(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


Facebook Derangement Syndrome, Part 1: Smart Glasses, SUVs, and Terrorism

2025-01-08 10:12:11+00:00

On January 1, 2025 […] a man drove a pickup truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States, then exited the truck and engaged in a shootout with police before being fatally shot. Fifteen people were killed, including the perpetrator, and at least thirty-five others were injured, including two police officers who were shot. (link)

Gizmodo chose this frame:

Meta Smart Glasses First Big Cultural Moment Is a Terror Attack

Back in 2018 Mike Masnick described Facebook Derangement Syndrome (FDS):

It seems to go something like this: Facebook did some bad things concerning our privacy, and therefore every single possible thing that Facebook does or Mark Zuckerberg says must have some evil intent. This is silly. Not only is it obviously wrong, but (more importantly) it makes it that much more difficult to have a serious discussion on the actual mistakes of Facebook and Zuckerberg, and to find ways to move forward productively.

I can’t find any reference to FDS prior to 2018, although there is wide reference to Trump Derangement Syndrome during his first presidency, and various blogs about Apple Derangement Syndrome in 2014, and the template/snowclone appears to have been in broad use at that time, possibly before.

Regarding FDS, later commentators have attempted to narrow application of the term to government actors, but the truth is: it affects everybody in the commentariat, from policy wonks to campaigning journalists to gobby digital activists; and fair do’s, Meta in general and Mark Zuckerberg in particular have more than enough money to weather the storm.

But it does have a consequence: learned helplessness.

Learned Helplessness

Large chunks of the Facebook executive simply believe that the media and civil society will always be against them, to the point that they have essentially given up on the idea of “positive press”.

This is a condition that I first encountered when I was working for Facebook in 2013-16, when the then Chief Security Officer suggested permanently blocking users from accessing Facebook via the Tor Network given the (then, reasonable) excuse that Tor users generated nothing but bad press: either such users were scrapers or criminals, or else they did nothing but complain when there was an outage caused by automated protection systems. I subsequently received a huge bonus and a “redefines expectations” job rating by finding a way to solve that sore point which generated a positive narrative for Facebook in such a way that civil society was incapable of attacking the outcome. However: FDS still exists, and the simplest test for it is to ask the person to explain Cambridge Analytica, because (again) Masnick is one of the few who gets it right.

But I digress… the nature of civil society discourse over the past 10 years has taught Facebook/Meta that they are not allowed to win the popular narrative, so instead they should just attempt to surf on top of it. They are disconnected from their users – and this is not healthy, but we have essentially done it to ourselves; Cambridge Analytica itself was a consequence of 2009-era fears of “platforms locking up all [our] data”.

For many journalists this has lead to the delightful circumstance that they can write whatever speculative crap they like about the company and there will be little if any chance of being held to account (Britons: we saw much the same re: tabloid writing about the Royal Family in the 1990s) because holding false critics to account merely provides oxygen to them, not to mention excites and empowers legitimate critics at the same time. It’s easier and safer instead to just track what’s going on and send a squad of public relations flacks and lawyers whenever any of this escalates to government levels.

Congratulations Civil Society, you just played yourself

So Meta is listening-but-mostly-not-listening, and some journalists are making hay by trying to stoke the techlash in pursuit of clicks; thus we encounter tone-deaf articles with consequent tone-deaf commentary, implicitly suggesting (e.g.) that the terrorist planning the New Orleans attack benefitted most consequentially from wearing “smart glasses” — and that such devices clearly present a threat to society because they enable “constant surveillance”. And, of course, the problem is Meta.

Yet you only have to go back to 2011, also in Gizmodo, to find this pre-techlash slice of techno-optimism:

Sometimes life is just too cool. Here are a smartphone and some earbuds that take information from a webcam attached to a pair of sunglasses and allow blind people to ‘see.’ Mass market implants that allow blind people to see directly are still some time away, although there is an individual who has an artificial eye. But there may be a way to bestow sight on a practical level. A product called vOICe allows deaf people to receive visual information about what’s in front of them. A pair of sunglasses with a webcam give signals to a smartphone. The phone then translates the visual information into audio signals. The placement and quality of the audio signals should allow people who are blind to navigate around the world by using the audio cues. The system has a code for the things it picks up visually, that can translate into helpful, if not very detailed pictures. ‘Up’ and ‘down’ are communicated by high and low frequencies, respectively. Light, and lots of it, turns up the volume, while dark is quiet. The camera scans at certain speeds, so a bright white object high up on the far right of the person would be indicated by a long pause, and then a loud high noise.

Go read the whole thing, and if you forget your prejudices you will likely agree that this means of helping the blind suggests a product idea that screams for immediate integration of Smart Glasses and GPT/LLMs with realtime image classifiers (“dog on the sidewalk in front of you“, “the peanut butter is on the table to your left“) and even — heavens forbid — actual facial recognition (“Alice is approaching you“) as part of a solution to assist people with sight impairment, as soon as possible.

All of the technologies now exist, putting it together would be pretty easy.

But then you can tell me why sighted people should be prevented from also using it, just in case they are terrorists, or because you’re scared of what data might be collected?

Not that I have had to make this point previously about other aspects of technology, nooooo…

2/ There should also be consideration of what Civil Society would like to achieve – like, more crypto? If so, it behooves Civil Society to frame its concerns and challenges carefully, lest it ends up making its opponent's arguments for them. — Alec Muffett (@AlecMuffett) January 27, 2019

Part 2 is here
[END]

[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/110827
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

DropSafe Blog via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/alecmuffett/