#AI and Workforce Development

[thisisgraeme]

AI in Tertiary Education: How We Could Best Shape the Future of Learning in New Zealand

Explore how AI could reshape New Zealand’s tertiary education system. From personalised learning to teacher reskilling, this post dives into the impact of AI on workforce readiness, cultural sensitivity, and the future of learning.

Crystal Ball Gazing: AI in Tertiary Education The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is set to transform tertiary education in New Zealand. Over the next decade, we should expect universities, polytechnics, and training institutes to undergo a significant shift driven by AI, digitalisation, and evolving economic needs. While agencies like the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) and the New…

[evalvue-blogs]

[townpostin]

RVS College of Engineering and Technology Inaugurates AI Skills Lab in Partnership with Dell and Intel

New AI Skills Lab at RVS College of Engineering and Technology, Jamshedpur, aims to enhance digital education and prepare students for future challenges. In a significant step towards innovative education, RVS College of Engineering and Technology, Jamshedpur, has partnered with Dell Technologies and Intel Corporation to inaugurate an advanced AI Skills Lab. JAMSHEDPUR – RVS College of…

[maxlearnmicrolearningplatform]

Is Microlearning the Future of Employee Training? Here’s What We Know!

Microlearning, a training methodology characterized by delivering content in short, focused bursts, is increasingly being recognized as a transformative approach in the realm of employee training. As the modern workplace continues to evolve, driven by technological advancements and changing employee expectations, microlearning emerges as a solution that addresses the need for agile, efficient, and engaging training methods. This article explores the potential of microlearning to shape the future of employee training, examining its benefits, applications, and challenges.

The Evolution of Employee Training

Traditional employee training programs often involve lengthy sessions, extensive manuals, and a one-size-fits-all approach. While comprehensive, these methods can be time-consuming, costly, and ineffective for the modern workforce, which values flexibility, personalization, and immediacy. Employees today are accustomed to accessing information quickly and efficiently, thanks to digital technologies. This shift in information consumption has paved the way for microlearning to gain prominence.

What is Microlearning?

Microlearning breaks down training content into bite-sized modules that can be easily consumed and retained. These modules can take various forms, including videos, infographics, podcasts, quizzes, and animations, typically lasting between 2 to 10 minutes. The goal is to deliver relevant, actionable information that employees can apply immediately, enhancing their skills and knowledge incrementally.

Benefits of Microlearning

Increased Engagement: Short, focused content is more engaging than lengthy training sessions. Employees are more likely to stay attentive and absorb the material when it’s presented in manageable chunks.

Flexibility and Accessibility: Microlearning modules can be accessed anytime, anywhere, using mobile devices or computers. This flexibility allows employees to learn at their own pace, fitting training into their busy schedules.

Improved Retention: Studies have shown that information retention is higher when learning is spaced out over time, rather than crammed into a single session. Microlearning’s structure supports this spaced learning approach, reinforcing knowledge and skills.

Cost-Effective: Developing microlearning content can be more cost-effective than traditional training programs. It reduces the need for in-person training sessions, travel expenses, and extensive training materials.

Personalization: Microlearning allows for more personalized training experiences. Employees can select modules that are relevant to their roles and career development, ensuring that the training is directly applicable to their needs.

Applications of Microlearning in Employee Training

Microlearning can be applied across various aspects of employee training, including:

Onboarding: New hires can benefit from microlearning modules that introduce company policies, culture, and job-specific information in a structured, digestible manner. This approach helps new employees acclimate faster and more effectively.

Compliance Training: Compliance topics often involve dense regulations and policies. Breaking down this information into microlearning modules makes it easier for employees to understand and adhere to compliance requirements.

Skill Development: Whether it’s soft skills like communication and leadership or technical skills like data analysis and software usage, microlearning can provide targeted training that enhances employee capabilities incrementally.

Product Training: Sales and customer service teams can use microlearning to stay updated on new product features, benefits, and usage. Short modules ensure they have the latest information to effectively support customers.

Performance Support: Microlearning can serve as just-in-time learning, providing employees with quick access to information they need to solve problems or perform tasks more efficiently.

Microlearning in Action: Case Studies

Several organizations have successfully implemented microlearning to enhance their training programs. For example:

Google: Google uses microlearning to train its employees on various topics, including new technologies, management skills, and company policies. Their approach includes short videos, quizzes, and interactive modules that employees can access on-demand.

IBM: IBM leverages microlearning to keep its workforce up-to-date with the latest technological advancements and industry trends. Their microlearning strategy includes bite-sized courses, podcasts, and gamified learning experiences.

Coca-Cola: Coca-Cola has implemented microlearning for its sales teams, providing short, focused training on product knowledge, sales techniques, and customer engagement strategies. This has helped improve sales performance and customer satisfaction.

Challenges of Microlearning

Despite its many benefits, microlearning also presents some challenges:

Content Development: Creating high-quality microlearning content requires careful planning and expertise. Organizations need to ensure that the content is engaging, relevant, and effectively designed to meet learning objectives.

Integration with Existing Systems: Integrating microlearning with existing learning management systems (LMS) and other training platforms can be complex. Organizations need to ensure seamless access and tracking of microlearning modules.

Consistency: With multiple microlearning modules, maintaining consistency in tone, style, and quality can be challenging. Organizations must establish guidelines to ensure uniformity across all content.

Measuring Effectiveness: Assessing the impact of microlearning on employee performance and knowledge retention can be difficult. Organizations need robust evaluation methods to measure the effectiveness of their microlearning initiatives.

The Future of Microlearning in Employee Training

As organizations continue to navigate the changing landscape of employee training, microlearning is poised to play a significant role in the future. Here are some trends and predictions for its evolution:

Increased Adoption: More organizations will adopt microlearning as part of their training strategies, recognizing its benefits in enhancing employee engagement and performance.

Advanced Technologies: The integration of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and data analytics will enable more personalized and adaptive microlearning experiences. These technologies can analyze employee performance data to recommend relevant modules and provide real-time feedback.

Gamification: Gamification elements, such as leaderboards, badges, and rewards, will be increasingly incorporated into microlearning to boost motivation and engagement.

Social Learning: Social learning features, such as discussion forums, peer reviews, and collaborative projects, will enhance the microlearning experience by fostering interaction and knowledge sharing among employees.

Focus on Soft Skills: With the growing importance of soft skills in the workplace, microlearning will increasingly focus on areas like communication, leadership, and emotional intelligence, providing employees with the tools to succeed in a dynamic work environment.

Conclusion

Microlearning represents a promising future for employee training, offering a flexible, engaging, and efficient approach to skill development and knowledge retention. As organizations seek to meet the evolving needs of their workforce, microlearning provides a solution that aligns with modern learning preferences and technological advancements. While challenges remain, the potential benefits of microlearning make it a compelling strategy for the future of employee training. By embracing microlearning, organizations can enhance their training programs, improve employee performance, and drive overall business success.

[airwavesdotblog]

Tesla Streamlines Operations Amidst Market Pressures: A Strategic Shift Towards Autonomy

Tesla has announced plans to lay off more than 10% of its global workforce. This decision is part of a broader internal restructuring as the company faces several challenges: Workforce Reduction: Tesla will reduce its headcount by over 10%, affecting its global workforce. The layoffs are a response to the company’s first annual decline in vehicle deliveries since 2020. Executive…

[unlockingthefuture]

The AI Workforce Reshaping Talent and Skills in The Digital Transformation Era

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace is not just a futuristic concept but a present reality, significantly impacting how businesses operate and compete. The integration of AI into various sectors is reshaping the landscape of talent and skills required in the digital transformation era. This blog delves into the transformative power of the AI workforce, highlighting the role of top digital transformation services in India and showcasing case studies from digitally transformed companies.

[marciodpaulla-blog]

Shaping the Future of Work: The Impact of AI and Quantum Computing on Employment

AI & Quantum Computing are a dual-edged sword: job displacement vs. new opportunities 🌐 In the Quantum age, we need to focus on retraining, upskilling & ethical tech deployment ���� Let's ensure a future where tech advancement & job security coexist 🤝

The landscape of employment is undergoing a pivotal transformation, with AI and Quantum Computing at the forefront of the debate on job displacement. In 2023, 37% of senior executives reported job losses due to AI, with projections indicating an increase to 44% by 2024, particularly impacting white-collar jobs estimated to see 29-45% of tasks replaced or significantly augmented by AI technologies…

[neosciencehub]

Country needs 10 Lakh AI Experts by 2026: Rajanna

Country needs 10 Lakh AI Experts by 2026 : Rajanna @neosciencehub #neosciencehub #science #AI #AIExpertise #DigitalIndia #TechTalent #Hyderabad #Innovation #AIForGood #ArtificialIntelligence #Technology #Workforce #Digital #Transformation #AIStrategy

In a significant assessment that underscores the burgeoning demand for artificial intelligence (AI) expertise within India, V. Rajanna, the president of technology services and software at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), has articulated a compelling vision for the future of AI in the nation. Speaking at the annual assembly of the Hyderabad Software Enterprises Association (HYSEA), he highlighted…

[digitallearning-consulting]

How AI Learning Solutions Can Help Workforce Development. AI could potentially power the Learning Experience to help develop a more skill workforce. Read more AI Learning Solutions for Workforce Development

[thisisgraeme]

The Future of Teaching and Learning: Harnessing AI & Innovative Strategies for Educators

🚀 Discover the exciting future of teaching and learning! Learn how AI and innovative strategies are transforming education for the better. Don't miss my latest blog post on the Future of Teaching and Learning

With advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) gaining momentum, teaching and learning needs to evolve rapidly. As educators, we must be prepared to adapt and embrace these changes to ensure our students are equipped for the ever-changing world they will enter. Below, I discuss some of my assumptions, explore both conventional and unconventional answers to the future of teaching and learning,…

[sgrji]

"The Future of AI: Opportunities and Challenges"

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly advancing and transforming industries, from healthcare to finance to transportation. The technology has the potential to improve efficiency, accuracy, and decision-making. However, as with any emerging technology, there are also challenges to consider. One major challenge is the potential for job displacement as AI takes over tasks previously done by…

[reasonsforhope]

Determined to use her skills to fight inequality, South African computer scientist Raesetje Sefala set to work to build algorithms flagging poverty hotspots - developing datasets she hopes will help target aid, new housing, or clinics.

From crop analysis to medical diagnostics, artificial intelligence (AI) is already used in essential tasks worldwide, but Sefala and a growing number of fellow African developers are pioneering it to tackle their continent's particular challenges.

Local knowledge is vital for designing AI-driven solutions that work, Sefala said.

"If you don't have people with diverse experiences doing the research, it's easy to interpret the data in ways that will marginalise others," the 26-year old said from her home in Johannesburg.

Africa is the world's youngest and fastest-growing continent, and tech experts say young, home-grown AI developers have a vital role to play in designing applications to address local problems.

"For Africa to get out of poverty, it will take innovation and this can be revolutionary, because it's Africans doing things for Africa on their own," said Cina Lawson, Togo's minister of digital economy and transformation.

"We need to use cutting-edge solutions to our problems, because you don't solve problems in 2022 using methods of 20 years ago," Lawson told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a video interview from the West African country.

Digital rights groups warn about AI's use in surveillance and the risk of discrimination, but Sefala said it can also be used to "serve the people behind the data points". ...

'Delivering Health'

As COVID-19 spread around the world in early 2020, government officials in Togo realized urgent action was needed to support informal workers who account for about 80% of the country's workforce, Lawson said.

"If you decide that everybody stays home, it means that this particular person isn't going to eat that day, it's as simple as that," she said.

In 10 days, the government built a mobile payment platform - called Novissi - to distribute cash to the vulnerable.

The government paired up with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) think tank and the University of California, Berkeley, to build a poverty map of Togo using satellite imagery.

Using algorithms with the support of GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that uses AI to distribute cash transfers, the recipients earning less than $1.25 per day and living in the poorest districts were identified for a direct cash transfer.

"We texted them saying if you need financial help, please register," Lawson said, adding that beneficiaries' consent and data privacy had been prioritized.

The entire program reached 920,000 beneficiaries in need.

"Machine learning has the advantage of reaching so many people in a very short time and delivering help when people need it most," said Caroline Teti, a Kenya-based GiveDirectly director.

'Zero Representation'

Aiming to boost discussion about AI in Africa, computer scientists Benjamin Rosman and Ulrich Paquet co-founded the Deep Learning Indaba - a week-long gathering that started in South Africa - together with other colleagues in 2017.

"You used to get to the top AI conferences and there was zero representation from Africa, both in terms of papers and people, so we're all about finding cost effective ways to build a community," Paquet said in a video call.

In 2019, 27 smaller Indabas - called IndabaX - were rolled out across the continent, with some events hosting as many as 300 participants.

One of these offshoots was IndabaX Uganda, where founder Bruno Ssekiwere said participants shared information on using AI for social issues such as improving agriculture and treating malaria.

Another outcome from the South African Indaba was Masakhane - an organization that uses open-source, machine learning to translate African languages not typically found in online programs such as Google Translate.

On their site, the founders speak about the South African philosophy of "Ubuntu" - a term generally meaning "humanity" - as part of their organization's values.

"This philosophy calls for collaboration and participation and community," reads their site, a philosophy that Ssekiwere, Paquet, and Rosman said has now become the driving value for AI research in Africa.

Inclusion

Now that Sefala has built a dataset of South Africa's suburbs and townships, she plans to collaborate with domain experts and communities to refine it, deepen inequality research and improve the algorithms.

"Making datasets easily available opens the door for new mechanisms and techniques for policy-making around desegregation, housing, and access to economic opportunity," she said.

African AI leaders say building more complete datasets will also help tackle biases baked into algorithms.

"Imagine rolling out Novissi in Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Ivory Coast ... then the algorithm will be trained with understanding poverty in West Africa," Lawson said.

"If there are ever ways to fight bias in tech, it's by increasing diverse datasets ... we need to contribute more," she said.

But contributing more will require increased funding for African projects and wider access to computer science education and technology in general, Sefala said.

Despite such obstacles, Lawson said "technology will be Africa's savior".

"Let's use what is cutting edge and apply it straight away or as a continent we will never get out of poverty," she said. "It's really as simple as that."

-via Good Good Good, February 16, 2022

[probablyasocialecologist]

These claims of an extinction-level threat come from the very same groups creating the technology, and their warning cries about future dangers is drowning out stories on the harms already occurring. There is an abundance of research documenting how AI systems are being used to steal art, control workers, expand private surveillance, and seek greater profits by replacing workforces with algorithms and underpaid workers in the Global South.

The sleight-of-hand trick shifting the debate to existential threats is a marketing strategy, as Los Angeles Times technology columnist Brian Merchant has pointed out. This is an attempt to generate interest in certain products, dictate the terms of regulation, and protect incumbents as they develop more products or further integrate AI into existing ones. After all, if AI is really so dangerous, then why did Altman threaten to pull OpenAI out of the European Union if it moved ahead with regulation? And why, in the same breath, did Altman propose a system that just so happens to protect incumbents: Only tech firms with enough resources to invest in AI safety should be allowed to develop AI.

[...]

First, the industry represents the culmination of various lines of thought that are deeply hostile to democracy. Silicon Valley owes its existence to state intervention and subsidy, at different times working to capture various institutions or wither their ability to interfere with private control of computation. Firms like Facebook, for example, have argued that they are not only too large or complex to break up but that their size must actually be protected and integrated into a geopolitical rivalry with China.

Second, that hostility to democracy, more than a singular product like AI, is amplified by profit-seeking behavior that constructs increasingly larger threats to humanity. It’s Silicon Valley and its emulators worldwide, not AI, that create and finance harmful technologies aimed at surveilling, controlling, exploiting, and killing human beings with little to no room for the public to object. The search for profits and excessive returns, with state subsidy and intervention clearing the way of competition, has and will create a litany of immoral business models and empower brutal regimes alongside “existential” threats. At home, this may look like the surveillance firm and government contractor Palantir creating a deportation machine that terrorizes migrants. Abroad, this may look like the Israeli apartheid state exporting spyware and weapons it has tested on Palestinians.

Third, this combination of a deeply antidemocratic ethos and a desire to seek profits while externalizing costs can’t simply be regulated out of Silicon Valley. These are fundamental attributes of the industry that trace back to the beginning of computation. These origins in optimizing plantations and crushing worker uprisings prefigure the obsession with surveillance and social control that shape what we are told technological innovations are for.

Taken altogether, why should we worry about some far-flung threat of a superintelligent AI when its creators—an insular network of libertarians building digital plantations, surveillance platforms, and killing machines—exist here and now? Their Smaugian hoards, their fundamentalist beliefs about markets and states and democracy, and their track record should be impossible to ignore.

[plantify]

Toontown Corporate Clash: Grunt Cogs

Intro

This is an except from the Clash Crew's latest QNA session. This doesn't outright state too much about Grunt Cogs, but I do not like the implications of them not having "fully developed personality chips". This could be taken in many ways which I think would only serve to weaken Clash's writing, as well as cause minor to major contradictions to things already shown in-game. Corporate Clash is pretty defined by giving Cogs more of a personality. They already had some semblance of this in TTO, but they are closer to humans in Clash. Every single Suit has their own complex personality and life story. Sure, it may be infeasible to actually show this for Grunt Cogs in normal gameplay, but it's important. Even if Cogs Inc is objectively in the wrong, you still have to think about all the lives of Suits who work for the company. If the Grunt Cogs are "less human" than more important Manager Cogs, then a lot of that element is stripped away. I will quickly analyze some specific in-game examples of this.

Rainmaker:

Misty explains that she has been hurt by her own kind in ways that Toons would not understand. We can infer that her personality traits make her a poor fit among colleagues, which leads to poor treatment towards her as a result. This is something that often happens in real life, so we don't need the perpetrators to be robots that only act mean because it's all their programming tells them to do. Real people already act this way. Assuming that Grunt Cogs are the main perpetrators against Misty, this situation would lose some nuance under the implications that they aren't as human as Managers. Why would Misty care about what someone tells her if they aren't on the same level of sentience she is? It would be akin to having AI Chatbots insulting you; there isn't any actual person telling you how much they hate you, so it loses all meaning.

Witch Hunter:

Prester's fight revolves around him using his voice and words to empower Grunt Cogs to fight for a common cause. Sure, this may just be yet another battle against Toons, but he wants to go greater than just that, talking of Cog Communities, using fear tactics, and more. If we are under the assumption that the minds of Suits are just as complex as those of humans, than this notion becomes really cool; he's convincing others to fight for him, and all these Cogs that join him must have their own personal reasons for listening to Prester. It makes Prester himself also seem like he's great at uniting others for a common cause. HOWEVER, under the assumption that Grunt Cogs just have really basic personality traits, and not much going on in their mind aside from what they were programmed for, there is no variation whatsoever in the reasoning for listening to him. It becomes a lot more like just telling a bunch of programs to do something, and they all obey, with no nuance whatsoever. There are also two Cogs during his ending cutscene which resist his words, explaining that many employees have complained about Prester. These two are already showing individuality just by doing this, as well as explaining that other Suits genuinely do not like Prester in the workforce. If they were all practically the same, these two should not be able to resist his words, and there also likely wouldn't be as many complaints regarding Prester.

Major Player:

Dave's fight already shows some variation between Grunt Cogs. Some of them are eager to get on stage and perform with Dave, whilst others are more timid, confused, or unbothered by being called onto the stage. This could be seen as a minor retcon under the assumption of Grunt Cogs having less personality. Adding onto this, why would he perform to a group of Suits that are less likely to feel heartfelt emotion or interest in what he's doing? At that rate, he should simply just perform to Manager Cogs and whatnot.

Chainsaw Consultant:

While the focus of Chip's fight is the override itself, bringing in the fact that Grunt Cogs have less developed personality chips brings in interesting implications. Why does Chip even have the override installed? It is a experimental, untested feature, and they're testing it on Chip. Yknow, one of the guys with a fully developed personality. Someone who's much more likely to suffer from having it installed. Someone who's much more likely to try and resist it BECAUSE he has a life of his own, and is his own person. If the company has countless non-important workers with no personality, why wouldn't you just test the override on one of them? If they don't really have a life of their own, or are otherwise devoid of a real personality, wouldn't it make more sense for the override to work more flawlessly on the Grunts? Of course this wouldn't be an issue under the assumption that Grunt Cogs are just as well-developed as Manager Cogs. They would face the same issues that Chip does under the effects of the override. Also, unrelated to the override, but this also makes the fact that Chip uses the Grunt Cogs as weapons hit less hard. He shoots them out of cannons at the Toons, against their will. He fires them en-masse to use as cannon fodder. Obviously, under the context that they don't matter nearly as much, this makes it harder to care about them and weakens that aspect of the narrative.

Conclusion

This was a quick look at some of the in-game examples of things that could be put into question under the assumption that Grunt Cogs aren't as fully developed as other Suits. There are absolutely more examples in-game, as well as more narrative factors that could be discussed and delved into concerning this topic.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A link-clump demands a linkdump

Cometh the weekend, cometh the linkdump. My daily-ish newsletter includes a section called "Hey look at this," with three short links per day, but sometimes those links get backed up and I need to clean house. Here's the eight previous installments:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

The country code top level domain (ccTLD) for the Caribbean island nation of Anguilla is .ai, and that's turned into millions of dollars worth of royalties as "entrepreneurs" scramble to sprinkle some buzzword-compliant AI stuff on their businesses in the most superficial way possible:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/08/ai-fever-turns-anguillas-ai-domain-into-a-digital-gold-mine/

All told, .ai domain royalties will account for about ten percent of the country's GDP.

It's actually kind of nice to see Anguilla finding some internet money at long last. Back in the 1990s, when I was a freelance web developer, I got hired to work on the investor website for a publicly traded internet casino based in Anguilla that was a scammy disaster in every conceivable way. The company had been conceived of by people who inherited a modestly successful chain of print-shops and decided to diversify by buying a dormant penny mining stock and relaunching it as an online casino.

But of course, online casinos were illegal nearly everywhere. Not in Anguilla – or at least, that's what the founders told us – which is why they located their servers there, despite the lack of broadband or, indeed, reliable electricity at their data-center. At a certain point, the whole thing started to whiff of a stock swindle, a pump-and-dump where they'd sell off shares in that ex-mining stock to people who knew even less about the internet than they did and skedaddle. I got out, and lost track of them, and a search for their names and business today turns up nothing so I assume that it flamed out before it could ruin any retail investors' lives.

Anguilla is a British Overseas Territory, one of those former British colonies that was drained and then given "independence" by paternalistic imperial administrators half a world away. The country's main industries are tourism and "finance" – which is to say, it's a pearl in the globe-spanning necklace of tax- and corporate-crime-havens the UK established around the world so its most vicious criminals – the hereditary aristocracy – can continue to use Britain's roads and exploit its educated workforce without paying any taxes.

This is the "finance curse," and there are tiny, struggling nations all around the world that live under it. Nick Shaxson dubbed them "Treasure Islands" in his outstanding book of the same name:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780230341722/treasureislands

I can't imagine that the AI bubble will last forever – anything that can't go on forever eventually stops – and when it does, those .ai domain royalties will dry up. But until then, I salute Anguilla, which has at last found the internet riches that I played a small part in bringing to it in the previous century.

The AI bubble is indeed overdue for a popping, but while the market remains gripped by irrational exuberance, there's lots of weird stuff happening around the edges. Take Inject My PDF, which embeds repeating blocks of invisible text into your resume:

https://kai-greshake.de/posts/inject-my-pdf/

The text is tuned to make resume-sorting Large Language Models identify you as the ideal candidate for the job. It'll even trick the summarizer function into spitting out text that does not appear in any human-readable form on your CV.

Embedding weird stuff into resumes is a hacker tradition. I first encountered it at the Chaos Communications Congress in 2012, when Ang Cui used it as an example in his stellar "Print Me If You Dare" talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njVv7J2azY8

Cui figured out that one way to update the software of a printer was to embed an invisible Postscript instruction in a document that basically said, "everything after this is a firmware update." Then he came up with 100 lines of perl that he hid in documents with names like cv.pdf that would flash the printer when they ran, causing it to probe your LAN for vulnerable PCs and take them over, opening a reverse-shell to his command-and-control server in the cloud. Compromised printers would then refuse to apply future updates from their owners, but would pretend to install them and even update their version numbers to give verisimilitude to the ruse. The only way to exorcise these haunted printers was to send 'em to the landfill. Good times!

Printers are still a dumpster fire, and it's not solely about the intrinsic difficulty of computer security. After all, printer manufacturers have devoted enormous resources to hardening their products against their owners, making it progressively harder to use third-party ink. They're super perverse about it, too – they send "security updates" to your printer that update the printer's security against you – run these updates and your printer downgrades itself by refusing to use the ink you chose for it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

It's a reminder that what a monopolist thinks of as "security" isn't what you think of as security. Oftentimes, their security is antithetical to your security. That was the case with Web Environment Integrity, a plan by Google to make your phone rat you out to advertisers' servers, revealing any adblocking modifications you might have installed so that ad-serving companies could refuse to talk to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

WEI is now dead, thanks to a lot of hueing and crying by people like us:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/google_abandons_web_environment_integrity/

But the dream of securing Google against its own users lives on. Youtube has embarked on an aggressive campaign of refusing to show videos to people running ad-blockers, triggering an arms-race of ad-blocker-blockers and ad-blocker-blocker-blockers:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/where-will-the-ad-versus-ad-blocker-arms-race-end/

The folks behind Ublock Origin are racing to keep up with Google's engineers' countermeasures, and there's a single-serving website called "Is uBlock Origin updated to the last Anti-Adblocker YouTube script?" that will give you a realtime, one-word status update:

https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/

One in four web users has an ad-blocker, a stat that Doc Searls pithily summarizes as "the biggest boycott in world history":

https://doc.searls.com/2015/09/28/beyond-ad-blocking-the-biggest-boycott-in-human-history/

Zero app users have ad-blockers. That's not because ad-blocking an app is harder than ad-blocking the web – it's because reverse-engineering an app triggers liability under IP laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which can put you away for 5 years for a first offense. That's what I mean when I say that "IP is anything that lets a company control its customers, critics or competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

I predicted that apps would open up all kinds of opportunities for abusive, monopolistic conduct back in 2010, and I'm experiencing a mix of sadness and smugness (I assume there's a German word for this emotion) at being so thoroughly vindicated by history:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

The more control a company can exert over its customers, the worse it will be tempted to treat them. These systems of control shift the balance of power within companies, making it harder for internal factions that defend product quality and customer interests to win against the enshittifiers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

The result has been a Great Enshittening, with platforms of all description shifting value from their customers and users to their shareholders, making everything palpably worse. The only bright side is that this has created the political will to do something about it, sparking a wave of bold, muscular antitrust action all over the world.

The Google antitrust case is certainly the most important corporate lawsuit of the century (so far), but Judge Amit Mehta's deference to Google's demands for secrecy has kept the case out of the headlines. I mean, Sam Bankman-Fried is a psychopathic thief, but even so, his trial does not deserve its vastly greater prominence, though, if you haven't heard yet, he's been convicted and will face decades in prison after he exhausts his appeals:

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/sam-bankman-fried-guilty-on-all-charges

The secrecy around Google's trial has relaxed somewhat, and the trickle of revelations emerging from the cracks in the courthouse are fascinating. For the first time, we're able to get a concrete sense of which queries are the most lucrative for Google:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/1/23941766/google-antitrust-trial-search-queries-ad-money

The list comes from 2018, but it's still wild. As David Pierce writes in The Verge, the top twenty includes three iPhone-related terms, five insurance queries, and the rest are overshadowed by searches for customer service info for monopolistic services like Xfinity, Uber and Hulu.

All-in-all, we're living through a hell of a moment for piercing the corporate veil. Maybe it's the problem of maintaining secrecy within large companies, or maybe the the rampant mistreatment of even senior executives has led to more leaks and whistleblowing. Either way, we all owe a debt of gratitude to the anonymous leaker who revealed the unbelievable pettiness of former HBO president of programming Casey Bloys, who ordered his underlings to create an army of sock-puppet Twitter accounts to harass TV and movie critics who panned HBO's shows:

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/hbo-casey-bloys-secret-twitter-trolls-tv-critics-leaked-texts-lawsuit-the-idol-1234867722/

These trolling attempts were pathetic, even by the standards of thick-fingered corporate execs. Like, accusing critics who panned the shitty-ass Perry Mason reboot of disrespecting veterans because the fictional Mason's back-story had him storming the beach on D-Day.

The pushback against corporate bullying is everywhere, and of course, the vanguard is the labor movement. Did you hear that the UAW won their strike against the auto-makers, scoring raises for all workers based on the increases in the companies' CEO pay? The UAW isn't done, either! Their incredible new leader, Shawn Fain, has called for a general strike in 2028:

https://www.404media.co/uaw-calls-on-workers-to-line-up-massive-general-strike-for-2028-to-defeat-billionaire-class/

The massive victory for unionized auto-workers has thrown a spotlight on the terrible working conditions and pay for workers at Tesla, a criminal company that has no compunctions about violating labor law to prevent its workers from exercising their legal rights. Over in Sweden, union workers are teaching Tesla a lesson. After the company tried its illegal union-busting playbook on Tesla service centers, the unionized dock-workers issued an ultimatum: respect your workers or face a blockade at Sweden's ports that would block any Tesla from being unloaded into the EU's fifth largest Tesla market:

https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-sweden-strike/

Of course, the real solution to Teslas – and every other kind of car – is to redesign our cities for public transit, walking and cycling, making cars the exception for deliveries, accessibility and other necessities. Transitioning to EVs will make a big dent in the climate emergency, but it won't make our streets any safer – and they keep getting deadlier.

Last summer, my dear old pal Ted Kulczycky got in touch with me to tell me that Talking Heads were going to be all present in public for the first time since the band's breakup, as part of the debut of the newly remastered print of Stop Making Sense, the greatest concert movie of all time. Even better, the show would be in Toronto, my hometown, where Ted and I went to high-school together, at TIFF.

Ted is the only person I know who is more obsessed with Talking Heads than I am, and he started working on tickets for the show while I starting pricing plane tickets. And then, the unthinkable happened: Ted's wife, Serah, got in touch to say that Ted had been run over by a car while getting off of a streetcar, that he was severely injured, and would require multiple surgeries.

But this was Ted, so of course he was still planning to see the show. And he did, getting a day-pass from the hospital and showing up looking like someone from a Kids In The Hall sketch who'd been made up to look like someone who'd been run over by a car:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53182440282/

In his Globe and Mail article about Ted's experience, Brad Wheeler describes how the whole hospital rallied around Ted to make it possible for him to get to the movie:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/article-how-a-talking-heads-superfan-found-healing-with-the-concert-film-stop/

He also mentions that Ted is working on a book and podcast about Stop Making Sense. I visited Ted in the hospital the day after the gig and we talked about the book and it sounds amazing. Also? The movie was incredible. See it in Imax.

That heartwarming tale of healing through big suits is a pretty good place to wrap up this linkdump, but I want to call your attention to just one more thing before I go: Robin Sloan's Snarkmarket piece about blogging and "stock and flow":

https://snarkmarket.com/2010/4890/

Sloan makes the excellent case that for writers, having a "flow" of short, quick posts builds the audience for a "stock" of longer, more synthetic pieces like books. This has certainly been my experience, but I think it's only part of the story – there are good, non-mercenary reasons for writers to do a lot of "flow." As I wrote in my 2021 essay, "The Memex Method," turning your commonplace book into a database – AKA "blogging" – makes you write better notes to yourself because you know others will see them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

This, in turn, creates a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragments that are just waiting to nucleate and crystallize into full-blown novels and nonfiction books and other "stock." That's how I came out of lockdown with nine new books. The next one is The Lost Cause, a hopepunk science fiction novel about the climate whose early fans include Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben and Kim Stanley Robinson. It's out on November 14:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/05/variegated/#nein