These are the stories I found worth reading during the course of my day. I hope you enjoy them.

• The coming software apocalypse, is a great long read on The Atlantic. I didn’t like the headline, but the story is great look into our reliance of software and weaknesses that are all around it. I urge you to read this.
• If you look hard enough, you know Amazon HQ2 is just spin and polishing a turd, John Battelle eruditely explains.
• A driverless car with some common sense? A startup called iSee is working on it. I am not clear on how their approach is special compared to other, but otherwise it seems like an idea and a company paying attention to. MIT Technology Review has the story.
• Let Twitter be Twitter, Dave Winer argues.
• Surveillance is the business model of the Internet, says Bruce Schneier, commenting on this story about Tinder. An eye-opening read.
• You want more context, then read this N+1 story, The Commercial Surveillance State.

Randomly

• FBI exposes wide scale corruption in the (US) College Basketball program. Worth a read. #
• 88 percent of American adults watched the August total solar eclipse or about 215 million. That’s a lot. #
• Listen up Steve Jobs wannabes, being abusive bosses works only for so long. So shape up. #
• Boston vs Silicon Valley. #

The recent debate about Facebook’s impact on politics and being easily manipulated by others (Russians for example) has resulted in a lot of outrage. Increasingly, when I think about Facebook and it’s algorithm, I use the following questions as my framework.

After ten years of limiting its tweets to 140 characters (a limit imposed due to the limitations of old school SMS systems), Twitter decided it was time to experiment with the character limit and change it to 280 characters as a trial for some of its users. I am not sure why 280, but it is not going to keep me awake at night. Apparently it did get a lot of people hot-and-bothered. Like Dave Pell (of NextDraft):

…the reason Twitter thrived is because people were not intimidated by a big blank page that reminded them of the essays they dreaded during youth. Most people hate writing. Hence our societal move toward emojis and animated GIFs as a main mode of communication. 140 characters is so short that it doesn’t feel like writing. It certainly doesn’t feel like you need to be a writer to participate. 280 moves you away from “everyone can do it” and towards, “this is a great place for English majors.” And trust me, as an English major, that’s not a path that leads to an increased stock market valuation.

He wasn’t alone – Twitter was ablaze with dismissals of 280 characters. It left me scratching my head. What’s the big deal? I mean you don’t have to use 280 characters. Whether you are using 140 or 280 characters to be an idiot/genius/self-promotional/funny/angry, you are going to be an idiot/genius/self-promotional/funny/angry. 

Marc Champagne (great name) founder of the Kyo app, emailed a few months ago and wanted to chat with me for a podcast. He wanted to know more about my approach to photography. I don’t quite have an approach, except as I told him “I find photography a way of capturing what I’m feeling and sharing it with others.” During the conversation with Marc, I mused about my approach to life…“Are you living your life by a set of rules and regulations set by society?” And perhaps now you know why I am not so keen on going on with Facebook and other social networks that start to influence how I do things.

I am taking a bit of a vacation from Facebook — mostly because I find the social media is starting to become a bit distracting. It is not that I don’t like connecting to the people, but I am finding it hard to support a service that I am starting to see as empathy-challenged. 

Looking through a wider lens, I am starting to find a subtle change happening in myself. Despite my best efforts, I am starting to see my life in context of life led by others. It is not how I think and who I am, and perhaps a little time off the networks will give me better perspective. The sad part is that I have outsourced my birthday calendar to Facebook and as a result have totally forgotten everyone’s birthdays. So if I miss yours, forgive me and I wish you a great birthday.

In the interim, if you wish to keep up with me – visit my blog where I will post occasional personal updates, along with sharing some of my photos, new podcasts and obviously opinions & ideas around new technology. The WordPress app and SmugMug automatically post links to Facebook and Twitter, so you will always get an alert. My Instagram photos too will flow into your stream, as will the articles from Pi.co.

But the best way to know what’s happening with me, sign-up for my newsletter. And If you need to reach me, drop me a note — email or text message. I won’t be checking the Facebook Messages as well.

September 23, 2017, San Francisco.