LET’S BE FWENDS ISSUE #50:

GENDER DEFAULTS HARM SOCIETY, YOUR PHONE IS EASILY IDENTIFIABLE AND WHAT COMES AFTER CAPITALISM?

“A servant is the true reflection of his master.” ~ Arthur M. Jolly

Female voice assistants fuel damaging gender-stereotypes

Have you ever noticed that computers that talk typically have a female voice? Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant are recent examples, but also car GPS systems typically have a female voice, as have auditory warning systems in airplanes (“Bitching Betty”, they call it)

In Science Fiction, there’s the female voice of “Her”. (There’s also the notable exception of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey)

The most common theory why this is the case is that females are considered less threatening, and the “service” role of an assistant is more in line with typical female gender-stereotypes.

The UN performed a study suggesting that the usage of female voices for digital assistants are encoding harmful gender-biases into technology and urges vendors to find ways to make digital assistants more neutral.

Your Smart Phone will betray you:

De-anonymising through sensors

Your smartphone contains a host of sensors, like a microphone, a camera, an accelerometer, or a GPS unit. All of these sensors need to be carefully calibrated for optimal performance, which typically happens in the factory after assembly.

Four researchers where able to read out the fingerprint the sensor calibration of smartphones in less than one second by just using sensor output:

“A calibration fingerprinting attack infers the per- device factory calibration data from a device by careful analysis of the sensor output alone. Such an attack does not require direct access to any calibration parameters since these are often embedded inside the firmware of the device and are not directly accessible by application developers.”

A website could fingerprint, and therefore identify, your device in under second by just looking at sensor data and without your knowledge.

If the researcher’s claim is true and these fingerprints are more or less globally unique, there’s a huge security and privacy problem just around the corner.

What comes after Neoliberalism?

Adam Smith, the guy who started it all.

One thing you have to give to all the free-market proponents out there: They managed to blur the differences between neoliberalism as an ideology and capitalism as an economic system to such an extent that everybody thinks they are the same. Like, you can’t have capitalism without neoliberalism, which basically means insanely low taxes for the rich, a laissez-fair state, austerity and rampant privatisation.

Joseph Stiglitz says that it is clear by now that this ideology has failed, and asks: What comes next? And what should come next?

One point strikes me as especially important:

“The fourth key item on the progressive agenda is to sever the link between economic power and political influence. Economic power and political influence are mutually reinforcing and self-perpetuating, especially where, as in the US, wealthy individuals and corporations may spend without limit in elections.”

It’s not just the US, it’s basically everywhere in the world. And with the shifts going on in the media landscape, as more and more money goes from traditional media to largely unregulated, uncontrolled, pseudo-neutral digital media platforms, this will be a key issue in the coming years.

Re-Designing something that maybe doesn’t need a redesign

What happens when you ask 50 designers to re-invent something everbody knows, has a very clear utility and has been built for thounds of years? Like, say, the chair?

Fun things. Fun things happen.

Design, Food, Makers in Linz

No idea what to do on 26.6. and 27.6.? Why not head over to Linz and attend some talks and workshops the good people at Creative Region are organising?

The workshop with Stiven Kerestegian - Head of Innovation at IKEA - sounds really interesting.

But honestly, I’d also like to ask him why their products are getting crappier and crappier all the time. This is not some tongue in cheek why-is-IKEA-furniture-so-hard-to-assemble (it isn’t), but a real and honest question about quality, sustainability and how long you’re supposed to own IKEA furniture. Because most of the stuff cannot be disassembled without seriously impacting stability or function, and thus not moved to a new place.

I’d really like to talk about that.

Check out the complete program, and enjoy some interesting talks and good food.

Always be careful about unintended consequences when designing something. As a not so unintended consequence please enjoy this virtual high-five. It’s wednesday, and you’ve earned it. 📆