
Google Urbanism - peteratt
http://googleurbanism.com/
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heydenberk
Is this political protest art or some Professor Jeff Jarvis fever dream about
innovention? I can't make any sense of it.

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darrelld
No matter how I changed the attention slider I just couldn't seem to focus on
anything.

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Bartweiss
That "set your attention" slider is a cool idea I've never seen before.

It's also painfully hard to use (the maximum attention setting involved 4
overlapping animations at one point), and scary in a factual relativity sort
of sense I've never even tried to pin down. It vaguely reminds me of the sort
of manipulation NewsDiffs was created to counter - stories changing tone and
even facts in real time with no acknowledgement of that fact.

I don't see any sign of that _happening_ on this page, but imagine one of
those sliders with conflicting content at different attention levels. I find
it creepy on a level I have trouble explaining.

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peteratt
That is exactly what caught my attention, barring the pseudo-dystopian theme.
I'd say that a different arrangement (e.g. a short TL;DR followed by a Learn
More, and finally by the full whitepaper) would seem more "natural". That
slider you can modify at will depending on your current attention span seems
strangely creepy for reasons beyond my current human psychology understanding.

~~~
Bartweiss
That's a good observation. I've seen a couple of things offer successive
"takes" of increasing complexity, and always thought it was an interesting
idea.

At a first guess, my bad reaction to the slider was based on an intuitive fear
that the differences would be something more substantive than best-effort
restatements of one idea.

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ocdtrekkie
This seems to be... someone's attempt to get hired as an idea man by Google to
implement this proposal? With perhaps the scariest proposal ever. Essentially
encouraging Google to control cities and be a monopoly, language the site
actually uses.

"Google takes on more of the responsibilities of the state, becomes a central
gateway to the basic services of city"

"Become the go-to partner for “Smart-City”, displacing all other competitors
from this market because of focus on human behavior."

"This could give you a monopoly over both physical and digital realms, leading
the next generation of global tech conglomerates..."

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Bartweiss
And I almost worry that it might get someone hired. _The New Digital Age_ is
all about this kind of pervasive physical/digital monopoly/monopsony,
essentially pitching 'deep company' structures as a successor to 'deep state'
ones.

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erispoe
There is value in conveying your message clearly.

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bduerst
This is something best handled through an agnostic B-corp or NPO, funded by
Google and other tech companies (the way _Let 's Encrypt_ has been handled
[1]).

However fragmented this message is, I get that they're trying to propose a
program to bridge the gap with the physical world, but that results in
regional monopolies. Sure, cities and states can help regulate it, but it's
best if the organization was aligned entirely with the people living in that
region.

[1] [https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/](https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/)

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microcolonel
This website is tiresome and confusing. I have no concrete idea what they're
trying to say. This is after reading the first two attention settings. I
failed to read the last due to technical malfunctions.

Is this an appeal to Google to monopolize Orwell's Nightmare?

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anarchy8
What a horribly designed website.

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doublerebel
Physical space data mining and attention bidding is exactly what's happening
to us if we don't stop it. I wondered how long it would be before someone said
it out in the open. The only odd thing about the presentation is the
assumption it's not already happening. I'm pretty sure these levers are
already well in motion.

Get ready for hordes of robots mining fake attention for money, though. We'll
continue to ship bits around the internet by robots for robots to validate
marketing budgets.

This future phenomenon is probably the best argument for a private web, if not
a decentralized one.

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the_watcher
I'm very unclear as to what this is. It looks like some third party trying to
get Google to hire them to help them start tracking us offline the same way
they do online, which is frankly terrifying.

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cygned
So broken on Safari mobile. Too bad.

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mmanfrin
Good god the scrolling behavior on that site is _obnoxious_. I scroll down,
and it _scrolls me back up because I didnt scroll enough_.

#1 way to make me discount your ideas before I've even read them.

~~~
erispoe
Don't worry, they got plenty of other ideas like this.

