Depressingly illuminating.

This weekend, I visited family and complained to myself that their Amazon Fire sticks were emphasizing ad delivery over being a TV. I guess that’s the future for my Roku stick, too? What a sucky future we live in.

I’ve been trying to figure out how angry to be about this move from Amazon, and Doctorow’s thinking is helpful: Very angry. (I don’t own and would never own an Echo, but it still makes me mad).

What a mess.

The headline doesn’t really make the point, but the article is interesting; of course Amazon drivers would be sent into areas evacuated for fire.

It never occurred to me that you could use a Kindle in such a “de-Amazoned” way… and it also infuriates me that Amazon still interferes this much.

This is cute, but also Ring doorbells are seriously the thing that scares me most on Halloween.

A few months ago, some colleagues reached out to ask if I would be willing to record a guest lecture for our library science program’s LIS 600: Information in Society. In particular, they were interested in having me record something for a week on the digital divide. I am conversant on that topic, but it’s not an area of specialty for me, so I was unsure about it until I realized that some of the readings for that week touch on topics like platform design that I am really interested in through my work on social media communities.

This sucks on so many levels.

Funny meme, depressing reality.

This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic from yesterday spoke to me at a deep level: My first thoughts went to generative AI, an area in which I feel like a fetishization of optimization is crowding out really important questions of what is good. As I put it in a university survey earlier today, there are undeniable benefits to the use of AI tools, but there are important questions as to who benefits.

Helpful reminder that it’s low-paid, underappreciated workers who contribute to AI as much as high-paid programmers and household-name executives.

This made me laugh out loud while reheating my leftovers for lunch.

Don’t know how I missed this story yesterday, but what the heck? Like the article says, nothing particularly new revealed by these stunts, but it’s still a compelling critique of Amazon.

This morning, I read an excellent piece by Lam Thuy Vo at The Markup expressing concern about how services like Amazon’s Ring cameras can distort police priorities and perpetuate bias. Here’s a good summary passage: As a reporter, I’ve always been interested in systems that disadvantage some people—when it comes to policing, they are often Black or Latino—while prioritizing the wishes of a smaller, much more powerful subset—often affluent White folks.

Public-private surveillance is the worst of both worlds. Ring is creepy.

Amazon: also the worst.

What a gross idea.

After leaving our local indie bookstore, I realized how appropriate it was to spend some money there the same day the FTC goes after Amazon.

Amazon is too big, and while I’m not a policy expert, I welcome government efforts to keep it in check.

I’m not thrilled about AI’s ability to do this, but let’s be clear: Amazon is as much to blame here, and I like them even less.

So many of our conveniences depend on someone else doing work we wouldn’t want to do ourselves.

Hear hear. Ring is a creepy company, and we shouldn’t support them.

Look, this is the kind of book that I bought knowing already that I’d agree with its thesis, so maybe you shouldn’t read my review of it. Nonetheless, I think Caine does an excellent job of bringing together many of the arguments against Amazon. This company is bad news, and while it’s hard to escape it entirely, I think the world would be a better place if more of us did less to support it.

As I’ve blogged about a couple of times recently, I’m currently reading R. Sikoryak’s Terms and Conditions, a graphic novel adaptation of the 2015 iTunes Terms and Conditions document, which no one ever reads. I was struck (if not surprised) by something stated explicitly in the document, which appears on p. 59 of Sikoryak’s volume: The software products made available through the Mac App Store and App Store (collectively, the “App Store Products”) are licensed, not sold, to you.

Someone’s paying the price for the convenience of shopping on Amazon.

I missed the vertical integration aspect of this in earlier reporting I’ve read. It makes this story even worse.

Such a bad idea. Normalizing Ring won’t make it any better—only worse.

Doctorow convinced me years ago that Audible was terrible, but here, he showed me just how bad they are.

Kiddo starts at a new school on Wednesday, and I’ve been putting off signing the Acceptable Use Policy and Chromebook Policy because I want to read them carefully. I don’t know how much I can do about anything that I’m really concerned with, but I’m a tech researcher when I’m not being kiddo’s dad, so I feel an obligation to be informed and raise a fuss when something is fussworthy.

Some good points about how Amazon owning Roomba is scarier than just Roomba existing on its own—even if I didn’t realize that Roomba was creepily mapping houses.

Amazon keeps getting bigger, and I don’t think that’s for the better.

It’s concerning to see private surveillance prop up public surveillance like this.

This is why I’m trying to buy more physical copies of things—or at least DRM-free stuff. I have lots of regrets about the size of my Kindle library, for example.

I’ve been plenty spooked by Ring’s video capabilities, but apparently I haven’t been worried enough about its audio surveillance.

Amazon already has too big a footprint here. Don’t feel great about this.