Weekend Reading: Pollen Edition

Happy Friday! Whoa, how did it get to be mid-May already? Is your semester over, yet? How are your allergies? Got big plans for summer? Here, for your weekend reading pleasure, are 5 links and a video.

• "Invisible Labor and Digital Utopias," by Audrey Watters: "As a woman who writes online about technology, I have grown far too tired of ‘permission-less-ness.’ Because ‘open’ doesn’t just mean using my work for free without asking. It actually often means demanding I do more work – justify my decisions, respond to accusations, and constantly rethink how and where I want to be and am able to be and work on the Internet. So I’ve been thinking a lot, as I said, about ‘permissions’ and ‘openness.’ I have increasingly come to wonder if ‘permission-less-ness’ as many in ‘open’ movements have theorized this, is built on some unexamined exploitation and extraction of labor – on invisible work, on unvalued work. Whose digital utopia does ‘openness’ represent?"

• "Palantir Knows Everything About You," by Peter Waldman, Lizette Chapman, and Jordan Robertson (Bloomberg): "Founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel and some fellow PayPal alumni, Palantir cut its teeth working for the Pentagon and the CIA in Afghanistan and Iraq. The company’s engineers and products don’t do any spying themselves; they’re more like a spy’s brain, collecting and analyzing information that’s fed in from the hands, eyes, nose, and ears. The software combs through disparate data sources—financial documents, airline reservations, cellphone records, social media postings—and searches for connections that human analysts might miss… As Palantir tries to court corporate customers as a more conventional software company, fewer "forward-deployed" engineers will mean fewer human decisions. Sensitive questions, such as how deeply to pry into people’s lives, will be answered increasingly by artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms. The small team of Privacy and Civil Liberties engineers could find themselves even less influential, as the urge for omnipotence among clients overwhelms any self-imposed restraints.

• "Over 400 Startups Are Trying to Become the Next Warby Parker. Inside the Wild Race to Overthrow Every Consumer Category," by Tom Foster (Inc.): "The appeal of the direct-to-consumer movement goes like this: By selling directly to consumers online, you can avoid exorbitant retail markups and therefore afford to offer some combination of better design, qual­ity, service, and lower prices because you’ve cut out the middleman. By connect­­ing directly with consumers online, you can also better control your messages to them and, in turn, gather data about their purchase behavior, thereby enabling you to build a smarter product engine. If you do this while developing an ‘authentic’ brand—one that stands for something more than selling stuff—you can effectively steal the future out from under giant legacy corporations. There are now an estimated 400-plus DTC startups that have collectively raised some $3 billion in venture capital since 2012."

• "Online Ad Targeting Does Work — As Long As It’s Not Creepy," by Louise Matsakis (Wired) : "If you click on the right-hand corner of any advertisement on Facebook, the social network will tell you why it was targeted to you. But what would happen if those buried targeting tactics were transparently displayed, right next to the ad itself? That’s the question at the heart of new research from Harvard Business School published in the Journal of Consumer Research. It turns out advertising transparency can be good for a platform—but it depends on how creepy marketer methods are. The study has wide-reaching implications for advertising giants like Facebook and Google, which increasingly find themselves under pressure to disclose more about their targeting practices."

• "Fake it till you make it: meet the wolves of Instagram," by Symeon Brown (The Guardian): "Last year, the Financial Conduct Authority launched a crackdown on investment scams and police raided 20 premises suspected of operating binary options fraud, but so far, the social media influencers who appear to be working as middle men for foreign firms have escaped their attention. Social media has become a wild west for marketers aware that regulators can’t keep up with their online activity. Complaints about the aggressive nature of social media influencers’ stealth marketing have been growing. Between 2010 and 2016, the number of social media users grew to more than a billion, while the number of complaints to the UK Advertising Standards Authority about social media marketing posts breaching guidelines rose by a staggering 1,567%. It is almost impossible to count the number of marketing affiliates masquerading as successful traders on Instagram, but we can count the number of promotional posts they’ve made using hashtags such as #binaryoptions (222,206), #traderlifestyle (64,151), and #richkidsofinstagram (529,574). Those numbers rise by the minute and the thousands of accounts generating them appear and disappear constantly."

And our video this week is from Simone Gertz: "Why you should make useless things"

[Lead image, "pollens", is by Identity Photogr@phy and is licensed under CC BY]