Why I Care About Drones – Part One

On September 28, 2023September 28, 2023 By Faine GreenwoodIn drones, TechnologyLeave a comment

The white object paused for a moment in the late-fall sky over Palo Alto, buzzing in place like an electric white hummingbird. Then, as I watched, it floated with eerie, perfect stability in the direction of the Stanford soccer fields, red and green lights blinking UFO-style on its undercarriage. I’d never seen anything man made, move like that before, flying in stable, parallel lines like a freakishly disciplined hummingbird.

I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

For a long time, I’d been cynical about the world-shaking wonders that techbro-engendered innovation would supposedly bestow upon humanity. I’d spent the last few years working as a reporter in Southeast Asia, and I’d watched in real time as Facebook came to Myanmar and was, almost immediately, turned into a tool for broadcasting genocidal hatred against religious minorities. (I’ve written about that here).

_{the ur-drone. the little dude that started it all.}

I’d also watched social media companies decimate the journalism industry I had once, all too foolishly, dreamed of making a career in. Since starting a master’s degree program at Stanford a few months earlier, I’d seen nothing to convince me that my grim take on the state of modern technology was wrong.

And now I was looking at something that actually surprised me, a little flying robot hovering calmly way up above Silicon Valley’s 2013-era wasteland of cat-washing startups, gig-economy scams, and Facebook-fueled privacy violations.

It wasn’t like I was totally unaware of drones, or the fact that regular people could buy them now: I’d read about them in the normal course of keeping up with tech news, and one of my college friends had even made drones the focus of his own career in journalism. But coming face to face with one, away from all the abstract talk about them on Twitter? That was different.

_{pretty sure it was this field specifically}

I started to follow the drone across the playing fields, the first one I’d ever seen.

I wanted to see where it was going to land.

That moment is my drone origin story. It’s the moment where I was formally introduced to the weird helicopter-computer things – specifically, the kind that are relatively cheap, sold at normal stores, and intended for civilian use – that I’ve spent the last decade building my career around.

Which leads to a second question for anyone who knows me and what I do: why have I stuck with drones for so long, anyway? What’s gripped me so hard – someone who began my career as a journalist with zero engineering background to speak of – about little flying camera robots?

On one level, my career in drones has been a matter of practicality, a pragmatic move in an uncertain world. I was following a familiar narrative: a disillusioned millennial realizes that the foreign correspondent career they’d dreamed of has been buried alive in a shallow, unmarked grave by the likes of big-tech social media companies and ever-more voracious executives , and that the time has come to move on to better-compensated, STEM-filled pastures.

But of course, it’s more than that.

I’ve spent a decade working with, writing about, and thinking about small drones because something about them resonates deeply with the lizard-level part of my mind responsible for finding things cool as hell. And it’s not just that civilian drones are intrinsically cool, which even the most avowed drone-haters will probably admit when pressed: they’re cool in an intensely complex and fraught way, man-made tools equally capable of freaking people out and fascinating them.

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Drones bring out strong reactions in people, in a way that many other modern tech wonders, from food-delivery apps to high-resolution TVs, simply don’t. They’re shape-shifters, chameleons, objects that can be used for everything from pure altruism to hideous violence – and while these transistive properties aren’t unique to drones, it’s also true that your iPhone can’t physically roam. Which, of course, a drone can (albeit much less independently then many people believe is possible).

Among other things, drones are:

Mass-produced flying cameras that even poorly coordinated people (like me) can pilot, meaning that for the first time in history, anyone with a few hundred bucks and functional thumbs can gaze, god-like, upon the vast expanse of the earth from above.

_{i use this meme too much and i don’t care}

Easily-accessible mechanisms by which cops and oppressive governments can create a to-go version of the panopticon, hovering eerily above a civil rights protest near you.

Near-miraculous map making devices that humanitarian aid workers can use to rebuild cities and lives after nightmarish natural disasters, and that indigenous activists in Borneo can pilot to capture data good enough to win them court cases against gigantic, land-grabbing corporations.

Off-the-shelf products that Ukrainian soldiers use to super-accurately target artillery strikes against Russian armor, and to blast Soviet-era grenades directly into the faces of enemy fighters, whose last, surprised, moments are captured on grainy drone-borne live video. (I’ve written about this quite a bit too).

Flying eyes that have, in just a decade or so, captured an entire world of perspectives that no one had ever seen before – drone’s-eye views that we now see everywhere in art, film, and on television, aerial angles we’ve grown so accustomed to seeing that it’s easy to forget they weren’t always there.

_{FPV DIY drones REALLY look like bugs, if we’re counting.}

That’s a lot of complexity to consider when we’re talking about a four-armed, plastic-paneled, model helicopter that kind of looks like a bug.

As for me personally, it’s all of these things, but there’s one more factor. The biggest one of them all.

I’m fascinated by drones because I am not, on the face of it, the kind of person anyone would have expected to work with them for a living.

In large part, I owe my career in drones to spite.

While I’ve always been enthralled by science and technology, I’m cursed with a form of dyscalculia which makes me impressively bad at arithmetic. I’m one of those poor saps who still can’t calculate tip percentages in my head without whipping out my phone, or without making a joke about how it’s a good thing we actually do all have calculators in our pocket nowadays, ha ha ha. (I’m really, really glad that teachers today have lost the ability to make that comment).

As a nerdy kid, I desperately wanted to be good at math. I believed the scientists who said that grasping it was the key to perceiving larger worlds of wonder and cosmic understanding (and so on), and I also knew that decent standardized math scores were a necessary prerequisite for getting into good colleges in the throat-slittingly brutal environment of 2000s undergrad admissions. But no matter how hard I tried, my SAT math scores never rose above the level of “dismal,” a failure that looked even more weird and embarrassing when compared to my perfect scores on every verbal-based standardized test I ever took.

I suffered, in other words, from a terrible case of lop-sided brain.

Eventually, my world-class inability to calculate tips in my head festered into a deep well of resentment towards the entire system, which, appeared to be designed to make damn sure that everything in life – from college to career to basic economic stability – rode upon if you could do a quadratic equation in a painfully fluorescent-lit room without looking at your notes or not.

When I graduated right into the teeth of the recession in 2010 and started my first job as a reporter, in an industry that I was well-aware was dying all around me, and in an era where everyone in power devoted a lot of time to waxing poetic about the noble virtues of boy-genius STEM professionals in hoodies, my ressentiment grew even more intense.

I spent a lot of time worrying about what would happen if I could never find another journalism job, if I was doomed to eventually end up in the garbage-bin of precarious employment that our culture had, in its infinite wisdom, designated for losers (like me) who had debased themselves by getting an English degree.

Such was the anxious, fear and loathing-filled head space I was in at the start of my journalism master’s degree at Stanford in 2013.

While I wasn’t deluded enough to think that a journalism master’s degree would magically usher me into a well-compensated and rewarding career as a foreign correspondent in the media hellscape of the 2010s, I’d decided to enroll in the program on the basis of two things.

First: having any kind of Stanford degree at all might help keep my resume from being immediately filtered out of an employer’s inbox by the cruel hand of a sorting algorithm, and that was worth something.

Second: maybe, while spending a year hanging around Stanford in the midst of all that irrational, sun-kissed, economic exuberance, I’d find something to do that wasn’t journalism. Something where I might actually get a reasonable amount of money. Something I liked doing in a place that would be willing to overlook my shameful failures in the realm of 6th-grade fractions.

But I wasn’t very hopeful.

_{ten years later and, thank Christ, we still don’t have burrito delivery drones}

All of these bleak and confused visions of my future were on my mind on that day at Stanford in 2013, and maybe that’s also why I started following the drone. Eventually, I zeroed in on where the DJI Phantom had come from. I was not very surprised to find that it belonged to two friendly, tanned Stanford seniors in flip-flops. Everyone at Stanford was friendly, tanned, and had on flip-flops.

Like most everyone else I’d met since I’d arrived here, they told me they were working on a start-up idea. Specifically, they’d use drones to deliver burritos. While I was not very interested in a prospective future where bubbly future venture capitalists had legal carte-blanche to drop foil-wrapped carne asada projectiles onto my head, I was very much interested in the drone itself. And they were eager to tell me about it.

It was a Phantom produced by China’s DJI company, it cost around $800, and it was, I’d later learn, the first truly beginner-friendly drone capable of shooting truly high quality video to hit the market. You just had to attach a GoPro sports camera to the bottom, and although the Phantom had only been released in January, YouTube was already filling up with sweet aerial surfing videos.

As I rode my bicycle back to my apartment, I thought about the drone. I could think of a lot of things that reporters, like me, could do with it.

Report on war zones from a safer distance away from the fighting and the violence. Investigate distant, closed-off places where reporters would usually be denied access, both by natural forces and by people who’d rather not be investigated. Capture striking and never-before seen angles on natural disasters, destruction, and large-scale human dramas, from refugee camps to anti-government protests.

Anyway, I needed to write a story about something for my journalism classes – and digging into drones sounded more exciting than anything else I could think to write about, in the unrelentingly sterile environs of Palo Alto.

The Stanford UAV Club logo.

That’s how, a week later, I ended up at the Stanford UAV Club meeting, which was shortened to SUAVE, an ironic adjective for a group of people who had extraordinarily strong opinions on toy helicopters.

It was emphatically not called the drone club in official communications, and there was a reason for that. “UAV” means “unmanned aerial vehicle,” a technical term that specifically, precisely describes flying, computerized gizmos without people riding them.

Back in 2013, UAV enthusiasts were fighting an increasingly desperate rear-guard action to convince the public to start using that unfortunate acronym to refer to the small, largely home-built hobby aircraft they worked on – instead of using “drone,” an ominous, deadly-sounding word most still associated with the huge, missile-equipped Predators the US government was flying over the Middle East in the course of the War on Terror.

The Stanford UAV Club’s members were almost all aeronautical engineering students, who were, impressively, even more clean-cut and earnest than the other Stanford students I’d met, with a little bit more social awkwardness and a little bit less of that lingering whiff of pure avarice that lingered unpleasantly in the air wherever computer science and business majors congregated (which was pretty much everywhere) .

Most of them, I’d eventually come to learn, were once the kind of kid who’d hang out at airports and memorize the name of every single aircraft they saw fly overhead, who eventually turned into the kind of adult who liked spending their leisure time fiddling with remote controlled aircraft – a pursuit that was both a life-long hobby and also, conveniently, pretty central to their actual academic work.

That was the purpose for the Stanford UAV club: a location, as well as some club funding, for figuring out how to build fun-sized flying machines with computer enhancement, in the fine do-it-yourself tradition that RC hobbyists had been carrying on since the 1940s.

When I walked into that first meeting, after having introduced myself to the club’s president as a journalist, I assumed I’d just be hanging around in a sort of detached, observational role, making my little anthropological notes on the intriguing social customs of Drone Guys (and, perhaps unsurprisingly, they were indeed all guys at the time). Which means that I was a little surprised when, during that first meeting, President Timothy turned to me and the other new guy – a slightly jittery-looking computer science student – and asked if we wanted to get some drone building experience ourselves.

The computer science guy and I flicked glances at each other from across the conference table. Us? We weren’t engineers-engineers, and I’m pretty sure we both had only a very vague, impressionistic idea of what a drone’s guts actually looked like. I assumed that building a drone from scratch involved delicately wiring up precision-electronics in a clean room filled with people in jumpsuits.

drone guts

Meanwhile, I was so poorly coordinated that I regularly struggled with things like “opening doors with standard house keys.” Were these supposedly clean-cut aeronautical engineering types trying to coerce me into starting a fire so they could collect insurance money?

“It’s easier than it sounds,” said Timothy, in the winsome, boyish voice of a former Eagle Scout.

The craft room where SUAVE built its little flying robots was a small, closet-like space: the white foam skeletons of dead model aircraft hung on pegs on the wall, and every spot of available space was covered in bins of unidentifiable wires, tubes, and motors. The club members rummaged around and brought out box after box of electronic bits and batteries, which looked, to my eyes, exactly like the parts one would use to make a low-rent pipe bomb.

“I’ll show you how to get started,” Timothy said, walking over to our table with a laptop with a PDF instruction manual pulled on the screen, and yet another box that contained a selection of what appeared to be dismembered drone arms and bodies, made of metal and red-and-white plastic. “First, we’re gonna need the glue gun.”

“A glue gun?” I said, incredulous.

“Oh, yeah. We do a ton of this drone building stuff with a glue gun,” he replied, serenely.

The computer science student and I exchanged glances again. Wait, this is how they do it? I thought, as I watched the club leader moosh a little tiny brushless motor onto one metallic drone arm with a big, sloppy dollop of hot glue.

This is that engineering mystique, that pursuit of precision brilliance that I’d been led to believe, for all this time, was far beyond the grasp of my feeble, creative-writing-doing brain? They’re literally just gluing shit together?

“Well, that’s all we’ve got to do to attach the motors. Now we’ve got to secure the battery,” Timothy said. And then he reached for the duct tape.

In this way, I came to my second drone epiphany. Yes, it was indisputably true that I was horrible at basic arithmetic, and it was also true that I had only the faintest idea (at the time) how all this electronic junk somehow could be mashed together to produce a flying computer.

But if the bulk of the work required to put together a marvelous little flying robot could be executed with a glue gun and a roll of duct tape you could buy at the drug store, maybe drones weren’t beyond my understanding. Maybe, just maybe, I could learn to build them and fly them myself. It wasn’t like I had anything to lose.

And that’s exactly what I did.

——————————————————————————————-

Part Two coming soon, in which I elaborate further about why civilian drones matter and why it’s a good thing, actually, that average people can use them to contemplate the earth from above, make maps, and even the playing field a bit with the powerful.

Facebook Destroys Everything: Part 3

On September 1, 2023September 1, 2023 By Faine GreenwoodIn facebook, TechnologyLeave a comment

When Covid arrived, I was, like most reasonable people, terrified of the virus. I was also absolutely terrified by the glittering, data-hoovering opportunity that a global pandemic represented for the always-hungry likes of Facebook and Google.

My fears about how Big Tech might take advantage of this planet-sized tragedy only solidified after it came out in early March 2020 that the Trump administration had been holding conference calls with Silicon Valley to discuss how they might be able to work together on battling the pandemic – and if the companies had any useful data they might be willing to share with the federal government.

My mind filled with visions of an unholy alliance between privacy-destroying tech firms and the deranged Trump administration, who could use public health concerns to legally mandate that Americans cough up their health and location data to both Zuck and the MAGA set in exchange for access to Covid testing and vaccines.

There was some precedent for my paranoia.

I’d spent the last decade watching as Facebook sweet-talked governments, medical systems, and non-profits around the world into adopting their platform for communicating with the public about crises, seducing decision-makers with promises of an easy, domesticated solution that would liberate them from having to futz with building and updating their own websites.

I’d also watched in disgust as how, after crucial organizations became comfortable with pushing out vital information on Facebook, the company began to make it harder and harder for people to find or to view those potentially life-saving posts if they weren’t already logged in. The end-game was obvious: they were building a world where if someone wanted to look at updates from their city government on local flooding, or see what their local hospital was saying about flu vaccinations, they’d have to submit to becoming legible to Facebook first.

Covid, then, represented a massive opportunity for a company that was already so clearly hell-bent on taking advantage of disaster and crises as away to herd even more organizations and people into its blue, walled-off paddocks.

And while it was true that Facebook and Trump regularly sparred with one another in public, as GOP leaders complained that the platform was unfairly censoring them (when in truth, the site was doing the exact opposite), it was a different story in private.

*_{i was a kid when this happened and it just keeps getting dumber and more insidious the more I read about it}*

At the time, Facebook policy vice president and former George W Bush policy advisor Joel Kaplan – a notorious participant in the 2000 “Brook’s Brothers” riot that helped secure the presidency for George W Bush – was working overtime to win the MAGA set’s trust. Why wouldn’t Zuckerberg and his highly-paid and ethically suspect colleagues take the opportunity to partner, at least for now, with the Trump administration?

Much to my surprise, and relief, both Trump and Facebook spectacularly fumbled the world-domination bag.

In retrospect, it was even less surprising that the rift between the MAGAs and Big Tech began over disinformation.

In early March, as the world became horribly aware that Covid was both real and destined to become real bad, Facebook joined forces with Google and Twitter to announce that their sites would make a special effort to counter the spread of egregious misinformation about the pandemic.

Then came May 25th, 2020, and the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of a bloodthirsty Minneapolis cop. As protests against police brutality ignited across the United States, social media users were confronted with a tsunami of hate speech and disinformation directed against Black Americans and activists. Perhaps anticipating what would happen next, Trump hastened to sign a executive order on “preventing online censorship,” although it was almost entirely symbolic in practice.

President Trump then, in the course of making his own contributions to the fire hose of racist bullshit that swirled around the Internet at the time, crossed a line. In ominous May 29th posts on both Facebook and Twitter, he declared that “once the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Twitter acted relatively quickly to limit the public’s ability to view or interact with Trump’s post, citing their rules against “glorifying violence.”

Facebook, meanwhile, didn’t do shit.

As both the public and national media took note of the two social media platform’s distinctly different approach to Trump’s violent rhetoric, Mark Zuckerberg was eventually forced to say something. In an impressive display of weasel-words, Zuckerberg wrote a lengthy post justifying his decision to leave the President’s egregiously terms-of-service violating emission up, claiming (as he had before in response to Myanmar) that the company “shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth.”

Mark was, I suspect, surprised when his word salad failed to turn down the heat on both himself and his company.

Repulsed Facebook employees publicly called both Zuckerberg and Joel Kaplan out, accusing their leaders of bending over to accommodate the whims of the GOP. Soon, over 800 advertisers had joined a boycott against the company, including heavy-hitters like Coca-Cola, Ford, and Unilever. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Zuckerberg finally agreed at the end of June to do more to remove violence-inciting posts and to label posts by politicians with virulently policy-flouting content.

While many critics from the left were temporarily quieted by this move, Facebook’s woes weren’t over yet.

In mid-July, Zuckerberg, in a rare display of semi-human sentiment, openly criticized the Trump administration’s stunningly shit response to the virus in a live interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci. Soon after the Fauci comments, Zuckerberg insisted to Axios that he didn’t have a secret deal with Trump, as some media outlets had begun to speculate – though he did confirm that he spoke with the President “from time to time.” Trump, for his part, largely kept quiet about these open provocations. For a few days, it seemed like Zuckerberg was, infuriatingly, managing to once again get away with his obfuscating aw-shucks act.

Then in early August, Trump claimed (falsely) in a Fox and Friends interview, which he shared on Facebook, that children are “almost immune” from Covid-19. Facebook, pushing its luck, decided that it would hold the President to its terms of service: it deleted Trump’s video.

Predictably, Trump lost his shit, and perhaps even more predictably, he lost his shit during an interview with Gerald Rivera.

After deeming his comment on Covid to be “a perfect statement, a statement about youth,” he took up his old claim that Facebook was censoring him. “They’re doing anybody, on the right, anybody, any Republican, any conservative Republican is censored and look at the horrible things they say on the left,” Trump wailed to Geraldo’s sympathetic listeners.

By September, Trump was making ominous noises at the White House about taking “concrete legal steps” against social media sites that censored conservatives online. The relationship between the President and Facebook would remain distrustful at best until Trump – grudgingly – left office.

Which was, of course, a good thing. The Trump administration’s wildly unpredictable behavior and constant hostility to Silicon Valley’s prideful overlords ensured that both the government and Big Tech would fail to pull off the frightening privacy-destroying partnership I’d been so afraid of when the pandemic first began.

But bad as the relationship between Trump and Zuck now was, Donald Trump was still allowed on the platform. Which he used to spewed claims about voter fraud up to and after the 2020 election, and where his supporters openly discussed the plans that would eventually lead to January 6th in ever-more-deranged Facebook groups.

On that particular day of infamy, Facebook did suspend Trump’s account. But only after Twitter did it first. (Trump now has his Facebook account back, but he doesn’t use it much. The moment has passed).

Facebook found little friendliness from the new Biden administration, populated by staffers who were far less enamored with big tech than the technocrats of the Obama era had been.

Biden’s team immediately criticized the company for failing to adequately control rampant disinformation about the Covid vaccine, as the Democrat-led administration set about frantically picking up the pieces of the GOP’s disastrous pandemic response. Meanwhile, it battled with Biden in public, Facebook (per whistleblower revelations) carefully tracked the spread of Covid disinformation internally – while consistently sharing as little of their findings with the new Democrat-led government as possible.

Eventually, Facebook did eventually, begrudgingly, give into Biden administration pressure to take down obvious Covid-19 bullshit. It was a move that was in alignment, you might recall, with what Zuckerberg publicly claimed he was going to do when the pandemic began.

It was also a choice that the GOP is now, as I write this in the summer of 2023, using to bolster their nonsense claims (which they’ve been making in one form or another since 2015) that the Biden administration is unjustly censoring the GOP on social media.

A Louisiana judge recently used this exact rationale to ban federal agencies and officials from working with social media companies to address “protected speech.” And much of the media continues to politely ignore the fact that Trump and the GOP have spent years blatantly pressuring social media companies to cater to them, actions they’ve figured out they can obfuscate by shrieking as loudly as possible about how they’re being oppressed by the Coastal Elite.

And then came Meta.

At the end of 2021, Zuckerberg, high on an in-house supply incomprehensible to the likes of groveling, ground-dwelling peasants like us, announced that his company would be changing its name, placing products like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp under the same blandly ominous title.

What’s more, the whole shambling horror would be pivoting operations over to something he’d dubbed the Metaverse, an incomprehensible concept that was – I think, it’s terrifically hard to say for sure – positioned somewhere in between hideous NFTs of vomiting apes, The Blockchain (such as it is), and a 2005-era VR video game where you don’t have any legs. Supposedly, it was a play to attract more young people, more hip people, to Meta’s increasingly geriatric lineup of products. After all, nothing says youthful cool like dropping fake computer money on virtual branded estate.

*_{turns out that people just want to be sexy 20-foot dragon ladies in VR worlds, not dead-eyed dorks posing in front of monuments}*

Unsurprisingly to everyone who isn’t Mark Zuckerberg, the Metaverse was a majestic, world-beating failure. Meta hemorrhaged money, burning billions of dollars in pursuit of a lame product that nobody wanted. The company’s frantic flailing drove even more people away from Facebook’s both grotesquely ethically compromised and now terminally lame platform. For the first time ever, in early 2022, Facebook started losing users.

Facebook, or Meta, was by no means dead. But Facebook, surprisingly, had stopped feeling inevitable.

As the world became aware of Elon Musk’s manure-brained battle to weasel out of buying Twitter in 2022, the attention of what remained of tech journalism shifted away from Zuckerberg’s failings to Musk’s even splashier, rocket-fuel stained antics. By 2022, the Metaverse’s incredible, legless failure had conditioned many people to view the company as more absurd than it was outright evil. I noticed a considerable uptick in fluff pieces about how Mark Zuckerberg was learning BJJ, like a normal human with normal, relatable hobbies.

For Mark, Elon Musk’s incredible two year effort to light his own reputation on fire has also had the remarkably convenient knock-on effect of making him seem reasonable. “Yes, Zuckerberg’s companies ransack private data and tear apart societies, and he does openly thirst for world domination,” some reasoned, “but you also don’t see him promoting creepy eugenics theories, blowing up rockets in environmentally sensitive areas, or directly meddling in the Ukraine War.”

And so, Zuckerberg and the Metaverse and everything else were able to slink back into the shadows for a bit. Sure, there were still stories about how the company was failing to control hate speech in conflict zones. How it had been slapped with more historically huge and yet affordable fines from the European Union. How people in poor countries were getting charged for their supposedly free Facebook-branded mobile data. But the media had, largely, shifted its coverage of man-made horrors beyond our comprehension to the latest, splashiest abominations that Elon was involved in.

When Elon Musk finally did walk into Twitter HQ with a shit-eating grin and a stupid Home Depot sink in his hands, his status as the Internet’s new Most Hated Man was secured. And it became terribly apparent that Twitter as we knew it, as I knew it, was gone for good, and something much, much worse was going to take its place.

Enter Threads.

Meta’s Twitter-killer features little news by design, in line with Meta’s new hardline strategy against accommodating those press-room bastards that have inflicted them with so many indignities in the past. It also has even less moderation than Facebook or Instagam ever did, echoing both Musk and Zuckerberg’s profoundly cynical, if hard to argue with, realization that governments don’t have the courage to force them to make their websites less evil. Unsurprisingly, the site already has a hate-speech problem.

Somehow, some people, mourning over the terminally-ill wreck of what was once Twitter, are still hailing Zuckerberg as something of a savior, or at least, as someone who’s substantially less evil than Elon Musk (which is wrong, but is very convenient for Zuck). Others are shrugging and leaning into Threads, shifting back into the once all-powerful idea that Facebook is inevitable, that resisting it is as foolish as shooting into the eye of a hurricane.

As for me? I’m somewhat afraid of Threads, albeit less so now, in August, then I was when it first came out in July, as it’s become clear that the service isn’t becoming the default Twitter-replacement that Meta had so fervently hoped it would be. But I’m also angry about Threads, the kind of rage that develops when you see your oldest and most loathsome enemy somehow survive threat after threat, and continue to shamble hungrily on.

I’m angry about how Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook and all the rest of his horrible companies have been able to spend the last 15 years getting away with it, how they never seem to suffer truly meaningful consequences for constantly, continuously, making the world worse. And I’m also angry about how so many people know what Zuckerberg is, and know what he’s done, and are still willing to give him yet another chance.

*_{facebook has always made me feel like I’m trapped in a Bruegel painting}*

“Maybe this time, he won’t be evil!” people say, and then he does something evil again, and the same people claim that this was, somehow, a surprise. It’s a lot like inviting the Dread Vampire Zartok into your home, even after he’s drained the blood of your neighbors, because he hasn’t drained your blood yet. It’s a form of collective madness, or at least, it makes me, and everyone else who has spent years trying to warn people, feel mad.

Oh, I’d like to imagine that Mark Zuckerberg sleeps terribly.

That every night, the hungry ghosts of the dead close in upon him.

The small, charred ghosts of the Rohingya children burned alive in their homes, who still smell faintly of smoke and cooked flesh.

The pale and bloated ghosts of the people who drowned in the Mediterranean after fleeing ethnic cleansing in their home countries, whose faces have been nibbled upon by deep-sea fish.

The suicides.

The men and women slowly tortured to death in secret Syrian prison cells.

They gather around him, and they whisper things that cannot be written into his ear. And he is tormented.

But that’s a fantasy.

Mark Zuckerberg is a man who sleeps well. He has hobbies. He enjoys non-descript barbecue sauce. He’s happily married. He has none of the freakish, manic anxiety that swirls around Elon Musk. Zuckerberg is self-assured.

He walks, serene, under a shield of plausible deniability. After all: he didn’t burn those Rohingya villages himself. He didn’t lead the soldiers that chased those Muslim Indians off of their land, or the vigilantes killing their ethnic enemies in Ethiopia.

He didn’t personally destroy the self-esteem of teenage girls, or publicly stream a mass-shooting at a mosque in New Zealand, or coordinate storming the Capitol on January 6th. He didn’t spread the lies that persuaded millions of Americans to wave off the vaccines that might have saved their lives, and he didn’t give those Kenyan moderators the PTSD that makes them see the faces of the screaming dead at night.

Certainly, Zuckerberg would acknowledge that his website played a role. But who’s to say how much of one? It is so hard to quantify these things. And there are fewer and fewer people left who have the time and the resources to try.

“But can we really blame Facebook for that?” some people will say. “Wasn’t journalism already in trouble before he came along?

Maybe. But isn’t it interesting how Mark Zuckerberg and his company exists entirely in a cocoon of plausible deniability, in an ecosystem they’ve designed to exquisitely accommodate their own version of reality?

Perhaps I am too hard on Mark Zuckerberg.

Perhaps he deserves another chance to connect the world, like he says he always meant to do. Move fast. Break things. You have to make a few mistakes to get ahead. Just a few little mistakes.

“The idiots trusted me,” Mark Zuckerberg famously said, in the early-on years, when people had not learned what he was yet.

No. I won’t be posting on Threads.

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The World is Dependent on Drones Made by Just One Chinese Company – And That’s a Problem (And More)

On August 8, 2023August 8, 2023 By Faine GreenwoodIn drones, Technology, UAV, writingLeave a comment

What’s the Deal With All These Chinese Drones?

I’ve been watching the rise of China’s DJI consumer drone company for over a decade, ever since DJI launched the cheap drone epoch we’re living in today with the release of the original Phantom back in 2013. The Phantom was revolutionary, the first drone that pretty much anyone could use to shoot sweet footage of surfers – a device that launched an entire industry of drone service providers, and turned the Shenzen based company into, arguably, China’s closest answer to Apple.

Phantom 1 - DJI — *_{the very first 2013-era Phantom 1 drone}*

At the same time, the United States and other countries have grown increasingly suspicious of DJI’s motives and loyalties, and lawmakers, like the odious Ron DeSantis in Florida, are rolling out new policies that crack down on the use of Chinese-made drones by government employees, from police officers to state university researchers.

Which might seem kinda reasonable, as compared to the other things DeSantis gets up to, except there’s one big, fat problem: there is no non-Chinese consumer drone company that does what DJI does. Much less does it at such a low price-point, which is a vital consideration for the vast swaths of modern drone users who don’t have unlimited cash to throw around.

And building a DJI-killer is a lot harder than you might assume: although a number of Western competitors tried to knock DJI off the pedestal over the last decade, they all failed. Partially, this was because DJI’s Shenzen location gives it direct access to the world’s biggest source of electronic parts manufacturing. Partially, a lot of those Western consumer drone companies made some really dumb decisions. Eventually, they largely stopped trying.

This is also why both Ukrainians and Russians are continuing to chew through vast quantities of DJI drones on the battlefield, despite massive misgivings about their reliance on Chinese tech. While Russian leaders may regularly claim that they’ll be coming out with a DJI replacement any day now, I’m not exactly holding my breath.

What’s more, our uncomfortable dependence on DJI creates a pretty enormous problem for civilian drone users in every country that doesn’t get along with China. If DJI drones were suddenly banned in one fell swoop in the US tomorrow, as some GOP lawmakers are calling for, then the civilian drone industry would be, to put it delicately, completely screwed.

I believe that it’s possible for the US and Europe to figure out how to build drones that can actually compete with DJI products, but it’s going to take some government support and changing up some of our existing priorities. Anyway, read the full Foreign Policy story here.

Facebook Believes Americans Are Good at Evaluating Their Sources, And Other Comfortable Delusions

On January 23, 2018 By Faine GreenwoodIn dystopian horror, facebook, journalism, TechnologyLeave a comment

Mark Zuckerberg would like you to know that he cares a lot about disinformation and bots and propaganda. He is very concerned about this, and is also very aware that he possesses terrifying technological powers. (See, his brow! Consider how it furrows!) And so on January 19th, he made another one of his big announcements. He’s decided, in his serene wisdom, to trust the people of Facebook to determine what is true. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

“The hard question we’ve struggled with is how to decide what news sources are broadly trusted in a world with so much division,” Zuckerberg chirped in his announcement (I always imagine him chirping in these, like a smug billionaire chickadee). “We decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective.” Users will be asked to rate the credibility of news sources, though only those that Facebook determines they are familiar with, through some mysterious and possibly eldritch method. These “ongoing quality surveys” will then be used to determine which news sources pop up most often in users news feeds. Will there be any effort to correct for craven partisan sentiment? No, apparently there will not be. Will there be some mechanism for avoiding another mass and gleeful ratfucking by 4chan and 8chan and whatever other slugbeasts lurk within the Internet? No, apparently there will not be. Everything will be fine!

On January 19th, we learned that Facebook is the last organization in the entire world that still has great faith in the research and assessment powers of the average American. Is Facebook actually that unfathomably, enormously naive? Well, maybe. Or perhaps they are, once again, betting that we are stupid enough to believe that Facebook is making a legitimate effort to correct itself, and that we will then stop being so mad at them.

Which is insulting.

Any creature more intelligent than an actual avocado knows that Facebook’s user-rating scheme is doomed to miserable failure. Researchers Alan Dennis, Antino Kim and Tricia Moravec elegantly diagnosed the project’s many, many problems in a Buzzfeed post, drawing on their research on fake news and news-source ratings. They conclude, as you’d think should be obvious, that user-ratings for news sources are a very different thing than user-ratings for toasters. “Consumer reviews of products like toasters work because we have direct experience using them,” they wrote. “Consumer reviews of news sources don’t work because we can’t personally verify the facts from direct experience; instead, our opinions of news are driven by strong emotional attachments to underlying sociopolitical issues.”

Facebook, if we are to believe that they are not actively hoodwinking us, legitimately believes that the American people have, in the past year, somehow become astute and critical consumers of the news. But this impossible. Facebook’s magical thinking is roughly equivalent to putting a freezer burned Hot-Pocket in a microwave and hoping that it will, in three minutes, turn into a delicious brick-oven pizza. There is no transmutation and there is no improvement. The Hot Pocket of ignorance and poor civic education will remain flaccid and disappointing no matter how much you hope and wish and pray.

there is some trippy ass clipart for Facebook on pixabay

This doesn’t mean there is no hope for the information ecosystem of the United States. It does not mean that this ongoing nightmare is permanent. As Dennis, Kim, and Moravec suggest, Facebook could grow a spine and start employing actual experts. Experts empowered to filter. Experts who are empowered to deem what is bullshit and what is not. But of course, this is what scares them most of all. See what Zuckerberg wrote in his Big Announcement: “The hard question we’ve struggled with is how to decide what news sources are broadly trusted in a world with so much division. We could try to make that decision ourselves, but that’s not something we’re comfortable with.”

“Not comfortable with.” Consider that wording. They’re not comfortable with doing the one thing that might actually help to dislodge the cerebral-fluid sucking leech that is currently wrapped around the brainstems of the social-media using public. It would be so awful if Facebook was made uncomfortable.

And it will do anything to avoid discomfort. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are simply abdicating responsibility again. They know that these “checks” won’t work. They know damn well that hiring editors and engaging in meaningful moderation is what they haven’t tried, and what is most likely to work, and what is most likely to earn them the ire of the Trump cult that now squats wetly in the White House. Cowardice has won out, again: they’ve simply come up with another semi-clever way to fob off responsibility on its users. When these “credibility checks” inevitably fail or are compromised by hordes of wild-eyed Pepes, Facebook will, right on schedule, act surprised and aghast, then quickly pretend it never happened. You should be insulted that they think we’ll just keep falling for this. We have to stop falling for this.

These so-called credibility checks are just Facebook’s latest milquetoast and insulting effort to pretend it is dealing with its disinformation problem. Just a few weeks ago, Facebook announced that it would be reducing public content on the news feed. This is to social-engineer “meaningful social interactions with family and friends” for its users. This might sound well and good – if you are much more comfortable with being socially-engineered by blank-eyed boys from Silicon Valley than I am – or at least it does until you hear from people who have already undergone this change. Facebook is fond of using countries from markets it deems insignificant as guinea pigs for its changes, and in 2017, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Cambodia, Slovakia, Bolivia, and Serbia were shoved in the direction of “meaningful social interaction.” (One does wonder about the selection, considering the unpleasant history these nations share). The results were, to quote local journalists in Guatemala, “catastrophic.” Reporters in these countries suddenly found their publications – important sources of information in fragile political systems – deprived of their largest source of readership and income.

Adam Mosseri, head of Facebook’s News Feed, responded to these reporter’s anguish with the serene, Athenian calm that only tech evangelicals can muster: “The goal of this test is to understand if people prefer to have separate places for personal and public content. We will hear what people say about the experience to understand if it’s an idea worth pursuing any further.”(Whoops, we broke your already-fragile democracy! Move fast! Break things!) Dripping a new shampoo line in little white bunny rabbit’s quivering eyeballs is also a test . The difference between the two? Testing your new product on embattled reporters in formerly war-torn nations is much more socially acceptable.

Facebook has also recently attempted to socially engineer us into being better citizens. In late 2017, I wrote about Facebook’s ill-considered civic engagement tools or “constituent services,” which were meant to (in a nutshell) make it easier for you to badger your representative or for your representative to badger you back. Using these tools, of course, required a Facebook account – and you also had to tell Facebook where you lived, so it could match you up with your representative. Facebook would very much like a world in which people need to submit to having a Facebook account to meaningfully communicate with their representatives. Facebook would, we can probably assume, very much like a world where pretty much everything is like Facebook. This is probably not going to change.

Yes, I know: Zuckerberg furrowed his brow somewhere in his mansion and said that he might consider cutting his profits to reduce the gigantic social problem that he’s engendered. By that, he means doing things that might actually address the disinformation problem: these things might take a variety of forms, from actually hiring experts and editors, to actually paying for news (as, incredibly, Rupert Murdoch just suggested) to hiring and meaningfully compensating a competent army of moderators. But consider our available evidence. Do we really believe that he’ll flout his (scary) board and do the right thing? Or will he and Facebook once again choose comfort, and do nothing at all?

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” said John F. Kennedy, in a quote that I am deadly certain Facebook employees like to trot out as they perfect methods of micro-targeting underpants ads to under-25 men who like trebuchets, or perfect new Messenger stickers of farting cats, or sort-of-accidentally rupture American democracy. Perhaps someday Facebook will develop an appetite for dealing with things that are actually hard, that are actually uncomfortable.

I’m not holding my breath.

Remote Sensing Workshop at Harvard – Satellites! Drones!

On February 27, 2016February 27, 2016 By Faine GreenwoodIn drones, TechnologyLeave a comment

Interested in how remote sensing can be used for humanitarian response? Check out the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s June 2016 remote sensing workshop, which I’ll be co-instructing.

We’ll be covering the basics of satellite and drone technology, as well as data collection and platforms, ethics and legal issues in remote sensing, and more. While the course is geared towards humanitarian professionals and managers, I suspect many people with an interest in remote sensing will find it informative and interesting.

The course will be held on the Harvard campus, and lunch and breakfast will be covered.

You can register online, though feel free to get in touch with me independently if you have any specific questions. And, share with your friends.

DIY Drones and the FAA’s Drone Registration Plan

On November 6, 2015 By Faine GreenwoodIn drones, journalism, Technology, UAVLeave a comment

The FAA has decided that drone registration may be its best bet for making sure drones don’t become a national nuisance after the Christmas gift-buying rush. But will it really work? And does it take into account DIY drones? I’m skeptical. You can read my take at Slate.

A Major Problem With the FAA Plan to Register All Drones – Slate

“It’s all the drone world can talk about: The Federal Aviation Administration announced Monday that all drones—not just those used for commercial purposes—would soon have to be registered, with the hope of providing a way to link badly behaved drones to their pilots. The new system, FAA representatives (optimistically) said, is hoped to be in placed by mid-December, to anticipate the hordes of underage children and overconfident dads expected to get drones for Christmas. There are lots of potential problems with this plan, which other experts have admirably described. But I want to focus on one particular obstacle. What should the FAA do about registering DIY drones—the flying objects that people make in their garages, instead of running out and buying?”

Drone Racing at MakerFaire – Slate Piece

On October 22, 2015 By Faine GreenwoodIn drones, MakerFaire, photography, TechnologyLeave a comment

I wrote about the new sport – and yeah, it’s a sport – of drone racing for Slate. I headed to World Makerfaire in Queens at the end of September, which was definitely the first time I’ve ever been out to Queens. (It takes a long time when you’re heading in from Brooklyn, as it turns out, though I’m glad the NYC subway has a flat fare).

Drone racing was a huge hit at World MakerFaire 2015, and it was fascinating to watch the public reception, considering that I’d only just become aware of the sports existence a year ago. Here’s hoping we’ll soon be able to bet on high-tech drone races in Macau and Monaco in the not so distant future. Check out the Aerial Sports League for more information.

Some bonus photographs from the event, which didn’t make it onto Slate:

Kenneth Loo on the field. FPV goggles are at least semi-cool, if you ask me.

Eli attaching a baseball to a Hiro battle drone, since, duh, what else are you going to do?

Jason fixing a drone before getting back into the race.

Reiner is having some sort of strong opinion here but I can’t remember what it was.

In which I experiment with action photography settings on my D600.

Drone Mapping a Mental Hospital with the DJI Phantom 3 Professional

On September 24, 2015September 24, 2015 By Faine GreenwoodIn drones, photography, Technology, UAVLeave a comment

I recently bought a Phantom 3 Professional, operating under the logic that it costs $1200 and is therefore much more economical than a hexacopter. Myself and my partner, Daniel, are working on developing expertise in 3D mapping with a UAV, and I’d been looking for a new model capable of waypoint navigation and shooting high-quality, undistorted still images. My Phantom 2 still worked great, but it wasn’t great for mapping – built to use a fish-eye lens GoPro camera, and unable to carry out waypoint navigation without extra, expensive parts.

I was really sold on buying a Phantom 3 Pro after I visited the DroneDeploy offices in San Francisco and watched a demo of their waypoint navigation software, which is paired with their cloud computing processing. You fire up your mobile phone or tablet, sync it with the Phantom 3, then draw a box around the area you want to map. The software calculates how many times the Phantom will need to cross the area, the altitude of the area, and how many pictures are required, then you press a button. The Phantom proceeds to launch itself and carry out its work without your input, though you can always call it back from the controller. Simplicity. I like it.

So, I bought a Phantom 3 Pro— and since I live in the giant no-fly-zone otherwise known as Washington DC, I had it shipped to Daniel in Boston where I regularly visit him. On my last visit in early September, we decided to test out DroneDeploy and the Phantom 3 by using it to map the abandoned Medfield State Hospital in Medfield, Massachusetts, which I’d found out about on Atlas Obscura. (Scenes from “Shutter Island” were filmed there). Unlike most creepy, abandoned mental hospitals, this one had been opened to the community for use as a park, while the town decides how best to redevelop it. It’s a sprawling complex with red brick architecture and lush greenery around it in summer, with the Charles River bending towards one corner.

My new Phantom 3, configured to run DroneDeploy off my Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet.

We parked across the street and walked in, and identified a parking lot where we could easily launch the drone from a flat location. DroneDeploy synced up easily enough with my Phantom 3, and I chose to map about half of the area, going conservative for a fist-time experiment. I pressed the button. It worked great: the Phantom efficiently flew off in the designated pattern, in neater lines then I could manage myself. It retuned to home in about 15 minutes, and landed itself, albeit with more force then I’d like. I may, in the future, switch back on manual control of the Phantom as it comes in to land after a DroneDeploy mission, as I prefer to catch it rather than landing it.

Since DroneDeploy missions currently can’t be flown with the camera at an oblique angle, I manually shot my own oblique imagery, with the Phantom 3 camera set to shoot images every five seconds. I flew reverse transects from the DroneDeploy pattern, and – following advice from DJI’s Eric Cheng – flew the drone in large, slow circles over the area I want to map. I probably should have worked with alternating the altitude more, but I was pleased enough with the images I was able to collect. The Phantom 3 handles even more smoothly than the Phantom 2, and shoots beautifully crisp still images with its 12-megapixel camera, without the distortion that used to annoy me with the GoPro.

We used both DroneDeploy’s processing tool and Agisoft Photoscan 3D to process the final imagery. Daniel has a great summary of the pros and cons of each over at his blog, so I won’t recap them – but in summary, DroneDeploy was a lot faster, while Agisoft PhotoScan had higher quality results but took a longer time and required much more processing power, and also required us to manually fill in some holes in the mesh.

Here is the final, orthorectified map. DroneDeploy’s ability to quickly orthorectify 2D maps using cloud processing is definitely handy. In the 3D model, DroneDeploy was not able to incorporate our oblique imagery successfully, although we’ve been in touch about the problem, and they’ve told us it will be fixed. There’s two other problems with DroneDeploy as of this writing: it only works with Android phones and tablets, and it requires either Wifi access or mobile data to function.

Both features are in the works, but keep this in mind if you want to experiment with it.In Agisoft Photoscan, which did use our oblique imagery, the sides of the model weren’t as detailed as we’d like – though, some of this is to be expected when mapping an entire complex of buildings. We could probably fix this by taking the time to shoot oblique imagery around each individual building, but this would take quite a bit of extra time and battery power. (I’d like to try it anyway).

The Drone Deploy model:

Medfield State Hospital
by mountainherder
on Sketchfab

The Agisoft Photoscan model:

Medfield State Hospital – PhotoScan
by mountainherder
on Sketchfab

Overall, I’m very pleased with the Phantom 3 Professional as an inexpensive mapping tool, and I’m excited to see what we can come up with next. I’m also interested in doing more work with DroneDeploy – and I eagerly await the release of the off-line version, which should make it a much more viable tool for field work. What else could we map in the area around Boston?

Drones and Aerial Observation: our primer for New America is finished!

On August 14, 2015 By Faine GreenwoodIn aid, drones, TechnologyLeave a comment

We’ve finally done it: the “Drones and Aerial Observation” primer I’ve been working on for New America with support from the Omidyar Network and Humanity United has been released into the wild. Ever wondered how drones can help with peaceful endeavors, from disaster response, to conservation, to archaeology? We have you covered.

With this book, I’m of the mind that myself, my colleague Konstantin Kakaes, and the drone experts who contributed chapters have created an overview of drone technology accessible to people who don’t already know what a “gimbal” is. (Yes, I am aware that is a funny word).

We hope the book will encourage people to start thinking of drones as a tech they can practically use for their own field endeavors. While drones certainly look complicated when you first encounter them – at least, that’s how I felt about them – it’s a tech that’s remarkably accessible to people who don’t have aeronautical engineering PHDs.

You can download the whole shebang as a PDF, or you can also download individual chapters. Share it, print it out, tell your friends, tell us what you think, tell your friends what you think.

On my end, I wrote chapters 4 and 5: “How to Make Maps with Drones” and “Mapping in Practice.” Writing these chapters was a real crash-course in drone mapping for me, and I’m grateful to come out the other side alive and with a better sense of what’s required to carry out mapping projects. I hope I can pass that on to you. I’m also planning to get my own mapping drone in the very near future so I can start carrying out some of this work myself.

I also wrote Chapter 9, which is a case study of the world’s largest archaeological drone mapping project, carried out by the Ministry of Culture in Peru. They were incredibly hospitable to me, and I had a great time watching the researchers deal with the quotidian, difficult, occasionally terrifying realities of making maps with drones in remote and difficult areas. Many thanks to Aldo Watanave and Dr. Luis Jaime Castillo Butters for taking me along for the ride. A Slate piece about this work is impending as well.

To celebrate the release of the book on July 22nd, we held a “Drones and Aerial Observation” symposium at our Washington DC offices. The half-day event featured a lot of great thinkers and practitioners on UAV technology, and from my admittedly biased perspective, I thought it went very well. You can see videos and slideshows of the panel discussions at this link.

I’d love to hear what you think about the primer, so feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or Facebook, or maybe even email. More drone-related writing and research coming up: watch this space!

dji S1000 pisaq BW — My favorite photo from my distinctly drone-focused trip to Peru.

How Drones can Protect Indigenous Land Rights – Latest for Slate

On July 17, 2015 By Faine GreenwoodIn aid, drones, southeast asia, TechnologyLeave a comment

The countryside in Flores. Which is not Borneo, but I like the picture.

Drones to the Rescue: how unmanned aerial vehicles can help indigenous people protect their land – Slate

My latest on Future Tense, documenting how inexpensive UAVs can help indigenous people (and other people without much access to resources) document where they live and what they own. From an interview with Irendra Radjawali, a fascinating Indonesian geographer who begun pioneering this kind of work with the Dayaks of Borneo, with some inroads into Papua and Bali. It’s really cool stuff.

I think this is going to be a particularly important usage of drones, and I hope to do more writing and research on that potential in the near future.