It’s my new year’s media diet resolution to reduce how much social media algorithms determine the news I consume. So far so good, and to keep myself honest, I’m trying to select five interesting stories each day that weren’t delivered to me by some trending news widget.
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- “The NSA’s voice-recognition system raises hard questions for Echo and Google Home” (The Verge) – How terrified should you be of your always-on Amazon Alexa? Following Ava Kofman’s in-depth report in The Intercept on just how adept the NSA and other government agencies are at snooping on voice networks, Russell Brandom argues you should be very worried indeed. Past experience suggests that whenever useful data is amassed, law enforcement and intelligence services will seek to use it no matter the intentions of whoever amassed it.
- “Kurds Say Damascus Gave an Ultimatum Before Turkish Strikes” (Bloomberg View) – Turkey’s current operation to clear Kurdish forces from Syria — forces that were U.S. allies in fighting ISIS — shows that “Turkey, Iran, Russia and the Syrian regime are coordinating their actions more than either side is letting on,” Eli Lake reports.
- “Why Facebook’s news feed changes are bad news for democracy” (The Guardian) – Emily Bell makes the case that whatever harm Facebook’s announced changes to its News Feed mean for publishers in the Western world, its decision to back away from journalism will hurt chances of democratic emergence in places like Cambodia and Myanmar. Worth reading alongside Ben Thompson’s (more sympathetic) take on Mark Zuckerberg’s motivations in making “time well-spent” the top priority of the social network.
- “To Be, or Not to Be” (The New York Review of Books) – Masha Gessen on making choices.
- “Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs” (The Guardian) – Andy Beckett makes the case that the era of employment is ending — and why that might not be a terrifying development.