Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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This week, how the pandemic pushed us deeper inside our troubled relationship with technoconsumerism. And the emergence of a new way to fight back.
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1. Facebook saw daily users increase by 12% in 2020.
2. Amazon’s net profits rose by 84%.
3. Netflix signed up 26 million new paid subscribers in the first half of the year, against 28 million for the whole of 2019.
4. A global survey conducted by polling company Ipsos just before the pandemic found that concern over the way companies use our data had risen by 8% since 2013.
5. Data Leverage: A Framework for Empowering the Public in its Relationship with Technology Companies asks what ordinary people can do to win back some of the power being amassed by the big digital platforms.
6. A few years ago coder and technologist Daniel Howe and others created AdNauseum, a browser plugin that blocks but simultaneously clicks on every online ad served by a web browser.
7. A recent research paper concluded that AdNauseum works, and defended it against the accusation that by making advertising impossible it will lead to the demise of free content on the web.
8. Alias is a device that sits on top of a smart speaker and continually ‘whispers’ a stream of inaudible static to it so that the device can’t eavesdrop on those around it.
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I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. See you then,
David.
New World Same Humans #57 – Audio Version