Zag To The Zig #23 :: All the music in the world, Chinese cyber-spying and a 'driven' London cyclist
How is your Corona-fascination going? Kids coming home with Corona-jokes yet? One thing I’ll be doing this week is considering whether I should go to SXSW in 2 weeks time. Not that I’m worried about getting ill. But would I really want to be stuck in some quarantine situation if shit or panic hits the fan?
Needless to say this week we have invented a new ‘room’ in the ZTTZ-house.
In the Medicine Cabinet
Zeynep Tufekci is one of those people who always have an interesting view on the overlap between tech, society and politics. In this article she makes the point that it was exactly the authoritarian and tech-enabled structures that made it harder for Chinese leadership to control the Corona Virus.
NO2 is a gas emitted by motor vehicles, power plants, and industrial facilities. In China the pollution levels have changed dramatically over the last few weeks (and no, it doesn’t have much to do with Chinese New Year).
In the Ethics Corridor
A report from the Economic Policy Institute last year found that CEO compensation in the US grew 940% (😲😲😲) between 1978 and 2018, while worker compensation grew only 12% over the same time period. They even made a list of the 10 most overpaid CEOs. Interesting to see that publications like FactCompany choose to pay attention to reports like this.
Some teenagers are coordinating to feed Instagram’s algorithm the wrong data (and keep some form of privacy).
🕵️♀️ If you love spy stories and/or are worried about cyber-intelligence, then do read on. This is the story of how the African Union Headquarters had its data leaked to China for 5 years. The building was funded by the Chinese government and quite a bit of IT infrastructure was installed by Huawei. Questions and allegations abound!
In the Tech Basement
For the last 6 years consultant Tom Whitwell compiled a list of 52 Things I Learnt this year. Always some nice nuggets of trivia and/or wisdom in there. But what struck me this year is that he included a few stories that were uncovered by TomBot, a machine learning tool for finding interesting stories, trained on previous 52 Things lists. ZTTZ-bot, me wants one! 🤖
What? Fed up with musicians having to worry about copyright cases (“your song sounds very similar to mine - pay up!”), these programmer-musicians used algorithms to create every melody possible and published them as open source, making them (more or less) public domain.
Seriously? In order to create more contact-less environments to stop Corona spreading, this Wuhan hospital had an unmanned, self-service till system built in 5 hours. ⏱️⏱️
(note: story is on Abacus, which is tied to Alibaba, which is tied to the tech company who installed it).
In the Innovation Kitchen
It’s always interesting to see how companies that are successful in this digital age operate. This is a useful insight in Amazon’s principles and ways of working. I’m particularly intrigued by the 6-page bi-annual planning document. Be prepared to hear that from all your consultants (if this hasn’t happened already).
Random ZTTZ
I think we all need “an enjoyable waste of time”, like the one a London cycling fan sort of rolled into. Over the span of 4 years, he somehow developed the need to cycle every single street of London. He tracked it on physical maps (fantastic!) as well as exporting a lovely animation of his progress. Jealous.