# data[].attributes.headline
Meet the 26-year-old entrepreneurs using Instagram to build an art empire from scratch

# data[].attributes.subject
Meet the 26-year-old entrepreneurs using Instagram to build an art empire from scratch

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Aged just 23, two recent university graduates, Joe Kennedy and Jonny Burt, decided it was time to set up an art gallery. More important than their initial 300- square-foot pop-up space in Chiswick, London next to a butcher's shop, was the pair's determination to exploit the power of Instagram.

Three years on, they've developed an online network of young, international buyers from Hong Kong, the Middle East and the US and they have a 4,000-square-foot gallery in Soho, London. They now have plans to expand internationally and turn Unit London into the first major art gallery franchise.

"Most museums and art galleries still think of social media as a plaything for narcissistic teenagers who want to take photos of their breakfast. They don't take it seriously as a commercial tool," Kennedy told Business Insider.

Burt and Kennedy take social media very seriously. Their last show Paintguide - "the first Instagram curated art exhibition" - brought together 61 artists from around the world who had all built their reputations on Instagram. Savvy almost to the point of cynicism, the duo recognized the "huge PR value" of the exposure that comes from an exhibition featuring artists that have hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers. Joe and Jonny even have celebrity support from the likes of Jude Law, Bob Geldof, and Jean Paul Gautier.

Since they are doing a good job of dragging the fine art world into in the 21st century, Business Insider decided it was time to interview them, while having a look round their Soho gallery.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Meet the 26-year-old entrepreneurs using Instagram to build an art empire from scratch

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Aged just 23, two recent university graduates, Joe Kennedy and Jonny Burt, decided it was time to set up an art gallery. More important than their initial 300- square-foot pop-up space in Chiswick, London next to a butcher's shop, was the pair's determination to exploit the power of Instagram.

# data[].attributes.headline
From Microsound to Vaporwave: Internet-Mediated Musics, Online Methods, and Genre

# data[].attributes.subject
From Microsound to Vaporwave: Internet-Mediated Musics, Online Methods, and Genre

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Project MUSE - From Microsound to Vaporwave: Internet-Mediated Musics, Online Methods, and Genre

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How is the internet transforming musical practices? In this article, through a study of five prominent popular and cross-over music genres spanning the period from the late 1990s to the present, we examine how the internet has augmented the creative, aesthetic, communicative, and social dimensions of contemporary music.

# data[].attributes.headline
Spotify and the streaming music industry

# data[].attributes.subject
Spotify and the streaming music industry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Few people have heard of Lauv, Russell Dickerson, Kim Petras, or Trippie Red. In a couple of months, everyone will.

Spotify-the biggest music-streaming service in the world right now, with 140 million active users, 60 million of whom are paying subscribers-this week launched RISE, a program that promotes hand-picked emerging artists. "We have the biggest distribution system in the world for streaming music, so why not use that to help young artists," Troy Carter, Spotify's head of creator services, said to Billboard.

Those four musicians, chosen for the first round, will get prime placement in playlists and company promotional materials, TV ads, and special live events; Carter added that Spotify wants to be "what MTV was" and "what HOT 97 was" for these indie acts and others to come. (The former gave generous play to videos from new artists and the latter is a New York hip-hop radio station; both have been vital in the ascent of many a music career.)

RISE-which follows the launch of similar emerging-artist initiatives from Apple Music and Deezer-takes Spotify squarely out of its purposed status as a mere music-streaming service. Spotify is now an authoritative discovery platform, a talent incubator with its RapCaviar playlist phenomenon, a network of popular radio stations, and also the primary way people are listening to music (well, after YouTube). The tech company is nearly a self-sustaining music industry in and of itself.

It's perhaps that breadth that's leading investors to look upon it so favorably. Tech-focused boutique investment bank GP Bullhound released a paper yesterday that gives Spotify a valuation of $20 billion when it goes public later this year or early in 2018. Analysts at the firm say Spotify's current 60-million-subscriber figure is on target to grow to 100 million in summer 2018 and 500 million by 2020-giving Spotify "long-term potential of being valued at $100 billion."

A tall order. GP Bullhound, a Spotify investor, also has some bias here. But given that Spotify is one of the main reasons the music industry is growing again for the first time in decades, it's not too unreasonable a prediction.

Read this next: When pop stars have Instagram, they no longer need record labels

Most Popular

Read full story

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Spotify is not just streaming. It's becoming the entire music industry.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Few people have heard of Lauv, Russell Dickerson, Kim Petras, or Trippie Red. In a couple of months, everyone will. Spotify-the biggest music-streaming service in the world right now, with 140 million active users, 60 million of whom are paying subscribers-this week launched RISE, a program that promotes hand-picked emerging artists.

# data[].attributes.headline
Free streaming and its effects on digital music consumption

# data[].attributes.subject
Free streaming and its effects on digital music consumption

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Let the music play? Free streaming and its effects on digital music consumption

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The tremendous growth in interactive music streaming is raising questions about its effects on the music industry. While premium subscriptions offer u...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A 101 on the net-aware movement

What does Post-Internet mean?

As an art movement Post-Internet follows up on the concept of Internet art or 'net.art' which was more of an exploration of internet technology. Through (mainly) the second half of the nineties the internet was slowly, say 56Kb slowly at first, finding its way into our daily life and eventually began altering our perception of reality. In the post-Internet era, being online has become so much of our daily life, that it is impossible to think of how we would interact, gather information, work or play without it. Post-Internet art is not about the Internet as a medium anymore, but more of an examination of this virtual world and its impact and relation to the real world.To put it simply: not merely made on the net, but about the net. Influenced by art movements of the past like Dadaism and Fluxus, net-aware art is not to be seen as a solid structured group, but more of a playful, fluid and conceptual form of art.

What about the music?

There's a duality embedded in this kind of music, as a lot of these artists came up through club culture, be it in New York, London or Berlin and so are influenced by genres like techno, house, juke, grime, hip-hop, R&B or even hardstyle. Building on the legacy of the likes of Aphex Twin, Autechre, Fennesz and others who trail-blazed experimental electronic music from the nineties onward, this new generation of iconoclasts have created something intricate and well designed, so that their music is more like an artwork than a consumption piece.

So, what do all these post-Internet aesthetics sound like? To say it is not an easy listen could be an understatement to some: it can be abrasive, unnerving and at times chaotic or uncentered. The feel of it is very technological; as if the beats and textures are a direct audible translation of electronic pulses passing through a bunch of network cables all twisted and bundled together. Below you'll find a selection of artists who are associated with this scene to give you an idea of what post-Internet music could sound like. It is by no means an exhaustive list but more of an introduction, a 101 if you will.

One artist who took the lead in this field, especially in terms of achieving mainstream exposure, is Arca (AKA Alejandro Ghersi). Noted for working with Kanye West on several tracks of Yeezus, producing Björk's latest album Vulnicura and collaborating with futuristic pop queen FKA twigs. While living in New York he became part of the GHE20G0TH1K scene. Spearheaded by Venus X, these underground parties were about breaking boundaries, tearing down walls between all kinds of genres, about embracing queerness and liberty and leaving prejudice at the door.

A characterizing trope within the post-Internet movement is the use of samples, or better yet micro samples. These sound bits are highly distorted and hardly recognizable after being been passed through all kinds of filters and effects. It is this excess of distortion that brings to the foreground the use of the technique itself as a way of processing the real to make it more virtual. What Photoshop is to our visual culture, Ableton is to contemporary electronic music. Similar to how PC Music turned the volume on the visual codes and strategies employed in pop and advertising imagery to show its own bubblegum fakeness, you could say post-Internet musicians employ Ableton (and other software) to make their own kind of hyper-saturated music, laying bare that what you eventually hear is miles away from its origin.

Another post-Internet forerunner is Holly Herndon. Her approach is a little more intellectual, 'cleaner' and less dystopian than most of the other artists that we'll be discussing here. Currently a doctoral candidate at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Herndon fuses her classical music upbringing with a harder tech-based sound design. Herndon's work revolves around humanness and technology, providing social commentary on the way in which we communicate and interact with each other over the net and how it is inherently different from the IRL experience. Not only is the medium different, but the language, the expectations and the interactions themselves are literally framed and mediated through our screens. Herndon challenges the idea that online life is of less value than real life in the same way she opposes the notion that the laptop is of less value as an instrument than say the contrabass or piano, something she explains via Pitchfork.

Her sophomore album Platform explores different ideas of community (like the ASMR community on Youtube), communication, identity and information gathering and is characterized by the juxtaposition of beats, clicks and glitches against the human voice. The vocals are reminiscent of choral music and often sound very angelic even though the lyrics themselves can be very mundane or politically and socially engaged. The song Home is a direct response to the NSA saga. "I can feel you in my room. Why was I assigned to you? I feel like I'm home on my own. And it feels like you see me." The anonymity of the Internet is not what we thought it was, there are eyes watching us, monitoring us, our personal data is being collected and stored somewhere. It would have been easy to translate this idea into something dystopian, but Home feels more like a love note to her NSA agent.

"Now that experimental music is in the club, what does that mean politically?" Holly Herndon asks herself. "Will we just hear weird sounds and then get drunk and dance, or are we now able to discuss the values that experimental music can conjure up in those scenarios as well?"
- Holly Herndon on Pitchfork

One of the acts Holly Herndon collaborated with for her second album is Amnesia Scanner. There's not a lot of information to be found on the Internet about this name. (Oh, the irony). Their Last.fm bio states they have worked as a producer for Mykki Blanco, and that's about it. However, as Angels Rig Hook is one of the most interesting things I've heard - ever - I couldn't help but share this track/mixtape. The little over 14 minutes track is a collage of stereo sounds, with lyrics written by internet persona poet/visual artist Jaakko Pallasvuo, amounts to a jarring exploration of the limits of what to some would still be deemed pleasurable.

M.E.S.H. is another one of those artists whose influence within the community of netaware artists is not to be underestimated. Hailing from Santa Barbara, he moved to New York and later to Berlin where he became part of the Janus collective, which offered a platform for musician-producers to test out their music in a club atmosphere, linking them with like-minded people and fostering talent such as Lotic, Renaissance Man and KABLAM.

M.E.S.H.'s sonic world sounds very much like a skewed and dragged collage; shattered glass, broken beats and ominous disruptive melodies joining in from afar. The result is a dense immersive angular soundscape, pulling inspiration from a wide range of genres including noise, grime, hardstyle, Musique Concrète and even Baroque and Renaissance music. Even though there are many references to the past, the result sounds very cyber-eclectic and could easily be called futuristic, a notion which he told The Fader he had rejected.

"[...] made from two very different rhythmic speeds played on the same grid and made to fit together through syncopation, [...] I wanted to create a sense of focus that can come from following two divergent lines of thought that eventually converge again in unexpected ways."
- M.E.S.H. on FACT

Even though M.E.S.H.'s musical patterns come across as those Ableton rectangles, they're mostly hand played, which to the fine tuned ear will make these elements sound 'sloppy' as he puts it in the Fader. For this artists, it is a way to bring the humanness back into the machine or the computer generated.

Similar in terms of style to M.E.S.H. is the Houston-born but Berlin-based J'Kerian Morgan aka Lotic. Equally disruptive and skewed as M.E.S.H. but tends to be more aggressive at times and more reliant on R&B, house and IDM patterns. Listening to Heterocetera EP, you'll hear Lotic's signature balancing act between the aggressive turbulence and anchor points referencing the known. Once again, a tension of chaos and the familiar is present here: a carefully constructed visceral cycle through raw assaulting rhythms that tend to fall apart to become something new again. It is this dynamic and fluid soundscape that gives the feeling of ever pushing forward to the boundaries of the now towards the future that is characteristic for post-Internet music.

His EP Agitations, released on Janus reads more like a mixtape than a collection of separate tracks, and therefore defies the bite-size ready-to-consume commodification prevalent in our Internet culture. When we encounter unconventional examples like this, we have to wonder, is the post-Internet movement also contra-Internet?

Taking aggressiveness to even further is TriAngle signee Rabit. According to a press release from the label, his album Communion is "inspired by issues relating to sexuality, gender, ownership of our natural bodies, societal and governmental injustices, and media manipulations."

Album track "Pandemic" is as unnerving as it is cataclysmic. Throughout the record, Rabit's genre hops as he turns to grime for 808 kicks and shattered glass, looks towards industrial for granular drone tones, and video games provide machinegun beats. Particularly unsettling is the pairing of gunshot salvos with the abstruse sound of children in distress, adding a human aspect to the harshness of the composition.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A 101 on the net-aware movement What does Post-Internet mean? As an art movement Post-Internet follows up on the concept of Internet art or 'net.art' which was more of an exploration of internet technology. Through (mainly) the second half of the nineties the internet was slowly, say 56Kb slowly at first, finding its way into our daily life and eventually began altering our perception of reality.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
is web scraping legal? a million-dollar mystery

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Is Web Scraping Legal? A Million-Dollar Mystery, Demystified!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Is Web Scraping Legal? A Million-Dollar Mystery, Demystified!

# data[].attributes.body
more fun content for your consideration

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A look into how memes have developed throughout different periods within internet history. This is intended to hit the highpoints of meme evolution over the years, and by no means does this video attempt to individually evaluate every single meme out there....there are other channels for that kind of stuff.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Who wants to work on a weapon?

These kinds of leaks didn't happen when I started reporting on Facebook eight years ago. It was a tight-knit cult convinced of its mission to connect everyone, but with the discipline of a military unit where everyone knew loose lips sink ships. Motivational posters with bold corporate slogans dotted its offices, rallying the troops. Employees were happy to be evangelists.

But then came the fake news, News Feed addiction, violence on Facebook Live, cyberbullying, abusive ad targeting, election interference and, most recently, the Cambridge Analytica app data privacy scandals. All the while, Facebook either willfully believed the worst case scenarios could never come true, was naive to their existence or calculated the benefits and growth outweighed the risks. And when finally confronted, Facebook often dragged its feet before admitting the extent of the issues.

Inside the social network's offices, the bonds began to fray. An ethics problem metastisized into a morale problem. Slogans took on sinister second meanings. The Kool-Aid tasted different.

Some hoped they could right the ship but couldn't. Some craved the influence and intellectual thrill of running one of humanity's most popular inventions, but now question if that influence and their work is positive. Others surely just wanted to collect salaries, stock and resumé highlights, but lost the stomach for it.

Now the convergence of scandals has come to a head in the form of constant leaks.

The trouble tipping point

The more benign leaks merely cost Facebook a bit of competitive advantage. We've learned it's building a smart speaker, a standalone VR headset and a Houseparty split-screen video chat clone.

Yet policy-focused leaks have exacerbated the backlash against Facebook, putting more pressure on the conscience of employees. As blame fell to Facebook for Trump's election, word of Facebook prototyping a censorship tool for operating in China escaped, triggering questions about its respect for human rights and free speech. Facebook's content rulebook got out alongside disturbing tales of the filth the company's contracted moderators have to sift through. Its ad targeting was revealed to be able to pinpoint emotionally vulnerable teens.

In recent weeks, the leaks have accelerated to a maddening pace in the wake of Facebook's soggy apologies regarding the Cambridge Analytica debacle. Its weak policy enforcement left the door open to exploitation of data users gave third-party apps, deepening the perception that Facebook doesn't care about privacy.

And it all culminated with BuzzFeed publishing a leaked "growth at all costs" internal post from Facebook VP Andrew "Boz" Bosworth that substantiated people's worst fears about the company's disregard for user safety in pursuit of world domination. Even the ensuing internal discussion about the damage caused by leaks and how to prevent them...leaked.

But the leaks are not the disease, just the symptom. Sunken morale is the cause, and it's dragging down the company. Former Facebook employee and Wired writer Antonio Garcia Martinez sums it up, saying this kind of vindictive, intentionally destructive leak fills Facebook's leadership with "horror":

The fact that some Facebooker would place their personal grudge and views above the interests of the company fills anyone on the home team with horror (in the same way that the current administration colluding with foreigners to secure a domestic victory does Americans).

- Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) March 30, 2018

And that sentiment was confirmed by Facebook's VP of News Feed Adam Mosseri, who tweeted that leaks "create strong incentives to be less transparent internally and they certainly slow us down," and will make it tougher to deal with the big problems.

I'm really worried about this. I worry it'll make it much more difficult to step up to the challenges we face.

- Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) March 30, 2018

Those thoughts weigh heavy on Facebook's team. A source close to several Facebook executives tells us they feel "embarrassed to work there" and are increasingly open to other job opportunities. One current employee told us to assume anything certain execs tell the media is "100% false."

If Facebook can't internally discuss the problems it faces without being exposed, how can it solve them?

Implosion

The consequences of Facebook's failures are typically pegged as external hazards.

You might assume the government will finally step in and regulate Facebook. But the Honest Ads Act and other rules about ads transparency and data privacy could end up protecting Facebook by being simply a paperwork speed bump for it while making it tough for competitors to build a rival database of personal info. In our corporation-loving society, it seems unlikely that the administration would go so far as to split up Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp - one of the few feasible ways to limit the company's power.

Users have watched Facebook make misstep after misstep over the years, but can't help but stay glued to its feed. Even those who don't scroll rely on it as a fundamental utility for messaging and login on other sites. Privacy and transparency are too abstract for most people to care about. Hence, first-time Facebook downloads held steady and its App Store rank actually rose in the week after the Cambridge Analytica fiasco broke. In regards to the #DeleteFacebook movement, Mark Zuckerberg himself said "I don't think we've seen a meaningful number of people act on that." And as long as they're browsing, advertisers will keep paying Facebook to reach them.

That's why the greatest threat of the scandal convergence comes from inside. The leaks are the canary in the noxious blue coal mine.

Can Facebook survive slowing down?

If employees wake up each day unsure whether Facebook's mission is actually harming the world, they won't stay. Facebook doesn't have the same internal work culture problems as some giants like Uber. But there are plenty of other tech companies with less questionable impacts. Some are still private and offer the chance to win big on an IPO or acquisition. At the very least, those in the Bay could find somewhere to work without a spending hours a day on the traffic-snarled 101 freeway.

If they do stay, they won't work as hard. It's tough to build if you think you're building a weapon. Especially if you thought you were going to be making helpful tools. The melancholy and malaise set in. People go into rest-and-vest mode, living out their days at Facebook as a sentence not an opportunity. The next killer product Facebook needs a year or two from now might never coalesce.

And if they do work hard, a culture of anxiety and paralysis will work against them. No one wants to code with their hands tied, and some would prefer a less scrutinized environment. Every decision will require endless philosophizing and risk-reduction. Product changes will be reduced to the lowest common denominator, designed not to offend or appear too tyrannical.

In fact, that's partly how Facebook got into this whole mess. A leak by an anonymous former contractor led Gizmodo to report Facebook was suppressing conservative news in its Trending section. Terrified of appearing liberally biased, Facebook reportedly hesitated to take decisive action against fake news. That hands-off approach led to the post-election criticism that degraded morale and pushed the growing snowball of leaks down the mountain.

It's still rolling.

How to stop morale's downward momentum will be one of Facebook's greatest tests of leadership. This isn't a bug to be squashed. It can't just roll back a feature update. And an apology won't suffice. It will have to expel or reeducate the leakers and those disloyal without instilling a witch hunt's sense of dread. Compensation may have to jump upwards to keep talent aboard like Twitter did when it was floundering. Its top brass will need to show candor and accountability without fueling more indiscretion. And it may need to make a shocking, landmark act of contrition to convince employees its capable of change.

When asked how Facebook could address the morale problem, Mosseri told me "it starts with owning our mistakes and being very clear about what we're doing now" and noted that "it took a while to get into this place and I think it'll take a while to work our way out . . . Trust is lost quickly, and takes a long time to rebuild."

I think it starts with owning our mistakes and being very clear about what we're doing now. For much of the company November 2016 was their first negative cycle, so it's also good to share old stories. And then you have to deliver, you have to make real progress on the issues.

- Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) March 30, 2018

This isn't about whether Facebook will disappear tomorrow, but whether it will remain unconquerable for the forseeable future.

Growth has been the driving mantra for Facebook since its inception. No matter how employees are evaluated, it's still the underlying ethos. Facebook has poised itself as a mission-driven company. The implication was always that connecting people is good so connecting more people is better. The only question was how to grow faster.
If you're a Facebook employee or anyone else that has information to share with TechCrunch, you can contact us at Tips@techcrunch.com or this article's author Josh Constine's DMs are open on Twitter. Here are some of our feature stories on Facebook's recent issues:
Now Zuckerberg will have to figure out how to get Facebook to cautiously foresee the consequences of what it says and does while remaining an appealing place to work. "Move slow and think things through" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The real threat to Facebook is the Kool-Aid turning sour

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Who wants to work on a weapon? These kinds of leaks didn't happen when I started reporting on Facebook eight years ago. It was a tight-knit cult convinced of its mission to connect everyone, but with the discipline of a military unit where everyone knew loose lips sink ships.

# data[].attributes.body
There is method in the madness

# data[].attributes.body
what could go wrong?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Curious about the mysteries of the internet's deepest and darkest crevices? Check out the new gallery exhibit from a bold Swiss art collective named !Mediengruppe Bitnik. The group has equipped a laptop with an automated bot designed to surf a massive online dark market site called Alpha Bay and make illicit purchases at random.

The bot is given a weekly budget of $100 in bitcoin, and the artists have no clue what kind of contraband will arrive at the gallery. Giving the program, also known as Random Darknet Shopper, free rein is certainly a risky move, since drugs and weaponry are available on the site. It's sort of like a digital Secret Santa for illegal goods. What could be better?

This new exhibit isn't !Mediengruppe Bitnik's first foray into the shadowy corners of the internet marketplace. Random Darknet Shopper was first let loose in a gallery in Switzerland in 2014. Designed to buy one random item per week, the program spent the first few weeks ordering relatively innocuous, albeit illegal goods such as fake Nike sneakers, a baseball cap with a hidden camera and counterfeit Diesel jeans. It was when the mischievous bot ordered ten ecstasy tablets from Germany that authorities began to take notice.

Surprisingly, Swiss police were actually rather easygoing about Darknet Shopper's shady dealings, deciding that the transactions were "reasonable means for the purpose of sparking public debate about questions related to the exhibition." Not every police force has such a nuanced understanding of subversive contemporary art. Let's hope authorities in the UK are this relaxed if !Mediengruppe Bitnik's bot decides to, say, order a kidney or hire a hitman when the new exhibit opens in London.

"I sleep badly the night before it goes shopping," one of the bot's creators, Domagoj Smoljo, told The Independent in the UK. "It is something that is out of our control. We feel vulnerable, but at the same time we like it."

The Swiss exhibition resulted in some interesting purchases, like this passport scan bought from Hungary.

And these knock-off Diesel jeans from China.

And these fake Nikes, also from China.

The Random Darknet Shopper is on display beginning December 11 at the Horatio Junior gallery in London.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Computer Bot Goes on Dark Web Shopping Spree in the Name of Art

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Curious about the mysteries of the internet's deepest and darkest crevices? Check out the new gallery exhibit from a bold Swiss art collective named !Mediengruppe Bitnik. The group has equipped a laptop with an automated bot designed to surf a massive online dark market site called Alpha Bay and make illicit purchases at random.

# data[].attributes.headline
From Vaporwave to Penisbearcats: Facebook’s vernacular meme neighbourhoods

# data[].attributes.subject
From Vaporwave to Penisbearcats: Facebook’s vernacular meme neighbourhoods

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Even though Facebook has reached unimaginable heights in terms of users, the platform still houses a plethora of obscure pages. The Facebook data-extraction tool Netvizz provides an excellent method to 'dig into' the vernacular or arcane spaces of Zuckerberg's platform. Netvizz's 'page like network'-function provides data indicating which Facebook pages 'like' other pages. Say page A likes pages B and C, all pages will be registered as node with their relations - in this example node A pointing to (i.e. liking) nodes B and C. While this is fruitful in visualising the inner circle of a page's likes, it gets more interesting when the network goes a step further. By selecting a depth of 2 in Netvizz, the network will also show what pages B and C like. For instance, it will show that node A likes node B and C, but also that node B likes nodes X and Y, and that node C likes M and N. The resulting network shows a 'weak ties'-network, indicating the implicit connections between Facebook pages. This text will descriptively describe the 'blocks in the meme-neighbourhoods'.

A Facebook-page called 'Disdainus Maximus', a self-proclaimed hub for 'original content and social shitposting', generates a particularly insightful network, as seen above. The size of the nodes indicates how many likes it receives from other nodes in the network (i.e. a bigger node means more node-likes), while the more red a node is, the more absolute likes it has (i.e. from regular Facebook users). Note: the network was generated in March 2017, so it is somewhat outdated.

The Disdainus Maximus-network shows four distinct clusters of 'meme neighbourhoods': right-wing populist (meme) activism, western nationalism, pluralist apolitical memes and imperial memes.

The closest connections to Disdainus Maximus (inside the red circle) are pages that fairly outspokenly portray right-wing sentiments. For instance, Disdain for Plebs (now banned) and The Straight, White, Capitalist spread anti-liberal and pro-capitalist memery. The neighbourhood's block of Deus Vult-pages indicate a connection to faux-ironic Christian memes. The countryball-block might not be outspokenly right-wing, but some countryball-pages are more partisan than their Reddit counterpart. Additionally, the neighbourhood includes Trump's own Facebook-page, within a block of 'establishment populism' containing Breitbart, the NRA and Nigel Farage. A block of 'unironic Trump activism' can be idenitified that hosts less ironic content and more 'sincere' Trump-memes, like Diamond and Silk and MAGA Memes.

The right-wing neighbourhood (no pun intended) contains pages with more troublesome sentiments, heavily idolising Western culture. These can be relatively innocent, like the page 'Traditionalist Western Art', which mostly posts art pieces without further context. However, more extreme pages also show up, uttering pride of 'whiteness' or feverish European nationalism. Anti-globalist and anti-left sentiments are also present, particularly through the page Smash Cultural Marxism (spreading the antisemitic conspiracy of a global network of Marxists pulling the Earth's strings).

On the left-hand side, a big sphere of less political meme-pages pops up, containing 'high-concept' in-jokes. Their names are a sight to behold, with personal favourites being 'Kermit de la Frog: The Mean Green Meme Machine', 'Penisbearcats', and 'Avant-garde memes from China'. This neighbourhood contains everything from post-ironic meme-ing to 'sequels' of other pages (e.g. 'This is not a Meme Page', 'Full house memes 2' and 'META Penisbearcats'). One noteable block contains Vaporwave-page: an aesthetic style inspired by 80's synth EDM.

Finally, a cluster of Imperial memes shows up, with pages containing an aliterating name representing a former Empire, e.g. 'Jammin' Japanese Memes' or 'Cute Confederate memes'.

The meme-network was made by Sal Hagen and Marc Tuters of OILab in collaboration with Carlo de Geatano.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
From Vaporwave to Penisbearcats: Facebook's vernacular meme neighbourhoods

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Even though Facebook has reached unimaginable heights in terms of users, the platform still houses a plethora of obscure pages. The Facebook data-extraction tool Netvizz provides an excellent method to 'dig into' the vernacular or arcane spaces of Zuckerberg's platform. Netvizz's 'page like network'-function provides data indicating which Facebook pages 'like' other pages.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Governments worldwide have been ramping up regulations for cryptocurrencies and hiring research and blockchain surveillance teams. One firm that tracks transactions on the Bitcoin Core blockchain is called Chainalysis, and this year the company has gathered over a half a million USD on record from various government and law enforcement entities. Also read: South Korean Exchange Korbit Stops Serving International Citizens
Public Records Show Chainalysis Is Garnering Quite a Bit of Funds from Government Agencies

Over the course of the past year, one company has received a lot of money from government and law enforcement groups. That firm is Chainalysis, a blockchain surveillance team created in October 2014 by Jan Moller, Jonathan Levin, and Michael Gronager. Currently there's a whole slew of teams that monitor blockchain activity, but Chainalysis has worked with nearly every U.S. government agency and is also employed by European organizations as well such as Europol. On record, the company has garnered $500,000 USD from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and many more entities. The company is likely the most hired firm dedicated to following bitcoin transactions as multiple reports have disclosed many contracts and partnerships with Chainalysis over the past twelve months.

The IRS, DEA, ICE, FBI, Ficen, and Many More Government Entities Continue to Hire Chainalysis

For instance, the U.S. law enforcement agency the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have poured a lot of money into Chainalysis's coffers. The company was hired by the IRS earlier this year, and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has paid Chainalysis this past fall . All three of these agencies have paid Chainalysis multiple times in the past as the firm has helped with investigations like the Silk Road trial and the Mt. Gox bankruptcy as well. Last year the company also disclosed in a U.S. congressional hearing that it knew the location of the missing 650,000 BTC lost during the Mt Gox demise. At the congressional hearing, the Chainalysis co-founder Jonathan Levin told a U.S. senator the firm had found the Mt Gox coins. Levin states this past June:

Chainalysis was the official investigator in the Mt. Gox bankruptcy case and the destination of those coins is definitely known.

The Company Aims to Respect Privacy While at the Same Time Preventing Financial Abuse

Chainalysis' website states that the company believes in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. However, the company was built to spot connections between digital identities and identify malicious actors. The firm's mission statement is to create tools that respect user privacy but also prevent abuse within the financial system at the same time.

Companies that hire Chainalysis receive reports on blockchain activity that include alerts and quarterly reviews. The company helps organizations with onboarding customers and assists them by showing exactly where funds are coming from by verifying blockchain sources. Chainalysis also says they have very efficient "cyber threat intel" that can teach employees how to deal with blockchain related threats.

"Train your analysts to be able to spot emerging threats from the deep web and investigate ransomware or extortion notes in-house," emphasizes the New York-based blockchain surveillance firm.

Speculators Believe Chainalysis Has Gathered Millions from Government Entities Worldwide
What do you think about governments hiring Chainalysis to monitor the bitcoin core network and other blockchains? Let us know what you think in the comments below. Images via Shutterstock, and Chainalysis. Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section.
The fact that Chainalysis is gathering a lot of clients stemming from governments and law enforcement entities is becoming more alarming to privacy advocates who believe in the future of cryptocurrencies. The public records concerning funding Chainalysis for investigation is $500,000, but that's just in the U.S. It is estimated that this one blockchain surveillance company has received millions from governments all around the world.

Jamie Redman is a financial tech journalist living in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for Bitcoin, open source code, and decentralized applications. Redman has written hundreds of articles about the disruptive protocols emerging today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Your Taxes Paid for a Lot of Blockchain Surveillance Last Year - Bitcoin News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Governments worldwide have been ramping up regulations for cryptocurrencies and hiring research and blockchain surveillance teams. One firm that tracks transactions on the Bitcoin Core blockchain is called Chainalysis, and this year the company has gathered over a half a million USD on record from various government and law enforcement entities.

# data[].attributes.body
A good idea or too late?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I usually write in Google's online word processor Google Docs, even when noting the company's shortcomings. This article is different: it was drafted in a similar but more private service called Graphite Docs. I discovered it while exploring a nascent and glitch-ridden online realm known as the decentralized internet.

Proponents as varied as privacy activists and marquee venture capitalists talk about the decentralized internet as a kind of digital Garden of Eden that can restore the freedom and goodwill of the internet's early days. The argument goes that big tech companies have locked up our data and minds inside stockholder-serving platforms that crush competition and privacy. Ultra-private, socially conscious decentralized apps, sometimes dubbed DApps, will give us back control of our data and let startups slay giants once more.

"The best entrepreneurs, developers, and investors have become wary of building on top of centralized platforms," Chris Dixon, a partner with investor Andreessen Horowitz, wrote last month in a kind of manifesto for a more decentralized internet. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has similar concerns. Graphite Docs and some other early DApps are far from perfect but show there's something to the hype. A life less dependent on cloud giants is possible, if not yet easy.

When you type in Google Docs, every word is sent to the ad company's servers, where you must take it on faith your data will be left alone. Despite Google's privacy policies and strong reputation for security, it has the technical ability to do whatever it wants with information you entrust to it. When I tapped these sentences into Graphite Docs they received a higher level of protection.

I could still access and edit my document from different computers, and even invite collaborators, because it was backed up online as I worked. But the data was stored in an encrypted form, on a network of computers unable to read my data. The encryption keys needed to unscramble it never left my own devices, meaning that unlike with most of the online services I use, my data was solely under my control.

All that was possible because Graphite Docs is built on top of Blockstack, a platform for decentralized internet apps developed by a startup of the same name. You access apps on the platform through a browser, but they run locally, on your computer, with help from software you install from Blockstack. That software helps you create the ID you need to log in to Blockstack apps and stores your encryption keys. And it gives you a choice of where you want to store your encrypted data: your own server or the Gaia storage network powered by Blockstack and some early adopters who have contributed their own computers to the cause. You can access your data from anywhere-as long as you remember your 12-word encryption keyphrase.

As you've probably gathered, getting started on the decentralized internet isn't as easy as downloading a new app from an app store. The people behind these clunky, early apps claim that it eventually will be. They argue cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, powered by many computers around the globe, and the datastores of a similar design known as blockchains, show that robust, secure infrastructure doesn't need central authorities or servers. "We're working to build a new internet, and the end goal is everyone you know is on it every single day," Blockstack cofounder Ryan Shea says.

For a computing platform to become that ubiquitous it must attract two kinds of people: developers to build news apps and services, and users. Decentralized apps and services are already appearing aimed at both audiences.

Several groups are working on alternatives to cloud storage providers like Amazon. When I uploaded photos to a service called Storj, for example, they were chopped up, encrypted, and distributed among a network of computers owned by strangers who had volunteered storage space on their systems in return for fees paid in cryptocurrency. You may know the basic idea from fictional startup Pied Piper in the sitcom Silicon Valley, but it works-albeit in my experience slowly and not always reliably.

Many decentralized internet projects are, like Graphite Docs, pitched as more private versions of existing products. The service, which offers spreadsheets as well as documents, was founded by developer and writer Justin Hunter, who plans to make money by offering an enterprise version to organizations that value privacy. Another project, OpenBazaar, is something like a decentralized eBay. When I browsed last week I saw lemon matcha tea, postage stamps, and hemp oil available to anyone willing to pay in bitcoin or a spinoff currency, bitcoin cash. In December, Blockstack put up $50,000 to encourage people to build decentralized messaging apps that could compete with apps such as Slack. Apps such as iMessage, WhatsApp, and Signal already encrypt what you write locally, but they still rely on a central server to move messages around.

Some parts of the emerging decentralized internet have serious backing from people who helped build the current generation of tech giants, with their centralized services. Now that their creations are proving difficult to compete with, venture capitalists appear to be seeking returns elsewhere.

Venture firms Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz, backers of Google and Facebook, respectively, have invested in a decentralized data-storage network called Filecoin, a creation of startup Protocol Labs intended to compete with conventional cloud storage. As with many decentralized internet projects, the company has raised money by selling a form of cryptocurrency that will later be used to motivate participation in the final system. Blockstack, a public benefit corporation, recently raised $50 million in the same way, adding to the more than $5 million in venture funding it has received from investors including Union Square Ventures, an early backer of Twitter.

Despite that blue-chip backing, the decentralized internet remains a niche interest closely allied with the idiosyncratic world of cryptocurrencies-and it shows. When I visited DTube, billed as a decentralized variant of YouTube, the trending videos were predominantly male vloggers opining on topics including bitcoin trading and the need to dissolve the US government.

Videos were sometimes very slow to load. But they weren't interrupted or obscured by ads, and I didn't have to wonder whether watching an interview with conspiracy theorist G. Edward Griffin would be cataloged by an ad-profiling algorithm and haunt me later. Users can tip video creators with the cryptocurrency steem, and popular videos can bring in hundreds of dollars' worth. The video files themselves are stored on the interplanetary file system, IPFS, a decentralized file-sharing system powered by volunteers.

It's a clever design but one that illustrates how decentralized systems might face legal and governance problems. Some parts of the IPFS network support copyright takedowns, but they can be worked around. DTube's operators say they can't censor videos on the service, and that content will only disappear if the site's users overwhelmingly down-vote it. If the community's actions don't meet the expectations of copyright lawyers, or end up penalizing certain kinds of content, expect things to get complicated.

Can these early, clunky decentralized apps ever compete with the centralized services that dominate today? When I ask Stavros Korokithakis, a software developer in Greece, he replies, "Certainly." He and a friend have built a decentralized app called Hearth, described as a cross between Dropbox and a web-hosting service.

Korokithakis says he wants to help people create personal and idiosyncratic web pages as they did on the "old web" of the 1990s, before predefined and ad-supported social profiles like those offered by Facebook ruled the world. But he concedes that taking on the centralized giants is a tough challenge. For now, decentralized apps' clearest benefit is their resistance to censorship, he says, yet "the average person doesn't feel the need to evade censorship."

David Pakman, a partner with venture firm Venrock, which has invested in a forthcoming decentralized video-streaming network called Props, argues that decentralized apps will soon have more to offer. New platforms begin by trying to emulate old ones but take off when people create new services that were previously unimaginable, he says.

It's a convenient way to avoid being pinned down on just what the decentralized web will be good for. It's also true. The creators of the Apple II did not predict the success of the first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, the killer app that helped establish the utility of PCs in workplaces. The DoD-backed academics who laid the foundations of the internet didn't foresee or build Facebook.

Finding the killer apps of the decentralized internet will take more time, people, and money than have been thrown at the problem so far. Pakman says that societal attitudes to power and big tech companies appear to be in the right place to deliver them. "There's massive distrust in centralized everything," he says. "We don't trust the government, don't go to church or synagogue, don't trust banks, and now we no longer trust tech companies."

Reinventing the Internet

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, but he isn't happy with how it turned out.

Fictional startup Pied Piper's plan for a "new internet" was good for laughs in the TV show Silicon Valley, but some entrepreneurs are building it for real.

Do we really need a blockchain for everything? Some startups seem to have grabbed hold of the concept only because their original business plans went awry.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Decentralized Internet Is Here, With Some Glitches

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I usually write in Google's online word processor Google Docs, even when noting the company's shortcomings. This article is different: it was drafted in a similar but more private service called Graphite Docs. I discovered it while exploring a nascent and glitch-ridden online realm known as the decentralized internet.

# data[].attributes.headline
Starbucks Wi-Fi Hijacked People's Laptops to Mine Cryptocurrency

# data[].attributes.subject
Starbucks Wi-Fi Hijacked People's Laptops to Mine Cryptocurrency

# data[].attributes.body
now sip the bitterness of betrayal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Image: Flickr/jmettraux

When Stensul CEO Noah Dinkin visited a Starbucks in Buenos Aires recently, he probably didn't expect to be served some sneaky cryptocurrency miner code along with his coffee. But thanks to the store's internet provider, that's exactly what he got.

"HiStarbucks, did you know that your in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires forces a 10 second delay when you first connect to the wifi so it can mine bitcoin using a customer's laptop?" Dinkin tweeted on December 2. "Feels a little off-brand." Dinkin wrote that Bitcoin was the digital currency being mined, but CoinHive, the company that provided the code for the miner, only works with Monero, a competing coin.

Surreptitious cryptocurrency mining has become a bit of a phenomenon of late. The value of digital currencies is skyrocketing across the board, so companies and websites are getting in on the gold rush by injecting a user's browser with code that hijacks their processing power to generate digital tokens. This process, known as "mining," is resource-intensive and can significantly impact performance.
Read More: A 'Fortnite' Cheat Maker Duped Players Into Downloading a Bitcoin Miner
On December 11, Starbucks responded to Dinkin's tweet, acknowledging the issue and announcing that it's been resolved. Visitors to the Buenos Aires location where Dinkin noticed the mining code will no longer have their computers sneakily hijacked, it would seem.

"As soon as we were alerted of the situation in this specific store last week, we took swift action to ensure our internet provider resolved the issue and made the changes needed in order to ensure our customers could use Wi-Fi in our store safely," the official Starbucks account tweeted to Dinkin.

Starbucks spokesperson Reggie Borges told Motherboard that the incident was isolated to the Beunos Aires location and the problem was with the service provider, not Starbucks itself.

"Last week, we were alerted to the issue and we reached out to our internet service provider-the Wi-Fi is not run by Starbucks, it's not something we own or control," Borges said over the phone. "We want to ensure that our customers are able to search the internet over Wi-Fi securely, so we will always work closely with our service provider when something like this comes up."

"We don't have any concern that this is widespread across any of our stores," Borges continued.

In a way, using any laptop that logs into the Wi-Fi at a busy coffee shop to mine cryptocurrency is a genius way to generate revenue. In another, more salient way, it's completely invasive and inappropriate.

Next time you're checking email while sipping an espresso at your favourite joint, it might pay to investigate if your computer is chugging along.
UPDATE: This article has been updated to include comment from a Starbucks spokesperson.
Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Starbucks Wi-Fi Hijacked People's Laptops to Mine Cryptocurrency

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Image: Flickr/jmettraux When Stensul CEO Noah Dinkin visited a Starbucks in Buenos Aires recently, he probably didn't expect to be served some sneaky cryptocurrency miner code along with his coffee. But thanks to the store's internet provider, that's exactly what he got.

# data[].attributes.headline
This App Is Helping Black Organizers Bail People Out of Jail

# data[].attributes.subject
This App Is Helping Black Organizers Bail People Out of Jail

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Appolition co-founders Kortney Ziegler and Tiffany Mikell. Image: Appolition

February 13 is Black Love Day, an alternative to Valentine's Day founded in 1993 for Black people to love and celebrate one another. This year it also marks the beginning of a month-long effort by the National Bail Out collective, a network of Black organizers-including Black Lives Matter and the Dream Defenders-who are working to end cash bail and pretrial detention, with the help of Appolition, an app released in November.

Black people are disproportionately impacted by the bail system because they are more likely to have low incomes before they are detained. The Prison Policy Institute found that the typical Black man, Black woman, and Hispanic woman in jail live below the poverty line before landing in jail. This can wreak havoc on entire communities: when people aren't able to post bail and spend days in jail, they stand to lose their jobs, homes, and even custody of their children.

Part of the funds for the bail out, which will take place in Memphis, Los Angeles, and a few cities in Alabama and Texas, come from the Appolition app, created by Kortney Ziegler and Tiffany Mikell, two Black tech founders who also started Aerial Spaces, a tool to host live, online events. In 2013, Ziegler also created Trans*H4CK, an organization that provides visibility and support for transgender and gender nonconforming people in tech.

When Appolition users make purchases with a credit or debit card, each one is rounded up to the nearest dollar. The app is linked to its user's bank account, collects the spare change, and donates it to organizations focused on bail relief for Black Americans.

"They're the reason why the app exists in the first place," Ziegler, social engineer and Appolition co-founder, told me, referring to the National Bail Out collective.

"I haven't seen anything like it before"

Since the app launched three months ago, over 7,500 users have signed up and have raised more than $60,000. Appolition collects about $2,000 per day, according to Ziegler. In December, direct donations from people who learned about National Bail Fund Network from Appolition supported Black Lives Matter Cambridge, a local chapter of the national organization, and the Massachusetts Bail Fund with its holiday bail outs.*

"I haven't seen anything like it before and I'm just humbled by the community of folks who are signing up and joining and wanting to do their part," said Arissa Hall, a project coordinator at the National Bail Fund Network.

About 85 percent of the money collected goes to the National Bail Out collective, which distributes the funds to its partners. The rest goes to overhead costs and founders say they are expecting more growth.

"There are thousands of people who want to join [Appolition as users] and we have to now rebuild the software in a way that we can be inclusive of all folks so it's an exciting problem to have," Ziegler said, noting that they want to be able to accept donations from all banks and financial institutions.

Appolition is currently fundraising to expand support to other organizations doing social justice work and will begin accepting donations from people internationally. Ziegler, who is based in Oakland, is particularly interested in exploring how the app can help people who've been impacted by drug laws now that recreational cannabis is legal in California.

Meanwhile, the month-long bail-out initiative will lead up to the National Black Mamas Bail Out in May, an event that also took place last year and exceeded its goal of raising $250K for bail, freeing more than 100* women on Mother's Day.
Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day Corrections: This article originally said Appolition funds bailed out 23 people, but the funds were part of a larger effort. This article also originally said 30 women were bailed out on Mother's Day, but the number was actually 100 mothers and caretakers. by signing up for our newsletter .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
This App Is Helping Black Organizers Bail People Out of Jail

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Appolition co-founders Kortney Ziegler and Tiffany Mikell. Image: Appolition February 13 is Black Love Day, an alternative to Valentine's Day founded in 1993 for Black people to love and celebrate one another.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Professor Richard Susskind has bad news for your children. "We're training young people to be good at what machines are already good at," he says during a discussion with Emma Barnett at FutureFest 2016. In Susskind's latest book , co-authored with his son, he explores the very real possibility that future experts will lose their jobs to artificial intelligence. So confident in this is he that he thinks thousands of students are driving down a career cul-de-sac without realising it.

You might be rolling your eyes at this point, feeling that warnings of robots taking your job are overblown, trite, or both, but Susskind - an expert in law and AI - has a history of being dismissed by peers. "In 1996 I wrote a book on the future of law and - I know it sounds ridiculous now - but I said that 'the dominant way that lawyers will communicate in future will be by email.' At the time, the Law Society of England and Wales said I shouldn't be allowed to speak in public and that I was bringing the legal profession into disrepute."

So it's no surprise that 20 years on, some people still have their fingers in their ears. "It's hard convincing a room full of millionaires that they've got their business model wrong," he quips.

In Susskind's book, he and his son explore two possible futures: one where machines augment our current professions (a doctor using Skype to remotely connect with a patient, say), and one where the profession is directly replaced (the computer does the diagnosis, cutting out the middleman). Elements of this are, of course, already rearing their heads. "In one year, more people signed up to Harvard's online courses than attended the entire university since it began," Susskind says, while highlighting advancements in practically every sector. "Even in the clergy, we found an app called Confession," he says. "It has tools for tracking sin, and a dropdown menu with offers of contrition." It brings to mind, Susskind says, an aphorism from the science-fiction writer William Gibson: "The future has arrived, it's just not evenly distributed yet."

This needn't be a scary scenario; we just need to adapt to the changes that seem increasingly inevitable. "Our professions are creaking. If you think of the difficulties of our NHS, of getting access to justice, of our education system. Our professions aren't really delivering the quality of service we want," he says. "We say in a technology-based internet society, surely there are other ways of sorting out problems that, historically, professionals would solve." In short, this AI-driven future should be something to embrace. "People are wanting to do to professions what Amazon did to bookselling," he argues.

"The least likely future is nothing's going to change," says Susskind, "yet that's the assumption that many people are basing their entire careers on."

"Humans don't like change"

As AI is a big focus for FutureFest this year, it's no surprise that I run into Susskind on a panel again later in the day - this time discussing similar issues with futurologist David Smith. It isn't, as it turns out, much of a debate, as they're pretty much in complete agreement.

"We started off with automating manual tasks - diggers, cranes, lorries, et cetera," Smith explains. "Then we automated clerical tasks, so we don't have hundreds of people sitting at desks writing in ledgers, and lots of people lost their jobs and they did something else. Then we automated managerial decision-making, and that's increasingly built into systems behind the scenes. All this is now is the professions' turn. This is what's uncomfortable: the professions that you studied for years have never had to go through this degree of change."

"Human beings don't like change. Corporations don't like change. Startup firms that want to beat corporations love change," says Smith, and they are the disruptors here. Sometimes disruption can happen too quickly for our "creaking institutions" (to paraphrase Susskind) to cope: "The law lags behind technology by five, six or seven years," he claims.

As if immediately proving Smith's points regarding humans and change, one of the questioners from the audience articulates much of our unease, even at an event where people have paid money to look into the future. "This feels like an incredibly weird debate we're watching, like 'look at the pretty asteroid in the sky'," he comments. Why isn't the government doing anything about the inevitable?

Susskind, up to this point a seemingly half-full glass of optimism, couldn't really argue with that. "I can offer you almost no comfort at all," he replied. "It seems to me that we simply have not engaged, in industry, in government, in policymaking at the highest level. These people need to be thinking most about this imminent issue for resolution, even though the technology will take some time to unfold."

There are signs this is beginning to be taken seriously, but as ever with these changes, far too slowly. Former Conservative leader William Hague wrote about the issue in The Telegraph just two months ago, and the same issue had been discussed at a fringe event during this year's Labour Party conference in Liverpool. "Technology can either be our master or our servant," Jon Trickett, shadow secretary of state for business, innovation and skills, . "I think we will have to make it our servant."

That seems a somewhat naive view to me. It's certainly something Susskind is used to hearing, but he's unconvinced that our progress could be stopped, even if we as a society decided we wanted to. "There are two strategies: you can either say 'I'm going to compete with the machines, or you can say you're going to build the machines. Those are really the only two options."

Stop me if you've heard this one before

Of course, it's easy to be a little hyperbolic about these things. As another FutureFest speaker, Jared Robert Keller - a specialist in the history of automation and the labour market - points out, these fears have been a part of our debate since the 1920s. On 11 December 1927, The New York Times featured the headline "' MACHINES, MACHINES!' THE FUTURIST'S CRY; But the World Asks Whether Man Will Be Enslaved by the Instruments He Creates to Free Him From Bondage." The 1933 Chicago World Fair put it a bit more bleakly, with the motto " Science finds, industry applies, man conforms. "

With such a rich history of experts predicting bleak things for unemployment - and as yet being quite far off - Keller is perhaps a little more sceptical than most. He outlines a mistake made time and time again with our predictions about the future of work: we judge future job markets by what is available at the time of the prediction. Take cybersecurity - a whole sector that simply didn't exist a few short decades ago. "It's kind of a zero-sum game, where one job taken by a robot means one less potential job for a human being," Keller explains, "but as we know the job market is constantly changing and creating new occupations."

"I think if we're going to say that 'we're the generation that proves the rule, where mass unemployment hits,' we have to be very clear about what makes us the exception."

I put this quote directly to Susskind when I sit down to talk with him later. "We have seen no evidence in any of our research that the new tasks that emerge are tasks for which machines have a comparative disadvantage over human beings, and that's very, very different," he replies. "In the past when the new tasks have emerged, there have been no machines to take them on."

" The point is our machines are wildly more capable than they were, so somehow to compare primitive factory technology to what we have now is to be missing the point," he added. I explain more of the context of the quotes, highlighting that it was surveying the environment in an historical context. "Historians are not always helpful in periods of discontinuity," Susskind counters. "Historians will say we can learn from the past, and it's true, but I think this is a different era."

"Remember I've been involved in AI for 35 years - my doctorate was in AI - I didn't say this 35 years ago. I'm saying it now."

Coping with the transition

Despite this, Susskind doesn't believe this rapid transformation will occur right away, and if you're over the age of 50 and reading this, you'll likely be spared the most dramatic shifts. " We don't think this is an overnight change. The 2020s is a decade of redeployment rather than unemployment, but by the 40s there will be significant questions of what human beings should do."

But it's a future that he's broadly optimistic for. In particular, the idea that knowledge can be held in commons. "It's a kind of vision, and maybe even an ideology, that really excites us," says Susskind. "In areas such as medicine, the idea that everyone on the planet has access to good diagnostic and treatment systems is amazing. That everyone on the planet could have access to guidance to what their entitlements are is amazing. That small businesses could dip into the expert ise of [management consulting firm] McKinsey, not by having to pay their hourly rate but by accessing some online service, is fantastic."

(Above: Richard Susskind)
"What's harder to be excited about is the reality that there'll be fewer and fewer things for human professionals to do, because this requires a whole recalibration of our thinking - in terms of the role of work in our lives, and whether work is necessary for a meaningful life and so forth.

"This is too important to be left to technologists. This is too important to be left to the market."

Quite. As the debate I mentioned earlier showed, politicians aren't paid to think of the long-term consequences - quite the opposite in fact. They're incentivised to push short-term policies with swift returns, to hold aloft when seeking re-election five years later.

Unless we think about these terms, we could well have a crisis of capitalism, Smith believes. "If you think about the language, it's very old: we use the ideas of retirement, pensions, taxation, welfare, how we generate money. The language is all wrong. This is half the problem - we can't really have a conversation until we rethink how it really works," he says.

Ultimately, he concludes, to use our current vernacular, businesses that employ fewer people but make more money will have to pay more tax, but that's a problem in its own right. "Making people want to do that in any single geographical jurisdiction or tax regime is going to be really interesting.

"There needs to be a debate among politicians who have a view of the future - and there aren't many - for a political system that has more long-term thinking." How do we extract money from automated industries - and in a global society, how do we ensure the money just doesn't cross tax borders? Because if humans aren't earning a wage anymore, then something has to give.

If all of this is leaving you feeling alienated from the seismic changes on the horizon, I'll leave you with this quote from Susskind: "We are living through a period of greater and more rapid technological progress than humanity's ever seen," he told the audience during the debate. "It's just a privilege to be alive during this period.

"You can fold your arms as many professionals do and say 'I hope I can hold out until retirement', or you say 'actually, what's my role in this?' Every couple of hundred years you have an opportunity to take part in a fundamental change in human society. We've got that now. I think to be scared of it is to miss the point."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Professor Richard Susskind has bad news for your children. "We're training young people to be good at what machines are already good at," he says during a discussion with Emma Barnett at FutureFest 2016. In Susskind's latest book , co-authored with his son, he explores the very real possibility that future experts will lose their jobs to artificial intelligence.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Imagine you are nothing like how you are right now," says Duretti Hirpa, a senior engineer at Slack. The words tumble out of her mouth as she tries to convey the alienation and otherness of working in Silicon Valley when you don't fit the conventional image of an engineer. "It's very tough to explain to someone what you experience, if it's not their lived experience," she says. Between 2006 and 2011, women represented just 12 percent of the engineering workforce in the United States, according to data collected by the American Association of University Women. In the same time period, women of color accounted for just over 4 percent of the engineering talent.

Silicon Valley companies also struggle to retain female engineers. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that 32 percent of women in science, technology, engineering, and math leave the field within a year compared to 22 percent of men. Women told WIRED about work environments in which they often are the only female on their team and must constantly reaffirm their skills and knowledge. They see few role models or paths for advancement. Erica Baker, an engineer and outspoken voice for diversity and inclusion in tech, says that although many companies track their diversity, "we don't really talk much about the inclusion part. What are you doing to make sure that everybody is included and feels safe and happy and comfortable and supported and valued in your organization?"

This lack of progress drew national attention again earlier this year when programmer Susan J. Fowler published a blog post detailing the sexual harassment and discrimination she faced at Uber. The most alarming revelation may have been Fowler's depiction of a corporate culture that all but ignored her allegations, even when she reported them to human resources.

All industries face challenges when it comes to gender disparity. But what do those challenges look like when 88 percent of your field looks nothing like you? Five women engineers based in Silicon Valley, whose years in the industry range from 8 months to 20 years, shared their experiences with WIRED.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Women Engineers On the Rampant Sexism of Silicon Valley

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Imagine you are nothing like how you are right now," says Duretti Hirpa, a senior engineer at Slack. The words tumble out of her mouth as she tries to convey the alienation and otherness of working in Silicon Valley when you don't fit the conventional image of an engineer.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's shameful that our children are still so computer illiterate. Let's give them the skills to take on the tech giants, and create a more democratic internet

hree years ago, before the Brexit dreams of renewed imperial glory and Vimto for all took wing, England took an uncharacteristically bold step into the future. Michael Gove was in charge of the Department for Education, and he appeared to make good his promise to revolutionise the teaching of computing in schools. He damned the subject known as information and communication technology (or ICT), which its detractors - with a good deal of justification - said was too often reducible to showing kids how to use PowerPoint. "About as much use as teaching children to send a telex or travel in a zeppelin," said Gove. The new thing, he enthused, was computer science, and a drive to ensure that schools would now show their pupils "not just how to work a computer; but how a computer works, and how to make it work for you".

Five-year-olds were to be shown how to code; those aged seven to 11 would be introduced to "sequence, selection, and repetition in programs". In 2015, after a long period of groundwork, it was announced that a new GCSE in computer science was to be introduced. At last, there seemed to be an institutional recognition that the future - or, in reality, the present - could not just be based around such Gove-ite articles of faith as the 12 times table, the ability to spot "fronted adverbials" and old-fashioned classroom discipline, but HTML and JavaScript.

And so to reality, and a country increasingly hit by schools cuts, with a decaying government so consumed by leaving the EU that it seems not to hear any complaints, let alone listen to them. Ten days ago, the reality of the teaching of computing in schools was laid bare by a report from the Royal Society, and it was not pretty. More than half of England's schools are still not offering computer science GCSEs. At the last count, the proportion of the country's pupils who actually sat the exam was a miserable 11%. There is a pronounced gap between rural and urban areas. To cap it all, there is still a lack of girls studying computer science: only 20% of GCSE candidates in the past year were female, and only 10% of female students decided to carry the subject on at A-level.

Thanks to long years of education being kicked around by politicians, the pressures wrought by targets and inspections and the effects of the public sector pay cap, there is an on-going recruitment crisis in teaching as a whole, with computing among the most obvious casualties. England is meeting only 68% of its computer science teacher recruitment targets, partly because of the handsome career prospects available in the private sector (the same picture applies in Scotland, where the number of computing teachers has fallen by 25% since 2005). In the absence of even half-decent training, existing teachers say they do not have the right support to get on top of the new subjects: according to a YouGov survey published last month, 67% of primary and secondary school teachers believe they cannot teach coding because of a lack of "skills and teaching tools", and just under 40% say they do not have access to the right hardware and software.

Earlier this year, one teacher summed up the essential problem: "I'm learning as I go along with the kids." You cannot teach maths, Spanish, physics or basic grammar on that basis. Why should a subject as exacting as computing be any different?

Largely to education's detriment, the parts of the Gove revolution that were more easily accomplished are in place, but this one is foundering, and the upshot seems to suit our state of national disrepair to a T: by the time your child is 11, he or she might be studying the second world war for the third time, but coding will too often remain neglected. It's good to know about the blitz, for sure, but it will not make you better suited to the future, either as a country or an individual.

So it is that a tragedy unfolds. Outside the classroom, a deep cultural change is afoot. If you have the money and inclination, you can acquaint your kids with programming skills via such inspired inventions as the Kano computer kit, a crowdfunded wonder that snaps together like Lego, and allows its users to start to master the basic processes of coding. Across the country, there is a growing network of Code Clubs largely built on the goodwill of volunteers.

Two weeks ago, I took my eight-year-old daughter to one, run on Saturday mornings. She has since built her first elementary website, variously focused on Stig of the Dump and the computer game and entertainment franchise Five Nights at Freddy's. For the two hours we were there, a thought glued itself to my mind: why isn't school more like this?

Just to make this clear: this is not fundamentally about creating an army of professional programmers, any more than teaching people Spanish or Mandarin is reducible to encouraging people to be full-time linguists. A grasp of coding is a classic generalisable skill: it fosters an understanding of logic, advanced problem-solving, and the processes needed to turn ideas into functioning systems. As automation and AI gain pace and threaten whole chunks of the labour force, the people who possess such talents increasingly stick out. They work in manufacturing, financial services, retail, the media and more - and in the midst of the most challenging economic environment this country has probably ever faced, they seem to be among the few people who might hold the key to some kind of viable future. And at the moment, the fact they exist feels more like a matter of accident than design.

The importance of computing education also cuts straight to what is arguably the biggest cultural issue of our time: our increasingly lamentable collective relationship with the internet, and what that means for our lives. The idea that Facebook and Google are coming close to killing the internet's last residue of anarchic democracy by colonising the online world is a cliche, but only because it's true. Their dominance depends on the way that most people now blindly obey their diktats in the same way that my generation gawped at the TV - not least the young people who are immersed in the social media world, and often find themselves vulnerable to its worst excesses. The only way you can even start to reverse all that is by prising off the digital facade and encouraging people to remake the online world as they want.

And then there is the gender issue. It rather pains me to say this, but for as long as computing remains largely outside the classroom, its take-up will be vulnerable to the crass cultural pressures that too often make it a male preserve. Fund it properly, make a point of bringing in women computing experts to illustrate the fact that their specialism is for everybody, and you might just achieve miracles - starting, perhaps, with the upending of the tech world's current addiction to testosterone.

The Royal Society report recommends £60m of new spending over the next five years, and the recruitment of 8,000 new computing teachers in English secondary schools. The aims are laudable enough, but they sound like only the start. Averting our eyes from the future is in danger of becoming a deep national trait. Before it's far too late, we need a new generation that can hack, code, and find out what might lie beyond the Facebook era. Without them, we will sink.

* John Harris is a Guardian columnist
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Don't just teach kids to code - teach them to question Facebook and Google | John Harris

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's shameful that our children are still so computer illiterate. Let's give them the skills to take on the tech giants, and create a more democratic internet hree years ago, before the Brexit dreams of renewed imperial glory and Vimto for all took wing, England took an uncharacteristically bold step into the future.

# data[].attributes.headline
Youtube for sharing skills - so what's the role of formal higher education in the future? Is it even needed?

# data[].attributes.subject
Youtube for sharing skills - so what's the role of formal higher education in the future? Is it even needed?

# data[].attributes.body
This is a good tutorial tho

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to Make a Prediction - Intro to Deep Learning #1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome to Intro to Deep Learning! This course is for anyone who wants to become a deep learning engineer. I'll take you from the very basics of deep learning to the bleeding edge over the course of 4 months. In this video, we'll predict an animal's body weight given it's brain weight using linear regression via 10 lines of Python.

# data[].attributes.body
Just something more to worry about

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Automation may be destroying jobs faster than it's creating new ones, but all hope isn't lost. TechRepublic spoke to MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson on changing the course of the future.

Erik Brynjolfsson has a dream of the future. Or perhaps more accurately, a nightmare.

A vision of a world where computers entrench the power of a wealthy elite and push the majority into poverty. A world where the rising tide of technology doesn't lift all boats, but sucks under all but the biggest ships.

Brynjolfsson is an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and co-author of The Second Machine Age, a book that asks what jobs will be left once software has perfected the art of driving cars, translating speech and other tasks once considered the domain of humans.

Dystopia is only one outcome foreseen by Brynjolfsson, but why does he even think it's a possibility?

New technology has upended industries for millennia. But the advent of the power loom or steam engine didn't permanently rob men of labour. So what makes today different? For Brynjolfsson it is the pace at which digital technologies grow in power, together with signs that computers are already diminishing the role of human labour.

The exponential rise in the capabilities of computer chips was famously noted by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who spotted that the number of transistors packed into a chip doubles about every 18 months. In the 40-plus years since he made that observation the transistor count of computer processors has climbed from 2,300 to more than four billion, and with each doubling comes a leap in the sophistication of the logic the chip can handle.

"The accumulated doubling of Moore's Law, and the ample doubling still to come, gives us a world where supercomputer power becomes available to toys in just a few years, where ever-cheaper sensors enable inexpensive solutions to previously intractable problems, and where science fiction keeps becoming reality," Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, associate director of the Center for Digital Business at MIT, write in the book.

"Sometimes a difference in degree (in other words, more of the same) becomes a difference in kind (in other words, different than anything else). The story of the second half of the chessboard alerts us that we should be aware that enough exponential progress can take us to astonishing places," the book continues.

Brynjolfsson identifies various astonishing technologies lining up to encroach on human labour. Take Rethink Robotics' Baxter, a robotic humanoid torso complete with arms, claw-like grips and a head with an LCD face. Baxter is designed to replace factory line workers employed in repetitive but as-yet-unautomated tasks, such as inserting large components into circuit boards. Baxter can be trained to carry out new jobs far more simply than its robotic predecessors, primarily by taking its arm and guiding it to where it needs to pick up and drop items. His 'hands' can be swapped out for suctions cups or different grippers to allow him to take on different tasks. That flexibility and rapid retraining, together with Baxter's low price relative to other industrial robots, opens up the possibility of automating a swathe of new roles.

However, Baxter is but one mechanised usurper Brynjolfsson sees waiting in the wings. In the warehouse there are Kiva Systems' knee-high bots designed to lift items from shelving, in the office the Double telepresence robot, and of course the superstars of advanced computing, Google's self-driving car, and IBM's quiz-showing winning Watson.

Brynjolfsson points out that the rate of technological change is of a different order in the information age to the industrial revolution.

"I think it's going to require a similar level of overall change but it's probably going to have to happen faster. The steam engine was a remarkable breakthrough and really set off the industrial revolution, but as we say in the book it doubled in power and efficiency approximately once every 70 years and quadrupled after 140 years," he said.

Erik Brynjolfsson

"The computer processor doubles in power every 18 months, 10 times greater every five years, it's a very different scale of advancement and it's affecting a broader set of the economy than the steam engine did, in terms of all the cognitive tasks. It's happening a lot faster and more pervasively than before."

But is it correct to link the rate of societal change, and of advances in artificial intelligence, to the breakneck pace at which processors are becoming more powerful? Not everyone agrees.

Nick Jennings, professor of Computer Science at Southampton University has years of experience working with agent-based computing and intelligent systems. He doesn't foresee runaway advances in the field of AI that will reverberate throughout the rest of society.

"[I don't see] major shifts, no," said Jennings. "I see a gradual increase in automation and a gradual increase in the software tools that people have to support them in their day-to-day work. I don't see any non-linearities, I see processing getting better, speeds getting better, more data becoming available and us running more complicated algorithms on that data. I don't see anything that is going to cause a phase change or a disjunction in one go.

"Barring a quantum computing appearing, something that really would change the game for everything. I think standard breakthroughs that everyone is going to see, steady, inexorable progress," he added.

Are people already losing out to tech in the workplace?

Even with computing technologies improving at that "steady, inexorable" rate, jobs may be being destroyed faster than they are created.

For most of the second half of the twentieth century the economic value generated in the US - the country's productivity - grew hand-in-hand with the number of workers. But in 2000 the two measures began to diverge. From the turn of the century a gap opened up between productivity and total employment. By 2011, that delta had widened significantly, reflecting continued economic growth but no associated increase in job creation.

Image: Erik Brynjolfsson/Andrew McAfee - The Second Machine Age. Jared Bernstein/Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

"Unlike much of the 20th century we're now seeing a falling ratio of employment to population and that's something that concerns us. We don't think it's inevitable but we do think that many of the underlying trends in technology are likely to accelerate this so it's something we need to pay some serious attention to," said Brynjolfsson.

That schism manifests in other disparities. Over the past quarter of a century the income gap between the richest and the poorest in OECD countries has continued to widen. Today the average income of the richest in these countries is nine times that of the poorest.

And it's not the only stat that spotlights the widening inequality. For the first time since the Great Depression, over half the total income in the United States went to the top 10 percent of Americans in 2012. On top of that, between 1973 and 2011 the median hourly wage in the US barely changed, growing by just 0.1 percent per year.

This wealth gap isn't restricted to America. In Sweden, Finland and Germany, income inequality has grown more quickly over the past 20 to 30 years than in the US.

The book states:

"Production in the second machine age depends less on physical equipment and structures and more on the four categories of intangible assets: intellectual property, organizational capital, user-generated content, and human capital," the book states, going on to point out that in the US, the share of GDP going to labor has declined over the past decade, falling to its lowest point in the third quarter of 2010, 57.8 percent.

"As The Nobel Prize-winning economist Wassily Leontief agreed, stating definitively in 1983 that 'the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors'."

Image: Erik Brynjolfsson/Andrew McAfee - The Second Machine Age

The prediction that society is heading towards a period of technological unemployment was made decades ago by John Maynard Keynes, who forecast it as an inevitable outcome of society discovering ways to make labour more efficient more rapidly than finding new uses for labour.

"There's no economic law that says 'You will always create enough jobs or the balance will always be even', it's possible for a technology to dramatically favour one group and to hurt another group, and the net of that might be that you have fewer jobs," said Brynjolfsson.

Which jobs are at risk?

So what sort of jobs does Brynjolfsson think will fall before software automation and the ability of computer systems to spot patterns in vast stores of data? Unsurprisingly, it's those tasks that are routine and easily defined.

"These middle-skilled structured tasks, routine information processing tasks will continue to be under a lot of pressure: bookkeepers, travel agents, legal aids - maybe not lawyers or attorneys but the first level associates. I already talked to one big law firm and they said they're not hiring as many of those sorts of people because a machine can scan through hundreds of thousands or millions of documents and find the relevant information for a case or a trial much more quickly and accurately than a human can," said Brynjolfsson.

Beyond these roles Brynjolfsson pictures call centre operators gradually being replaced by question-answering, automated systems - born of a marriage between IBM's Jeopardy-winning system Watson and Apple's Siri virtual assistant. He also foresees some driving roles being reduced to babysitting a computer that controls the vehicle for the majority of the journey - freeing up the human driver to complete other tasks.

Brynjolfsson is talking about the near future, but wind forward a couple of decades and the successors to the deep learning and other artificial intelligence techniques of today could have automated away half of the jobs that exist in the US today.

That's the prediction of Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne from Oxford Martin School & Faculty of Philosophy in the UK.

"According to our estimate, 47 percent of total US employment is in the high risk category, meaning that associated occupations are potentially automatable over some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two," they predict in the report The Future of Employment.

During the coming decades they forecast two "waves of computerisation" during which different categories of jobs will be washed away, with no field of employment left untouched.

"In the first wave, we find that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labour in production occupations, are likely to be substituted by computer capital.

Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne

"As computerised cars are already being developed and the declining cost of sensors makes augmenting vehicles with advanced sensors increasingly cost-effective, the automation of transportation and logistics occupations is in line with the technological developments documented in the literature.

"Furthermore, algorithms for big data are already rapidly entering domains reliant upon storing or accessing information, making it equally intuitive that office and administrative support occupations will be subject to computerisation.

"The computerisation of production occupations simply suggests a continuation of a trend that has been observed over the past decades, with industrial robots taking on the routine tasks of most operatives in manufacturing. As industrial robots are becoming more advanced, with enhanced senses and dexterity, they will be able to perform a wider scope of non-routine manual tasks. From a technological capabilities point of view, the vast remainder of employment in production occupations is thus likely to diminish over the next decade."

They also predict disruption to jobs in services industries from personal and household services robots, automation of more routine sales roles, such as cashier and telemarketers, and from prefabrication of buildings to construction jobs.

Even qualities held up as intrinsically human, such as aspects of creativity, may not always remain beyond the capacity of machines. In the 1950s a young chess prodigy performed a chess move feted as a feat of exceptional human ingenuity during a match dubbed The Game of the Century. Yet, as Brynjolfsson points out in the book, today that same move will be carried out by any run of the mill chess program when presented with the same board. As he puts it: "Sometimes, one man's creativity is another machine's brute-force analysis." As computers continue to advance in power, even with the slowing of Moore's Law, brute-force analysis becomes viable for a much wider set of problems.

Digital creation vs destruction

Once a technology can be delivered digitally, it can advance at the heady rate made possible by Moore's Law. When this happens, the chances are its capabilities will increase in leaps and bounds while its costs fall in tandem.

Brynjolfsson explores the idea that digital technology can drastically reduce the cost of technologies, as well as the infrastructure and people needed to support them.

Take digital photography. As Brynjolfsson and McAfee point out, in an age where our photos sit on hard drives rather than in ring-bound albums, the need for a large number of workers disappears.

"These photos are all digital, so hundreds of thousands of people who used to work making photography chemicals and paper are no longer needed. In a digital age, they need to find some other way to support themselves," they write.

Image: Oxford Martin School & Faculty of Philosophy

"Companies like Instagram and Facebook employ a tiny fraction of the people that were needed at Kodak. Nonetheless, Facebook has a market value several times greater than Kodak ever did and has created at least seven billionaires."

This hollowing out of supporting infrastructure can be seen repeated in multiple industries.

"Once the algorithms are digitised they can replicated and delivered to millions of users at almost zero cost."

The authors also see this journey to near-free delivery as a positive - reducing the cost of using that technology to the point where it is accessible to much larger numbers of people, empowering them to build new businesses. Look at how the web led to an explosion in online companies. Or look at how it has led to an explosion of courses taught by some of the world's most prestigious institutions and now freely available online.

However, this technological bounty, as Brynjolfsson calls it, may not be sufficient to offset increases in the cost of living. While the cost of taking photos may have plummeted the same cannot be said of many essentials people need to survive - food, drink and fuel. The book cites research by Jared Bernstein, who compared increases in median family income in the US between 1990 and 2008 with changes in the cost of housing, healthcare, and college. He found that while family income grew by around 20 percent during that time, prices for housing and college grew by about 50 percent, and health care by more than 150 percent.

Which roles could flourish in the age of machines?

Job prospects are not equally gloomy for every profession according to Brynjolfsson as well as the study by Oxford Martin School & Faculty of Philosophy.

They identify three broad areas of human endeavour that will be resilient to automation in the short to medium term.

Manual roles

Despite many manual roles being low-paid, this type of work is likely to remain surprisingly resistant to automation. Some of the jobs that are poorly compensated today remain exceptionally tricky for robots, as even simple manual tasks like walking over uneven terrain are beyond the capabilities of most modern bots. The phenomenon is known as Moravec's Paradox, an observation by leading AI researchers in the 1980s that computers found hard the tasks we found easy and vice versa. While it might take a human seconds to fold a towel, a robot made to carry out the task in 2010 took nearly 25 minutes.

As the book points out: "Results like these indicate that cooks, gardeners, repairmen, carpenters, dentists, and home health aides are not about to be replaced by machines in the short term. All of these professions involve a lot of sensorimotor work, and many of them also require the skills of ideation, large-frame pattern recognition, and complex communication."

"Machines are very clumsy when you think about it. They don't have the agility, and few if any robots could pick up a dime that's on a desk, even though a two or three-year-old person could do that," said Brynjolfsson.

Creative

"Digital technologies are in many ways complements, not substitutes for, creativity," said Brynjolfsson.

"If somebody comes up with a new song, a video, or piece of software there's no better time in history to be a creative person who wants to reach not just hundreds or thousands, but millions and billions of potential customers.

"That's great news for a lot of people who are becoming millionaires or even billionaires by using their creativity to create new products and services that can be digitised," he added.

Interpersonal

"Machines are not very good at motivating, nurturing, caring and comforting people. Human interactions are something that are important but, so far at least, machines are wholly inadequate for those kind[s] of tasks."

The stunted social skills of machines should mean that salespeople, managers and entrepreneurs have a reasonably bright future, as will nurses, kindergarten teachers and home help aids, he said.

Erik Brynjolfsson

Better together

A more optimistic outcome than automation leading to mass unemployment is to see these technologies as a tool that will allow people to achieve more.

Just as no one laments electronic word processors meaning no longer having to retype a document from scratch, so we'd likely welcome the ability for real-time speech recognition and translation.

Brynjolfsson explores this idea of people cooperating with machines, rather than competing against them, and achieving more than either one could individually.

The power of human-machine collaboration was demonstrated by two unranked amateur chess players in 2005, says Brynjolfsson and McAfee in the book. The pair of chess enthusiasts took part in a Playchess.com freestyle chess tournament, where individuals can team up with other people or computers. Despite going up against several grandmasters and a supercomputer named Hydra the pair of amateurs were able to win the contest, using custom chess software running on three laptops to analyse the boards and guide their play.

"This is a real frontier for entrepreneurs to develop new ways of what we call 'Racing with machines', combining machines and humans in new ways to allow them to do tasks they previously couldn't have done," said Brynjolfsson.

"I think that's very exciting and it's very poorly understood. For example, I could imagine augmented reality helping people. Imagine you are a home help aid or a nurse and you see an unusual mole or a lesion and are not quite sure what it is, you could use augmented reality glasses or other tools to send a photograph of that growth to a human expert or even an expert system, a decision-making system that analyses the shape and contours of that lesion and gives advice on whether you need to bring that person in for treatment," he added.

Similarly, AR glasses could overlay useful information for mechanics, surgeons, chefs to "help them with the parts of the jobs they wouldn't otherwise know how to do", he added.

"[There are] many other kinds of tasks where you combine the technology with human skills, so even middle-skilled workers could accomplish tasks that previously they couldn't have done," Brynjolfsson said.

The book repeats something that could turn out to be useful career advice in future: "The career advice that Google chief economist Hal Varian frequently gives: seek to be an indispensable complement to something that's getting cheap and plentiful."

Southampton University's Professor Jennings sees a role for AI in teaching people skills needed for new roles.

"You could see the AI as a system and repository for corporate knowledge," Jennings said. "You can embody much of that in the software. Having the software system act as a corporate memory could make it easier to do medium skilled jobs. It could aid skill transfer and fluidity of people [to move between jobs]."

Having software agents able to feed workers relevant data and crunching records in a fraction of the time it would take a person may be essential if digital data continues to grow at its current exponential pace.

"As we get ever more data and information available it gets increasingly hard for humans to be able to take account of that," said Jennings. "I see the machine stepping up and providing clever amalgamations of that data and working on it with the humans."

He gave the example of how IBM's Watson system could aid doctors by making suggestions based on research from the latest medical journals. The system is already being trialled at at the Maine Center for Cancer Medicine and Westmed Medical Group in New York, where it is recommending lung cancer treatments.

From his knowledge of the way AI systems work today, Jennings finds it difficult to conceive of a system that can replace a person's entire set of skills.

"AI software tends to be very deep and very narrow," he said. "A lot of more professional jobs or tasks just require that broader base of expertise and experience that AI struggles to codify."

Instead Jennings see systems that rely upon AI routines gradually taking a larger and larger role in helping people do their jobs.

"Where it will start to happen is in narrow tasks. It will start with the computer making suggestions and if gradually all you ever do is press 'Yes' then gradually your trust in what the software can do will increase," he said. "That to me is a better model for take-up then 'Right we're going to develop some swanky software and sack all these people'."

Will the displaced find new roles?

The first machine age - the Industrial Revolution - may have destroyed the livelihoods of many artisan tradesmen but it did not have a lasting negative impact on the number of jobs in industrialised nations.

History teaches us that labour markets are able to recover from the changes wrought upon them by technological change, said Alan Manning, professor of economics at the London School of Economics.

"If I take an historical perspective then technical change has always destroyed some jobs and created others, and this would in some sense be no different from that," Manning said. "There will be some people who have spent 20 or 30 years specialised in a job and suddenly there is no demand for that. They suffer big losses but in the long run that washes out, no young people go into those jobs and they go into something else and there is always something else to go into."

Image: Nick Heath/YouTube

The second machine age has undoubtedly created swathes of jobs that would have seemed baffling just a few decades back. Just travel back to the late 90s and try to explain what it is to be a YouTube Let's Player or to the early 80s and tell someone you're an SEO Expert.

But Brynjolfsson says society shouldn't expect that people will simply adapt to the employment opportunities afforded to them by new technologies. To adjust to the labour upheaval that followed the industrial revolution required a long-term overhaul of education systems, he said, an approach that may need to be repeated.

"If you look back to the first machine age the vast majority of Americans worked in agriculture. Now it's less than two percent," he said. "Those people [working in agriculture] didn't simply become unemployed, they reskilled. One of the best ideas that America had was mass primary education. That's one of the reasons it became an economic leader and other countries also adopted this model of mass education, where people paid not only for their own children but other people's children to go to school."

More legislation followed and by the 1950s laws were in place supporting widespread high school and college education in the US.

"We put a lot of effort into reskilling people in these earlier eras. It was very costly and not simple, but ultimately it was successful," said Brynjolfsson.

That commitment to education needs to continue says Brynjolfsson, who argues that lifelong learning will be essential for people to keep pace with the changing demands of roles constantly being reshaped by technology.

"We have to reinvent education and reskilling, and people are going to have to take it upon themselves to more aggressively learn these skills. Because the technology is changing more rapidly, it's going to be a case of lifelong learning and continuously reskilling."

Of course education is still expensive and difficult, but Brynjolfsson believes teaching could become far more accessible in future with the advent of universities like Stanford making entire courses freely available online, and online teaching sites such as Khan Academy.

"Courses online can help tremendously. Education has been a laggard in using digital technologies but that makes me optimistic because there's a lot of room for improvement of doing a better job and I think that will happen in the coming years," he said.

Better education, doesn't mean continuing to teach the same subjects in the same way, and certainly not focusing primarily on the three Rs - reading, writing, and arithmetic - which still are the cornerstones of the classroom in many parts of the world.

Nick Jennings

"The three Rs were once the skills that workers needed to contribute to the most advanced economy of the time. As Mitra points out, the educational system of Victorian England was designed quite well for its time and place. But that time and place are no longer ours," according to the book.

To remain valuable knowledge workers in this latest machine age, Brynjolfsson and McAfee say people will need to focus on learning skills that are tricky for computers, such as ideation (the creation of new ideas), large-frame pattern recognition, and complex communication.

Changing national education policy isn't going to happen overnight, and, in part, Brynjolfsson sees the book as a wake-up call, as a reminder that if technologies are leading us down the wrong path, then we as individuals need to do something about it.

"One of the reasons we wrote the book was to get people to change the conversation, to pay attention to these issues and take them on head on," he said. "What we have to do is understand that, as we say in the last line of the book, 'Technology is not destiny, we shape our destiny.' If we do take an active role I think we can come out on the other side much wealthier and with more shared prosperity than ever before, but it's certainly not inevitable."

Cover image: Mike Rubenstein and Science/AAAS

See all TechRepublic Newsletters

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why AI could destroy more jobs than it creates, and how to save them

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Automation may be destroying jobs faster than it's creating new ones, but all hope isn't lost. TechRepublic spoke to MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson on changing the course of the future. Erik Brynjolfsson has a dream of the future. Or perhaps more accurately, a nightmare.

# data[].attributes.headline
THE FUTURE OF EMPLOYMENT: HOW SUSCEPTIBLE ARE JOBS TO COMPUTERISATION?

# data[].attributes.subject
THE FUTURE OF EMPLOYMENT: HOW SUSCEPTIBLE ARE JOBS TO COMPUTERISATION?

# data[].attributes.body
Hide your photos

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Image: Screenshot from SendVids

There's a video of Gal Gadot having sex with her stepbrother on the internet. But it's not really Gadot's body, and it's barely her own face. It's an approximation, face-swapped to look like she's performing in an existing incest-themed porn video.

The video was created with a machine learning algorithm, using easily accessible materials and open-source code that anyone with a working knowledge of deep learning algorithms could put together.
A clip from the full video, hosted on SendVids, showing Gal Gadot's face on a porn star's body.
It's not going to fool anyone who looks closely. Sometimes the face doesn't track correctly and there's an uncanny valley effect at play, but at a glance it seems believable. It's especially striking considering that it's allegedly the work of one person-a Redditor who goes by the name 'deepfakes'-not a big special effects studio that can digitally recreate a young Princess Leia in Rogue One using CGI. Instead, deepfakes uses open-source machine learning tools like TensorFlow, which Google makes freely available to researchers, graduate students, and anyone with an interest in machine learning.

Like the Adobe tool that can make people say anything, and the Face2Face algorithm that can swap a recorded video with real-time face tracking, this new type of fake porn shows that we're on the verge of living in a world where it's trivially easy to fabricate believable videos of people doing and saying things they never did. Even having sex.

So far, deepfakes has posted hardcore porn videos featuring the faces of Scarlett Johansson, Maisie Williams, Taylor Swift, Aubrey Plaza, and Gal Gadot on Reddit. I've reached out to the management companies and/or publicists who represent each of these actors informing them of the fake videos, and will update if I hear back.

Fake celebrity porn, where images are photoshopped to look like famous people are posing nude, is a years-old category of porn with an ardent fan base. People commenting and voting in the subreddit where deepfakes posts are big fans of his work. This is the latest advancement in that genre.

"This is no longer rocket science."

According to deepfakes-who declined to give his identity to me to avoid public scrutiny-the software is based on multiple open-source libraries, like Keras with TensorFlow backend. To compile the celebrities' faces, deepfakes said he used Google image search, stock photos, and YouTube videos. Deep learning consists of networks of interconnected nodes that autonomously run computations on input data. In this case, he trained the algorithm on porn videos and Gal Gadot's face. After enough of this "training," the nodes arrange themselves to complete a particular task, like convincingly manipulating video on the fly.

Artificial intelligence researcher Alex Champandard told me in an email that a decent, consumer-grade graphics card could process this effect in hours, but a CPU would work just as well, only more slowly, over days.

"This is no longer rocket science," Champandard said.

The ease with which someone could do this is frightening. Aside from the technical challenge, all someone would need is enough images of your face, and many of us are already creating sprawling databases of our own faces: People around the world uploaded 24 billion selfies to Google Photos in 2015-2016. It isn't difficult to imagine an amateur programmer running their own algorithm to create a sex tape of someone they want to harass.
Read more: Facial Recognition for Porn is a Privacy Nightmare Waiting to Happen
Deepfakes told me he's not a professional researcher, just a programmer with an interest in machine learning.

"I just found a clever way to do face-swap," he said, referring to his algorithm. "With hundreds of face images, I can easily generate millions of distorted images to train the network," he said. "After that if I feed the network someone else's face, the network will think it's just another distorted image and try to make it look like the training face."

In a comment thread on Reddit, deepfakes mentioned that he is using an algorithm similar to one developed by Nvidia researchers that uses deep learning to, for example, instantly turn a video of a summer scene into a winter one. The Nvidia researchers who developed the algorithm declined to comment on this possible application.

In almost all of the examples deepfakes has posted, the result isn't perfect. In the Gadot video, a box occasionally appeared around her face where the original image peeks through, and her mouth and eyes don't quite line up to the words the actress is saying-but if you squint a little and suspend your belief, it might as well be Gadot; other videos deepfakes have made are even more convincing.

Porn performer Grace Evangeline told me over Twitter direct messages that porn stars are used to having their work spread around free to tube sites like SendVid, where the Gal Gadot fake is uploaded, without their permission. But she said that this was different. She'd never seen anything like this.

"One important thing that always needs to happen is consent," Evangeline said. "Consent in private life as well as consent on film. Creating fake sex scenes of celebrities takes away their consent. It's wrong."

Even for people whose livelihoods involve getting in front of a camera, the violation of personal boundaries is troubling. I showed Alia Janine, a retired porn performer who was in the sex industry for 15 years, the video of Gadot. "It's really disturbing," she told me over the phone. "It kind of shows how some men basically only see women as objects that they can manipulate and be forced to do anything they want... It just shows a complete lack of respect for the porn performers in the movie, and also the female actresses."

I asked deepfakes whether he considered the ethical implications of this technology. Did consent, revenge porn, and blackmail enter their mind while developing this algorithm?

"Every technology can be used with bad motivations, and it's impossible to stop that," he said, likening it to the same technology that recreated Paul Walker's post-mortem performance in Furious 7. "The main difference is how easy [it is] to do that by everyone. I don't think it's a bad thing for more average people [to] engage in machine learning research."

Ethically, the implications are "huge," Champandard said. Malicious use of technology often can't be avoided, but it can be countered.

"We need to have a very loud and public debate," he said. "Everyone needs to know just how easy it is to fake images and videos, to the point where we won't able to distinguish forgeries in a few months from now. Of course, this was possible for a long time but it would have taken a lot of resources and professionals in visual effects to pull this off. Now it can be done by a single programmer with recent computer hardware."

Champandard said researchers can then begin developing technology to detect fake videos and help moderate what's fake and what isn't, and internet policy can improve to regulate what happens when these types of forgeries and harassment come up.

"In a strange way," this is a good thing, Champandard said. "We need to put our focus on transforming society to be able to deal with this."
Correction: This story has been updated to clarify that deepfake's algorithm is similar to the research produced by Nvidia researchers, but that there's no evidence that it's an application of their work.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here and We're All Fucked

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Image: Screenshot from SendVids There's a video of Gal Gadot having sex with her stepbrother on the internet. But it's not really Gadot's body, and it's barely her own face. It's an approximation, face-swapped to look like she's performing in an existing incest-themed porn video.

# data[].attributes.body
Humour in the Internet Age

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On Friday 12 January 2018, curators Julie Freeman and Hannah Redler Hawes left work at London's Open Data Institute confident that, come Monday morning, there would be at least a few packets of crisps in the office.

Artist Ellie Harrison's Vending Machine (2009; pictured below) sits in the ODI's kitchen, one of the more venerable exhibits to have been acquired over the institute's five-year programme celebrating data as culture. It has been hacked to dispense a packet of salty snacks whenever the BBC's RSS feed carries a news item containing financial misfortune. ...

Quarterly by Direct Debit

Inclusive of applicable taxes (VAT)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
open data institute; [joycat]lmao; julie freeman; hannah redler hawes; ellie harrison; vending machine; pip thornton; data as art; adwords; poetry; wordsworth; wilfred owen; lee montgomery; stupidity tax; franco and eva mattes; ceiling cat; new scientist live; mole-rat surveillance project

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Data as Culture: Humour and absurdity stalk the internet

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On Friday 12 January 2018, curators Julie Freeman and Hannah Redler Hawes left work at London's Open Data Institute confident that, come Monday morning, there would be at least a few packets of crisps in the office.

# data[].attributes.body
interesting statistics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Paid and free digital media consumption by type 2017 | UK Survey

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The statistic presents data on paid and free digital media consumption among internet users in the United Kingdom as of March 2017, broken down by content type. Among those who reported consuming digital TV programs within the three months previous to survey, 72 percent reported consuming this content completely for free.

# data[].attributes.body
What would the Internet be like without net neutrality?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Thinkstock.

Net neutrality is on life support now in the United States, with less than one week until the Federal Communications Commission is set to vote on Chairman Ajit Pai's proposal to pull the plug on the open internet protections. If all goes to plan for Pai, by as early as January, internet providers will be permitted to speed up access to some websites that are willing and able to pay.

But it's hard to say what using the internet without net neutrality in the U.S. will actually be like. There are many different paths internet service providers might take, and a lot of the action will probably happen over time, not all at once.

It may start with ISPs offering streaming services like Netflix, Spotify, or YouTube the opportunity to pay a fee to reach users at faster speeds during certain times of the day. It may mean Comcast speeds up access to its own video service. Or many AT&T customers will get a better connection to HBO than Comcast subscribers, and Verizon subscribers get a better connection to Facebook. Using Google Maps might not count against your data plan on your phone, but using Yelp would. But one thing we do know is that any anti-competitive behavior from Comcast won't start until September, since one of the conditions it agreed to when the feds approved its merger with NBC/Universal required Comcast to abide by net neutrality until then.

One way to imagine what might happen to the U.S. internet in a post-net neutrality world is to look at how ISPs act in countries without net neutrality. There aren't very many examples, but those we do have should give us reason to worry. Those case studies suggest that providers can find many ways to extract fees from subscribers, steer their buying habits, and charge websites and online platforms to get priority access to internet users.

Get Future Tense in your inbox.

In many countries without net neutrality, mobile plans are the worst culprit. Take what happens in Guatemala, for example. "Many people will have two SIM cards there because on one SIM card they can access WhatsApp for free, and on another SIM card you access Facebook for free," says Renata Avila, a senior adviser at the Web Foundation. If you buy a small amount of data that gets used up quickly, WhatsApp will still be accessible after the cap is reached, but not the rest of the internet. If you do try to access other websites or apps, you'll be prompted to pay more. Similar mobile internet plans exist in Balkan countries, Avila said, but there you might buy a SIM card that favors Viper, a popular messaging service in that region.

The scary part is that it might happen piecemeal, with one free service here and one slower website there.

This practice is also common throughout the European Union. The EU has net neutrality laws, but they don't outright prohibit mobile plans that allow users to only access certain apps without cutting into their data plans. Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, described the situation in Portugal in a tweet that went viral in October. The tweet showed a page from Meo, a mobile and home internet provider in Portugal that offers various packages made up of websites and apps that don't cut into your monthly data plan. So if you use social media a lot, you can buy a package that allows you to use Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and a few other major social media companies without cutting into your data, a practice commonly called zero-rating. It's a model that actually isn't illegal in the U.S. even under the current network neutrality rules, which state that the FCC can consider on a case-by-case basis whether companies are using data caps in anti-competitive ways. In fact, AT&T already does this in the U.S. by providing its home broadband customers with unlimited free data when they also subscribe to the AT&T-owned DirecTV. AT&T mobile customers can also stream content from DirecTV for free. Similarly, certain T-Mobile plans allow users to stream as much Spotify or Apple Music as they'd like without cutting into their data allotment.

This may sound like a nice perk, but privileging access to certain apps in packages like this helps cement the dominance of incumbent powerful internet brands, since users can't even access other apps once their small pool of data is used up, and it's the telecomm that decides which apps make it into the bundle. "This incentivizes telecoms not to increase data caps on mobile internet," says Estelle Masse, a senior policy analyst at Access Now, an international digital rights advocacy group. A more net neutrality friendly approach, Masse explains, would be to get rid of or lift the data caps altogether.

Beyond not charging for access to particular websites or apps, there are also cases of internet providers straight-up blocking access to certain kinds of apps. In Morocco in 2016, multiple internet providers agreed to block voice over internet services, like Skype or WhatsApp, potentially in an effort to push users to subscribe to phone plans. Unhappy Moroccans heavily protested the ban, which was lifted months later. In a particularly egregious case in Canada in 2005, the telecom company Telus blocked access to a union website that promoted a labor strike against the internet company. In 2012, AT&T announced it would block U.S. users' access to FaceTime on iPhones unless they paid for a higher data plan, but it reversed course after consumer advocates sent complaints to the FCC.

All of these examples differ in important ways, and none illustrates exactly what a fully tiered internet looks like. But together, they tell a story about what Americans might be able to expect starting next year. These non-neutral practices aren't necessarily obvious when they're happening, and they might not feel particularly nefarious. If AT&T customers are getting free music streaming from one service, they might not care that it's disadvantaging other music streaming companies. And users also might not realize what they're missing: Access to rare songs or works from independent artists that don't make it onto the free streaming app. Meanwhile, the idea of what the internet is, a place where it's easy to discover all kinds of hard-to-find music and become an aficionado on just about any genre, may begin to disappear. The internet could become more homogenized in turn, as fewer people continue to contribute to niche communities.

The scary part is that it might happen piecemeal-with one free service here and one slower website there. Before we know it those who are already in power may become further entrenched, and we'll all be worse off for it.
This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and . Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, follow us on Twitter and sign up for our weekly newsletter.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What the Internet Is Like in Countries Without Net Neutrality

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Net neutrality is on life support now in the United States, with less than one week until the Federal Communications Commission is set to vote on Chairman Ajit Pai's proposal to pull the plug on the open internet protections.

# data[].attributes.body
A very fascinating article I found about Internet art and culture ~

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Last weekend, a fascinating act in the history of humanity played out on Reddit.

For April Fool's Day, Reddit launched a little experiment. It gave its users, who are all anonymous, a blank canvas called Place.

The rules were simple. Each user could choose one pixel from 16 colors to place anywhere on the canvas. They could place as many pixels of as many colors as they wanted, but they had to wait a few minutes between placing each one.

Over the following 72 hours, what emerged was nothing short of miraculous. A collaborative artwork that shocked even its inventors.

From a single blank canvas, a couple simple rules and no plan, came this:

Each pixel you see was placed by hand. Each icon, each flag, each meme created painstakingly by millions of people who had nothing in common except an Internet connection. Somehow, someway, what happened in Reddit over those 72 hours was the birth of Art.

How did this happen?

While I followed Place closely, I cannot do justice to the story behind it in the few words here. There were countless dramas -- countless ideas, and fights, and battles, and wars -- that I don't even know about. They happened in small forums and private Discord chats, with too much happening at once, all the time, to keep track of everything. And, of course, I had to sleep.

But at its core, the story of Place is an eternal story, about the three forces that humanity needs to make art, creation, and technology possible.

The Creators

First came the Creators. They were the artists to whom the blank canvas was an irresistible opportunity.

When Place was launched, with no warning, the first users started placing pixels willy-nilly, just to see what they could do. Within minutes, the first sketches appeared on Place. Crude and immature, they resembled cavemen paintings, the work of artists just stretching their wings.

Even from that humble beginning, the Creators quickly saw that the pixels held power, and lots of potential. But working alone, they could only place one pixel every 5 or 10 minutes. Making anything more meaningful would take forever -- if someone didn't mess up their work as they were doing it. To make something bigger, they would have to work together.

That's when someone hit on the brilliant notion of a gridmap. They took a simple idea -- a drawing overlaid on a grid, that showed where each of the pixels should go -- and combined it with an image that resonated with the adolescent humor of Redditors. They proposed drawing Dickbutt.

The Placetions (denizens of r/place) quickly got to work. It didn't take long -- Dickbutt materialized within minutes in the lower left part of the canvas. The Place had its first collaborative Art.

But Creators didn't stop there. They added more appendages to the creature, they added colors, and then they attempted to metamorphize their creation into Dickbutterfly. Behind its silliness was the hint of a creative tsunami about to come.

But it didn't happen all at once. Creators started to get a little drunk on their power. Across the canvas from Dickbutt, a small Charmander came to life. But once the Pokemon character was brought to life, it started growing a large male member where once had been a leg. Then came two more.

This was not by design. Some Creators frantically tried to remove the offending additions, putting out calls to "purify" the art, but others kept the additions going.

Suddenly, it looked like Place would be a short-lived experiment that took the path of least surprise. Left to their own devices, Creators threatened to turn the Place into a phallic fantasy. Of course.

The problem was less one of immaturity, and more of the fundamental complexity of the creative process. What the Creators were starting to face was something that would become the defining theme of Place: too much freedom leads to chaos. Creativity needs constraint as much as it needs freedom.

When anyone could put any pixel anywhere, how does it not lead immediately to mayhem?

The Protectors

Another set of users emerged, who would soon address this very problem.

But like the primitive Creators, they weren't yet self-aware of their purpose on the great white canvas. Instead, they began by simplifying the experiment into a single goal: world conquest.

They formed Factions around colors, that they used to take over the Place with. The Blue Corner was among the first, and by far the largest. It began in the bottom right corner and spread like a plague. Its followers self-identified with the color, claiming that its manifest destiny was to take over Place. Pixel by pixel, they started turning it into reality, in a mad land grab over the wide open space.

The Blue Corner wasn't alone. Another group started a Red Corner on the other side of the canvas. Their users claimed a leftist political leaning. Yet another started the Green Lattice, which went for a polka-dot design with interspersing green pixels and white. They championed their superior efficiency, since they only had to color half as many pixels as the other Factions.

It wasn't long before the Factions ran head-on into the Creators. Charmander was among the first battle sites. As the Blue Corner began to overwrite the Pokemon with blue pixels, the Creators turned from their internecine phallic wars to the bigger threat now on their doorstep.

They fought back, replacing each blue pixel with their own. But the numbers were against them. With its single-minded focus on expansion, the Blue Corner commanded a much larger army than the Creators could muster. So they did the only thing they could do. They pled for their lives.

Somehow, it struck a chord. It ignited a debate within the Blue Corner. What was their role in relation to Art? A member asked: "As our tide inevitably covers the world from edge to edge, should we show mercy to other art we come across?"

This was a question each Faction faced in turn. With all the power given to them by their expansionary zeal, what were they to do about the art that stood in their path?

They all decided to save it. One by one, each of the Factions began flowing around the artwork, rather than through them.

Rebel against Bluegoisie all you want, but let's make one thing clear: THESE THREE ARE OFF ABSOLUTELY OFF LIMITS. THEY ARE NOT TO BE HARMED. from place

This was a turning point. The mindless Factions had turned into beneficent Protectors.

Still No Happy Ending

Finally at peace with the ravenous color horde, the Creators turned back to their creations. They started making them more complex, adding one element after another.

They started using 3-pixel fonts to write text. A Star Wars prequel meme that had been sputtering along took a more defined shape, becoming one of the most prominent pieces of art in Place.

Others formed Creator collectives around common projects. Organizing in smaller subreddits that they created just for this purpose, they planned strategies and shared templates.

One of the most successful was a group that added a Windows 95-esque taskbar along the bottom, replete with Start button in the corner.

Another were a block of hearts. They started with only a few, mimicking hearts of life in old bitmap video games, like Zelda, before their collective took off with the idea. By the end they stretched across half the canvas, in a dazzling array of flags and designs.

And of course, there was Van Gogh.

But not all was well. The Protectors who they had once welcomed with relief had become tyrants dictating fashion. They decided what could and couldn't be made. It wasn't long before Creators started chafing under their rule.

Meanwhile, with the issue of artwork resolved, the Factions had turned their sights on each other, forcing followers to choose sides in epic battles. They had little time to pay attention to the pathetic pleas of Creators who wanted approval for ideas of new art.

The fights between the Protectors got nasty. A Twitch live-streamer exhorted his followers to attack the Blue Corner with Purple. There were battle plans. There were appeals to emotion. There were even false-flag attacks, where the followers of one color placed pixels of the opposing side inside their own, just so they could cry foul and attack in return.

But the biggest problem of all was one of the only hard rules of Place -- it couldn't grow. With the Factions engaged in a massive battle among themselves, the Creators started realizing there wasn't space to make new Art.

Country flags had started emerging pretty much from the beginning. But as they grew and grew, they started bumping into each other.

Out in the unclaimed territory of the middle of the canvas, with no Protector to mediate between them, Germany and France engaged in an epic battle that sent shockwaves through Place.

Suddenly, a world that had been saved from its primitive beginnings looked like it would succumb to war. There were frantic attempts at diplomacy between all sides. Leaders form the Protectors and the Creators and met each other in chat rooms, but mostly they just pointed fingers at each other.

What Place needed was a villain that everyone could agree upon.

The Destroyers

Enter the Void.

They started on 4chan, Reddit's mangled, red-headed step-brother. It wasn't long before the pranksters on the Internet's most notorious imageboard took notice of what was happening on Reddit. It was too good an opportunity for them to pass up. And so they turned to the color closest to their heart -- black. They became the Void.

Like a tear spreading slowly across the canvas, black pixels started emerging near the center of Place.

At first, other Factions tried to form an alliance with them, foolishly assuming that diplomacy would work. But they failed, because the Void was different.

The Void was no Protector. Unlike the Factions, it professed no loyalty to Art. Followers of the Void championed its destructive egalitarianism, chanting only that "the Void will consume." They took no sides. They only wanted to paint the world black.

This was exactly the kick in the ass that Place needed. While Creators had been busy fighting each other, and Protectors still measured themselves by the extent of canvas they controlled, a new threat -- a real threat -- had emerged under their nose.

Against the face of extinction, they banded together to fight the Void and save their Art.

But the Void was not easy to vanquish, because the Place needed it. It needed destruction so that new Art, better Art, would emerge from the ashes. Without the Void, there was no force to clean up the old Art.

I used to hate the Void but watching the time-lapses I see they're a vital part of the r/place ecosystem. Like a forest fire making way for new life. from place

And so, by design or not, the Void gave birth to some of the largest Art in the Place.

Take, for example, the part of the canvas right in the center. Almost since the very beginning, it had been one of the most contested areas on the map. Time and again, Creators had tried to claim the territory for their own. First with icons. Then with a coordinated attempt at a prism.

But the Void ate them all. Art after art succumbed to its ravenous appetite for chaos.

And yet, this was exactly what Place needed. By destroying art, the Void forced Placetions to come up with something better. They knew they could overcome the sourge. They just needed an idea good enough, with enough momentum and enough followers, to beat the black monster.

That idea was the American flag.

In the last day of Place, a most unlikely coalition came together to beat back the Void, once and for all.

They were people who otherwise tear each other apart every day -- Trump supporters and Trump resisters, Democrats and Republicans, Americans and Europeans. And here they were coming together to build something together, on a little corner of the Internet, proving in an age when such cooperation seems impossible, that they still can.

The Ancients Were Right

Reddit's experiment ended soon after. There are so many more stories hidden deep in the dozens of subreddits and chat rooms that cropped up around Place. For every piece of artwork I mentioned, there are hundreds more on the final canvas. Perhaps the most amazing thing is that on an anonymous, no-holds-barred space on the Internet, there were no hate or racist symbols at all on the final canvas.

It is a beautiful circle of art, life and death. And it isn't the first time in our history that we've seen it.

Many millenia before Place, when humanity itself was still in its infancy (the real one, not the one on Reddit), Hindu philosophers theorized that the Heavens were made of three competing, but necessary, deities that they called the Trimurti. They were Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Protector, and Shiva the Destroyer.

Without any single one of them, the Universe would not work. For there to be light, there needed to be dark. For there to be life, there needed to be death. For there to be creation and art, there needed to be destruction.

Over the last few days, their vision proved prescient. In the most uncanny way, Reddit proved that human creation requires all three.

The Final Canvas

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Last weekend, a fascinating act in the history of humanity played out on Reddit. For April Fool's Day, Reddit launched a little experiment. It gave its users, who are all anonymous, a blank canvas called Place. The rules were simple....