“We all want a purpose, a meaning that governs our lives. The internet is a web of meanings, a dense thicket of purposes. It doesn’t explain anything, really, just lets your alleged meanings fly out there and slam into someone else’s alleged meanings. There is no central meaning on the internet; the internet doesn’t actually exist to be honest. It simply resides in some collective imagination that we like to conjure up as we type in an eviscerating comment about a stranger. Strangers are almost always immoral heathens that like the opposite political party as you and seem to always say covertly offensive things.

We’re all strangers.”

— Accept That the Internet Wants to Kill You — Medium

Heavy stuff.

This problem of meaning is brought to a head in Silicon Valley. In trying to answer the question, “what does all this new technology mean for us?” Silicon Valley executives, investors and journalists often default to a story about human progress. Moreover, many in Silicon Valley are so privileged and talented that they can ask themselves what they would like their work to mean beyond simply making them richer. Venture capitalists (VCs) and entrepreneurs regularly invoke phrases like “make a difference,” “have an impact,” or “change the world,” which suggest that they at least partially view their work in moral terms; in terms of beneficence. Of the thousands of investments VCs might screen per year, they end up funding less than one percent. Yet, it is troublingly hard to glean consistent moral criteria from their investment choices. For people with so much discretion, one would think a robust concern with “changing the world” in any meaningful, moral sense, would at least preclude them from investing in companies such as Zynga; or, for that matter, cause them to fire the management team of Uber.

— Morality and the Idea of Progress in Silicon Valley | Berkeley Journal of Sociology

There’s a very specific definition of progress in Valley culture, and it’s intrinsically tied in with the idea of “productivity” and “efficiency.” Optimizing for it often has a very human cause, one that gets brushed under the rug as simply the price of progress. It’s time to start questioning that narrative.

“We don’t think you should ever have to trade it for a service you think is free but actually comes at a very high cost. This is especially true now that we’re storing data about our health, our finances and our homes on our devices,” Cook went on, getting even more explicit when talking about user privacy.

“We believe the customer should be in control of their own information. You might like these so-called free services, but we don’t think they’re worth having your email, your search history and now even your family photos data mined and sold off for god knows what advertising purpose. And we think some day, customers will see this for what it is.”

— Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech On Encryption, Privacy | TechCrunch

Speaking of trust, I certainly don’t hear Larry Page talking about user privacy the way Tim Cook does. You should also read what Tim has to say on encryption. It’s not just a matter of

The danger of a filter bubble isn’t whether it’s harming political discourse, but what it means for how we communicate with the people we care about most. Many Facebook users are unaware that Facebook is even filtering their news feeds, even after the debacle of their infamous emotion study, where some users had either happy or sad updates hidden from their feeds to see how it changed their own updates.

— Facebook Is Hiding Your Friends' Updates From You | Unicorn Booty

I’m now contributing to the wonderful site Unicorn Booty, and this is my first piece. There’s something very dangerous about a social media company determining what you see, even if it’s with an algorithm. Especially if it’s with an algorithm.

“Everyone has to eat, obviously, and so “cooking” is much more of a central human life-activity than “compiling a Linux app from source.” However, the parallel here is that to someone who’s not at least a semi-skilled computer user and who’s never faced down a bash prompt, compiling that application seems not just intimidating but actually impossible. And that same feeling of hopelessness is present for people who have never learned how to properly cook. Both activities ultimately boil down to a discrete series of steps guided by a mix of instruction, experience, and intuition; both look equally impenetrable to an outsider”

— The psychology of Soylent and the prison of first-world food choices | Ars Technica

Some interesting thoughts about Soylent in this piece, but this paragraph stuck out to me. It reflects some thoughts I’ve expressed before about skill acquisition.

And now I’m back to giving serious thought about getting some Soylent to use as quick, easy breakfasts.