Monthly Archives: January 2022

The House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol has ordered several social media firms to hand over data relating to the attack, a significant step toward transparency that could have broader privacy implications.

The committee on Thursday subpoenaed Twitter, Meta, Alphabet and Reddit for private messages exchanged on the platforms about the attack as well as information regarding moderation policies that allowed communities to remain online even as they incited violence in early 2021.

Congressman Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the select committee, said the committee was seeking to answer two key questions: how the spread of misinformation contributed to the violent attack, and what steps social media companies took to prevent their platforms from being breeding grounds for radicalizing people to violence.

The subpoenas mark an escalation in the committees efforts to get answers from the tech companies. Thompson added in his letter that the subpoenas came after months of engagement with the firms and that the four companies had so far ignored requests for information.

We cannot allow our important work to be delayed any further, he said.

The panel in August asked 15 tech companies, including the four subpoenaed on Thursday as well as TikTok, Snapchat, Parler and 4chan, for records related to the riot.

In letters sent this week to the tech firms, Thompson lamented their lack of response. In a letter to Metas CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, Thompson said that despite repeated and specific requests for documents related to Facebooks practices on election misinformation and violent content, the committee had still not received these materials.

Meta said in a statement that it planned to produce the documents requested. Reddit also told the Guardian it had received the subpoena and planned to comply with the requests. Twitter declined to comment. Google did not respond to request for comment.

As Chairman Thompson said recently, Facebook is working with [the committee] to provide the necessary information we requested. Since then, Meta has produced documents to the committee on a schedule committee staff requested and we will continue to do so.

Following the January 6 attack, social media platforms have been scrutinized for amplifying calls to violence, spreading misinformation and serving as an organizing tool for the rioters.

Last March, lawmakers grilled the CEOs of Google, Twitter and Facebook about the platforms role in the Capitol riot. And in the months since, the major platforms have all announced initiatives to curb the spread of misinformation through their products.

But still, much about the content moderation policies of major tech firms remains black box, with executives slow to reveal details of how misinformation and hate speech is moderated and how many resources are dedicated to mitigating such issues. Now, increased transparency could come by means of subpoena.

For lawmakers, the problem came even more acutely into focus with papers leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen in October 2021, which showed how Facebook failed to enforce policies that would rein in hate speech because they were detrimental to its bottom line. Speaking to Congress, Haugen called for more transparency from Facebook and other companies, including an independent oversight board.

In a letter to Zuckerberg, the select committee cited revelations from Haugen, requesting access to the companys internal analyses of the spread of misinformation and calls to violence relating to the 2020 election.

In particular, the committee requested more information on the Stop the Steal movement and how it was regulated. A Stop the Steal Facebook group amassed hundreds of thousands of members and was used to coordinate some of the actions on January 6. While Facebook eventually took it down, other related pages stayed online, said Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

It is absolutely crucial to understand the decision making process that led to them to leave those pages online how they executed enforcement of their policies against violence, encouraging violence, intimidation, extremism and hate.

Similarly, Reddit has been requested to provide information on its community r/The_Donald. That group was banned from Reddit in June 2020, but its community migrated to another platform where many actions of January 6 were planned.

Lawmakers were also seeking materials from Alphabet, the parent company of YouTube, because the video platform hosted significant communications by key players in the Capitol attack, including Trumps former chief strategist Steve Bannon and rioters livestreaming their movements on January 6.

Activists say the need to hold companies accountable for how their policies contributed to the Capitol riots should be held in balance with civil rights and privacy protections.

The subpoenas may bring up privacy concerns, said Evan Greer, deputy director of digital rights group Fight for the Future. Forcing companies to hand over private messages of its users could have major privacy implications, Greer said.

Its essential to remember that government surveillance and demands for data from private companies are primarily weaponized against marginalized communities, they said. The white supremacists who stormed the Capitol deserve to be held accountable, but we should never cheer on expansions of surveillance or government overreach.

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Breeding grounds for radicalization: Capitol attack panel signals loss of patience with big tech - The Guardian

from the there-goes-that-plan dept

Karl recently wrote about how Congress' antitrust efforts are flailing (even with the plan to hold a hearing on Senators Klobuchar & Grassley's antitrust bill) and one reason why the efforts have stumbled may be Senator Josh Hawley's decision to really show off his fascist side.

We've been pointing out the serious problems with Hawley and his policy ideas since long before January 6th of 2021. Even though it was fairly clear from early on that his hypocritical posturing and populism were little more than a cynical attempt to get the Trumpian base to back his massive ego and ambition for a potential Presidential run, a bunch of Democrats were happy to cynically embrace Hawley because he was "anti-big tech" and willing to hate all the same people that some Democratic Senators hated as well. Of course, January 6th and Hawley's now infamous raised fist appear to have resulted in Democrats realizing that even if he hates Mark Zuckerberg too, that doesn't mean he's worth working with.

Now the Washington Post has noted that since January 6th, Democrats suddenly were no longer willing to partner with Hawley on bills that regulate "big tech," which is a bit of a problem, since he was their Republican co-sponsor on a variety of "bipartisan" legislation.

By this time last Congress in January 2020, Hawley had partnered with Democrats to lead at least eight letters on tech issues, including with Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), then the Senate minority whip, according to a review by The Technology 202. The topics spanned from data privacy to kids online safety to potential risks posed by tech firms with links to China.

But a year into this Congress, during which his top issues have only gained prominence, Hawley hasnt led any bipartisan letters on tech policy issues that his office has publicly released, according to a review. All of the new tech bills hes introduced this past year have been either a solo or Republican-only effort. And of those four bills he co-led early last Congress, only one has been reintroduced without him on it.

The article claims that this means that Hawley's "once-glowing prominence in the debate has faded," though I question that premise. He's still out there bashing tech in stupid, nonsensical ways. He's just doing it on Fox News and to an increasingly ignorant base who still thinks that he can magically ignore the 1st Amendment and force Twitter to allow idiots to spew nonsense. The fact that he can't actually advance any legislation is kind of meaningless here. Possibly (and this is good) it slows some of the legislation down, but Hawley has never been interested in actually passing legislation in the first place. It was always about getting his name in lights among the right people. And he got his headlines from Democrats who were willing to look the other way on Hawley's populist/fascist tendencies when it was politically convenient for them. And now Hawley doesn't need them any more to get the kind of headlines he needs.

The real thing for me is looking at just how cynical Democrats were to join up with Hawley on this prior to last January 6th. It was no secret -- certainly not in and around the Senate -- about Hawley's populist/fascist views, and his willingness to stomp all over principles or rights to feed his ambition. But they were willing to do so because it helped them out. It's good that they're apparently no longer willing to team up with Hawley to give him any kind of legislative "win" on this topic, but it remains ridiculous that they were ever willing to do so in the past -- back before Hawley was so commonly and publicly associated with the insurrection.

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Filed Under: antitrust, big tech, bipartisanship, josh hawley

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Josh Hawley Was The Democrats' Partner In Trying To Regulate Big Tech; Then The Public Realized He Was A Fascist - Techdirt

To train for their famous 1969 mission to the moon, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins spent time in the lunarlike deserts of the American West.

One day, they ran into an elderly Native American man. He recognized them from TV and asked them for a favor.

My tribe believes sacred spirits live on the moon, he said. Could you give them a message for us?

The astronauts agreed. So, the man had them memorize a phrase in his native language. When they asked him what it meant, he demurred: Its a secret between our tribe and the moon spirits.

What happened next was one of the most poignant skirmishes in the age-old war between past and future, natives and colonizers, tradition and technology. That conflict is a bit like the one were currently waging with the large tech companies.

You know: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, Twitter and so on.

We let them into our lives, which they promised to make better. They did, sort of. But, they also stole our privacy, poisoned our politics, wasted our time, degraded our human interactions and messed with the minds of our children. Meanwhile, these electronic pirates have made fortunes off our personal information and their skill in addicting us to their products and services.

In a rare show of bipartisan comity, our elected and appointed leaders seem to be awakening to the problem. Congress has held hours of hearings and introduced dozens of bills over the past year to protect us from these invaders. The measures would strengthen privacy protections and strip social media companies of their protection from legal liability for the harm they cause.

That latter privilege was accorded them by Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. The loophole allows websites to be treated as common carriers, like a phone company routing calls obliviously, instead of as self-interested gatekeepers crafting algorithms to determine who sees what online and selling microscopically targeted advertising to accompany that content.

To protect young people from such intrusive behavior, Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey has introduced an update of the Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act, which he helped craft in 1998. The new version would spare kids from targeted advertising, stiffen security standards on electronic devices marketed to them and include an eraser button to eliminate kids personal info at will.

Another tool for taming Big Tech is antitrust law. The House Judiciary Committee has finished work on six bills that would help prevent tech companies from using their monopoly power to maximize profits and smother competition.

The courts have become the latest antitrust battleground. A federal judge this week allowed a Federal Trade Commission suit against Facebook to move forward. The FTC alleges that the company, which controls 70 percent of the daily social media market (98 percent among desktop users), has maintained its position by buying up potential competitors. Google, which has more than 80 percent of the market for internet search and 90 percent for Android app sales, is facing three antitrust suits over its treatment of competitors.

Encouraging as those efforts may be, chances of success are slim. The tech industry now accounts for more than one-third of the total U.S. economy. Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google alone are worth more than $7 trillion, bigger than the gross domestic product of any country in the world, except the U.S and China.

That kind of money buys a lot of lawyers, lobbyists and, alas, politicians. Tech executives are among the biggest contributors to political campaigns, and getting bigger. Not surprisingly, hardly any of the bills introduced in Congress are expected to be debated, let alone passed. Even the FTC suits are considered by many legal experts to be long shots, partly because of the plaintiffs impressive array of top-drawer lawyers.

This mismatch in firepower reminds us of what happened to Native Americans when the white man first arrived on this continent, with his superior wealth and technology. The locals never had a chance.

The old geezer who confronted Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins in the desert clearly knew his history.

When the astronauts returned to their base that day, they searched for an expert who understood the mans language. They finally found one and repeated the words theyd memorized. The translator burst out laughing. Then he told them the meaning of that message:

Dont believe a single word these white men tell you. Theyve come to steal your land.

Donald Morrison is an Eagle columnist and co-chairman of the advisory board. The opinions expressed by columnists do not necessarily reflect the views of The Berkshire Eagle.

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Donald Morrison: Is Congress ready for the war against Big Tech and big money like Facebook and Google? - Berkshire Eagle

With regulators around the world looking at reining in Big Tech, the companies in the crosshairs are increasingly eager to point out their rivals' sins.

Why it matters: Investigations in the U.S. and around the world are targeting Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. To make their case, regulators need to show the companies are squelching competition a task the tech companies may be aiding with their infighting.

Driving the news: An increasing part of each company's game plan seems to be to try to shift the spotlight and hope that regulators will put their limited time and resources against some other target.

Yes, but: All the finger-pointing to protect individual companies' interests could just further blemish the entire industry in the court of public opinion.

Between the lines: Industries that face a concerted threat from Washington often band together and send their trade groups into the fray to represent them as a united front.

The big picture: The government's campaign to limit Big Tech's power faces a big challenge in going after many targets at once, each of which has a different approach and grip on the market.

Meanwhile, the tech giants are collectively frustrated at legislative proposals that take aim at them but exclude both foreign tech companies and other corporate giants, such as Walmart.

Original post:

Tech giants play the blame game - Axios

The European Commission is moving fast on legislation that would change how tech giants operate in the digital marketplace.

The proposed Digital Markets Act (DMA), introduced in 2020, specifically targets the practices of "gatekeeper online platforms." Governments, including the U.S., use the term gatekeepers to describe the power that companies like Apple, Google and Amazon have over third parties that use their platforms. The Digital Markets Act was introduced alongside the Digital Services Act (DSA), complementary legislation that aims to protect users online by providing transparency into how content algorithms work.

The DMA removes the ability of tech giants to enact a preference toward their products and keep users from connecting to third parties outside their platforms. The DMA would also allow users to remove any preinstalled apps on their phones.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, will likely pass the DMA and DSA sometime before July, according to Cdric O, France's minister for digital and telecommunications. If passed this year, the legislation will be implemented in 2023 and will be applied across the EU.

"The DMA is about updating our conventional antitrust rules in order to adapt to the digital world, and the DSA is about content moderation," O said during a webinar presented by the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C. "Within 18 months, Europe would have been able to propose, negotiate and adopt two of the most important texts in the history of the internet."

The DMA still needs significant work for it to be effective legislation, said Marshall Van Alstyne, professor of information systems at Boston University's Questrom School of Business.

The goals of the DMA -- to create fairness and competition -- are good ones, Van Alstyne said. However, he said the DMA is missing one essential goal: to create value.

Van Alstyne said the premise behind the DMA is the belief that market concentration is too high, making the markets less competitive, and too much of the wealth is being appropriated by large firms and not shared equitably across users and smaller firms in the digital ecosystem.

By making value the goal, "you might actually get better policy," he said.

One of the DMA policies that prevents value creation is the inability to combine data sources without explicit user opt-in, which makes it harder to create network effects. Network effects is the concept that a product or service's value increases as the number of people using that product or service increases.

One example is COVID-19 tracing, he said. "You can't really do effective COVID tracing if everyone has to explicitly go opt-in. You can't create good networks in that context."

Another is the DMA's proposed restricting of tech giants' abilities to make acquisitions. According to the DMA proposal, online platforms identified as gatekeepers would be required to report intended mergers or acquisitions to the European Commission.

While some mergers or acquisitions are problematic and should be stopped or challenged, Van Alstyne said not all mergers are bad. Indeed, large companies acquiring smaller firms can set those larger firms up to be competitors to other large firms, he said.

If you simply stop at 'the big platforms can't do this,' that's a problem. Marshall Van AlstyneProfessor, Boston University

"If you simply stop at 'the big platforms can't do this,' that's a problem," he said.

The DMA is specific on what activities big tech companies can and can't engage in, which may create issues down the road as the tech environment changes since it's not as adaptable, he said.

Van Alstyne said one of the first areas the DMA gets right is elimination of most-favored nation clauses.

Oftentimes, when large platforms contract with third parties to let them sell on their platforms, the contract terms stipulate that the third parties must offer their products at prices as good as or better than other platforms with which the third parties may do business.

Van Alsytne said that makes it hard for third parties operating on the platform to offer better prices even on their own websites.

"It makes it very hard for them to do better, and it makes the platform monopolistic," he said.

Other valuable pieces of the DMA include potentially including a concept called in situ data rights. In situ data rights gives users the power to keep their data in one location, such as Facebook, and determine what third-party companies can access that data.

Van Alstyne said providing users with in situ data rights addresses issues created by legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation, which entrenched data with companies like Facebook and Google under privacy protections.

"Startups could access the data without having to remove it from its original location, they could just get API permission and start to access large quantities of it in location," he said. "So you should be able to combine more data sets with users' permission to create more value, to create more of the network effects."

Makenzie Holland is a news writer covering big tech and federal regulation. Prior to joining TechTarget, she was a general reporter for the Wilmington StarNews and a crime and education reporter at the Wabash Plain Dealer.

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EU closes in on regulating big tech with Digital Markets Act - TechTarget

It is certainly big news when an executive leaves a big tech firm. Even bigger news when said firm happens to be the worlds biggest EV automaker with a trillion-dollar valuation, and its leader is not just the richest person on the planet, but the richest person in history.

Enter Tesla, whose head of HR, Valerie Capers Workman, has just announced she is leaving the automaker after five years. An attorney and impact leader, who worked closely with CEO Elon Musk in her role as VP of people, Workman was also a passionate diversity advocate. And as the highest-ranking black executive at Tesla, she was vocal in defending Teslas support for minorities following a number of lawsuits that exposed alleged racial abuse.

Workman is leaving Tesla to become chief legal officer of career placement startup Handshake.

This move, from the worlds top EV maker valued at US$1.036 trillion and with 70,000-plus employees, to a startup valued at US$1.5bn with just 200 employees, is reflective of a human capital movement some call it the Great Resignation that is seeing execs swapping their big tech company roles for those in much smaller tech startups.

The poster child of the movement, Jack Dorsey, famously left his position as Twitters chief executive last year to dedicate himself to his crypto startup Square, now renamed Block. But, throughout the pandemic, through 2020 and 2021, there has been an acceleration of movement from big to small tech, as executives reevaluate their lives and purpose.

In 2020, Dhivya Suryadevara left GM, where she had spent nearly 15 years, including two as CFO, to become finance chief at startup Stripe; while 16-year Google veteran Shanna Preve gave up her role leading product partnerships to becomeVP of enterprise sales and business development atfood-delivery startup DoorDash.

In 2021, this migration picked up pace. Instacart recruited four executives from public tech companies, including two from Facebook Asha Sharma, a Facebook VP, to be its COO; and Max Eulenstein, a director from Instagram, to be VP of product for the Instacart App.

And there's more. Googles former VP joined Coinbase as chief product officer; Facebooks VP of engineering Raymond Endres moved to Airtable as CTO; and Disneys top streaming executive Kevin Mayer took a leap of faith, becoming CEO of TikTok, a leap that sadly didnt work out.

Last year, ecommerce giant Amazon saw an exodus of executives leaving for startups: six departed for Nestle startup subsidiary Freshly, including the former innovation chief and chief commercialisation officer; while Amazons previous head of fulfilment operations, Jenna Owens, swapped her role for that of COO at Gamestop; and Rodrigo Brumana resigned as Amazons CFO of private-label business to join online fashion marketplace Poshmark Inc. as its new CFO.

And this exodus from Amazon has continued into 2022. Former head of marketing for Amazon Subscription Boxes, Rene Villegas, recently moved to wireless broadband startup Starry to be CMO; 12-year Amazon veteran John Curran has swapped his role as CFO for Amazons international consumer division for a chief finance role at food startup CloudKitchens; and Craig German, a 14-year executive veteran of Amazon has jumped ship to ecommerce startup Fabric, where he is now the firms first SVP of corporate marketing.

The list is almost exhaustive, especiallyconsidering we are only two weeks into 2022. So, what's going on? And why now? While just a few years ago, an executive role at Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft or Meta was highly coveted, since the onset of the pandemic, and the subsequent acceleration of tech startups and huge valuations, more and more execs are leaving the big-tech giants to pursue roles in exciting new startups.

Pandemic burnout and reevaluation and a backlash against tech companies that have grown all-powerful are among reasons cited. And then there's the fact that startups offeremployees the chance for execs to really make a splash, with many execs feeling they can have more impact and influence on a startups journey than within a huge firm. Not to mention a chance to cash in on the potential riches of startups and public companies, which are booming right now.

Here, we highlight some of the key movements from big firms to startup that have kicked-off 2022.

Former Meta and Microsoft executive Karandeep Anand has joined fintech startup Brex, as the market disruptor raises US$300m in a Series D-2 round. Joining from Meta where he led the tech giants business products group, serving more than 200 million businesses globally, Anand also spent 15 years at Microsoft, where he led the product management strategy for Microsoft's Azure cloud and developer platform efforts. Bringing extensive product leadership experience to the Brex table, Anand understands the Brex customer and knows how to build and scale business products with consumer-grade ease to meet the needs of fast-growing companies, says co-CEO Henrique Dubugras.

Big tech executive Jenny Arden joins Zillow Group as the Seattle-based real estate firms first chief design officer. An Ivy League graduate, Arden has had a 20-year career leading creative and design teams at Nike, Lyft and Airbnb. Most recently spending 16 months as VP of digital design at Nike, she also led teams at Lyft and Airbnb, and was a lead designer at Google. She has also worked in design at Dell, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. Described by Zillow Group COO Jerremy Waksman as having an impressive track record of building and designing transformative customer-facing products that provide intuitive and connected experiences, Arden will oversee the companys product design and user experience research and help to build Zillow 2.0.

Microsoft veteran Harvinder Bhela is leaving tech giant Microsoft to join hybrid cloud service startup NetApp in its newly created role of chief product officer. With 25 years at Microsoft, where he held multiple executive leadership positions, Bhela most recently served as corporate VP of the Microsoft 365 security, compliance and management business, which he grew to more than US$10bn in annual revenue, making Microsoft the largest security company in the world. Bhela is tasked with accelerating the startups transformation into a multi-cloud, storage and data services leader.

12-year Amazon veteran John Curran is swapping his role as chief financial executive for Amazons international consumer division for a CFO role at food startup CloudKitchens. This comes as the takeaway kitchen startup owned by former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, triples its valuation to US$15bn following a capital raise of US$850m last November.

Originally posted here:

Executive migration from big tech to startup picks up pace - Business Chief

The problem with tech, many declare, is its quantitative inclination, its hard math deployed in the softer human world. Tech is Mark Zuckerberg: all turning pretty girls into numbers and raving about the social wonders of the metaverse while so awkward in every human interaction that he is instantly memed. The human world contains Zuck, but it is also everything he fails at so spectacularly. That failure, the lack of social and ethical chops, is one many believe he shares with the industry with which he is so associated.

And so, because Big Tech is failing at understanding humans, we often hear that its workforce simply needs to employ more people who do understand. Headlines like Liberal arts majors are the future of the tech industry and Why computer science needs the humanities have been a recurring feature of tech and business articles over the past few years. It has been suggested that social workers and librarians might help the tech industry curb social medias harm to Black youth and proliferation of disinformation, respectively. Many anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophersespecially those with advanced degrees who are feeling the financial squeeze of academias favoring of STEMare rushing to demonstrate their utility to tech behemoths whose starting salaries would make the average humanities professor blush.

Ive been studying nontechnical workers in the tech and media industries for the past several years. Arguments to bring in sociocultural experts elide the truth that these roles and workers already exist in the tech industry and, in varied ways, always have. For example, many current UX researchers have advanced degrees in sociology, anthropology, and library and information sciences. And teachers and EDI (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) experts often occupy roles in tech HR departments.

Recently, however, the tech industry is exploring where nontechnical expertise might counter some of the social problems associated with their products. Increasingly, tech companies look to law and philosophy professors to help them through the legal and moral intricacies of platform governance, to activists and critical scholars to help protect marginalized users, and to other specialists to assist with platform challenges like algorithmic oppression, disinformation, community management, user wellness, and digital activism and revolutions. These data-driven industries are trying hard to augment their technical know-how and troves of data with social, cultural, and ethical expertise, or what I often refer to as soft data.

But you can add all of the soft data workers you want and little will change unless the industry values that kind of data and expertise. In fact, many academics, policy wonks, and other sociocultural experts in the AI and tech ethics space are noticing a disturbing trend of tech companies seeking their expertise and then disregarding it in favor of more technical work and workers.

There have been times I was surrounded by more diversity in tech industry spaces than in the academic spaces from which the primary critiques of Big Tech derive.

Such experiences particularly make clear this fraught moment in the burgeoning field of AI ethics, in which the tech industry may be claiming to incorporate nontechnical roles while actually adding ethical and sociocultural framings to job titles that are ultimately meant to be held by the same old technologists. More importantly, in our affection for these often underappreciated soft professions, we must not ignore their limitations when it comes to achieving the lofty goals set out for them.

While it is important to champion the critical work performed by these underappreciated and under-resourced professions, there is no reason to believe their members are inherently more equipped to be the arbiters of whats ethical. These individuals have very real and important social and cultural expertise, but their fields are all reckoning with their own structural dilemmas and areas of weakness.

Take anthropology, a discipline that emerged as part and parcel of the Western colonial project. Though cultural anthropology now often espouses social justice aims, there are no guarantees that an anthropologist (85% of whom are white in the US) would orient or deploy algorithms in a less biased way than, say, a computer scientist. Perhaps the most infamous example is PredPol, the multimillion-dollar predictive policing company that Ruha Benjamin called part of The New Jim Code. PredPol was created by Jeff Brantingham, an Anthropology professor at UCLA.

Other academic communities championed by those pushing for soft data are similarly conflicted. Sociologys early surveillance and quantification of Black populations played a role in todays surveillance technologies that overwhelmingly monitor Black communities. My own research area, critical internet studies, skews very white and has failed to center concerns around race and racism. Indeed, I am often one of only a handful of Black and brown researchers in attendance at our fields conferences. There have been times I was surrounded by more diversity in tech industry spaces than in the academic spaces from which the primary critiques of Big Tech derive.

Social workers would likely add some much-needed diversity to tech. Social work is overwhelmingly performed by women and is a pretty diverse profession: over 22% Black and 14% Hispanic/Latinx. However, social workers are also implicated in state violence toward marginalized communities. For example, a social worker coauthored a controversial paper with Brantingham extending his predictive policing work to automated gang classification.

Here is the original post:

The Humanities Can't Save Big Tech From Itself - WIRED

Baidu's metaverse concept on XiRang starts with a "Creator City" with a tall skyscraper at its center, according to this visualization shared with reporters on Dec. 21, 2021.

Baidu

The metaverse, which requires a massive amount of computing power, is set to benefit global chipmakers but other tech-related industries could also gain from it, analysts say.

Widely seen as the next generation of the internet, the metaverse refers broadly to a virtual world where humans interact through three-dimensional avatars that can be controlled via virtual reality headsets like Oculus.

Through the metaverse, users can engage in virtual activities such as gaming, virtual concerts or live sports.

The metaverse drew much attention last year, when social networking giant Facebook announced it was changing its name to Meta in October.

Big tech firms will benefit as the technologies related to that virtual world emerge, analysts said.

"The metaverse winners are really the technology companies," DBS Bank's Chief Investment Officer Hou Wey Fook told CNBC's "Squawk Box Asia" on Monday. Semiconductor firms would be a clear beneficiary as the metaverse will need a lot of computing power, he said.

However, the benefits to chipmakers will be "uneven," Morningstar said in a report last week.

"Since many of the tasks that take place in a 'metaverse' involve real-time processing of immense amount of data, this will require the chips involved to use advanced process nodes that are only available at TSMC, Samsung and Intel," it said.

Other main areas set to support the metaverse infrastructure that investors could consider would be firms that are supplying the "key building blocks," such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence and video games graphics, said private banking firm Lombard Odier in a December report.

In such cashless, virtual environments, blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies may also play a key role. Blockchain supporting non-fungible tokens, or NFTs digital tokens that represent proof of ownership of assets such as art,collectiblesormemes could create an "interesting" ecosystem for digital content creation and monetization, the bank said.

"These could confer the right to use artworks or own creatures created in the metaverse, opening the door to a new virtual economy. In this realm, human creativity has virtually no limits," the firm said.

Facebook parentMeta, as well asApple,MicrosoftandGoogleare gearing up to release new hardware products and software servicesfor the metaverse.

In Asia, China is set to go big on the metaverse as well. Its biggest city, Shanghai, included the metaverse in its five-year development plan. The plan called for "encouraging the application of the metaverse in areas such as public services, business offices, social entertainment, industrial manufacturing, production safety and electronic games."

CNBC's Evelyn Cheng contributed to this report.

Originally posted here:

Chipmakers are set to be 'winners' as the metaverse takes off - CNBC

Shares of technology and internet stocks fell on Monday, extending recent declines as investors continued to monitor a rise in Treasury yields.

Losses were widespread across the group, with megacap names, semiconductor stocks and the software sector all tumbling. The group led broad declines in the U.S. equity market, and the Nasdaq 100 Index fell more than 2 percent.

The drop came as the yield on 10-Year U.S. Treasury notes rose to 1.8 percent, the highest in almost two years. Higher rates are seen as a challenge for high-growth and relatively expensive stocks as they reduce the present value of future earnings.

Among the notable movers, Amazon.com Inc. fell 3.4 percent to trade at its lowest intraday since May. The stock has dropped about 15 percent from a November peak and is down for a fifth straight session.

Bank of America affirmed a buy rating and $4,450 price target on the stock, writing that it expects 2022 will end better than it starts. The firm has Amazon as its top megacap pick, and it expects various headwinds -- including supply chain and labor issues, decelerating e-commerce growth, and multiple compression -- will ease throughout the year.

Google parent Alphabet Inc. fell 2.8 percent and is also down a fifth day, its longest such streak since November 2019. The stock has lost about 8 percent over the five-day drop and it is trading at its lowest since October.

Among other names, Microsoft Corp fell 2.7 percent to its lowest since October. Both Microsoft and Alphabet are coming off their biggest one-week percentage drops since March 2020. Also on Monday, Apple Inc. declined 2.1 percent and Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. dropped 4.5 percent. Tesla Inc. fell 2.8 percent.

The Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index dropped 2.4 percent. Among notable names, Nvidia Corp. dropped 5.4 percent, Advanced Micro Devices lost 3.4 percent, Marvell shed 5.1 percent, and Micron Technology dropped 2.8 percent.

Jordan Klein, a managing director at Mizuho Securities, noted that the weakness in chipmakers is following a similar slump in software names.

Could this be a sign of a much broader rotation out of tech altogether, with exposure to the best performing group in Tech during 21 now being reduced? he writes in a note. Semis, he added, carry a high relative risk if this becomes a general rotation out of tech overall where low relative valuation does not help.

The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector exchange-traded fund fell 3.2 percent on Monday. The ETF is down more than 20 percent from a November peak, touching its lowest since June.

Given the scale of the software weakness, some analysts are starting to see bargains in the group. Earlier, William Blair wrote that the rotation out of software will be short-lived as the sector continues to benefit from strong secular growth trends. Analyst Bhavan Suri is confident the software industry will exhibit durable growth and that overall business fundamentals remain intact.

2022 Bloomberg L.P.

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Amazon falls to lowest since May as Big Tech weakness continues - BetaBoston