Conversations with creators and thinkers who are charting the way forward in a tech-saturated society. Tech, community, video games, and whatever else is next.

Also available as an MP3 podcast. More info at our Podcast Central page.

September 24, 2018: M.A. Taylor, director, "The Creepy Line" - and Dr. Robert Epstein

Listen to this show:  Pop-up player!

This week: M.A. Taylor, director of the new documentary "The Creepy Line," with (past Techtonic guest) Dr. Robert Epstein, also featured in the film

Pointers to M.A. Taylor and Dr. Epstein:

• The Creepy Line website, which includes the trailer

• Taming Big Tech: The Case for Monitoring, by Dr. Robert Epstein (also linked on the playlist page full o' links from July 30, when he was on the show)

• Washington Post op-ed from 2013 about Google and elections by Dr. Robert Epstein, referenced in our interview this evening

• The Verge's negative review of The Creepy Line (Sept 19), which I disagree with - I think the reviewer covered politics, rather than technology, and so missed the larger point of the documentary. But worth seeing a counterpoint to my positive review.

• PJMedia's positive review of The Creepy Line (Sept 23): "During the interview, Epstein lamented Trump's win and his presidency, but he insisted that Google's power is a much more important and terrifying issue."

• The Real Google Censorship Scandal, by Kara Swisher (NYT op-ed, Sept 13): "Conservatives have been spreading the canard that social media companies oppress their views — a drum Mr. Trump has himself been banging on lately. ... I am astonished by the focus on this ridiculous scandal when a much more important issue concerning Google and censorship has been largely ignored by the public and by Washington. I’m talking about the fact that Google is considering re-entering the Chinese market after leaving it with a lot of righteous indignation less than a decade ago."

Recent Tech News

• John Oliver on Facebook (Sept 23, Last Week Tonight): (NSFW language - don't turn up loud in the middle of the office, or around kids)

• Alexa, Blow My Mind by Scott Galloway (Sept 21) - good review of recent launches by Apple and Amazon. On iOS vs. Android: "The Mecca of innovation, Apple’s Special Events, [is] where they announce the accessories of the global wealthy. If you think you’re buying into a differentiated ecosystem or technology, think again — the Galaxy and Android are pretty close. You’re buying into a cohort, the global affluent, and the entry fee is the monthly disposable income of a household in Hungary. An Android phone can be had for free, with a contract, but will molest you for data, pulling 10x more data points than iOS." As for Amazon, "Amazon announced a plethora of items that explain one freakishly hard to believe piece of data: Amazon’s Alexa group has had more open job positions than all of Google. Put another way, the brightest young minds in the world aren’t working at Instagram, the NSA, NASA, or Bottega Veneta, but at Alexa."

• The White House is considering an antitrust investigation into 'online platform bias' at Google and Facebook (Business Insider, Sept 22): "The president and other conservatives have repeatedly complained that they believe Facebook and Google (owned by corporate parent Alphabet) bias the way they show news to users by dampening down conservative voices or outlets."

• Google CEO Warns Staff: Stay Nonpartisan (WSJ, Sept 21): "Recent disclosures have fueled concerns Google’s search results favor liberal views over conservative ones.... An email chain from January 2017, days after the Trump administration instituted a controversial travel ban, showed Google employees discussing how they might be able to tweak the company’s search functions to show users how to contribute to pro-immigration organizations and contact lawmakers and government agencies, according to internal company emails. 'Recent news stories reference an internal email to suggest that we would compromise the integrity of our search results for a political end,' Mr. Pichai said to employees. 'This is absolutely false.'"

• Rescripting Search To Respect The Right To Truth, from Georgetown Law Technology Review (2018). As danah boyd puts it, "Deirdre Mulligan & Daniel Griffin make the brilliant case for how the Google cannot hold onto its obsession with neutrality given how people see search and how search is being manipulated."

• And about Kara Swisher's op-ed mentioning Google and China: Google Suppresses Memo Revealing Plans To Closely Track Search Users In China (The Intercept, Sept 21): "The Intercept has learned [Google's] plan to launch a censored search engine in China... The memo, authored by a Google engineer who was asked to work on the project, disclosed that the search system, codenamed Dragonfly, would require users to log in to perform searches, track their location — and share the resulting history with a Chinese partner who would have 'unilateral access' to the data.... According to three sources familiar with the incident, Google leadership discovered the memo and were furious that secret details about the China censorship were being passed between employees who were not supposed to have any knowledge about it."

...and from the Uncanny Valley:

• Spotify Teams Up With Ancestry to Create DNA-Curated Playlists (Complex.com, Sept 23)

• United Nations Accidentally Exposed Passwords And Sensitive Information To The Whole Internet (The Intercept, Sept 24): "The United Nations accidentally published passwords, internal documents, and technical details about websites when it misconfigured popular project management service Trello, issue tracking app Jira, and office suite Google Docs."

• Delta to start scanning faces at airport check-in (TechCrunch, Sept 20): "Delta will later this year roll out facial recognition at its terminal at Atlanta International Airport for anyone traveling on an international flight. The airline said the biometric facial scanning is optional — a move that will shave off a few minutes off each flight — but will help border and pre-flight security authorities before jetting out of the US. It’s the latest roll-out of facial recognition trials at Detroit Metropolitan and New York John F. Kennedy airports."

- - -

PODCAST: Subscribe to the Techtonic podcast