
AUSTIN, Texas – “We’re all chasing the shiny,” futurist Amy Webb said in a talk at the SXSW conference here Sunday morning.
That info-pundit was speaking of metaverse hype in particular. But the description also applies generally to this talkfest that marked its 35th birthday and its first re-birthday. The festival, which continues through Sunday, is happening in person after 2020’s pandemic-imposed cancellation and 2021’s digital-only event.
As in the Before Times, SXSW panels veered between starry-eyed forecasts of the future and stark warnings about the same. Webb’s talk, for example, spotlighted best- and worst-case scenarios for such budding technologies as artificial intelligence and digital identities.
The largest social network in the world figured in many of these conversations. Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen lit into the company in a talk Monday morning, saying Facebook still teems with toxic misinformation because “it makes more money running the system the way it does today.”
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She urged Facebook to make re-sharing a little slower (for example, by adding Twitter’s nag to read a story before sharing a link to it) and stop pushing giant groups. But she also suggested that Elon Musk should block Facebook from his Starlink satellite-internet service in countries in which Facebook can’t effectively moderate content in local languages (spoiler alert: he won’t).
Mark Zuckerberg then made an appearance via video Tuesday afternoon that could have come from a parallel universe. He ignored Haugen’s criticism, instead touting the virtual- and augmented-reality ambitions that led him to rename his company Meta.
“I think this is pretty clearly the next evolution of how you experience media and moments,” he said.
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Remedies to reel in the largest tech companies were harder to find at SXSW. European Union competition chief Margarethe Vestager endorsed strong regulation in an onstage interview Sunday, brushing aside suggestions that American tech firms might flee Europe to escape its rules.
“It’s for any company to decide, what is their business strategy?,” she said. “And so far, it has been a good business strategy to do business in Europe.”
But what flies in Brussels may not take off in Washington – or Austin. Beto O’Rourke, Democratic candidate for governor of Texas, alluded to that Saturday in a critique Saturday of incumbent governor Greg Abbott – and by extension, politics.
“We talk about Putin and the oligarchs there in Russia as though it’s some kind of foreign concern,” O’Rourke said. “We have them right here.”
Two Sunday speakers described another way to curb toxic online behavior: pressuring advertisers to block their ads, and therefore ad revenue, from the worst disinformation merchants.
“This playbook works,” said Check My Ads co-founder Clare Atkin. “We have already taken millions out of the disinformation economy.”
But as she and co-founder Nandi Jammi related, the online-ads industry also abounds with unaccountable operators. As Jammi warned: “There are no rules in ad tech.”
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The latest hope for a healthier online world is the “decentralized web,” a sometimes-vague concept of an internet built on blockchain technology outside the grip of giant tech companies.
“The Web we want should have many winners, not just a few platforms that control everything” Wendy Hanamura, director of partnerships at the Internet Archive, said at the start of a day-long decentralized-web panel track Tuesday.
But hours later, Freedom of the Press Foundation executive director Trevor Timm warned that the cryptocurrency industry was already coalescing around name-brand firms.
“Are we just transitioning to a system where there are other centralized giants than the ones we don’t like now?”, he asked. “The onramp to cryptocurrency, if you’re not using any large centralized companies, is very very hard.”
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