, but again, China has already demonstrated a willingness to censor speech on a platform banned in China; how much of a leap is it to think that a Party committed to ideological dominance will forever leave a route directly into the hearts and minds of millions of Americans untouched?
Again, this is where it is worth taking China seriously: the Party has shown through its actions, particularly building and maintaining the Great Firewall at tremendous expense, that it believes in the power of information and ideas. Countless speeches, from Chairman Xi and others, have stated that the Party believes it is in an ideological war with liberalism generally and the U.S. specifically. If we are to give China’s leaders the respect of believing what they say, instead of projecting our own beliefs for no reason other than our own solipsism, how can we take that chance?
A Reluctant Prescription
I am not a China absolutist; to give one timely example, while I mourn the end of a free and vibrant Hong Kong that I have had the pleasure of visiting on multiple occasions, I am unmoved by complaints about China’s promised adherence to the Basic Law; it has become clear that was a means to the end of reclaiming Hong Kong from a colonial power,1 and Hong Kong is unquestionably a Chinese city, ultimately subject to Chinese law. Similarly, I abhor and condemn and encourage all to speak out about what is happening to Uighur’s in Xinjiang, but I am not counseling U.S. intervention.
In short, I believe it is time to take China seriously and literally: the Communist Party is not only ideologically opposed to liberalism, it believes that only one of liberalism or Marxism can prevail. To that end it has been taking action for over 20 years to control information within its borders and, over the last several years, to control information outside of its borders. It is time for the U.S. to respond, both on the government level and corporate level, and it should do so in a multi-faceted fashion.
First, data security is absolutely a concern. To that end all companies that deal with valuable intellectual property or national security-related information should ban the use of WeChat by any of their employees, as should the government; it is simply too easy to pass information, even by accident. In addition, that same group of companies and governments should not use Zoom until the (American) company has shifted the bulk of its engineering out of China and demonstrated vastly improved corporate controls.
What matters more in an ideological war, though, is influence, and that is why I do believe that ByteDance’s continued ownership of TikTok is unacceptable. My strong preference would be for ByteDance to sell TikTok to non-Chinese investors or a non-Chinese company, by which I mean not-Facebook. TikTok is not only a brilliant app that figured out video on mobile, it is also shaping up to be a major challenge to Facebook’s hold on attention and thus, in the long run, advertising. This would be a very good thing, and I fear that simply banning TikTok will simply leave the market to Instagram Reels, Facebook’s TikTok clone.
However, if ByteDance is unwilling to sell, then the U.S. government should be willing to act. One possible route is a review of ByteDance’s acquisition of Musical.ly by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), or invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which would require declaring a national emergency; I would prefer that Congress take the lead. What is notable is that because of the dominance of the iOS App Store and Google Play Store there is no need for an ISP-level firewall; Apple and Google can not only remove TikTok from the App Store, they could, if ordered, make already-installed apps unusable.
This is, without question, a prescription I don’t come to lightly. Perhaps the most powerful argument against taking any sort of action is that we aren’t China, and isn’t blocking TikTok something that China would do? Well yes, we know that is what they would do, because the Chinese government has blocked U.S. social networks for years. Wars, though, are fought not because we lust for battle, but because we pray for peace. If China is on the offensive against liberalism not only within its borders but within ours, it is in liberalism’s interest to cut off a vector that has taken root precisely because it is so brilliantly engineered to give humans exactly what they want.
This originally said, “that was an agreement imposed on China by a colonial power” which is not technically correct; the point I was trying to make is that China promulgated the Basic Law as a response to British rule, not because it believed in it
Police in Vernon, B.C., are again asking members of the public to come forward with information about what they regard as a hit-and-run assault on a cyclist in the spring.
Police say they have located and seized a white Jeep Cherokee they believed was involved int he incident, but they are still looking to identify the vehicle's male driver and two male passengers at the time.
A statement said a 47-year-old man was riding his bicycle in the 2000-block of 43rd Street in Vernon on March 24 around 6:45 p.m. PT when he had an argument with three people in a white Jeep Cherokee.
As the cyclist began to ride away, the Jeep followed and then ran into him, knocking him off his bike and to the ground, the statement said. Two men then got out of the vehicle and assaulted the cyclist, police said.
The next day, Vernon RCMP released information about the assault and made its first appeal for information from the public.
Police are asking anyone with information about this incident to contact Sgt. David Evans at the Vernon North Okanagan RCMP non-emergency line of 250-545-7171.
Morning. I sit down at my desk. Meeting starts in thirty seconds. Let’s run through the pre-meeting checklist:
Turn on the video. Am I presentable? How’s the hair? And the outfit? Right, I look like I’m working.
Start the call. While in the green room, make sure the camera is on and the microphone is working. Test, test.
What’s in frame behind me? Tidy or a mess? Ok, tidy. There is visual interest, but no distracting clutter.
Join the conference call. Sit up straight. Stare straight at the camera.
Hello. Meeting time.
A Standard Video Conference Set-up
Like most of you, I have a computer with a built-in camera and microphone. This works. It’s fine. With a decent internet connection, you can get the video conference job done. The video looks like this in average lighting conditions:
Relative to the camera on your favorite smartphone, your default built-in camera is… probably just ok. The cameras on relatively new iPhone or Android devices are vastly superior to that built into your desktop or portable computer.
No big deal, right? It’s not like you’re photographing precious memories that you’ll keep forever. This is just a 30-minute meeting with Aliyah, the program manager. It’s not being preserved for posterity. It’s disposable, right?
Not really, but I’m not ready to make my point, yet. Let’s keep moving.
Time for Upgrades
My first upgrade to the Logitech Brio was motivated by mild curiosity. This HD webcam is marketed to businesses as a webcam. It sits happily on the top of your display and gives you a decent video upgrade. It looks like this:
This photo was taken at precisely the same time as the one above, and the quality improvement is startling. Logitech’s Brio is their best current offering and vastly better than their C920 and C930 models which provide quality much like the image above.
My second unintentional upgrade was to an iMac Pro, which has a 1080p camera. Same lighting, same time of day and this camera produced these result:
Better, right? More detail. Richer color. Little dark.
Both of these upgrades started me thinking about lighting. The Cave (my office) is dark, and depending on where the sun is in the sky; I can either look just fine, totally blown out with bright light, or a pixelated mess when light becomes scarce. Throughout the day, I’m often getting up to adjust my curtains to tweak lighting conditions.
Time for another upgrade. The Elgato Key Light. These were in scarce supply at the beginning of the Pandemic, but I got lucky and grabbed one when they were briefly available on Amazon. The key light’s LED panel floods the room with configurable light. You control brightness and warmness. Here’s what a spectrum of warmness (from cold to warm) looks like on the iMac Pro camera now with the key light.
The Elgato improved fundamental lighting issues. I spent less time running to adjust curtains to create adequate video conference lighting. However, I was expecting more in terms of control over the quality of light. It required significant adjustments to the Elgato to change the mood of the video.
Sidebar: Audio
If there is one aspect of your home audio-video conference you should upgrade right now, I’d spend money on audio. I’d already invested in a better audio set-up pre-Pandemic because of the podcast, but I wasn’t using this set-up for meetings because who uses a microphone during a work meeting? I do now.
One Monday, I’d forgotten to tear down the microphone set-up from the previous weekend’s recording, so I did a meeting with the microphone. The reaction was immediate and immense.
“Rands, I feel like I’m on a radio show.”
Here’s the difference between my desktop microphone and my microphone set-up:
Desktop:
The reaction from meeting participants to my sound quality is constant. Most everyone says something the first time they hear it, and that’s because desktop microphones (like cameras) are correctly designed for casual usage. They’re for that semi-infrequent video call check-in with your mother back in Brainerd, Minnesota. Your average desktop audio and video hardware was quite reasonably chosen for casual usage and was not chosen to support you sitting on conference calls six to eight hours a day.
Here’s my current audio set-up:
Shure BETA 87A. On top of my sound quality, my favorite feature of this microphone is it’s directional, which means it picks up the sound where it’s pointed. Do you know that human who loves clickity-clacking on the keyboard during a meeting? With this microphone, you can’t hear their typing unless that is where the microphone is pointed.
The Shure is an XLR microphone, which means you need an XLR interface and cables. Fun fact: cables often sold separately. I purchased the Tascam US-2×2 preamp, and it’s got a bunch of knobs and dials I mostly don’t use, yet, but it plugs into one of my USB ports.
Finally, I have the Shure on a swivel mount, which allows me to move anywhere in a 3-D space around my desk. It’s very well balanced and stays put when I move to a new location—highly recommended.
Next Level Video
Back to video. The reaction to my vastly higher quality audio got me wondering if there was a video equivalent. Serendipity reared its lovely head when a good friend pointed out the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema.
I’d already been on video calls where someone had set-up their DSLR as their desktop camera and was impressed. I’d investigated whether I could repurpose my slightly older Canon EOS to serve this purpose, but it doesn’t have an acceptable output mode. Combined with the necessity of also purchasing video capture hardware, I dropped the investigation.
The combination of the reaction to my audio plus the availability of the Elgato Cam Link 4k and my interest in the BlackMagicDesign camera resulted in another investment. Let’s jump to the visual punch line:
Right? The image quality plus the depth of field provided by the Canon EF 40mm lens makes for a strangely movie-like video conference experience. The Blackmagic set-up also revealed the value of Elgato Key Light. The combination of configurable lighting plus the stunning sensor on the Blackmagic provides a rich set of lighting moods. With the help of a handy clamp, the Pocket Cinema has attached the Elgato key light stand precisely above one of my monitors.
The Pocket Cinema does not have a continuous focus, which means I have to pick a spot in the depth of field of the lens and hang there lest I become out of focus. I’ve taken to anchoring the microphone at the spot I need to stay roughly near to remain in focus.
Let’s be clear. Comparing a built-it desktop camera or USB-webcam with a DSLR is not a fair comparison. They are two different hardware form factors designed for vastly different use cases. Or at least they used to be.
Good Meetings are Jazz
This lengthy (and ongoing) exploration and explanation are easy to chock up to technological nerdery. Yeah, I always need an intriguing side-project, and this is currently that project, but I have other motivation. See, I, like you, am stuck in this box on your screen—this my life now. I still have all the same meetings with all the same people, but we’re all stuck in our respective boxes, and we’ve got work to do. Together. Right now.
You will notice in all the sample shots above that I am looking at the camera. I place all of my external cameras directly over the middle top of my displays not because it’s a natural location, but it’s also a constant reminder to look at you. It’s a simple important act of connection that we’re slowly forgetting in virtual meetings because we’re alone and stuck in these boxes.
Remember in-person meetings? The audio-video quality of in-person meetings is excellent. It’s the quality bar. It allows us to see and hear subtle aspects of human interaction. It allows us to work better as a group. A well-run brainstorming meeting with a group of humans is comforting jazz. The equivalent meeting in a video conference is a master class in how technology gets in the way of humans effectively communicating, collaborating, and being creative at scale.
So, yeah, I’m investing a lot of time and money in working to make this box we’re all stuck in a little more humane, a little more connected, and a bit more fun. I consider this a critical investment.
I don’t want to explain why we’re bivouac’d at a friend’s house in San Marino. What matters, for the purpose of this post, is that we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the Covid-19 pandemic.
But hey, it’s a nice house in a nice town. My only complaint is that there’s nothing resembling an office desk or chair here. I’ve coped by collecting my ass and my electronics within an arrangement of mostly antique furniture. That’s what you see in the screenshot above. (From my most recentFloss Weekly podcast.) The rest of the house looks kinda like the set of Knives Out.
I start with this setting because a friend asked me to write my own version of what Francine @Hardaway published today in Releasing My Former Life. (It’s a good piece. Go read it. I also thank Francine for turning me on to #Clubhouse. It is reportedly invite-only and apparently website-less, but I’m hoping she or a reader can get me one. Or two.)
So, what to report?
Well, in pre-pandemic times my wife and I were on the road at least a third of the time, so we’re used to operating out of hotel rooms, conference spaces and seats by the gates of departing flights at airports. So living in places other than home is not odd for us. It is odd to go around wearing masks in public while keeping our distance, as if everyone had just farted; but we hardly go out at all. We provision the kitchen here with runs to Trader Joe’s or Costco on days when they open early for geezers, and that only happens every couple weeks or so. Also, this region isn’t one of those in denial of the pandemic. People here tend to have Fauci-compliant public health practices.
In the early mornings or late evenings, when it’s not 95° outside, I do venture out for walks of 2-3 miles or more in the neighborhood. The roads are wide here, and the pedestrian traffic is light, so I leave the mask off most of the time. There are also lots of amazing trees and gardens, so I’ll pause to admire those and post occasional photos of interesting stuff on Instagram. (This kind of thing, by the way, comprises almost my entire experience of Instagram.)
While paying work has taken a hit, I remain overcommitted to all the obligations I had before the pandemic arrived, plus a couple new ones, such as the Floss Weekly podcast. It bothers me that I’m not as efficient or as effective in that work as I’d like, but being bothered about it isn’t the same as being depressed or anxious. It just kinda sucks.
Other stuff…
Dorothy Parker said (or is said to have said) that she preferred the company of younger men “because their stories are shorter.” I am mindful of that. I also know it’s way too easy to talk about infirmities that accumulate, lengthen and get more complicated with age. So I avoid writing, thinking or talking about being old, even though it keeps me up at night, mostly because I have to pee.
I’m optimistic about the long-run future, though the short run will surely get worse before it gets better. (Bad things happen when people die at wartime rates and large hunks of the economy are turned off.) I could say more about that, but I won’t, because—
There is far more than enough political writing and talk. Sure, I fantasize about speaking up, because I do think I have some useful things to say. I just don’t expect what I say to make a bit of difference. The noise level is so high right now, and the effect level of any given tweet or post is so low, that I’m disinclined to say much. Add that to what I said here in 2014 and here two months ago, and you’ll see why I’d mostly rather work on other stuff.
The main thing for me right now is Customer Commons. If it succeeds, it will be the most leveraged thing I’ve ever done, meaning the best for the world. If you’re interested in helping, drop me an email. First name at last name dot com. Thanks.
“The truth is even though I’ve done an awful lot of zooming, it’s different because you don’t get the vibes.” Madeleine Albright, May 2020
I’ve worked remotely for the best part of a decade. Now that so many organisations have shifted to remote working and organising, I could share tips with you on how to facilitate an online meeting, or how best to set up your Slack channels. But honestly, we need to throw all the remote working ‘best practice’ rules out the window. If everyone started to work like I have been over the past seven years, it wouldn’t be a good thing.
Still, since remote working is here to stay, we have to figure out what does work. It’s not just the current pandemic — the shift towards online as well as offline action, the global nature of so many of the issues our organisations and movements tackle, the impact of border restrictions and immigration controls, and the improvement of the tools and technology that support remote coordination mean that this way of working is often standard and frequently the only option.
Why Zoom is exhausting
It’s having an impact on us. There is evidence that virtual ways of working are only entrenching inequalities and disparities within a group. Black and Indigenous people, other people of colour, and women, trans and non-binary people are talked over or sit silently, unable to get a word in. Differences in our housing situations and economic realities are exposed to each other through our Zoom backgrounds. Those with care-taking responsibilities, often women and lower income people, are having to contend with multiple, impossible demands at the same time.
Holding a marginalised identity is tiring in itself. On top of that, Zoom fatigue is real. There have been stretches over the past few years where I have felt delirious with exhaustion after sitting on 7–8 hours of video calls a day. Trying to explain the effect this way of working had on me to friends who didn’t work remotely used to be an isolating experience. I had the luxury of working from home and it didn’t sound too difficult — I felt I had no right to complain. So it’s been extremely validating during lockdown to see so many others describe their own feelings of tiredness and brain fog from being on hours and hours of Zoom calls.
The root causes of this fatigue are many and various. It’s harder to read social cues when you are looking at lots of faces at the same time. You have to exercise more of your judgement about when to speak up and when to keep quiet. You are likely sitting in a fixed position and less likely to relax in your chair and move when you need to. Your eyes are fixed several inches in front of you rather than moving to near, far, and back again. But I believe there is one reason above all that makes video calls tiring, and it’s that the experience shifts us into a trauma response.
In order to feel safe in the world, experience connection, and build trusting relationships, humans need co-regulation (read about Dr Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory for more information). Co-regulation is the process of two or more nervous systems attuning to each other and becoming calm through eye contact, positive facial and vocal expression, and sensitivity and responsiveness. We all know how this feels. When we are with someone we feel safe with, our breath and heart rate slows, our muscles relax, it’s easier to listen and we are quicker to smile.
Dysregulation is what happens with reduced eye contact, negative facial and vocal expression, insensitivity and lack of responsiveness. We know too well what this feels like. Our breath and heart rate quickens, our muscles tense, we are caught in our own story of wondering what is going on with the other person and are less able to listen and respond.
Video calls, and remote working in general, are built for nervous system dysregulation. We’re never quite looking each other in the eye. The camera is constantly freezing. Our voices lag or speed up, are unnecessarily loud or quiet. People’s facial expressions slacken while they check emails at the same time. Hands are out of sight while we take notes. Strange noises abound and we can’t be sure which square it’s coming from. Our nervous system response is mostly unconscious, so whatever our collective conscious intentions are, they do not make much of a difference. Our bodies on a fundamental level do not feel safe with each other. We can come off a call and wonder ‘am I the only one who thinks that was a complete waste of time?’ or ‘did the thing I just said land totally wrong?’ and have no idea as to the answer.
The Zoom decision cycle of doom
Calling it Zoom fatigue does not go far enough. The impact of working in this way is not just that we feel tired but that we are sitting in a low level trauma response for hours at a time. The impact is low trust relationships and a loss of memory associated with trauma and dissociation — I believe both of these effects deeply impact our collective ability to make decisions and to move forward.
If it’s harder to come to decisions because of low trust, and it’s harder to remember decisions because of collective dissociation, then it’s harder to get real buy-in on any decision by a group working or organising remotely. It becomes a self-fulfilling cycle that results in unhappy staff and volunteers and a massive slow down of the organisation’s likelihood of achieving its mission.
As Jenny Odell says in her book about the attention economy, How to Do Nothing, “A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act.”
So what can we do about this? We cannot possibly settle for the current situation, or train others in how to adapt to it either. There is too much at stake. Organisers working for racial equity, climate justice and gender equality have gained too much ground over the past months and years to see their pace slow down now as a result of the global pandemic.
We can focus on building trust and connection, and give people more tools to document decisions, for sure. Some of this is easy to implement — if you’re not currently taking notes and making them easily accessible during your meetings, start doing that now. We can also build ritual into our collective practices. The Sacred Design Lab lights a candle together to anchor themselves in physical space even as they meet remotely. Taking collective breaths together can help ground us in our bodies and regulate our nervous system responses.
But I think we can go much, much further than this, and that this moment requires us to think more inventively.
If I can’t dance…
We think of Zoom as the tool we are using for remote connection, but that isn’t the only tool at our disposal — our bodies are the other. Except we don’t use our bodies to their greatest potential when remote organising, we pretend that Zoom is a replacement for in-person meetings and sit politely at our desks. The result is absurd. Rather than replicate the feeling of being together IRL, we transmute into a grid of floating heads, further alienating ourselves from each other.
So my question is this — how can we use our whole bodies to build trust and connection even when Zooming? Firstly, we could look to those who engage their whole bodies to communicate across distance — actors and dancers. They are trained to be hyper aware of what their bodies are communicating, using every inch of themselves to convey their inner life and be understood. Gestures and facial expressions are specific and heightened, often leading to the development of a whole new language of expressions as in ballet, breakdance, or kabuki.
You may think I’ve gone off the deep end but I keep wondering — what if remote organising doesn’t require less of our bodies, but much, much more? What’s to stop us from developing a more outré body language for remote working?
We already use some forms of stylised gesture for remote communication. One is emojis, a visual language that evolved to fill the gap when our voices and bodies are absent. Faces, hands, and hearts are the most popular emojis — we reassert our capacity for human connection again and again when we tap them out. The other one is consensus decision making. Many of us who have participated in activist meetings or attended protests will have twinkled our fingers in agreement or embodied a human microphone to pass a message on.
I know video calls feel different. I know it’s hard enough to get people to do a five minute icebreaker, let alone feel comfortable inventing a whole new body language for this purpose. I am under no illusions that we will change this overnight. But right now, we need to reckon with the fact that video communication is not real life. It does us and our missions a disservice to even pretend that it is, with devastating impacts to the day-to-day running of our groups and organisations, and to our overall ability to achieve our missions.
Let’s imagine. What if, 10–20 years from now, it was quite normal to be organising remotely (whether via video call or hologram..) and using our whole bodies?
I’m going to take some inspiration from a recent music video made on Zoom during lockdown by Thao & the Get Down Stay Down.
What if this was what ‘I love what you’re saying’ looked like?
What if this was what a ‘I have a question’ looked like?
What if this was what it looked like when a remote group landed on a decision?
What if this was what it looked like when a distributed coalition came together in strategy? (It’s actually a group of Juilliard students performing the Boléro)
Following this path means centering the voices and perspectives of those who have been living, working and organising like this for years either out of choice or necessity — neurodivergent people, disabled people, and people from cultures who are more bodily expressive and less uptight than the British one I am writing from. It means recognising that our bodies have limits and are constituted differently and that we need to create languages and alternatives that work for everyone so as not to replicate current inequities.
I wonder what the impact would be of centering these voices, experimenting with new ways of working and communicating with each other, and embodying our discussions while on calls. Whether it would keep us from moving into a trauma response of fight, flight, or freeze. Whether it would result in us being more in tune with our contributions and decisions. Whether we would better remember the conversation and the outcome. Whether we could collectively move into valuing multiple ways of being and knowing and away from the professionalisation and intellectualisation of NGOs that further disenfranchises marginalised voices. How our work would change, when we are fully engaged in each other’s humanity.
These wonderings are directly inspired by the work of groups like The Strozzi Institute, generative somatics and Forward Stance, who work with individuals and groups at the intersection of embodied leadership, healing, and social justice. By considering this work through the lens of remote technology, I hope we can radically change the way distributed groups and organisations operate too.
I don’t know what the end point looks like, or what the journey is to get there but I’m excited about the possibilities. If you’re interested in these questions too, I’d love to imagine and experiment together. Who’s in? Email me at hanna@wealign.net.
Renée@ReneeStephen
It's been stuck here for awhile now. I'm going to the liquor store, someone please text me when it's time to come h… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Elon Musk has stated on Twitter that Tesla isn’t going to be selling the Standard Range Model Y after all.
When Tesla first announced the Model Y, Musk said that there would be a ‘Standard Range’ trim option that would release after the Long Range options for a discounted price.
Now, it’s no longer an option, according to a recent tweet from the eccentric CEO. Musk says that the distance the Standard Range Model could travel wasn’t enough to meet the company’s standards, so Tesla decided to scrap it. For reference, the range was supposed to be somewhere around 370km.
No, as range would be unacceptably low (< 250 mile EPA)
There are reports that Telsa has reduced prices on the Model Y’s Long Range trims, but based on our prior reporting, those discounts aren’t reflected on the Canadian Tesla site. That said, Tesla has yet to release the Single Motor Long Range option, which could be cheaper and more accessible for consumers. It’s expected to have a 483km range.
When the company first announced the crossover, the Standard Range was priced at roughly $51,915 CAD and the Long Range Single Motor cost $64,000. Hopefully, the Long Range vehicle’s price goes down at least a few thousand dollars to make up for the loss of the base trim.
Still, either way, most people should be buying the longer-range Tesla trims since battery life is the most critical factor in an electric car.
We’re working on a thing to make Firefox start faster! It appears to work! Here’s a video showing off a before (left) and after (right):
Improving Firefox Startup Time With The about:home Startup Cache
For the past year or so, the Firefox Desktop Front-End Performance team has been concentrating on making improvements to browser startup performance.
The launching of an application like Firefox is quite complex. Meticulous profiling of Firefox startup in various conditions has, thankfully, helped reveal a number of opportunities where we can make improvements. We’ve been evaluating and addressing these opportunities, and several have made it into the past few Firefox releases.
This blog post is about one of those improvements that is currently in the later stages of development. I’m going to describe the improvement, and how we went about integrating it.
In a default installation of Firefox, the first (and only) tab that loads is about:home1.
The about:home page is actually the same thing that appears when you open a new tab (about:newtab). The fact that they have different addresses allows us to treat their loading differently.
Your about:home might look slightly different from the above — depending on your locale, it may or may not include the Pocket stories.
Do not be fooled by what appears to be a very simple page of images and text. This page is actually quite sophisticated under the hood. It is designed to be customized by the user in the following ways:
Users can
Collapse or expand sections
Remove sections entirely
Reorganize the order of their Top Sites by dragging and dropping
Pin and unpin Top Sites to their positions
Add their own custom Top Sites with custom thumbnails
Add or remove search engines from their Top Sites
Change the number of rows in the Top Sites and Recommended by Pocket sections
Choose to have the Highlights composed of any of the following:
Visited pages
Recent bookmarks
Recent downloads
Pages recently saved to Pocket
The user can customize these things at any time, and any open copies of the page are expected to reflect those customizations immediately.
There are further complexities beyond user customization. The page is also designed to be easy for our design and engineering teams to experiment with reorganizing the layout and composition of the page so that they can test variations on its layout in the wild.
The about:home page also has special privileges not afforded to normal websites. It can
Save and remove bookmarks
Add pages to Pocket
Cause the URL bar to be focused and selected
Show thumbnails for pages that the user has visited
Access both high and normal resolution favicons
Render information about the user’s recent activity (recent page visits, downloads, saves to Pocket, etc.)
So while at first glance, this appears to be a static page of just images and text, rest assured that the page can do much more.
Like the Firefox Developer Tools UI, about:home is written with the help of the React and Redux libraries. This has allowed the about:home development team to create sophisticated, reusable, and composable components that could be easily tested using modern JavaScript testing methods.
Unsurprisingly, this complexity and customizability comes at a cost. The page needs to request a state object from the parent process in order to have the Redux store populated and to have React render it. Essentially, the page is dynamically rendering itself after the markup of the page loads.
Startup is a critical time for an application. The user has expressed a need for their browser, and we have an obligation to serve the user as quickly and efficiently as possible. The user’s time is a resource that we should not squander. Similarly, because so much needs to occur during startup,2 disk reads, disk writes, and CPU time are also considered precious resources. They should only be used if there’s no other choice.
In this case, we believed that the CPU time and disk accesses spent constructing the state object and dynamically rendering the about:home page was competing with all of the other CPU and disk access happening during startup, and this was slowing us down from presenting about:home to the user in a timely way.
Generally speaking, in my mind there are four broad approaches to performance problems once a bottleneck has been identified.
You can widen the bottleneck (make the operations more efficient)
You can divide the bottleneck (split the work into smaller slices that can be done over a longer period of time with rests in between)
You can move the bottleneck (defer work until later when it seems that there is less competition for resources, or move it to a different thread)
You can remove the bottleneck (don’t do the work)
We started by trying to apply the last two approaches, wondering what startup performance would be like if the page did not render itself dynamically, but was instead a static page generated periodically and pulled off of the disk at startup.
Prototype when possible
The first step to improving something is finding a way to measure it. Thankfully, we already have a number of logged measurements for startup. One of those measurements gives us the time from process start to rendering the Top Sites section of about:home. This is not a perfect measurement—ideally, we’d measure to the point that the page finally “settles” and stops changing3—but for this project, this measurement served our purposes.
Before investing a bunch of time into a potential improvement, it’s usually a good idea to try to see if what you’re gaining is worth the development time. It’s not always possible to build a prototype for performance improvements, but in this case it was.
So, with that information, we thought we had a real improvement opportunity here. We decided to proceed with the idea, and began a long arduous search for “the right way to do it.”
Pre-production
As I mentioned earlier, about:home is complex. The infrastructure that powers it is complex. Coupled with the fact that no one on the Firefox Front-End Performance team had spent much time studying React and Redux meant that we had a lot of learning to do.
The first step was to get some React and Redux fundamentals under our belt. This meant building some small toy applications and getting familiar with the framework idioms and how things are organized.
With that grounding, the next step was to start reading the code — starting from the entrypoint into the code that powers about:home when the browser starts. This was an intense period of study that branched into many different directions. Part of the complexity was because much of the code is asynchronous and launched work on different threads, which introduced some non-determinism. While it is generally good for responsiveness to move work off of the main thread, it can lead to some complex reading and interpretation of the code when more than two threads are involved.
A tool we used during this analysis was the Firefox Profiler, to get a realistic sense of the order of executions during startup. These profiles helped to inform much of our reading of the code.
This analysis helped us solidify our mental model of how about:home loads. With that model in place, it was much easier to propose practical approaches for introducing a static about:home document into the ecosystem of pre-existing code. The Firefox Front-End Performance team documented our findings and recommendations and then presented them to the team that originally built the about:home system to ensure that we were all on the same page and that we hadn’t missed anything critical. They were already aware that we were investigating potential performance improvements, and had very useful feedback for us, as well as historical product decision context that clarified our understanding.
Critically, we presented our recommendation for loading a static about:home page at startup and ensured that there were no upcoming plans for about:home that would break our mental model or render the recommendation no longer valid. Thankfully, it sounded like we were aligned and fine to proceed with our plan.
So what was the plan? We knew that since about:home is quite dynamic and can change over time4 we needed a startup cache for about:home that could be periodically updated during the course of a browsing session. We would then load from that cache at startup. Clearly, I’m glossing over some details here, but that was the general plan.
As usual, no plan survives breakfast, and as we started to architect our solution, we identified things we would need to change along the way.
Development
We knew that the process that loads about:home would need to be able to read from the about:home startup cache. We also knew that about:home can potentially contain information about what pages the user has visited, and that about:home can do privileged things that normal web pages cannot. It seemed that this project would be a good opportunity to finish a project that was started (and mothballed) a year or so earlier: creating a special privileged content process for about:home. We would load about:home in that process, and add assertions to ensure that privileged actions from about:home could only happen from that content process type5
So getting the “privileged about content process”6 fixed up and ready for shipping was the first step.
This also paved the way for solving the next step, which was to enable the moz-page-thumb:// protocol for the “privileged about content process.” The moz-page-thumb:// protocol is used to show the screenshot thumbnails for pages that the user has visited in the past. The previous implementation was using Blob URLs to send those thumbnails down to the page, and those Blob URLs exist only during runtime and would not work properly after a restart.
The next step was figuring out how to build the document that would be stored in the cache. Thankfully, ReactDOMServer has the ability to render a React application to a string. This is normally used for server-side rendering of React-powered applications. This feature also allows the React library to passively attach to the server-side page without causing the DOM to be modified. With some small modifications, we were able to build a simple mechanism in a Web Worker to produce this cached document string off of the main thread. Keeping this work off of the main thread would help maintain responsiveness.
With those pieces of foundational work out of the way, it was time to figure out the cache storage mechanism. Firefox already has a startupcache module that it uses for static resources like markup and JavaScript, but that cache is not designed to be written to periodically at runtime. We would need something different.
We had originally supposed that we would need to give the privileged about content process special access to a file on the filesystem to read from and to write to (since our sandbox prevents content processes from accessing disks directly). Initial experiments along this line worried us — we didn’t like the idea of poking holes in the sandbox if we didn’t need to. Also, adding yet another read from the filesystem during startup seemed counter to our purposes.
We evaluated IndexedDB as a storage mechanism, but the DOM team talked us out of it. The performance characteristics of IndexedDB, especially during startup, were unlikely to work for us.
Finally, after some consulting, we were directed to the HTTP cache. The HTTP cache’s job is to cache pages that the user visits (when appropriate) and to offer those caches to the user instead of hitting the network when retrieving the resource within the expiration time7. Functionally speaking, this seemed like a storage mechanism perfectly suited to our purposes.
After consulting with the Necko team and building a few proof-of-concepts, we figured out how to tie the whole system together. Importantly, we figured out how to get the initial about:home load to pull a document out from the HTTP cache rather than reading it from the application resource package.
We also figured out the cache writing mechanism. The cached document that would periodically get built inside of the privileged about content process inside of a Worker off of the main thread, would then send that data back up to the parent to stream into the cache.
At this point, we felt we had all of the pieces that we needed. Construction on each component began.
One of the more gratifying parts of implementation was when we modified one of our startup tests to use the new caching mechanism.
In this graph, the Y axis is the geometric mean time to render the about:home Top Sites over 20 restarts of the browser, in milliseconds. Lower is better. The dots along the top are without the cache. The dots along the bottom are with the cache enabled. According to our measurements, we improved the rendering time from process start to Top Sites by just over 20%! We beat our prototype!
Noticeable differences
But the real proof will be if there’s actually a noticeable visual change. Here’s that screen recording again from one of our reference devices8.
The screen on the left is with the cache disabled, and on the right with the cache enabled. Looks to me like we made a noticeable dent!
Try it out!
We haven’t yet enabled the about:home startup cache in Nightly by default, but we hope to do so soon. In the meantime, Nightly users can try it out right now by going to about:preferences#experimental and toggling it on. If you find problems and have a Bugzilla account, here’s a form for submitting bugs to the right place.
You can tell if the about:home you’re looking at is from the cache by opening up the DevTools Inspector and looking for a <!-- Cached: <some date> --> comment just above the <body> tag.
Caveat emptor
There are a few cases where the cache isn’t used or is invalidated.
The first case is if you’ve configured something other than about:home as your home page (where the cache isn’t used). In this case, the cache won’t be read from, and the code to create the cache won’t ever run. If the user ever resets about:home to be their home page, then the caching code will start working for them.
The second case is if you’ve configured Firefox to restore your previous session by default. In this case, it’s unlikely that the first tab you’ll see is about:home, so the cache won’t be read from, and the code to create the cache won’t ever run. As before, if the user switches to not loading their previous session by default, then the cache will start working for them.
Another case is when the Firefox build identifier doesn’t match the build identifier from when the cache was created. This is also how the other startupcache module for static resources works. This ensures that when an update is applied, we don’t accidentally load old assets from the cache. So the first time you launch Firefox after you apply an update will not pull the about:home document from the cache, even if one exists (and will throw the cache out if it does). For Nightly users that generally receive updated builds twice a day, this makes the cache somewhat useless. Beta and Release users update much less frequently, so we expect to see a greater impact there.
The last case is in the event that your disk was in a situation such that reading the dynamic code from the asset bundle was faster than reading from the cache. If by the time the about:home document attempts to load and the cache isn’t ready, we fall back to loading it the old way. We don’t expect this to happen too often, but it’s theoretically possible, so we handle the case.
Future work
The next major step is to get the about:home startup cache turned on by default on Nightly and get it tested by a broader audience. At that point, hopefully we’ll get a better sense of its behaviour out in the wild via bug reports and Telemetry. Then our improvement will either ride the release train, or we might turn it on for subsets of the Beta or Release populations to measure its impact on more realistic restart scenarios. Once we’re confident that it’s helping more than hindering, we’ll turn it on by default for everyone.
After that, I think it would be worth seeing if we can load from the cache more often. Perhaps we could load about:newtab from there as well, for example.
One step at a time!
Thanks to
Florian Quèze and Doug Thayer, both of whom independently approached me with the idea of creating a static about:home
Jay Lim and Ursula Sarracini, both of whom wrote some of the groundwork code that was needed for this feature (namely, the infrastructure for the privileged about content process, and the first version of the moz-page-thumbs support)
Gijs Kruitbosch, Kate Hudson, Ed Lee, Scott Downe, and Gavin Suntop for all of the consulting and reviews
Honza Bambas and Andrew Sutherland for storage consultations
Markus Stange, Andrew Creskey, Eric Smyth, Asif Youssuff, Dan Mosedale, Emily Derr for their generous feedback on this post
This is only true if the user hasn’t just restarted after applying an update, and if they haven’t set a custom home page or configured Firefox to restore their previous session on start. ↩
You can think of startup like a traveling circus coming to town. You have to get the trucks and trailers parked, get the tents set up, hook up power, then lighting and sound … it’s a big, complex operation, and we haven’t even shot a clown out of a cannon yet. ↩
As the user browses, bookmarks and downloads things, their Highlights and Top Sites sections might change. If Pocket is enabled, new stories will also be downloaded periodically. ↩
It’s vitally important that content processes have limited abilities. That way, if they’re ever compromised by a bad actor, there are limits to what damage they can do. The assertions mentioned in this case mean that if a compromised content process tries to “pretend” to be the privileged about content process by sending one of its messages, that the parent process will terminate that content process immediately. ↩
This has changed slightly in the past few years with a feature called Race Cache With Network, which races the disk cache with the network instead of relying on the disk entirely. ↩
Back in 2005, there was some controversy over golfers getting LASIK for better than 20/20 vision. Baseball pros too. 20/15 vision helps: Maddux, a pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, was 0-3 in six starts before his surgery. He won nine of his next 10 games. Kite had LASIK in 1998 and won six events on the Champions Tour over the next five years.
It’s hard to detect, and the rules don’t know how to deal with it (or at least, didn’t at the time):
You can’t use a device to warm the ball, but you can use it to warm your hands. You can’t use a device to measure distance or “gauge the slope of the green,” but you can get the same powers through LASIK. In the age of biotechnology, you are the device.
What gets me is that this story is from 2005. What’s the state of the art today?
About 15-20 years ago, I was at a college reunion and got talking to a friend of a friend. I don’t remember the guy’s name, but he was a biochemist and doing his DPhil. I do remember that he had cochlear implants and he could turn a dial to hear better than I could at the party.
Our bodies have two ways to consume energy (he said), carbs and fat. Carbs are great: quick release. But carbs take up a lot of space. Fat, on the other hand, is slow to convert to energy, but it’s dense: a drop of fat carries the same energy as an apple of carbs.
I have no idea whether this is actually correct. I’m dredging up a story from almost two decades ago, and I barely remember it. The details are going to be all over the place, but broadly…
What this researcher was working on was a new kind of artificial energy store for use in food, and it was quick-release like carbs, but dense like fat.
And energy isn’t just used by your muscles. Remember it’s your brain too. What this researcher told me was that, in trials with rats in mazes, not only did the rats have more endurance, they were smarter too.
I asked him whether he’d eaten any. He said, yes he’d snuck some, and it tasted really bitter.
I remember specifically the current status: this novel food stuff was in human trials, and it was currently with the US military.
The early 2000s.
Ok, so he may have been bullshitting me. I have always been tremendously gullible, originally by nature and then strategically, deferring truth-assessment until the moment an idea or its consequences needs to be deployed, rather than at the moment I hear it. This broadens my imaginative space.
BUT: maybe it was a true story?
In which case – what is that substance? Does it have a measurable effect? How has it been developed, two decades on? Who is funding the research?
Also about 15 years ago I went camping in the desert with some neuroscientists. They told me about a “fix” for macular degeneration where the no-longer-functional retina was replaced by a regular camera sensor. The sensor was plugged directly into the optic nerve, and amazingly the brain would learn to interpret the signal. The subject would be able to see again.
Downside: the sensor output, being electrical and not electrochemical, would pretty soon entirely burn out the optic nerve, so - ethically - trials could only be performed on people who had macular degeneration and a terminal illness.
But every so often I hear about these sensors in the news, and go: hey, sounds like they’ve made progress.
Then there’s CRISPR gene editing, and the occasional conspiracy theory that some state or another has managed to develop it further than is publicly known, and there are edited humans wandering around. Indistinguishable from other humans, but - maybe - stronger, or smarter, or able to see in the dark, or with inhumanly high charisma, or much better at golf?
What would you do, as a country, if you had a dozen people who were smarter than everyone else? Would that make a difference?
What is the current cutting edge in secret cyborgs?
Vancouver cycling is wonderfully diverse. In this post we showcase some of our most popular posts about great bike rides in and around Vancouver, Canada. Vancouver cycling offers a range of options, from adventurous and athletic to easy and family friendly. Includes great bike rides in Vancouver, Burnaby, Port Coquitlam, Pitt Meadows, Richmond, and Vancouver Island.
Renée @ReneeStephen
iandunt on Twitter.
IanDunt
on Monday, July 13th, 2020 5:59pm
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ottocrat on Twitter.
ottocrat
on Monday, July 13th, 2020 6:03pm
Vancouver cycling is wonderfully diverse. In this post we showcase some of our most popular posts about great bike rides in and around Vancouver, Canada. Vancouver cycling offers a range of options, from adventurous and athletic to easy and family friendly. Includes great bike rides in Vancouver, Burnaby, Port Coquitlam, Pitt Meadows, Richmond, and Vancouver Island.