Jenna Wortham

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In an excellent New York Times Magazine piece, Jenna Wortham writes of the boon and bane that attends Barack Obama being the “first digital President,” the one who ushered into D.C. the start-up spirit of technologists, significantly shrinking the distance between the Y Combinator and K Street. 

Silicon Valley’s ideas and energy can be an intoxicating engine of creativity and leaders in that community claim to want to satisfy all the world’s wants, but let’s not forget these are huge corporations primarily concerned with the bottom line, not justice or equality or paying taxes. When Travis Kalanick briefly uses Iraq War veterans to try to foster good will, keep in mind that he has no long-term commitment to them. Most of the industry doesn’t view Washington as a sibling but as a profligate son.

Even truly benevolent titans like the sweater-clad 2.0 version of Bill Gates (formerly a bullying, vampiric capitalist) talks openly about how he doesn’t want the government to have his money because he can spend it more wisely. Perhaps that’s true in his case, but you wouldn’t want to base a country on such thinking. The gritty work of Congress should not and cannot have the brevity and grace of a particularly satisfying TED Talk.

As Wortham further notes, “fixing problems with technology often just creates more problems, largely because technology is never developed in a neutral way,” and that’s a challenge that will only grow more profound as AI develops further. She does, however, credit President Obama with realizing the limits of venture capital to cure the world’s ills, referencing his recent address at Carnegie Mellon. An excerpt from that speech:

The final thing I’ll say is that government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy. This is a big, diverse country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view. And part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.

So sometimes I talk to CEOs, they come in and they start telling me about leadership, and here’s how we do things. And I say, well, if all I was doing was making a widget or producing an app, and I didn’t have to worry about whether poor people could afford the widget, or I didn’t have to worry about whether the app had some unintended consequences — setting aside my Syria and Yemen portfolio — then I think those suggestions are terrific. (Laughter and applause.) That’s not, by the way, to say that there aren’t huge efficiencies and improvements that have to be made.

But the reason I say this is sometimes we get, I think, in the scientific community, the tech community, the entrepreneurial community, the sense of we just have to blow up the system, or create this parallel society and culture because government is inherently wrecked. No, it’s not inherently wrecked; it’s just government has to care for, for example, veterans who come home. That’s not on your balance sheet, that’s on our collective balance sheet, because we have a sacred duty to take care of those veterans. And that’s hard and it’s messy, and we’re building up legacy systems that we can’t just blow up.•

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Uber isn’t good for Labor, no matter how much Travis Kalanick tries to convince us, but the company and other rideshares might be a boon in other ways beyond useful technological innovations. I argued last year that these services could provide options to those who’ve traditionally been shortchanged by predatory and racist taxi drivers. Of course, bigotry is a deep and enduring wound, and the digital realm isn’t impervious to it.

From Jenna Wortham’s smart Medium essay “Ubering While Black“:

I’ve endured humiliating experiences trying to get a cab in the various cities I’ve visited and lived in. Available taxis—as indicated by their roof lights—locked their doors with embarrassingly loud clicks as I approached. Or they’ve just ignored my hail altogether. It’s largely illegal for cab drivers to refuse a fare, but that rarely deters them, because who’s going to take the time to file a report? And once, horrifyingly, while I was in San Francisco, a taxi driver demanded I exit his car. Fed up, I stubbornly refused, so he hopped out of his seat, walked around to my side, and yanked me out.

After that last incident, which happened a few years ago, I avoided cabs altogether. I stuck to riding public transportation, and rented cars when I traveled.

In 2011, I covered Uber’s debut in New York. The service, then a scrappy start-up, promised to let people request rides from private cars and taxis with a smartphone application. It initially seemed like a hard sell in a city resplendent with transit options, but I quickly found myself using it more frequently, especially when I traveled back to San Francisco.

Latoya Peterson, the founder of a site called Racialicious, first blogged about her experiences with Uber in 2012, wondering whether or not the technology could be a panacea for the discrimination she experienced trying to hail cabs.

“The premium car service removes the racism factor when you need a ride,” she wrote. Peterson, who lives in D.C., said that since her original post, she has taken “hundreds of rides” with Uber. “The Uber experience is just so much easier for African-Americans,” she told me recently. “There’s no fighting or conversation. When I need a car, it comes. It takes me to my destination. It’s amazing that I have to pay a premium for that experience, but it’s worth it.”

Even though requesting a car through Uber can cost more than a regular taxi, Peterson and I are each usually willing to pay extra to avoid potential humiliation.•

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It’s tough being Paddy Chayefsky these days. Charlie Brooker, the brilliant satirist behind Black Mirror, comes closest. If he doesn’t make it all the way there, it’s not because he’s less talented than the Network visionary; it’s just that the era he’s working in is so different. I’ve read many articles about Brooker’s impressive program and pretty much all of them miss the point I believe he’s making about our brave new world of technology. That includes Jenna Wortham’s recent New York Times Magazine essay, which referred to Mirror as “functioning as a twisted View-Master of many different future universes where things have strayed horribly off-course.” The Channel 4 show is barely about the future. It’s mostly about the present. And it isn’t about the present in the manner of many sci-fi works, which create outlandish scenarios which can never really be in the service of telling us about what currently is. Brooker’s scenarios aren’t the exaggerations they might seem at first blush. In almost no time, our hyperconnected world delivers something far more disturbing than his narratives.

Chayefsky and Andy Warhol and Marshall McLuhan could name the future and we’d wait 25 or 50 years as their predictions slowly gestated, only becoming fully manifest at long last. None of that trio of seers even lived long enough to experience the full expression of Mad As Hell of 15 Minutes of Fame or the Global Village. Brooker will survive to see all his predictions come to pass, and it won’t require an impressive lifespan.

Consider the initial episode, “The National Anthem.” In this installment, the British Prime Minister is blackmailed by an unknown terrorist into having sex with a pig on live TV in front of a gigantic worldwide audience. It’s supposed to be a shocking media event that unfolds before a rapt world, but the most surprising thing about it is that more people don’t time-shift it. About three years after “Anthem” aired, ISIS released its first beheading video, marrying Hollywood torture porn to real-life extremism, and millions of curious people pressed play. Ah, for the simpler days of pretend PM-on-pork penetration.

Another episode, “Fifteen Million Merits,” offered a similar example of the future arriving fast on the heels of a seemingly outrageous provocation. “Merits” creates a world in which humans are reduced to automatons, forced to ride stationary bicycles to provide power the world desperately needs, the riders soothed by drugs and apps and pornos they can purchase with merit points earned by pumping pedals. One of the disconsolate workers not fully anesthetized by the sensory overload, Bing, offers his points to a beautiful coworker, Abi, so that she can buy a ticket to compete on Hot Shots, an even-more-offensive version of American Idol, hoping to become a pop star and escape a life of drudgery. She walks into a latter-day dance marathon where they don’t only shoot horses but the riders as well. Abi doesn’t realize her version of stardom and is instead shunted into pornography, another body offered up to appease an unwittingly depressed populace. Last year, just three years after this episode aired, the Fappening arrived one weekend on screens in our pockets, a hacked sex show sent to distract and titillate the world. One of the victims of the breach was the British actress Jessica Brown Findlay, who had portrayed Abi in “Merits.” Again, technology enabled the so-called future to arrive before the prophecies had been digested, and it looked even uglier than dystopic fiction.

And that’s how things are now. Before Brooker (or anyone else) can fire a warning shot, before we can decide how to proceed, tomorrow is already moving in for the kill, a drone at our doorsteps that may be delivering takeout or, perhaps, a bomb. If you hurry, there’s still time to smile into the camera. We’re all pioneers now, constantly, without traveling anywhere, without moving a muscle. We live only in the past and present, the future hardly existing. That’s what Black Mirror is really about.•

 

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