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The Intricately-Manipulated Edition Saturday, July 7, 2018

The Death Of The Public Square, by Franklin Foer, The Atlantic

And now, the tech giants are racing to insert themselves more intimately in people’s lives, this time as personal assistants. The tech companies want us to tie ourselves closely to their machines—those speakers that they want us to keep in our kitchens and our bedrooms: Amazon’s Echo, Google Home, Apple’s Siri. They want their machines to rouse us in the morning and to have their artificial intelligence guide us through our days, relaying news and entertainment, answering our most embarrassing questions, enabling our shopping. These machines don’t present us with choices. They aren’t designed to present us with a healthy menu of options. They anticipate our wants and needs, even our informational and cultural wants and needs.

What’s so pernicious about these machines is that they weaponize us against ourselves. They take our data—everywhere we have traveled on the web, every query we’ve entered into Google, even the posts we begin to write but never publish—and exploit this knowledge to reduce us to marionettes. All this has become painfully evident in the controversies over Facebook. With this intimate portrait of our brains, Facebook maps our anxieties and pleasure points. It uses the cartography of our psyche to array the things we read and the things we watch, to commandeer our attention for as long as possible, to addict us. When our conversation and debate is so intensely and intricately manipulated, can it truly be said to be free?

Stuff

How To Free Up Space On Your iPhone, by Josie Colt, Wired

Don't let limited storage stop you from taking another Instagram-worthy photo or downloading another album to listen to on the go. It's easy to free up space on your iPhone. Follow our best tips and tricks and you'll lighten the load on your iPhone within an hour.

Review: Tap Is A Futuristic Hand-Worn Keyboard That Lets You Type With Gestures, by Juli Clover, MacRumors

Tap is a hand-worn, futuristic replacement for a keyboard, mouse, and game controller that connects to iPhones and iPads, Macs, and PCs, and other devices using Bluetooth.

Tap fits over your fingers and can be used on any surface, meaning you can do away with a traditional desk, but mastering its use takes some intensive practice that may turn some people away.

Develop

It's The End Of The API Economy As We Know It, by Bob Reselman, ProgrammableWeb

Companies that rely upon third-party public APIs (for example, those from Facebook, Twitter, and other API providers) to do business have always been at risk. This is nothing new. Over the last decade, ProgrammableWeb has watched and reported as many of the APIs that developers rely on (i.e., Netflix, ESPN, Edmunds, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) have either significantly dialed down their functionality, changed their API terms of service, or shut down altogether. But none of these made mainstream media headlines the way the recent Cambridge Analytica fiasco involving Facebook’s APIs did.

The damage was widespread. Not only has the much-maligned UK-based firm shut down, but many developers are also feeling the pain as Facebook and other API providers adjust their API capabilities accordingly, in many cases without warning.

Notes

Why We Suddenly Care That Google Let App Developers Read Our Gmail, by Will Oremus, Slate

The explanation is not that Google has been backsliding on its privacy practices. It’s that the public and the media are starting to set the bar higher in the wake of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal—reassessing, along the way, our relationships with some of the world’s biggest internet companies. And that’s a very good thing.