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Greetings, Openbeta!

It's nice to "meet" you. Well, we haven't actually met yet, but we should. My name is Tyler Becker. I'm part of the Experiences team at Betaworks Studios, our clubhouse for builders in NYC. My role is uniquely focused on connecting members to each other, the larger Betaworks community, and even directly helping them grow their products and get to the next milestone.

Last week we hosted RENDER: Human After All, a full-day conference entirely dedicated to "Humane Tech". The conference was an opportunity for us all to reassess our relationship with technology. Douglas Rushkoff set the tone by informing us of the perils humanity faces if it continues to feed the beast of social platforms with our data. And John Borthwick, Betaworks founder and CEO, reminded us that technology’s original purpose was to build a bicycle for the mind––an enhancer to the human’s intellect and capabilities.

So, how do we manipulate technology to our needs, without letting it manipulate us? Eli Pariser, a fellow at the New America Foundation, thinks a ruleset for Silicon Valley is a good start:

"Think about platforms through the lens of space… In good public life, spaces are almost always structured. They have rules. Silicon Valley has a myopia around this, believing that people in an unstructured space is conducive to good behavior."

I’m fortunate in my role as Member Connector to get to meet A LOT of people here at the club and I find these IRL conversations to be an essential ingredient in my week. Don’t get me wrong, I believe smartphones and laptops are essential to getting shit done, but staring at a screen for literal hours just isn't sustainable for human beings.

I encourage everyone to have more conversations with friends, strangers, HUMANS in the world around us. Outside the reach of algorithms and attention-grabbing headlines, conversation IRL can unravel through questions, probing, and personal interest. It’s content in its purest and healthiest form and the kind of content we all could do with a bit more of.

📸 by Jonathan Lantz.

Betas for you to try: Jumbo

Another thread of humanistic tech that we explored at RENDER is that of privacy. How can we build products that protect a user’s control over their own data? And how do we get back under control the data we unintentionally (and, perhaps, unknowingly) shared with existing platforms? Jumbo, one of the companies that demo’d at RENDER, has an answer.

Jumbo is your privacy assistant, to audit and fix your privacy settings on apps you are using. While most people don't trust Facebook/Google/Twitter/Amazon to protect their privacy, none of us are actually spending any time reviewing and changing our privacy settings on these platforms. Jumbo does it for you.

The app is available for free on iOS only, for now. Please share any feedback you have directly with Jumbo CEO, Pierre Valade, and be sure to vote within the app on which integrations you’d like to see next.

Events + Jobs + Reading

💅 Want to help build an app to help humans feel... well... more human? The team at Journey Meditation are currently hiring for a Senior Product Manager to come on board and help them build the world’s largest meditation community, both online and off.

💅 Other opportunities to build better are currently open here at Betaworks Studios (Growth Marketing Manager, Community Connector, Full-stack Engineer) or in the 128 open roles across the Betaworks Ventures portfolio.

🎡 Join us at Studios next Wednesday (8/7) for an event exploring a number of case studios on growth marketing. The key question we’ll be asking is: what is the most human-centric marketing strategy to pursue on the journey to a million users?

🧠 This week, we read about the launch of Amazon’s neural text-to-speech and newscaster, available through Amazon Polly. The system can learn to adopt a new speaking style from just a few hours of training.

🧠 In an interview with RENDER speaker, Tristan Harris, and other prominent thinkers in the space, Al Jazeera reported on the growing humane tech movement against the “existential threat” that technology poses against humanity.

👂 We’ve been harping on about the threat of deepfake technology for some time here on Openbeta, but now you can hear it from the official explainers of the internet: the Stuff You Should Know podcast. Will deepfakes ruin the world? Listen to the podcast to find out.

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That’s all for now!
—Tyler

JOBS
Betaworks Ventures Job Board

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