Group items tagged

Gamification is the application of game elements into nongame spaces. It is the permeation of ideas and values from the sphere of play and leisure to other social spaces. It’s premised on a seductive idea: if you layer elements of games, such as rules, feedback systems, rewards and videogame-like user interfaces over reality, it will make any activity motivating, fair and (potentially) fun. ‘We are starving and games are feeding us,’ writes Jane McGonigal in Reality Is Broken (2011). ‘What if we decided to use everything we know about game design to fix what’s wrong with reality?’

But gamification’s trapping of total fun masks that we have very little control over the games we are made to play – and hides the fact that these games are not games at all. Gamified systems are tools, not toys. They can teach complex topics, engage us with otherwise difficult problems. Or they can function as subtle systems of social control.

The problem of the gamified workplace goes beyond micromanagement. The business ethicist Tae Wan Kim at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh warns that gamified systems have the potential to complicate and subvert ethical reasoning. He cites the example of a drowning child. If you save the child, motivated by empathy, sympathy or goodwill – that’s a morally good act. But say you gamify the situation. Say you earn points for saving drowning children. ‘Your gamified act is ethically unworthy,’ he explained to me in an email. Providing extrinsic gamified motivators, even if they work as intended, deprive us of the option to live worthy lives, Kim argues. ‘The workplace is a sacred space where we develop ourselves and help others,’ he notes. ‘Gamified workers have difficulty seeing what contributions they really make.’

The whole premise of a true universal income program is that people can be eligible to receive the supplemental payment regardless of whether or not they work. While the income threshold for receiving the benefit necessarily varies by context, generally the idea is to help people clear the poverty threshold wherever they live.

In contrast, a significant part of the appeal of true UBI programs now comes from the fact that jobs–especially for less highly skilled workers–have not proven to be an adequate source of economic stability. And with automation threatening to make low-skilled jobs like cashier or waiter redundant, we can’t continue to rely on jobs as a path out of poverty. A UBI could certainly enable people to work if they would like to, but the point of it is that economic well-being should be a guarantee for all, regardless of labor.

Since 1982, the Alaskan government has sent a check to every resident from an investment fund established with oil revenues. In 2015, when oil prices were high, the Alaska Dividend Fund sent every individual an annual check for $2,072, or $8,288 for a family of four. Nobody is arguing that this annual stipend is enough to live on, or to qualify as a true UBI (especially because it fluctuates with the price of oil), but it’s a proven model for how a government can collect and redistribute revenue. Perhaps, Marinescu says, Alaska could be instructive in how states could put a tax on carbon and use the revenues to boost incomes.

The “new media” monopolists of Silicon Valley and the once-dominant traditional print media have clearly agreed that the “fake news” frenzy is a convenient pretext to step up their censorship of the internet through new algorithms, allowing them to boost their profit margins and silence opposition through a new framework of “algorithmic censorship.”

Last April, Google clamped down on alternative media with new structural changes to its algorithms — accompanying the change with an announcement tarring alternative media with the broad black brush of “misleading information, unexpected offensive results, hoaxes and unsupported conspiracy theories” as opposed to what it called “authoritative content.”As a result, organic search-engine traffic to these sites uniformly plummeted to less than half of what it had previously been, devastating many publishers.

The “new media” monopolists of Silicon Valley and the once-dominant traditional print media have clearly agreed that the “fake news” frenzy is a convenient pretext to step up their censorship of the internet through new algorithms, allowing them to boost their profit margins and silence opposition through a new framework of “algorithmic censorship.”This new model overwhelmingly favors those who see information and journalism as an article of commerce alone. It poses a stark threat not only to internet users’ ability to access information, but to the ability of citizens and social movements that hope to interact with, participate in, and wield influence over the political and economic activities that determine our lives and the fate of communities across the world.

More than a few thoughts emerged from the exercise, but the one that stands out is that the customer, the ultimate arbiter of success, must be held in awe.

Most of the strategies and practices advocated by Amazon’s founder have broad applicability, but a central mystery remains: Bezos himself, his combination of early life experience, intellect, emotional abilities and communication skills. Being Bezos isn’t teachable.