Whenever Facebook changes its interface, it has an impact on how millions of people communicate. In this sense, user interfaces are cultural artefacts.

the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.

be inspired by the untapped potential of human capabilities. Don't just extrapolate yesterday's technology and then cram people into it.

if you go into the Shanghai City Guide, it’s easy to put together a list of must-visit restaurants or family-friendly activities. Plus, not only is it easy to create bookmarks of places you want to save, but you can also browse other public bookmarks curated by creators and influencers, and then sort the bookmarks by location or distance. This type of bookmark discovery is a completely different use case than how we use Google Maps or Yelp today. Our Western location-based platforms use a manual, search-based process that primarily works for high-intent discovery. In contrast, thanks to the algorithms and user behavior on Douyin, the app can push new places to a user that he or she would never have thought to search for. Short video effectively enables the continuous discovery of the best places around you, and it gets better with every swipe as the platform better understands you and your interests.

Here are the adoption curves for a handful of major technologies in the United States. There are big differences in the speeds at which these technologies were absorbed. Landline telephones took about 86 years to hit 80% adoption.Flush toilets took 96 years to hit 80% adoption.Refrigerators took about 25 years.Microwaves took 17 years.Smartphones took just 12 years.Why these wide differences in adoption speed? Conformability with existing infrastructure. Flush toilets required the build-out of water and sewage utility systems. They also meant adding a new room to the house—the bathroom—and running new water and sewage lines underneath and throughout the house. That’s a lot of systems to line up. By contrast, refrigerators replaced iceboxes, and could fit into existing kitchens without much work. Microwaves could sit on a countertop. Smartphones could slip into your pocket.

Humor us for a moment and picture your favorite neighborhood restaurant. Ours is a corner spot in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. It has overflowing natural light, handmade textile seat cushions, a caramel wood grain throughout, and colorful ornaments dangling from the ceilings. Can you picture yours? Do you feel the warmth and spirit of the place?A Silicon Valley optimizer might say, “Well, they don’t brew their coffee at exactly 200 degrees. And the seats look a little ratty. And the ceiling ornaments don’t serve any function.”But we think that’s exactly the point. That these little, hand-crafted touches give our environment its humanity and spirit. In their absence, we’re left with something universal but utterly sterile — a space that may “perfectly” serve our functional needs, but leave our emotional needs in the lurch.

Operating systems were bubbly and evanescent, like nature. Apps were customizable, in every shape and size. And interfaces drew on real-life metaphors to help you understand them, integrating them effortlessly into your life.But as our everyday software tools and media became global for the first time, the hand of the artist gave way to the whims of the algorithm. And our software became one-size-fits-all in a world full of so many different people. All our opinions, beliefs, and ideas got averaged out — producing the least common denominator: endless sequels that everyone enjoys but no one truly loves.When our software optimizes for numbers alone — no matter the number — it appears doomed to lack a certain spirit, and a certain humanity.

In the end, we decided that we didn’t want to optimize for numbers at all. We wanted to optimize for feelings.While this may seem idealistic at best or naive at worst, the truth is that we already know how to do this. The most profound craftsmanship in our world across art, design, and media has long revolved around feelings.

When Olmstead crafted Central Park, what do you think he was optimizing for? Which metric led to Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight? What data brought the iPhone into this world? The answer is not numerical. It’s all about the feelings, opinions, experiences, and ideas of the maker themself. The great Georgia O’Keefe put it this way: "I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me... so I decided to start anew."

James Turrell took inspiration from astronomy and perceptual psychology. Coco Chanel was most influenced by nuns and religious symbols. David Adjaye drew from Yoruban sculpture, and Steve Jobs from Zen Buddhism and calligraphy.

And yet, in so much modern software today, you’re placed in a drab gray cubicle — anonymized and aggregated until you’re just a daily active user. For minimalism. For simplicity. For scale! But if our hope is to create software with feeling, it means inviting people in to craft it for themselves — to mold it to the contours of their unique lives and taste.

You see — if software is to have soul, it must feel more like the world around it. Which is the biggest clue of all that feeling is what’s missing from today’s software. Because the value of the tools, objects, and artworks that we as humans have surrounded ourselves with for thousands of years goes so far beyond their functionality. In many ways, their primary value might often come from how they make us feel by triggering a memory, helping us carry on a tradition, stimulating our senses, or just creating a moment of peace.This is not to say that metrics should not play a role in what we do. The age of metrics has undeniably led us to some pretty remarkable things! And numbers are a useful measuring stick to keep ourselves honest.But if the religion of technology preaches anything, it celebrates progress and evolution. And so we ask, what comes next? What do we optimize for beyond numbers? How do we bring more of the world around us back into the software in front of us?

So using that hook of “simplicity”, the best advice for “doing agile” is: Read the manifesto Figure out what makes you happy. And do that.

In fact, more people are technologists than ever before, insofar as a “technologist” can be defined as someone inventing, implementing or repurposing technology. In particular, the personal computer has allowed anyone to live in the unbounded wilderness of the internet as they please. Anyone can build highly specific corners of cyberspace and quickly invent digital tools, changing their own and others’ technological realities. “Technologist” is a common identity that many different people occupy, and anyone can occupy. Yet the public perceptions of a “technologist” still constitute a very narrow image.

A technologist makes reason out of the messiness of the world, leverages their understanding to envision a different reality, and builds a pathway to make their vision happen. All three of these endeavors—to try to understand the world, to imagine something different, and to build something that fulfills that vision—are deeply human.

Humans are continually distilling and organizing reality into representations and models—to varying degrees of accuracy and implicitness—that we can understand and navigate. Our intelligence involves making models of all aspects of our realities: models of the climate, models of each other’s minds, models of fluid dynamics.

We are an unprecedentedly self-augmenting species, with a fundamental drive to organize, imagine, construct and exercise our will in the world. And we can measure our technological success on the basis of how much they increase our humanity. What we need is a vision for that humanity, and to enact this vision. What do we, humans, want to become?

As a general public, we can collectively hold technologists to a higher ethical standard, as their work has important human consequences for us all. We must begin to think of them as doing deeply human work, intervening in our present realities and forging our futures. Choosing how best to model the world, impressing their will on it, and us. We must insist that they understand their role as augmenting and modifying humanity, and are responsible for the implications. Collective societal expectations are powerful; if we don’t, they won’t.

By improving home charging for urban apartment dwellers and prioritizing vehicles with smaller batteries, rather than road-trip-enabling charging stations and big batteries, we could maximize the miles we can affordably electrify. In an era of battery scarcity, we could have two 150-mile E.V.s for the battery capacity in every 300-mile E.V. Or, using the same 300-mile E.V. battery, you could have six plug-in hybrids with 50 miles of electric range for daily driving and a gasoline engine for those rarer road trips or many, many more e-bikes.

Rather than holding E.V. adoption hostage to our ability to make batteries match internal combustion in every way, government policy should focus on the cases where E.V.s have advantages that internal combustion will never match: waking up every morning with a full “tank” sufficient for daily commuting and errands.

Every aspect of interacting with the various institutions that monitored and managed my kids—ACS, the foster care agency, Medicaid clinics—produced new data streams. Diagnoses, whether an appointment was rescheduled, notes on the kids’ appearance and behavior, and my perceived compliance with the clinician’s directives were gathered and circulated through a series of state and municipal data warehouses. And this data was being used as input by machine learning models automating service allocation or claiming to predict the likelihood of child abuse.

The dominant narrative about child welfare is that it is a benevolent system that cares for the most vulnerable. The way data is correlated and named reflects this assumption. But this process of meaning making is highly subjective and contingent. Similar to the term “artificial intelligence,” the altruistic veneer of “child welfare system” is highly effective marketing rather than a description of a concrete set of functions with a mission gone awry.

Child welfare is actually family policing. What AFST presents as the objective determinations of a de-biased system operating above the lowly prejudices of human caseworkers are just technical translations of long-standing convictions about Black pathology. Further, the process of data extraction and analysis produce truths that justify the broader child welfare apparatus of which it is a part.

As the scholar Dorothy Roberts explains in her 2022 book Torn Apart, an astonishing 53 percent of all Black families in the United States have been investigated by family policing agencies.

The kids were contractually the property of New York State and I was just an instrument through which they could supervise their property. In fact, foster parents are the only category of parents legally obligated to open the door to a police officer or a child protective services agent without a warrant. When a foster parent “opens their home” to go through the set of legal processes to become certified to take a foster child, their entire household is subject to policing and surveillance.

Not a single one was surprised about the false allegations. What they were uniformly shocked about was that the kids hadn’t been snatched up. While what happened to us might seem shocking to middle-class readers, for family policing it is the weather. (Black theorist Christina Sharpe describes antiblackness as climate.)

In reality, artificial intelligence encompasses a range of techniques that largely remain useful for a range of uncinematic back-office logistics like processing data from users to better target them with ads, content and product recommendations.

the technologies would at times cause harm, as their humanlike capabilities mean they have the same potential for failure as humans. Among the examples cited: a mistranslation by Facebook’s AI system that rendered “good morning” in Arabic as “hurt them” in English and “attack them” in Hebrew, leading Israeli police to arrest the Palestinian man who posted the greeting, before realizing their error.

Recent local, federal and international regulations and regulatory proposals have sought to address the potential of AI systems to discriminate, manipulate or otherwise cause harm in ways that assume a system is highly competent. They have largely left out the possibility of harm from such AI systems’ simply not working, which is more likely, she says.

The impact is particularly noticeable among Generation Z and millennials, the first generations to come of age with the possibility of knowing where their peers are at all times. It has changed how friends communicate with one another and blurred lines of privacy. Friends now, sometimes unwittingly yet obsessively, check one another’s locations and bypass whole conversations — about where somebody is, what they are doing or how their days are going — when socializing. All of that information can be gleaned from Find My.

Although Find My is not marketed as a social experience, sharing locations has become a test of sorts, much like being included on a close friends list on Instagram or on a private story on Snapchat can signal closer friendships.

With Find My, “you aren’t actively choosing to do something as you reach a certain location because you’re constantly sharing your location,” said Michael Saker, a senior lecturer in digital sociology at City, University of London. As a result, “there’s an intimacy that’s intertwined with that act,” he added. “There’s a verification of being friends.”

In other words, when Kylie Jenner posts a petition demanding that Meta “Make Instagram Instagram again”, the honest answer is that changing Instagram is the most Instagram-like behavior possible.

The first trend is the shift towards ever more immersive mediums. Facebook, for example, started with text but exploded with the addition of photos. Instagram started with photos and expanded into video. Gaming was the first to make this progression, and is well into the 3D era. The next step is full immersion — virtual reality — and while the format has yet to penetrate the mainstream this progression in mediums is perhaps the most obvious reason to be bullish about the possibility.

The second trend is the increase in artificial intelligence. I’m using the term colloquially to refer to the overall trend of computers getting smarter and more useful, even if those smarts are a function of simple algorithms, machine learning, or, perhaps someday, something approaching general intelligence.

The third trend is the change in interaction models from user-directed to computer-controlled. The first version of Facebook relied on users clicking on links to visit different profiles; the News Feed changed the interaction model to scrolling. Stories reduced that to tapping, and Reels/TikTok is about swiping. YouTube has gone further than anyone here: Autoplay simply plays the next video without any interaction required at all.

Advertisers don’t really want to know who you are - they want to show diaper ads to people who have babies, not to show them to people who don’t, and to have some sense of which ads drove half a million sales and which ads drove a million sales.

In practice, ‘showing car ads to people who read about cars’ led the adtech industry to build vast piles of semi-random personal data, aggregated, disaggregated, traded, passed around and sometimes just lost, partly because it could and partly because that appeared to be the only way to do it. After half a decade of backlash, there are now a bunch of projects trying to get to the same underlying advertiser aims - to show ads that are relevant, and get some measure of ad effectiveness - while keeping the private data private.

Apple has pursued a very clear theory that analysis and tracking is private if it happens on your device and is not private if leaves your device or happens in the cloud. Hence, it’s built a complex system of tracking and analysis on your iPhone, but is adamant that this is private because the data stays on the device. People have seemed to accept this (so far - or perhaps the just haven’t noticed it), but acting on the same theory Apple also created a CSAM scanning system that it thought was entirely private - ‘it only happens your device!’ - that created a huge privacy backlash, because a bunch of other people think that if your phone is scanning your photos, that isn’t ‘private’ at all. So is ‘on device’ private or not? What’s the rule? What if Apple tried the same model for ‘private’ ads in Safari? How will the public take FLoC? I don’t think we know.

On / off device is one test, but another and much broader is first party / third party: the idea it’s OK for a website to track what you do on that website but not OK for adtech companies to track you across many different websites. This is the core of the cookie question

At this point one answer is to cut across all these questions and say that what really matters is whether you disclose whatever you’re doing and get consent. Steve Jobs liked this argument. But in practice, as we've discovered, ‘get consent’ means endless cookie pop-ups full of endless incomprehensible questions that no normal consumer should be expected to understand, and that just train people to click ‘stop bothering me’. Meanwhile, Apple’s on-device tracking doesn't ask for permission, and opts you in by default, because, of course, Apple thinks that if it's on the device it's private. Perhaps ‘consent’ is not a complete solution after all.

If you can only analyse behaviour within one site but not across many sites, or make it much harder to do that, companies that have a big site where people spend lots of time have better targeting information and make more money from advertising. If you can only track behaviour across lots of different sites if you do it ‘privately’ on the device or in the browser, then the companies that control the device or the browser have much more control over that advertising

it is very difficult to figure out what specific effect ATT has because there are so many factors involved

If ATT were so significantly kneecapping revenue, I would think we would see a pronounced skew against North America compared to elsewhere. But that is not the case. Revenue in North America is only slightly off compared to the company total, and it is increasing how much it earns per North American user compared to the rest of the world.

iOS is far more popular in the U.S. and Canada than it is in Europe, but Meta incurred a greater revenue decline — in absolute terms and, especially, in percentage terms — in Europe. Meta was still posting year-over-year gains in both those regions until this most recent quarter, even though ATT rolled out over a year ago.

there are those who believe highly-targeted advertisements are a fair trade-off because they offer businesses a more accurate means of finding their customers, and the behavioural data collected from all of us is valuable only in the aggregate. That is, as I understand it, the view of analysts like Seufert, Benedict Evans, and Ben Thompson. Frequent readers will not be surprised to know I disagree with this premise. Regardless of how many user agreements we sign and privacy policies we read, we cannot know the full extent of the data economy. Personal information about us is being collected, shared, combined, and repackaged. It may only be profitable in aggregate, but it is useful with finer granularity, so it is unsurprising that it is indefinitely warehoused in detail.

Seufert asked, rhetorically, “what happens when ads aren’t personalized?”, answering “digital ads resemble TV ads: jarring distractions from core content experience. Non-personalized is another way of saying irrelevant, or at best, randomly relevant.”

does it make sense to build the internet’s economy on the backs of a few hundred brokers none of us have heard of, trading and merging our personal information in the hope of generating a slightly better click-through rate?

Then there is the much bigger question of whether people should even be able to opt into such widespread tracking. We simply cannot be informed consumers in every aspect of our lives, and we cannot foresee how this information will be used and abused in the full extent of time. It sounds boring, but what is so wrong with requiring data minimization at every turn, permitting only the most relevant personal data to be collected, and restricting the ability for this information to be shared or combined?

Does ATT really “[deprive] consumers of widespread ad relevancy and advertisers and publishers of commercial opportunity”? Even if it does — which I doubt — has that commercial opportunity really existed with meaningful consumer awareness and choice? Or is this entire market illegitimate, artificially inflated by our inability to avoid becoming its subjects?

Conflicts like these are one of many reasons why privacy rights should be established by regulators, not individual companies. Privacy must not be a luxury good, or something you opt into, and it should not be a radical position to say so. We all value different degrees of privacy, but it should not be possible for businesses to be built on whether we have rights at all. The digital economy should not be built on such rickety and obviously flawed foundations.

Nick Clegg, president of Meta, penned a lengthy Medium post trying to portray a more positive vision to justify the company’s pivot to all-in for the metaverse future. To Clegg, the metaverse is “ultimately about finding ever more ways for the benefits of the online world to be felt in our daily lives.” This frame is backwards, and reinforces the technology-first lens of social construction that has not held up well over time. A better lens to explain the inevitability of the metaverse is that technology will, over time, provide ever more ways for the benefits of the offline world to be felt through online services. Today’s social media is about communication; the metaverse of tomorrow will be about experiences. Its value is not inherent, but rather lies in the ability of technology to recreate and transport things—in particular, experiences—that have inherent value.

Metaverse technology will, in all likelihood, follow that same evolution. Today’s VR headsets are the equivalent of phonographs and radio. But someday, metaverse users will be able to mix their favorite cocktails in their homes, strap on their multisensory gear, and “walk” into a virtual bar to socialize with friends located anywhere in the world. They’d save the $18 that cocktail costs in a physical bar, and spend it on the $18/month subscription fee for their VirtualBar membership. As the world continues to suffer from the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s easy to see the appeal of virtual substitutes for in-person experiences. In 2020, Zoom replaced in-person social events and professional collaborations; in 2030, the technology options will be far richer, and will capture and convey even more (though not all) of the subtle interpersonal dynamics inherent in human interaction.

The game is that every time we create a new technology, we’re creating new possibilities, new choices that didn’t exist before. Those choices themselves—even the choice to do harm—are a good, they’re a plus.

We want an economy that’s growing in the second sense: unlimited betterment, unlimited increase in wisdom, and complexity, and choices. I don’t see any limit there. We don’t want an economy that’s just getting fatter and fatter, and bigger and bigger, in terms of its size. Can we imagine such a system? That’s hard, but I don’t think it’s impossible.

Miller is the CEO of a new startup called The Browser Company, and he wants to change the way people think about browsers altogether. He sees browsers as operating systems, and likes to wonder aloud what "iOS for the web" might look like. What if your browser could build you a personalized news feed because it knows the sites you go to? What if every web app felt like a native app, and the browser itself was just the app launcher? What if you could drag a file from one tab to another, and it just worked? What if the web browser was a shareable, synced, multiplayer experience?

Miller became convinced that the next big platform was right in front of his face: the open web. The underlying infrastructure worked, the apps were great, there were no tech giants in the way imposing rules and extracting huge commissions. The only thing missing was a tool to bring it all together in a user-friendly way, and make the web more than the sum of its parts.

Browser's team instead spent its time thinking about how to solve things like tab overload, that all-too-familiar feeling of not being able to find anything in a sea of tiny icons at the top of the screen.That's something Nate Parrott, a designer on the team, had been thinking about for a long time. "Before I met Josh," he said, "I had this fascination with browsers, because it's the window through which you experience so much of the web, and yet it feels like no one is working on web browsers." Outside of his day job at Snap, he was also building a web browser with some new interaction ideas. "A big one for me was that I wanted to get rid of the distinction between open and closed tabs," he said. "I wanted to encourage tab-hoarding behavior, where you can open as many tabs as you want and organize them so you're not constantly overwhelmed seeing them all at the same time."

One of Arc's most immediately noticeable features is that it combines bookmarks and tabs. Clicking an icon in the sidebar opens the app, just like on iOS or Android. When users navigate somewhere else, they don't have to close the tab; it just waits in the background until it's needed again, and Arc manages its background performance so it doesn't use too much memory. Instead of opening Gmail in a tab, users just … open Gmail.

Everyone at The Browser Company swears there's no Master Plan, or much of a roadmap. What they have is a lot of ideas, a base on which they can develop really quickly, and a deep affinity for prototypes. "You can't just think really hard and design the best web browser," Parrott said. "You have to feel it and put it in front of people and get them to react to it."

The Browser Company could become an R&D shop, full of interesting ideas but unable to build a browser that anyone actually uses. The company does have plenty of runway: It recently raised more than $13 million in funding from investors including Jeff Weiner, Eric Yuan, Patrick Collison, Fidji Simo and a number of other people with long experience building for the internet, that values The Browser Company at $100 million. Still, Agrawal said, "We're paranoid that we could end up in this world of just having a Bell Labs kind of situation, where you have a lot of interesting stuff, but it's not monetizable, it's not sticky, any of that." That's why they're religious about talking to users all the time, getting feedback on everything, making sure that the stuff they're building is genuinely useful. And when it's not, they pivot fast.

If you’d looked at Skype in 2004 and argued that it would own ‘voice’ on ‘computers’, that would not have been the right mental model. I think this is where we’ll go with video - there will continue to be hard engineering, but video itself will be a commodity and the question will be how you wrap it. There will be video in everything, just as there is voice in everything, and there will be a great deal of proliferation into industry verticals on one hand and into unbundling pieces of the tech stack on the other. On one hand video in healthcare, education or insurance is about the workflow, the data model and the route to market, and lots more interesting companies will be created, and on the other hand Slack is deploying video on top of Amazon’s building blocks, and lots of interesting companies will be created here as well. There’s lots of bundling and unbundling coming, as always. Everything will be ‘video’ and then it will disappear inside.

the calendar is often the aggregation layer - you don’t need to know what service the next call uses, just when it is. Skype needed both an account and an app, so had a network effect (and lost even so). WhatsApp uses the telephone numbering system as an address and so piggybacked on your phone’s contact list - effectively, it used the PSTN as the social graph rather than having to build its own. But a group video call is a URL and a calendar invitation - it has no graph of its own.

one of the ways that this all feels very 1.0 is the rather artificial distinction between calls that are based on a ‘room’, where the addressing system is a URL and anyone can join without an account, and calls that are based on ‘people’, where everyone joining needs their own address, whether it’s a phone number, an account or something else. Hence Google has both Meet (URLs) and Duo (people) - Apple’s FaceTime is only people (no URLs).

When Snap launched, there were already infinite ways to share images, but Snap asked a bunch of weird questions that no-one had really asked before. Why do you have to press the camera button - why doesn’t the app open in the camera? Why are you saving your messages - isn’t that like saving all your phone calls? Fundamentally, Snap asked ‘why, exactly, are you sending a picture? What is the underlying social purpose?’ You’re not really sending someone a sheet of pixels - you’re communicating.

That’s the question Zoom and all its competitors haven’t really asked. Zoom has done a good job of asking why it was hard to get into a call, but it hasn’t asked why you’re in the call in the first place. Why, exactly, are you sending someone a video stream and watching another one? Why am I looking at a grid of little thumbnails of faces? Is that the purpose of this moment? What is the ‘mute’ button for - background noise, or so I can talk to someone else, or is it so I can turn it off to raise my hand? What social purpose is ‘mute’ actually serving? What is screen-sharing for? What other questions could one ask? And so if Zoom is the Dropbox or Skype of video, we are waiting for the Snap, Clubhouse and Yo.