I'm on University Challenge tonight

🪻Tune in!!!

I am competing with St. Edmunds Oxford alongside my three amazing SOAS teammates (and our amazing reserve sitting just off screen) on tonight’s episode of University Challenge, airing 20:30 on BBC2!! If you’re in the UK, you can find a live feed here. (If not, someone will put it on YouTube later in the week).

In other random news:

• I’m reading the literature section of United States: Essays by Gore Vidal. I love it so much that I am genuinely considering digging him up so we can have a marriage of convenience. We have probably seen the same number of Garbo films!!!

• General sentiment I’m playing with re. techno-optimism and pessimism - tech is great when it bends to human will, and not great when it attempts to dictate human will.

  • Social media, in its current default form (‘like’ button, notification tabs, mere existence of any sort of ‘feed,’ let alone an algorithmic one) is a transparent attempt to influence human behaviour rather than fulfil existing human needs.

    • A ‘bent to human will’ social media would just be an organised directory of people and businesses, sortable by name/place/profession/interests/goals etc. You would have a messaging function but no ‘like.’ You’d probably have ‘content,’ but it would be organised into searchable static folders rather than onto a chronological or algorithmic feed.

  • In the interests of human will and because I’ve just bought a new laptop: I need dominion over my personal computer. I would like to choose the programmes that run on it. I would like the operating system to leave me alone forever (i.e. don’t bug me about your new AI assistant or sell me software).

  • See also Google Maps’s automatic rerouting feature (the article explains it well, but it’s still an issue six years later - and the writer doesn’t mention that people driving moving cars are only given fifteen seconds to touch their screen and opt out! Might be actual grounds for legal challenge in the UK).