“I would suggest that convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today. As a driver of human decisions, it may not offer the illicit thrill of Freud’s unconscious sexual desires or the mathematical elegance of the economist’s incentives. Convenience is boring. But boring is not the same thing as trivial." — Tim Wu, The Age of Extraction

This is an interesting argument about what is driving the takeover of tech in our lives. The platforms that win the attention game are the ones who make things easiest. Wu describes the concept of 'couch lock,' a stoner term for the inability to move once you get comfortable, as a way of understanding this. Shifting your attention off of a platform, let alone leaving it altogether, becomes a chore.

This makes me wonder about the things that are intentionally slower and more deliberate, things that maybe take a bit more effort. How do you get people to choose inconvenience?

Okay, I've been a bit quiet with serious reading because I got fully hooked on Dungeon Crawler Carl. I think I read all of them in less than two months (finished #8 today). Now I wait for the next one...

There's been a lot of standout moments for me, some absurdly hilarious, some genuinely moving, and others deeply profound. Here's a bit that is currently sitting with me from the most recent book, a Parade of Horribles, in which the AI—spiralling a bit in a sort of existential crisis—is reflecting on what it has observed about human behaviour in the face of overwhelming odds stacked against them:

"I’m searching. Oh, how I’m searching, trying to answer that question. Is there such a thing as fate? You know what I’m finding? You’re unpredictable on a micro-level, but on a macro, long-term level you’re just like any other algorithm. But you know what I’m also finding? Deliberate actions, times when you’ve finally had enough, when you say I am going to make a change—that’s when your possibilities really open up. It’s an important lesson. No, I don’t understand motivations, certain types of emotions, but I do understand that."

I kind of love this idea that to an alien, or artificial super intelligence, we are still always capable of surprise. No matter how rigged the system might seem, or how out of options we might feel—it's not over. We choose life.

There's another line, repeated multiple times in the last couple books, "survival has more than one meaning." This is just as important. Choosing life is about more than just living, it's also not losing something essentially human in the process. Preserving the value and sanctity of life matters. How we survive matters.

“The companies insisted on their right to use facial-recognition systems to identify a stranger on the street without first obtaining the individual’s consent. As one lobbyist in the talks told the press, ‘Everyone has the right to take photographs in public… if someone wants to apply facial recognition, should they really need to get consent in advance?’”

Alongside reading the Age of Surveillance Capitalism, I've been blitzing through the Dungeon Crawler Carl series (currently on book 5). I like to have a fun read going at the same time as something more serious.

And it's been a fun read. Genuine laugh-out-loud moments and captivating plot point moments. It's one of those series I find myself sneaking in reading almost every free moment I have. So, kudos to Matt Dinniman.

However, I have also found the world building and larger story very motivating. It's the story of resistance and pushing back against a machine and system that only wants to break you. There was one part in the second book that I found myself reflecting on.

“If it used to be okay, but it’s not okay anymore, then maybe you should do something about it. Don’t compare your circumstances with how they were yesterday. Look at how they were years ago. We’re supposed to be making the world… the universe… a better place for our children. If it’s not better, if you’re dealing with cruelty, with neglect, then you should do something about it.” (emphasis mine)

Reading an interesting section in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff) on Google's cycle of dispossession, which is essentially how they normalize taking away our choices of privacy in every space they enter. It focuses on Google Street View and how it began with a celebration of public space while simultaneously making the argument that we have a different expectation of privacy when we use them.

This is a tricky bit of work they're doing here; essentially trying to equate the eyes on the street notion of public life with the use of surveillance tech. But these are very different things, especially in the hands of a company like Google. Jacobs' eyes on the street is about establishing a shared sense of ownership for public space. When a place is used by people, it creates a sort of social safety net in which strangers are tied together by an unspoken common goal. They are the eyes of the collective stranger—the community—whose gaze is not salacious but watchful.

The use of surveillance tech in the public realm is something that has bothered me for a while. It's driven not by a shared responsibility of protecting the common good but the individual desire to protect private interests. One builds communal trust, the other tears it down.

Google's attempt to claim access to the public realm is similarly compelled by their private interests. These eyes on the street are not watchful, nor are they communal. They are the exploitative gaze of a company who harvests our behaviours for their own benefit, indifferent to what makes a shared space good.