Spatial News? #057
This month we're continuing with techno-feudalism and its results, digital and physical fashion, and the Gemini and ChatGPT chatbots!
Lately, the newsletter's been dropping randomly like birds, but we're (tentatively) back on schedule. Spatial News? proudly presents... #057, the black edition!
Last month we discussed techno-feudalism in the context of the field of Cliodynamics. The same day I published that newsletter, by some kismetical fate, the Blockchain Gandalf himself Keir Finlow-Bates published On Social Media and Feudalism where he posts,
"We are in a techno-feudalistic world
All these platforms look like they're free, open and modern, but they're a step back to a bygone era. The landlords and barons have taken control of this new digital land, and we get to farm it and make a reasonable living at their behest."
Where Yanis Varoufakis is "more focused on techno-feudalism replacing capitalist markets. I'm more interested in the corresponding reduction in individual agency", as KF-B puts it.
He uses his own unfortunate (but unsurprising) experience on LinkedIn as case in point. Read his article to see what all the hubbub was about.
Related to this, back in SN #046 we shared what writer Cory Doctorow dubs "enshittification" or how platforms, TikTok in his example, "abuse th[eir] business customers to claw back all the value for themselves[...]
Then, they die".
As Mike Topalovich sees it,
Enshittification is Coming to LinkedIn
"[T]he 'social' aspect of this 'social network' will be intermediated by the platform's AI, which we are gleefully feeding and will continue to feed as long as the promise of LinkedIn stardom [Top Voice badges] is dangled in front of us.
We'll see the Big Tech rent-seeking behavior fully kick in, and then we will see the value of the platform diminish to zero for everyone except those willing to pay for bots to talk to other bots on your behalf hoping that you can find the right bot influencers to break through the bot noise in the big bot echo chamber."
Yowsa... This topia.
Based on our own experience, Spatial8 is considering where the newsletter's next home should be. Initially, LinkedIn didn't seem to like that we were sharing the newsletter from SubStack or from our own website, so, since this is S8's social media of choice for seemingly obvious reasons (you know, creating business and stuff), we decided to move the newsletter to LI.
Apparently, LinkedIn doesn't seem to like us sharing the newsletter any which way you slice it. The amount of views, click-through rate, and so on has dropped by like half since the move to LI. We now have the reach of baby T-Rex's arms. What to do?
In the comment section of the aforementioned Mike's article, Theo Priestley commented "Build and run your own web and email servers, control and own your content."
Ist es das?
While we ponder and research, take a listen to the
'Blurred Lines: Physical and Digital Fashion' podcast series
A year (and more) in the making, Spatial8 partnered with Marks & Clerk to create a podcast series "to help fashion brands stay ahead of the curve through unpicking the complex relationship between digital and physical fashion, hosting insightful conversations with a variety of digital fashion experts and providing industry-leading intellectual property (IP) advice".
Teemu Ollilainen started co-hosting then I took over the series along with ever-fashionable M&C Senior Associate Robecca Davey (at least, one of us had to look good!).
We had stellars like
领英推荐
? Kelly Vero , CEO of NAK3D , double dipping (in a good way) on Episode 1 Fashion and the metaverse and Episode 2 NFTs, fashion & IP
? Francesca Tabor , AI Ethics & Generative AI Innovation Consultant and Founder, on Episode 3 The uncertain landscape of fashion AI
? Marco Marchesi , CTO of The Fabricant , on Episode 4 The complex relationship between XR and fashion
? M&C's own Simon Portman on Episode 5 Data, privacy and security principles
Insights galore! Enjoy the aural feast!
Special thanks to Noelle Pearson who initially came to us with this idea, laying the foundation for what this great podcast series would become.
From fashionable flowers in bloom to gloom and...
Doomed, are ChatGPT and Google Gemini? Hmm?
A recent New York Intelligencer take says 'yup'.
No, this isn't about IP infringement or any of the related lawsuits being levied against OpenAI.
According to the article regarding Gemini specifically but chatbots in general, "It’s a piece of software mimicking a person whose job is to speak for a corporation. It has an impossible job, not because it’s hard but because it’s internally ill defined, externally contested, and kind of stupid. It was doomed from the start..."
Could the software ever succeed given these inherent challenges?
I like this comment by David Charlot in the post that I first saw this article:
"It is clear and should be extremely obvious that ChatGPT, Gemini, and all other variants are open sandbox tinkering tools for the creators to learn how the tools are used and to what extent they can be used. They aren't doomed. They exist as clever iterative journaling solutions for the grand human thought experiment."
This is exactly how I use these tools. I've probably written this already somewhere, but if you are well versed in the area you are asking about, willing to do the research to dig deeper or verify, and understand the tools' limitations (they aren't the "voice of God" <nose puff, smh>), then they can be very helpful and a form of play that can even lead to discovery. In this way, I think they're already successful.
In my case, when ChatGPT first came out, I asked it some of my old, dusty research questions from the days of writing my master's thesis. It would have taken me many months to research, read about, and figure out these answers. Instead, I had so many new insights and potential content (and renewed excitement to boot) that I considered writing several books!
Then, I, un-ironically, asked ChatGPT if writing e-books would be a good idea or if it would scrape my work and use it as fodder for someone else's queries.
<Read these next two sentences in a robot voice.>
"You are just being paranoid. You and your books are not important enough to scrape."
<Hmph... Chathole.>
Thanks for reading, Spatialists! And thanks to all of those I mentioned for creating and sharing great content that I could riff off of.
Creative Badass | Award-Winning Female Founder | Keynote Speaker | Author "Breaking Through Bytes"
12 个月Perfect in every way, every week(ish) ??