January 27, 2025
Phew! This semester is kicking my ass. Somehow I’ve started on the back foot and have been busy since day one. That said, I’ve got two interesting articles here touching on how we hide unethical behavior as “apps” and the seeming need to dependencize everything. (I made up the word dependencize; don’t blame the author.)
See the articles and some of my own thoughts below.
This article feels relevant as AI speculation dips today (I’ve seen folks refer to it as a counter-slap against “tech-bros”). Doctorow explains how an app called “Potatotrac” is used by a company to fix the prices of potatoes across the country. If it weren’t done “with an app,” he observes, we’d all recognize it as a crime.
Big Potato controls 97% of the frozen potato market, and any sector that large and concentrated is going to be pretty cozy. The execs at these companies all meet at industry associations, lobbying bodies, and as they job-hop between companies in the cartel. But they don’t have to rely on personal connections to rig the price of potatoes: they do it through a third-party data-broker called Potatotrac. Each cartel member sends all their commercially sensitive data – supply costs, pricing, sales figures – to Potatotrac, and then Potatotrac uses that data to give “advice” to the cartel members about “optimal pricing.”
Alongside the stock market news, AP News reported yesterday that inflation–the issue that likely led many voters to erroneously hand him the election–is already working its way down his list of priorities:
“They all said inflation was the No. 1 issue. I said, ‘I disagree,’” Trump said. “I talked about inflation too, but how many times can you say that an apple has doubled in cost?”
It’s hard to tell how many times the US will fall for the same bait and switch. Given the rise of AI, as well as the disparate moves by tech conglomerates to consolidate political and economic power, it’s useful to use Doctorow’s idea to ask ourselves: what are we and others letting slide because it comes with an app?
A bit less to say here, except that I’ve been noticing the phenomenon described by the author (a craze for dependencies) crop up elsewhere. Recently, I’ve finally succumbed to Emacs, and its slowly starting to become the central tool for a lot of my work. I’ve noticed, though, that when you look at forums and other resources online, there is so much advice to install packages. I can’t speak for others, but I know that if I was taking that advice rather than building my own tools using existing documentation and resources for vanilla Emacs/org-mode (aside: my favorite resource so far) I would know precisely nothing about the tool rather than… some. Let’s go with some.
Building it yourself might not always be attainable, but it does feel like a universally good thought to start with.