Hope you all had a good week. I finally got to visit my sister after 2 years of this pandemic, so was finally able to meet my youngest nephew for the first time. Suffice to say, I had a great week.
Because of the travel, though, my reading was less about tech this week, more about the world at large.
- Walgreens is testing digital cooler screens that track shopper behavior: Found this via a post on reddit (originally on /r/assholedesign) showing all the screens off, which made it impossible to see what was in the coolers. I wasn’t aware of this tech getting widely rolled out - lots of interesting questions and implications if this becomes popular.
- Here Comes the Full Amazonification of Whole Foods: While the Walgreens thing seems destined to add tech that ultimately (likely) makes the shopping experience much worse, Amazon is rolling out something that seems to make shopping a whole lot better. Underlying both are cameras and tracking… like I said, lots of interesting questions and implications here.
- DevToys for MacOS: A set of neat utilities for developers and technical folks. Inspired by a Windows project, apparently. I tried to download this while flying… Homebrew didn’t play nicely with the VPN over in-air wifi.
- How an obscure far-right website with 3 employees dominates Facebook in 2022: I’m spending a lot of my sabbatical thinking about news and trust on the internet. No one has cracked this, and I’m not sure there’s any technology people thinking about this the right way (with a few notable exceptions). Which leads me to sharing…
- Let’s strengthen local reporting by 50,000 new journalists: … this essay, which puts some real numbers against putting better news infrastructure in place in all of our communities. It’s worth reading both parts, which I found via a tweet from Jay Rosen.
A little postscript on those last two links: Every serious company investing money in tech for journalism - from The New York Times to the Post to a dozen other companies & non-profits - are thinking of success the way Facebook and Twitter and Uber do: scale by aggregation. That includes aggregation of both traffic and monetization. This feels wrong, at least if they hope to solve the trust issues. I feel like people have more authentic conversations in small groups and trust more easily without national attention. Think back to the Doctorow thread and the wind farm controversy I linked to over the last few weeks. Similar threads in both, in my opinion - points to some idea that maybe we can’t solve with an algorithmically scaled system. (also, Dunbar’s number seems relevant here…)