On my birthday the tech issues seem grimmer than ever but somehow I’m in good spirits
PLUS 5 Random Stories I read on my birthday, Encore about the dramatic downside of agents gone amok, and 3 Headline Headscratchers
My sincere apology for being a day late with this and for also missing last week’s Thursday’s publication. I was felled by an unusual cold that seem to be all congestion, energy enervation and brain shutdown. Still not back to jumping around but then that might be too much to expect as I turned 70 yesterday and I have a bum knee. So this is a special birthday edition.
MAIN COURSE: How a Youtube influencer portraying an idyllic family life ended up in jail
Can any of us become so seduced by technology that we compromise our values?
Last January Ruby Franke and her business partner received significant jail sentences for child abuse. Some of you may have heard about the “parenting” influencer with 2.5 million subscribers on Youtube falling from a state of internet grace. She shared videos documenting her charming life raising 6 children, documenting via video as they grew up. This January her eldest daughter released her tell all book describing the real life horror of growing up in this household of rigid discipline that resulted in malnutrition, forced restraint and torture. Most people will conclude, that the mother and her business partner were just evil sorts and got the punishment they deserved. Good on the daughter for writing this book to set the record straight.
But the entire situation, including the daughter’s and the Youtube channel viewers, fills me with a sense of gloom about what technology has wrought in our society. I have a firm belief that anyone could possibly end up like this too, if they let the various technology platforms we have dominate their life. I don’t buy into the sanctimonious take, but the pernicious one which we must guard against daily.
Consider this quote from the article I referenced: “At the start, you’re whipping out a camera to film your crying daughter. In the end, you might find yourself strategically positioning the camera in advance before you make her cry.” I think that every social platform from Instagram to TikTok, Quora to Pinterest have multitudes of examples of this behaviour: staged scenes, branded as authenticity. It all started decades ago with the completely unreal “reality” TV shows.
But the situation is more profound than the simple staging of falsity. We live in an era where there are little restraints on our exhibitism, and we engage with the camera in a flurry of mindless expressionism. Am I the only one that finds the daughter’s conduct also blameworthy? It wasn’t her actions that led to the arrest of her mother, but a younger brother who escaped his restraints and fled to a neighbours. Her first act was snapping a photo of her mother being arrested and posting it immediately to Instagram. A year later she capitalizes on the plight of her siblings (she had escaped most of the problems) with a money-making tell all book that is already sold out. The momfluencer’s sisters videotaped their reactions to Ruby’s arrest and conviction, proclaiming their innocence, posting them to their respective Youtube channels.
But there is more. The site had been taken down when this all came out. However, some of the videos have since been re-uploaded and dozens of past subscribers are re-watching then posting comments of contrition. This is false virtue signalling to me.
My final thought on this debacle - where the only people that I have any time for are the younger abused children - concerns memory. As the article says, “When the goal is going viral rather than making a memory, then the more shocking, heartbreaking, or outrageous the content, the better”.But is it even a memory and is the very nature of memory changing permanently? I watch my young grand-daughter repeatedly looking at pictures and videos of events captured forever visually (or until the sold state drives in the vast cloud server farms housing these pictures degrade which happens faster than you think) and wonder if years from now will she remember the event, …. or our much lesser visual representation of it? Will any of us?
SECONDI - 5 Random Stories I Read on my Birthday
TikTok’s lights got turned back on, as spared by Trump. For a change he appears to be actually seems to be following the law. He gave them an extension, as was provided for in the legislation, and he wants to help then make a deal to be bought, which is also envisioned by the law. My 2025 prediction about TikTok appears golden so far. This is Trump as deal-maker something he may actually good at. New role for POTUS: Mergers and Acquisitions Consultant.
So when actual hard-nosed researchers analyze less rigorous researchers’s studies, it turns out most longevity stories are false. There go the popular media stories about who is the oldest person in the world after the last one dies. Usually no real documentations to establish the actual birth date. Blue Zones, the concept that certain communities on Earth are blessed with above average number of centenarians, is based on slip shod research. The lightweight researchers (or charlatans if you prefer as I do) often used pension data, but it turns out relatives didn’t report their deaths to keep collecting the pension cheques for many years after the actual death. I love this quote: “Too few people in academia or among the general public have questioned how a man with no identifying documents living in a Venezuelan jungle could outlive every athlete, rich Swiss mountaineer and yogurt-slurping weekend warrior on Earth.”
The next time you get a weird, bureaucratic or stroppy email from someone it might not be them that responded. It might be their ambient agent, the next step after plain old vanilla digital agents. Are you with me? We don’t have plain Jane agents really working - see Encore below - and we are already on to ambient agents, a term first coined in January 14, 2025 so you know it is hot off the press. They are defined as multiple interlocking agents always active, helping you out. The first use case will be organizing your calendar, analyzing your inbox and responding email. I’d rather my inbox just stays unruly.
We live in a time when fertility is less of a problem than it used to be. Thousands of couples have managed to conceive through the use of IVF, and it has presumably added to their happiness. However, what do we do with the literal tens of millions of frozen embryos sitting in cold storage. It is a literal quagmire of ethical, societal and legal issues? Which brings us to:
Here is a story that should bring chills to you about the many downsides that could happen. Evidently a well financed firm is going to resurrect extinct or going extinct species with the latest cutting edge technologies. The first 3 up: wooly mammoths, what used to be known as the Tasmanian Devil, and the Dodo bird. But this effort will be sold as a great human achievement helping bring back species that went extinct, because of humankind. If the considerable simpler IVF created a potful of thorny issues, think what could happen here. However, I’m obviously the only person nervous if you read this marketingspeak: “our end-to-end de-extinction toolkit has been met with enthusiasm by the investor community.”
Encore: The danger of vanilla digital agents
Here is a little Gary Marcus for you, a 30 year AI academic who tries to keep society onside against AI. I know that most people don’t click on the links but this one is scary read. I try to take the mickey out of these stories, especially the insane people and their disingenuous marketing promises, but “jailbroken” agents can do everything we fear. Read about the Agent 47 and see if you don’t have nightmares. Makes cancel culture look like a mere balloon pop at a kids party
Let’s end with some larfs shall we.
HEADLINE HEADSCRATCHERS
This is how Emperor Elon will keep Trump in line. He is wealthier and could destroy Trump by shorting his crypto coin.
I’ll just leave this headline with you to put a little cringe into your day.
This might be more cringeworthy if it wasn’t that this decades out of date supreme court justice - thinking Pornhub is like an updated version of Playboy in the 1960s - actually is going to provide an “educated” ruling on regulating the access of minors to the type of porn that actually exists on todays internet.
That’s it. Will be back on Thursday with some more. I appreciate all of my readers. Feel free to leave a comment or share with someone you know.