A company called Sanas thinks they have the solution to problems faced by call center workers: Make them all sound white.¹

The tacit promise of Sanas seems to be that callers will be more polite — and more amenable to being helped — if they think the person on the other end is more like them. (This isn’t a new concept; call center workers in India, the Philippines and elsewhere already adopt American names, and are pressured to develop accents that will sound more “neutral” to Americans.)

But there’s a fundamental flaw with the tacit promises of Sanas…Accents don’t cause bias, they trigger pre-existing biases. That bigotry is supercharged by the power dynamics at play in the hellscape of modern customer service, where frustrated callers are trapped on the phone with agents who have little authority to solve their problems, and everyone is forced to interact exclusively through dehumanizing, uncanny valley scripts…

And Sanas does little to remediate this hellscape; it merely puts a filter on it.

The problem isn’t the accents, it’s the system itself.

Footnotes:

1. The Sanas website currently provides a demonstration of this, toggling between an unfiltered audio file and a filtered one. I’ve archived a spliced-together version of that audio here. It contains a snippet of unfiltered audio first, then filtered audio, then a mix of the two. ↩︎

Last year, artist Damien Hirst sold $20 million dollars’ worth of art tied to NFTs. That was 10,000 sales at $2,000 each. Hirst then gave buyers the option of receiving a physical piece, or an NFT representing it. 4,851 people chose the latter, and now, Hirst is destroying the physical works associated with their NFTs.

This is very stupid! These people paid Damien Hirst $2,000 to burn a painting. Fine, fine, and also to provide them with a meaningless digital asset. Still, let’s all try to be better than this.

I have approximately no desire to go to Walmart in the real world, so the odds of me visiting Walmart in the regrettable metaverse are very long indeed.

A screenshot of a truly risible Walmart presentation inside Roblox¹

Personally, my hope is that “the metaverse” is the 2020s version of 3D TV: Massively hyped and an utter commercial failure. Bonus points if it bankrupts Facebook Meta on the way down.

Footnotes:

1. The video is archived here. ↩︎

If you don’t know what NFTs and “Bored Apes” are, gosh, I don’t know, consider yourself lucky. It’s all a pretty vapid rabbit hole of cryptocurrency and mediocre-at-best artwork, and ignoring it is mostly for the best. Still, for today’s post, a brief primer is in order.

An NFT (non-fungible token) is a one-of-a-kind digital asset, which mostly has value because other people agree that it has value. That’s true of lots of things, of course, though NFTs tend to seem much dumber than most assets. You can read more about NFTs here, but I wouldn’t blame you if you don’t bother. Think of NFTs as sort of like digital baseball cards, and you won’t be too far off-base.

Bored Apes are a particular type of NFT, featuring computer-generated pictures of cartoon apes. They’re popular with celebrities, and often used as profile pictures. OK. If that sounds fairly stupid, then you understand enough.

With all that as preface, please enjoy the headline “Someone Stole Seth Green’s Bored Ape, Which Was Supposed To Star In His New Show”. In essence, someone stole the digital asset which was going to be used to star in a TV show. Because of the way NFTs work, the possessor of an NFT is generally assumed to be its owner. As such, this theft could present copyright issues for the new show. There’s a whole lot of time, energy, and money being spent on things that are at best bad art, and at worst, terrible for the environment. On the plus side, however, they at least provide the rest of us with something to laugh at.

Previously in NFT Nonsense: They Got Scammed At Least Twice

This week on “Our Terrible Future”, RadioShack is coming back to sell you cryptocurrency.

Hey, y’all, I have a slight concern. I think the future might be a little, tiny bit, completely dumb.

Investors spent millions of dollars on “NFTs” of cartoon apes and then they got scammed. So says this Vice article about a thief who ran off with millions of dollars people had spent to purchase “Evolved Apes”. Personally, I think if someone convinces you to pay millions of dollars for a JPEG, you were already scammed. But hey, if you disagree, I’m thinking of minting an NFT of the Brooklyn Bridge that I’d be glad to sell you.

Update (November 11, 2021): Friend-of-the-site Josh H. notes that John Cleese actually followed through on the dumb Brooklyn Bridge joke. While Cleese didn’t get the $69 million he set as a “Buy It Now” price, his sketch did sell for almost 18 Ethereum, which is about $85,000. Also, don’t miss the name of the auction’s winning bidder.

In an effort to defend itself in a wrongful termination suit, Amazon recently presented proof that it routinely fires workers who aren’t meeting productivity standards. That’s not exactly great either.

Critics see the system as a machine that only sees numbers, not people. “One of the things that we hear consistently from workers is that they are treated like robots in effect because they’re monitored and supervised by these automated systems,” Mitchell says. “They’re monitored and supervised by robots.”

While Amazon has been working hard to automate as much of their process as possible, it still requires human workers for many tasks. However, it appears robots have already taken the jobs of some warehouse supervisors.