Roundup #23: Powerpoint, AI images, the first recorded sound, and the Attention Economy
A wide-ranging roundup of interesting things that caught my eye in the past week!
There is much to round up. Buckle up!
In the category fear mongering about technology in times gone by: Powerpoint
The new media technology was going to make us stupid, to reduce all human interaction to a sales pitch. It was going to corrode our minds, degrade communication, and waste our time. Its sudden rise and rapid spread through business, government, and education augured nothing less than “the end of reason,” as one famous artist put it, for better or for worse. In the end, it would even get blamed for the live-broadcast deaths of seven Americans on national television. The year was 2003, and Americans were freaking out about the world-altering risks of … Microsoft PowerPoint.
It’s obvious that this is resurfaced because of the current fear mongering about AI. Is it different this time? Nobody knows. But the fear mongering is the same.
Human photograph disqualified after winning contest for AI generated photos
A photo of a flamingo taken by photographer Miles Astray won two awards in the AI category of the 1839 Awards — only to be disqualified when judges discovered it wasn’t AI-generated. 🦩😮
Astray had entered the real photo on purpose, aiming to make a point about the enduring power of human-made art in an AI-dominated world.
Titled Flamingone, the surreal shot fooled judges into thinking it was AI due to its odd, dreamlike composition. Once he revealed the image was captured on a Nikon DSLR with minimal editing, the contest organizers removed it to keep the category fair for actual AI submissions.
Despite the disqualification, organizers acknowledged Astray’s move as a thought-provoking statement about art, authenticity, and the blurred line between real and artificial creativity.
This whole thing is quite wholesome and funny. Did the photographer prove a point that human photos are still more powerful than AI generated ones? Maybe… Definitely a big shoutout to the organisers for not being prissy about it and instead just acknowledging the move as though-provoking. To what degree are my thoughts provoked? A bit, it raises questions and high-level observations:
Usually, AI content is mistaken for real. It’s interesting that the opposite also happens. This is probably going to happen often, both ways. The overall ‘realness’ of media is almost certainly going to undergo a crisis. But we knew that already.
A real photo won the contest. Does that mean it’s better? Does it prove anything about AI content’s quality? I don’t think so. All it shows is that the judges thought this was the most interesting photo, under the assumption that all photos were AI. It might not be surprising that the most interesting ‘AI Photo’ turned out to be a human one.
It is hard to even start comparing human and AI ‘photos’, in my mind. Part of the charm of great human photography is that the object actually exists in the real world. No number of AI generated images of ‘depressed looking owl’ can compete with this one image of an actual owl looking depressed. Actual photographs of real things will continue to hold higher value than AI generated ones, maybe even more so.
Trolling ChatGPT by claiming you’re drinking spoiled milk
Running a dive shop is not diving all day and then chilling with the guests
There are two important revelations everyone needs to experience at some point: 1) everyone is just making things up as they go, and 2) The representative experience for any dream situation is what it’s like on a random Tuesday.
I meet a lot of people who don’t like their jobs, and when I ask them what they’d rather do instead, about 75% say something like, “Oh, I dunno, I’d really love to run a little coffee shop.” If I’m feeling mischievous that day, I ask them one question: “Where would you get the coffee beans?” If that’s a stumper, here are some followups:
Which kind of coffee mug is best?
How much does a La Marzocco espresso machine cost?
Would you bake your blueberry muffins in-house or would you buy them from a third party?
What software do you want to use for your point-of-sale system? What about for scheduling shifts?
What do you do when your assistant manager calls you at 6am and says they can’t come into work because they have diarrhea?
If those questions don’t seem fun or at least interesting, you’re not going to love running a coffee shop. This is one of those things that, once unpacked is so obvious that it almost seems too basic to write about. But it creeps up.
When you think about writing for a living, do you picture yourself making a nice cup of coffee and opening your laptop on a wonderful quiet morning with a view over the mountains? Or do you picture yourself staring at a blank page filled with guilt because you’re about to miss your posting schedule?
When I picture a future living in a beautiful house in nature, like in Italy, I picture myself with my friends there, making pizzas in the outdoor oven. I don’t picture the isolation and lack of inspiration from living off the grid that I actually experienced first-hand while living on Bali.
The linked post from
is a characteristically great expose on ‘unpacking’. Happy to report that I have gotten much, much better at it over time, and the disillusionment with my mini-retirement on Bali was a very important lesson.Ukrainian gamification of Drone warfare
There is a points system in the Ukraine military where Drone pilots can earn credits to spend on upgrades, ammunition and other perks on an Amazon like website. You could make an epic Black Mirror episode about this!
Ukraine initially created its rewards system to incentivize drone units to target enemy positions more efficiently. The points could be used to purchase drone equipment from the state — a boon for many units relying on both official and crowdsourced resources to continue fighting.
To claim their points, units have to film and record their hits.
In April, Ukraine launched what was described as an Amazon-style website that officials said offered more than 1,000 types of equipment in exchange for points, including batteries, guns, and satellite communications devices.
Sources: Business Insider, Janes
Here is an attempt by Claude 4 to write the outline of a Black Mirror Episode on this theme.
The first ever recorded sound
In 1860, 17 years before Edison’s invention of the Phonograph, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville found a way to record sound waves onto paper, creating the first ever sound record. Obviously impossible to play back at the time, it took another 17 years until Edison created a way to both record sound and play back the records. But in 2008, with modern technology, the sound waves from the 1860 paper recordings were digitized and we can now hear them.
The ‘Attention Economy’ actually happened, and it sucks
I’ve been trying to figure out the mechanics of what happened in the 2010s for over 7 years. It made me a little depressed, and I could never really get my finger behind it as much as I wanted. There was also never anything I read from others that really felt like it hit the nail on the head, that fully synthesized it. But now, with Trump 2, with the big experiment of Elon Musk buying Twitter, with every app becoming TikTok, it all starts to make sense.
quotes the above Goldhaber snippet, and then ties together three stories in this post: the bombing of Iran, Mamdani’s election as the Democratic candidate for NYC mayor, and the fundraise of Cluely, the app to cheat on everything.If the Web and the Net can be viewed as spaces in which we will increasingly live our lives, the economic laws we will live under have to be natural to this new space. These laws turn out to be quite different from what the old economics teaches, or what rubrics such as "the information age" suggest. What counts most is what is most scarce now, namely attention. The attention economy brings with it its own kind of wealth, its own class divisions - stars vs. fans - and its own forms of property, all of which make it incompatible with the industrial-money-market based economy it bids fair to replace. Success will come to those who best accommodate to this new reality.
Trump yet again inverted system architecture - flipping how information and decision-making traditionally flow. Military strategy and diplomacy all became subordinate to social media dynamics. But he is moving on as if war is only a weekend thing.
Cluely is the one I personally understand best. Some guy got suspended from Columbia University after creating a tool for students to ‘cheat’ (secretly use AI) on interviews. He spun it to position himself as a martyr, and turns out to be super duper adapt at getting and keeping attention by pissing lots and lots of people off online. His startup Cluely positions itself as the app to cheat on everything, and raises money from A16Z. The VC explicitly calls out ‘the team’s strength in distribution’ in their memo as a key reason to invest. In other words, Cluely’s founders are masters of getting attention on social media. Attention is capital, and they know how to attract it. They got investment in large part because of their skill in getting attention.
They get attention by relentless rage-baiting1
As it turns out, the kind of people that best accommodate to the attention economy, i.e. who win the fight for attention, are kind of dicks, and there’s data to prove it.
Social media cracked that cozy oligopoly, which made a lot of people happy, because their views now had the chance to be heard. I was happy about it, because I felt that my own economic commentary was a bit better-informed and more reasonable than the output of many of the country’s most prominent business and economics columnists. In general, liberalism is supposed to thrive on free speech and the marketplace of ideas.
But what we discovered to our dismay, during the 2010s, is that the people who tend to win the scramble for social media influence and attention are toxic rabble-rousers who opportunistically press their grubby fingers into the cracks of every social division they can find in order to raise their own profile and clout. Bor and Petersen (2021) find:
Across eight studies, leveraging cross-national surveys and behavioral experiments (total N=8,434), we [find that] hostile political discussions are the result of status-driven individuals who are drawn to politics and are equally hostile both online and offline. Finally, we offer initial evidence that online discussions feel more hostile, in part, because the behavior of such individuals is more visible than offline. [emphasis mine]
People have been having this hunch that it’s the phones and social media for a while. And more and more it seems to become clear that it is, in fact, a real issue.
is convinced, and wrote an awesome post just now that ‘everything becomes TikTok’:Nobody says “My plan is to spend all weekend on my phone”, but that’s the reality for a lot of us now. At best we utterly waste our time, at worst we develop crippling anxieties or extremist politics. I wish I had some magic wand to wave that could tell you how we turn this around, but I’m not sure there is any way to change it. But if nothing else, we should be aware. If we’re aware of what’s happening and how it’s affecting us, we’ll at least have a chance to resist turning into crabs.
Worth a read!
That’s all this time!
Posting content deliberately designed to get people to enrage many people and get them to comment in anger