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Google Urbanism

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17 pointspeteratt19 comments

Is this political protest art or some Professor Jeff Jarvis fever dream about innovention? I can't make any sense of it.

No matter how I changed the attention slider I just couldn't seem to focus on anything.

That "set your attention" slider is a cool idea I've never seen before.

It's also painfully hard to use (the maximum attention setting involved 4 overlapping animations at one point), and scary in a factual relativity sort of sense I've never even tried to pin down. It vaguely reminds me of the sort of manipulation NewsDiffs was created to counter - stories changing tone and even facts in real time with no acknowledgement of that fact.

I don't see any sign of that happening on this page, but imagine one of those sliders with conflicting content at different attention levels. I find it creepy on a level I have trouble explaining.

That is exactly what caught my attention, barring the pseudo-dystopian theme. I'd say that a different arrangement (e.g. a short TL;DR followed by a Learn More, and finally by the full whitepaper) would seem more "natural". That slider you can modify at will depending on your current attention span seems strangely creepy for reasons beyond my current human psychology understanding.

That's a good observation. I've seen a couple of things offer successive "takes" of increasing complexity, and always thought it was an interesting idea.

At a first guess, my bad reaction to the slider was based on an intuitive fear that the differences would be something more substantive than best-effort restatements of one idea.

This seems to be... someone's attempt to get hired as an idea man by Google to implement this proposal? With perhaps the scariest proposal ever. Essentially encouraging Google to control cities and be a monopoly, language the site actually uses.

"Google takes on more of the responsibilities of the state, becomes a central gateway to the basic services of city"

"Become the go-to partner for “Smart-City”, displacing all other competitors from this market because of focus on human behavior."

"This could give you a monopoly over both physical and digital realms, leading the next generation of global tech conglomerates..."

And I almost worry that it might get someone hired. The New Digital Age is all about this kind of pervasive physical/digital monopoly/monopsony, essentially pitching 'deep company' structures as a successor to 'deep state' ones.

I think (hope) they are taking "Google" as a concept for marketing/impact purposes, not as Google per se. That said, if there's a company that'd dare to implement this, it'd be Google.

It's a research project trying to predict Google's future trajectory. There was a lot of this kind of thing at transmediale in Berlin last year. The view of tech from outside the SF Bay Area is often unsettlingly creepy, because people not in the bubble have a more realistic view of what the tech industry actually is.

I legitimately can't tell if this is a serious proposal, a work of dystopian/cyberpunk art, or somehow both.

There is value in conveying your message clearly.

This is something best handled through an agnostic B-corp or NPO, funded by Google and other tech companies (the way Let's Encrypt has been handled [1]).

However fragmented this message is, I get that they're trying to propose a program to bridge the gap with the physical world, but that results in regional monopolies. Sure, cities and states can help regulate it, but it's best if the organization was aligned entirely with the people living in that region.

[1] https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/

This website is tiresome and confusing. I have no concrete idea what they're trying to say. This is after reading the first two attention settings. I failed to read the last due to technical malfunctions.

Is this an appeal to Google to monopolize Orwell's Nightmare?

What a horribly designed website.

Physical space data mining and attention bidding is exactly what's happening to us if we don't stop it. I wondered how long it would be before someone said it out in the open. The only odd thing about the presentation is the assumption it's not already happening. I'm pretty sure these levers are already well in motion.

Get ready for hordes of robots mining fake attention for money, though. We'll continue to ship bits around the internet by robots for robots to validate marketing budgets.

This future phenomenon is probably the best argument for a private web, if not a decentralized one.

I'm very unclear as to what this is. It looks like some third party trying to get Google to hire them to help them start tracking us offline the same way they do online, which is frankly terrifying.

So broken on Safari mobile. Too bad.

Good god the scrolling behavior on that site is obnoxious. I scroll down, and it scrolls me back up because I didnt scroll enough.

#1 way to make me discount your ideas before I've even read them.

Don't worry, they got plenty of other ideas like this.

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