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.

November 19, 2018: Frank Pasquale, author of "The Black Box Society," on secret algorithms

Listen to this show:  Pop-up player!

This week: Frank Pasquale, author of The Black Box Society

Relevant links:

• Twitter: @FrankPasquale

• The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms Behind Money & Information

• Frank recommends following on Twitter: @podehaye, Paul-Olivier Dehaye

Recent News

• HQ2. WSJ, Nov 14, called it Amazon’s Golden Fleecing: "We rarely agree with socialist Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but she’s right to call billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies for Amazon 'extremely concerning.' These handouts to one of the richest companies in the history of the world, with an essentially zero cost of capital, is crony capitalism at its worst.... In New York they call this a racket, and with good reason."

• from The Onion: New York City Announces Subway Just For Amazon Employees Now.

• Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis (NYT, Nov 14)... which led to many followups, including...

• The moral and ethical rot at Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg’s Facebook (Washington Post, Nov 15): "Facebook itself at one point asked Jewish advocacy groups to characterize critics of the company as engaging in anti-Semitism. (Both Zuckerberg and Sandberg are Jewish.) This is the sort of stuff the Yiddish word 'chutzpah' describes."

• The Facebook Movie Told Us What We Needed to Know About Mark Zuckerberg (NYT, Nov 18): " 'The reality of running a company of more than 10,000 people,' Mr. Zuckerberg said on Thursday, 'is that you’re not going to know everything that’s going on.' It was a baffling explanation for anyone who took him and his deputy, Sheryl Sandberg, at face value when they swore, not long ago, that they would work openly to assert more control over the platform to stop misinformation campaigns, privacy breaches and incitements to violence.
Nothing was more at variance with their promises of transparency than The Times’s revelation that the company had hired Definers Public Affairs... as part of its work for Facebook, the firm circulated tip sheets suggesting that the liberal political donor George Soros — a common figure in anti-Semitic tropes — was behind a coalition of groups criticizing Facebook under the 'Freedom from Facebook' umbrella."

• Don't forget Google! Google accused of 'trust demolition' over health app (Nov 14): "A controversial health app developed by artificial intelligence firm DeepMind will be taken over by Google, it has been revealed... [the app] was first used to send alerts in a London hospital but hit headlines for gathering data on 1.6 million patients without informing them. DeepMind now wants the app to become an AI assistant for nurses and doctors around the world."

• "'Data collected by DeepMind Health will never be connected to Google accounts or services,' the company said in a previous statement... [now] DeepMind Health will be absorbed into Google Health." (CNBC)

- - -

PODCAST: Subscribe to the Techtonic podcast