Jack's Blob

Posts

The Growing Dangers of Media Consolidation

Every week we see a new headline highlighting a new deal, acquisition, or merger of some big-name media companies. It’s nearly impossible to pin down an accurate map of these ownerships, as new deals are so frequently changing the corporate media landscape. Sometimes, especially in the short-term, these deals can appear to work out well for the consumer. More often, however, they can prevent innovation and competition at best, while outright undermining our democracy at worst. http://frankwbaker.com/The%20big%20picture.jpg There really is no more exemplary candidate than AT&T. I would wager that most people my age are unaware that AT&T was founded by none other than Alexander Graham Bell, originally being called the Bell Telephone Company. Bell gradually accrued market dominance by either refusing to work with and/or buying out competitors , eventually rebranding to the American Telephone & Telegraph Company. Even after the formation of the Federal Communications C

Your (Lack of) Internet Privacy

“There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software.” - Edward Tufte Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash When it comes to the sanctity of your digital privacy, I don’t even know where to begin on the rapidly increasing list of exploitations. A commonly touted phrase around Silicon Valley goes, “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” The truth is, you aren’t giving Facebook any money – advertisers are. So who might the app really designed to best serve? You, or their customers? The goal of these tech giants is not to make Google, Twitter, or Instagram into the “best” app they can – it’s to collect as much attention into one spot as they can figure out how to. Every feature is a means to that end: attention, not satisfaction. Social media websites are advertiser-funded fly traps, designed not to help us, but merely to squeeze as much attention from our day as possible. The big question: how are

The Diffusion of Music Streaming

Photo by Heidi Fin on Unsplash For the last hundred or so years, give or take, $10 has just about always bought a single album. $10 vinyl records, $10 cassette tapes, and though CDs became a bit more expensive, iTunes eventually returned to a $10 average offering for their novel service. Now, for the same price, I get access to just about every song ever published, whenever I want. How did we get here? When Spotify first arrived on the scene offering a service to stream your favorite songs from the internet, it felt like a weird, impractical way to pay for your music. I have to keep paying ? And never actually own it? Yeah, I think I’ll pass. And I wasn’t alone – it took Spotify more than two years after launch to convince any A series investors that the music business could be fruitful. However, being the grubby little new-tech-lover I was, it wasn’t long before I found myself asking for a Spotify subscription for Christmas. Once I adopted it – and before the advent of

The Rise of the Mixtape

Engineer Lou Ottens. Image courtesy of AD.nl When the compact cassette first debuted, it wasn’t an entirely novel innovation. As its name might suggest, Lou Ottens sought to improve upon the bulky, often unreliable 1958 tape cassette system from RCA. The inspiration for innovation came from perhaps the most human desire of all: convenience. Phillips was interested in a potential market for a portable tape recorder, and after the speaker and batteries, the decreased dimensions hardly left room for the tape itself: a mere 2 x 4.5 inch space. To match the volumetric capacity of vinyl records, designers chose to, in the most analog way possible, compress the audio data in their novel tapes. By opting for a smaller stretch of tape per second of audio – 2 inches of tape compared to the then studio-standard 15 inches – the compact cassette traded some audio quality for the boost in portability. Under pressure from Sony, Phillips allowed the Japanese tech giant license to produce h

Why You Should Trust Self-Driving Cars

Living in 2020, self-driving cars are admittedly difficult to trust. The same way humans were wary of hot air balloons in 1783, the steam locomotive in 1801, and the automobile itself in 1886 (which reassuringly crashed into a wall during Karl Benz’s first public demonstration). This skepticism is nothing new, and is inseparably bound with the notion of innovation - especially in transportation. The hesitant disbelief undoubtedly felt by the ancient people gazing upon the first canoes more than likely parallels that of the onlookers to the first commercial flight in 1914. We often judge through the omniscient lens of hindsight, mindlessly blaming our ancestors for their inability to see the future, and scoff at their ignorance. Entering new domains of transportation is inherently intimidating, and autonomous vehicles are no exception. While the idea of humans relinquishing total control of the vehicle appears alien and alarming, close inspection into the subject reveals a bright fu

The Failure of the Modern Marketplace of Ideas

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash Fair warning: there is no hiding my personal politics on this one. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the concept of the Marketplace of Ideas. It’s hard not to, when arguably living in the most information-accessible period in all of history, wonder how we find ourselves divided into strict camps, all equally, intensely convinced of entirely perpendicular realities of the world. Even after Trump’s presidency is over, it’s depressingly clear that his reign over the willing minds of millions of Americans will continue. It’s also clear that no matter who’s in the White House, morally-bankrupt pawns like Giuliani will continue to spew unhinged, unfounded propaganda for however long it keeps them relevant. They are not doing this in a void – millions of people are listening to and believing in their lies, deepening the rift between citizens to a dangerous level. Globally, there are instances like Brazil and Myanmar, where entire democracies