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January 6, 2020: Station Manager Ken Freedman on tech trends in 2020

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Tech trends in 2020 with Station Manager Ken Freedman

Tech trends:

• Surveillance everywhere, I mean everywhere: Kohler puts an Alexa-enabled smart speaker in a showerhead (The Verge, Jan 3)

• "Reasonable" (?) responses to surveillance: How we survive the surveillance apocalypse (Washington Post, Dec 31): "The first time I used Jumbo, I was shocked that it identified a half-dozen privacy settings for Facebook and Google that even I had missed. Now the app goes in on a regular basis and deletes my Alexa recordings, Google data and Twitter posts, reducing the data trail I leave behind me."

• Students as vulnerable population under tech control: Colleges are turning students' phones into surveillance machines (Washington Post, Dec 24): "We're adults. Do we really need to be tracked?" ... "Why is this necessary? How does this benefit us? … And is it just going to keep progressing until we're micromanaged every second of the day?"

• Decoupling the Internet. From Axios (Jan 6, 2020): "The globalist triumphalism of the '90s and 2000s has given way to Trump-era protectionism and a splintering of the global internet into three distinct regions — the U.S., Europe and China — with fundamentally different legal regimes. China is where the ideal of internet freedom lost out to a government that now successfully monitors its citizens' doings and controls their speech. It has built its own domestic software and services industry that rival the U.S.-led Big Tech giants. China is also where much of our tech hardware, including most iPhones, get made. That keeps China and the U.S. interdependent — for now."

(And from Mike Gallagher in the NYT piece below: "The internet as we know it is largely American, but by 2030 the Chinese Communist Party will have built an entirely new internet where Beijing attempts to monopolize key supply chains, stifle free speech and hoard personal data. The menace is already real. The C.C.P. is increasingly exporting its model abroad. Huawei and ZTE seek to build the world’s networks; WeChat and TikTok play a growing role in online discourse; Chinese cryptocurrencies could one day threaten the dollar.")

• Climate change due to tech: Edward Snowden on the world in 2030 (NYT, Dec 26): "Electricity usage by data centers is enormous and expanding, threatening to top 10 percent of global electricity consumption within the next decade and to produce roughly five times the CO2 emissions of all current global air travel. As more power is required to cool these data centers, the warmer the planet will become."

• The Real Trouble With Silicon Valley (Atlantic, Jan/Feb 2020): "Perhaps it’s time to reconsider the wisdom of placing such a big bet on Silicon Valley delivering the United States from its rusting present to a glimmering future. Too much American ingenuity is chasing problems that simply don’t matter. The web was once celebrated as a democratizing force and a means of escaping institutional control. But Silicon Valley’s most profitable business model has been to construct expansive systems for tracking and manipulating human behavior."

• We've spent the decade letting our tech define us. It's out of control (Guardian, Dec 29)

• The Tech That Will Invade Our Lives in 2020 (NYT, Jan 1)

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