Zag To The Zig #45 :: Rug Pull Artist, Digital Minister & Copywriting AI
Good day! Hope you’re all well and finding your flow to go with. 🌊🌊
ZTTZ packs quite a lot of longer formats this week. Which is odd, as I have the attention span of a goldfish (no emoji ?? - 🐠) and feel weirdly out of control if I can’t scroll it or click it. Take your picks.
We start in the Tech Basement this week
The daughter is getting into Roblox, so dad needs to read up on this.
First learning (Boomer alert): Roblox isn’t 1 game, but a platform for people to build games on (and make money with). 60 million games so far!
In typical ZTTZ-fashion, I then got sidetracked into this article on the importance of low-code/no-code platforms.Learning number 2: you can buy different facial expressions of your avatar.
Which made me link to this: Photoshop now comes with emotion functionalities. Want more anger in the expression? There’s a slider for that.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. I love practical experiments like the one run by Flemish IT-magazine DataNews. To answer the question: will we, journalists, be replaced by AI copy-spewing machines, they tried it. (article in Dutch).
When AI listens, CEOs speak differently. On the one hand, you have AI analysing CEO speeches on financial matters to create market sentiment data for financial analysts, traders,… On the other hand you now have executives avoiding certain words they know will trigger negative connotations. They don’t teach that in business school.
In the Economy Room
The Economy of Pocket Money. The most popular thing that (US) kids are spending pocket money on? You guessed it. Roblox. Candy drops out of the top 5. Presumably, because they can no longer leave the house and can just take it from the cupboard.
The Digital Money economy. Huawei’s new smartphone comes with a built-in hardware wallet (know your blockchain) for China’s digital currency.
The Economy of Art, Scarcity, Greed and Blockchain. I truly enjoyed this and wanted to watch it again (= very rare).
Robin Schmidt is a film maker who makes content for the Defiant YouTube channel on all things Decentralised Finance. Inspired by conversations around the real-ness of digital art (NFTs, know your blockchain), he decided to run an art project called ‘The Rug Pull’, which involved exposing the private key (effectively the password to one's crypto account) of his own account. Lots of twists and turns and theories in this docu-meets-essay-meets-art-piece.
In the Ethics Corridor
I didn’t realise that Airbnb had a Chief Ethics Officer. This is a video interview with their previous one, Rob Chesnut, who’s currently promoting his book ‘Intentional Integrity: How Smart Companies Can Lead An Ethical Revolution’.
I raised eyebrows at the beginning, where he makes that Silicon Valley point of companies needing to take their responsibility because of governments failing.
But interesting angle: he said “We do what we measure.” Profit is easy to measure, so it’s easy to focus on that. Hence the change towards trying to measure impact on clients and other stakeholders.
🇹🇼🇹🇼 From the other end of the government v corporate spectrum comes this fascinating Exponential View podcast with Taiwan’s Digital Minister Audrey Tang, a former hacker and self-proclaimed conservative anarchist. Lots of insights and hands-on examples of how a government uses tech to work together with the population. Particularly interesting, given their geographical proximity to China.
If you prefer reading to listening, Wired had an in-depth profile of Tang.Surprising to me. This Deloitte UK study says that consumers have become less concerned about the use of their personal data. The amount of people who label themselves as ‘very concerned’ has decreased by no less than a 50% in 2 years time. Presumably not because things have become more clear and safe.
Random ZTTZ
Eye candy.
🏁 End note: 1 thing I’ll be doing this week
I’ll be preparing to move house. In a lockdown.