Daily Archives: June 24, 2022

The Texas law went into effect on May 11 when the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted the state's request for a stay of a district judge's injunction blocking the law.

Lobbying groups representing Facebook, Twitter, Google and other tech companies filed an emergency request with the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday, seeking to block a Texas law that prohibits large social media platforms from banning users based on their political views. The Texas law went into effect on Wednesday when the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted the states request for a stay of a district judges injunction blocking the law.

The law forbids social media companies with more than 50 million active users per month from banning members based on their political views and requires them to publicly disclose how they moderate content. It was signed into law by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, in September.

Internet lobbying groups NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association filed a lawsuit against the measure, and U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman in Austin, Texas, issued a preliminary injunction in December. Pitman had found that the law would harm social media companies free speech rights under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

WATCH VIDEO: Motorola Edge 30 Pro Review: Ideal But Not Perfect Android Smartphone?

The tech groups, in their emergency request, asked the Supreme Court to allow the District Courts careful reasoning to remain in effect while an orderly appellate process plays out.

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Tech Giants Ask US Supreme Court to Block Texas' New Social Media Law

Top tech multinationals such as Apple, Google and Microsoft are the most desirable employers for Gen Z students, new research has revealed, with pharmaceutical giants also ranking highly.

The Most Attractive Employers Index Ireland 2022 was compiled by Universum, part of IrishJobs.ie, and questioned more than 8,000 students in Ireland across business and economics, IT, engineering, natural sciences, humanities, law and medicine.

Among business and economics, IT and engineering students, Google, Microsoft and Apple were the top three choices, with Amazon and Intel close behind. Engineering students ranked Intel as their top choice.

Airlines also bounced back from the Covid chill in last years rankings, with business and economics students particularly interested in working at the companies. For that cohort, Aer Lingus ranked at number 12, while Ryanair gained 11 places to number 20. The rankings were ninth and 15th respectively for engineering students.

High-profile engagement with the Covid-19 vaccine development effort saw multinational pharmaceutical companies continue to ride high in the rankings. For Natural Sciences students, Pfizer was the top choice, with Johnson & Johnson and Boston Scientific second and third respectively. The HSE was in fourth place, with Glanbia in fifth.

Pfizer dropped to fifth for engineering students and 15th among those studying IT.

Steve Ward, UK and Ireland business director with Universum said the index offered an important snapshot of the type of companies and attributes that current students and graduates are searching for in their future employer.

With renowned tech and pharmaceutical multinationals leading the way in this years Index, its clear that third-level students are keen play their part in helping to shape the growing digital and scientific transformation that is underway across our economy and society, not only in Ireland, but across the globe. Both science and technology played a vital role during the COVID-19 pandemic, enabling people to work from home, businesses to continue functioning and healthcare to take place virtually, while also resulting in the development of a number of vaccines to help protect people during what was an extremely unsettling and uncertain period, he said.

The success of tech leaders such as Google, Microsoft, Apple and Intel in the market, and their ability to embrace new technologies and drive innovation during this period, have emerged as key drivers for students in choosing these companies, something which should help to give an indication of the type of attributes graduates today are searching for in their future employer.

There were new entries to the index, with An Post, Irish Rail and AXA Insurance entering the rankings. Mr Ward said it was encouraging to see Irish companies ranking well among students in this years index.

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'Gen Z' rank tech giants among top employment targets - The Irish Times

FR technology has become the centre-stage of a wide range of racial, ethnic, and gender biases and raised racial controversy

Finally, Microsoft has joined Facebook and announced to retire its AI-powered facial analysis tools, including those to infer emotional state and identity gender, age, smile, facial hair, hair and makeup.

So far, Microsoft had allowed access to its open-ended API technology that can scan peoplesfaces and help infer their emotional state based on their facial expressions or movements.

The tech giant said it will stop offering these features to new customers from June 21, while existing customers will have their access revoked on June 30, 2023.

Read: Biometric facial comparison technology introduced at all US airports (June 7, 2022)

It further added that thedecision has been taken as part of Microsofts Responsible AI Standard, a framework to guide how it builds AI systems.

AI is becoming more and more a part of our lives, and yet, our laws are lagging behind. Theyhave not caught up with AIs unique risks or societys needs, said Natasha Crampton, chief responsible AI officer at Microsoft.

While we see signs that government action on AI is expanding, we also recognize ourresponsibility to act. We believe that we need to work towards ensuring AI systems are responsible by design, she said in a statement.

Row over facial recognition technology

In fact, Microsoft is not the first to discard this system as Meta had already announced that itwould shut down Facebook facial recognition system, deleting the face scan data of more than one million users.

Unlike Face Detection, which helps in matching a detected face against a database of faces,Facial Recognition goes beyond to add value to surroundings and bringing up more details aboutthe person and his location based on images and videos.

Although the accuracy of facial recognition as a biometric tool is lower than iris recognition and fingerprint recognition, it was widely deployed by several governments and private companies in advanced humancomputer interaction, video surveillance and automatic indexing of images due to its advantages of contactless feature, especially during the pandemic.

However, facial recognition (FR) technology has become the centre-stage of a wide range of racial, ethnic, and gender biases. It has raised racial controversy with concerns such asviolating citizens privacy, making incorrect identifications, encouraging gender norms andbeing used in racial profiling.

Read: Black or White? Bias persists in machine learning models too (June 2, 2022)

Here are some bizarre findings on FR:

We found that older individuals, masculine presenting individuals, those with darker skintypes, or in photos with dim ambient light all have higher errors ranging from 20-60% Genderestimation is more than twice as bad on corrupted images as it is on clean images; ageestimation is 40% worse on corrupted images, coauthors of the Maryland study wrote.

A study conducted by researchers at the University of Virginia found that two prominent research-image collections displayed gender bias.

Another collection of 80 million tiny Images, was found to have a range of racist, sexist, and otherwise offensive annotations. Nearly 2,000 images were labeled with the N-word, and labels like rape suspect and child molester.

In a bizarre complaint in 2015, a software engineer pointed out that the image recognitionalgorithms in Google Photos were labeling his Black friends as gorillas.

Same algorithm hasshown that Googles Cloud Vision API had labeled thermometers held by a Black person as gunswhile thermometers held by a light-skinned person as electronic devices.

Read: Facebook to shut down facial recognition system (October 3, 2021)

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google in 2019 had largely discontinued the sale of facial recognitionservices but have so far declined to impose a moratorium on their data or products.

Tracy Pizzo Frey, managing director of responsible AI at Google Cloud, says the FR system has its limitations but the bias detection remains a very active area of research at Google as these help us improve our API.

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Why are tech giants shutting facial recognition... - The American Bazaar

Non-European tech firms that turnover more than 150m in the European Union (EU) will need to adhere to a new set of stricter sustainability reporting rules designed to clamp down on greenwashing.

The EU Council and European Parliament-backed Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) is designed to tighten up the existing rules that dictate how companies should disclose non-financial information about the sustainability of their operations.

This includes details about their environmental credentials, as well as their track record on addressing human rights, social rights and other governance factors.

Presently, 12,000 firms are required to disclose information on all these topics through the 2014 Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD), but this number will rise to 50,000 once the CSRD comes into force.

All large companies and those listed on regulated markets will be within the directives scope, along with their subsidiaries. The rules will also apply to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), although they will have the option to opt out of adhering to the rules until 2028 if they so wish.

Non-European companies will also be required to make disclosures under the CSRD if they generate a net turnover of more than 150m in the EU, and if they have at least one subsidiary or branch in its jurisdiction.

As detailed in a statement, confirming the EU Council and European Parliament have reached a provisional political agreement on what the CSRD should cover, the NFRD needs replacing because of concerns that the disclosures companies make through it are not detailed enough nor subject to enough scrutiny.

Under the new directives terms, companies within its scope will need to produce reports on the environmental, social and governance impacts of their operations, and will need to have their sustainability reporting independently verified.

They will also need to take steps to ensure their reporting is as accessible as possible to those outside of their organisations by devoting a dedicated section to sustainability in their company management reports.

To ensure that companies comply with the reporting rules, an independent auditor or certifier must ensure that the sustainability information complies with the certification standards that have been adopted by the EU, confirmed the statement. The reporting of non-European companies must also be certified, either by a European auditor or by one established in a third country.

The provisional agreement reached by the EU Council and European Parliament now needs to be approved by both parties, and the roll-out of the CSRD will progress in stages. As such, it will come into force for companies that are already within scope of the NFRD from 1 January 2024. For companies that are not, the directive will come into force from 1 January 2025, andfrom 1 January 2026 for SMEs.

Bruno le Maire, minister for economic affairs, finance and industrial and digital sovereignty, said the directive will bring benefits for European consumers by making it easier for them to make better-informed decisions about the companies they give their business.

This [directive] means more transparency for citizens, consumers and investors, he said. It also means more readability and simplicity in the information provided by companies, who must play their full part in society.

Greenwashing is over. With this text, Europe is at the forefront of the international race to standards, setting high standards in line with our environmental and social ambitions.

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Non-European tech giants could be subject to EU-backed anti-greenwashing directive - ComputerWeekly.com

As Marx might have put it, a spectre is haunting the worlds democracies: the spectre of tech power. For more than two decades those democracies slept peacefully while a small number of global corporations acquired a stranglehold on the most powerful communications technology since the invention of printing. The political earthquakes of 2016 provided a rough wake-up call as these slumbering giants suddenly realised that the technological was political, that unaccountable power was loose in their world, and that if they didnt rein it in they may wind up as democracies in name only.

The years since that rough awakening have seen a frenzy of legislative and regulatory activity: antitrust suits, draft bills in the US, the EU and the UK (among others), congressional and parliamentary inquiries and so on. Whether any of this leads to effective curbs on tech power remains to be seen, and this reviewer isnt holding his breath. The question is not whether tech giants can be brought under control: we know that they can because Xi Jinpings regime has been conducting masterclasses in how to do it. The question for us is: can liberal democracies do it?

All of which is by way of explaining why Jamie Susskinds big book is a welcome arrival on the scene. Its focus is unaccountable tech power and how it might be tamed. But unlike the many other works which critique, say, machine learning technology on the grounds of racial or gender bias or its environmental impact, Susskind raises the deeper question of why such powerful discriminatory technologies can be deployed at all. Why are democracies so cowed by digital technology that almost anything goes?

Hes struck, for example, by how Joe Biden, when he was running for president, started a petition asking Facebook to keep paid misinformation from influencing the election, while over on Capitol Hill, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, plaintively asked advertisers to tell technology companies to reduce online misinformation.

How did we get here where public officials have to plead with corporations to protect the integrity of the democratic system? The answer is that for 50 years liberal democracies have been building a polity where the interests of corporations are systematically prioritised over those of citizens. The result is a world in which tech companies are allowed to wreak their creative destruction while government and civil society are expected to mop up the wreckage, much like those Indian servants in the Raj who trudged after ceremonial elephants sweeping up their dung.

The name that Susskind gives to this slavish mindset is market individualism, an ideology that sees society as the product of a grand contractual bargain between each of its members, a vehicle for the pursuit of individual advantage, with no overarching pursuit of the common good. Its what I would call neoliberalism, in the sense that Gary Gerstle uses it in his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, and Susskind doubtless had reasons of his own for avoiding such an inflammatory term.

But thats a minor quibble. The important thing is Susskinds contention that a society governed by such an ideology will never be able to bring tech giants to heel. We need something better, and he knows what it is a republican mindset. Note the small r: this has nothing to do with the GOP, or indeed the IRA, but with a more venerable way of thinking about governance. To be a republican in that sense is, Susskind argues, to oppose all social structures that enable one social group to exercise unaccountable power (ie domination) over others. Republicans reject the institution of absolute monarchy, not just the flaws of particular kings. They fight for tenants rights, not just for more beneficent landlords. They demand legal protections at work, not just kinder bosses. And they object to the very idea of someone with Mark Zuckerbergs power, not Zuckerberg himself.

Susskinds book is essentially an exposition of how anyone who subscribes to these principles would approach the task of curbing the power of the tech companies now dominating our networked world. He kicks off with a succinct outline of how republicanism differs from market individualism and follows that with a diagnosis of how digital technologies control our behaviour, frame our perception of the world and increase the intrusions of markets into every aspect of our lives. But he also makes the point that there is nothing God-given about the political and economic system that has allowed all this to come about. It can and must be changed.

The remainder of the book is about what we should do differently if we do not wish to live as slaves to tech power. It involves taking seriously republican principles about not tolerating unaccountable power, after which it sets out a prospectus for a new system of republican governance of the industry. Accordingly, a lot of the second half of the book is about governing data, challenging the legitimacy of inscrutable machine-learning algorithms, antitrust matters, the difference between free speech and algorithmic amplification, and related topics.

Put like that, it may sound like a to-do list for policy wonks, but Susskinds gift for exposition means that the reader rarely loses the will to live as they head towards the (vast) bibliography. It also helps that he has a knack for the telling phrase: surveillance capitalists are the Big Brotherhood, for example; TikTok has subtly marginalised the unattractive and the poor; we need a Marketplace of Ideals; and so on.

But really, the most refreshing thing about this fine book is its ideological stance. The reason why most current attempts to rein in tech power are doomed is because its critics implicitly accept its legitimacy rather than being outraged by its arrogant effrontery. Thats because theyve been drinking the neoliberal Kool-Aid for nearly half a century. Ideology, after all, is what determines how you think when you dont know youre thinking. Its time for a change, and The Digital Republic is a good place to start.

John Naughton is an Observer columnist and chairs the Advisory Board of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at Cambridge University

The Digital Republic: On Freedom and Democracy in the 21st Century by Jamie Susskind is published by Bloomsbury (25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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The Digital Republic by Jamie Susskind review why the west was no match for the tech giants - The Guardian

Delegates wait in line at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Cannes, France, June 2019

Cannes Lions

While media executives are meeting with advertising leaders this week over glasses of rose at the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, they can't help but talk about the disconnect between hanging out with celebrities on yachts and the creeping feeling that a recession is around the corner.

"It feels like a party here," NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell said to CNBC's Julia Boorstin from Cannes on Wednesday. "I don't know if that's because most of you are out for the first time in a long time or because we're in the south of France in June, but no, it doesn't feel like a down market."

But Shell did acknowledge there are warning signs, albeit complicated ones. "The scatter market has weakened a little bit," he said, referring to the real-time cost of TV commercials, rather than the preset "upfront" market. "It's very complicated because there's so many things going on."

Macroeconomic downturns have historically led to a spike in layoffs throughout the media industry. With recession odds on the rise and executives preparing for an advertising revenue pullback in the second half of the year, media companies aren't laying off people or furloughing employees at least, not yet. Instead, industry leaders feel their companies are finally lean and balanced enough to weather an advertising downturn without sacrificing profit or contracting their businesses.

"Our focus has been to build a really resilient, adaptable digital media company," BuzzFeed Chief Executive Jonah Peretti said earlier this month. "We thrive amid volatility.We've built anagile, diversifiedbusiness model."

Jonah Peretti, founder and CEO of Buzzfeed; co-founder of the Huffington Post

Courtsy of Ebru Yildiz/NPR

"While an economic downturn may affect the media advertising market, we're on track to achieve our business growth goals following a milestone year of profitability," said Roger Lynch, CEO of Conde Nast. The company, which publishes The New Yorker and Vogue, turned a profit last year after many years of losing money.

Part of why smaller digital media companies feel prepared for a recession is they've already laid off hundreds of employees in the past few years, stemming from acquisitions and a desire to shed costs. BuzzFeed announced more layoffs just a few months ago.

Still, many digital media companies make the bulk of their money from advertising Conde Nast and BuzzFeed included. And not everyone is optimistic that media companies are out of the woods. Since going public, BuzzFeed shares have fallen more than 80%. BuzzFeed took in $48.7 million in advertising revenue during the first quarter, about 53% of total sales.

If companies are looking to save money on marketing, there's little they can do to avoid taking it on the chin, Graydon Carter, founder of subscription-based media company Air Mail and former longtime editor of Conde Nast's Vanity Fair, said in an interview.

"If you are in the business of programmatic advertising, which most digital media companies are, you'll suffer at some point when the economy turns. It's simply out of your hands," Carter said. "I think [a downturn] will be brutal and possibly long."

The last three recessions the 2020 Covid-19 pullback, the 2007-09 financial crisis and the 2001 dot-com bubble bust have all led to job loss spikes among media companies, many of which have historically lacked the balance sheets to shrug off temporary downturns in advertising. While the media industry has contracted over the past two decades, 2001, 2008 and 2020 were the three biggest years for job losses, according to data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

It's natural for executives to feel optimistic about their company's prospects. But their sense of "this time will be different" isn't without merit, said Alex Michael, co-head of LiontreeGrowth, which specializes in working with emerging media companies. This is especially true for smaller digital media companies, including newspaper and magazine owners, which have had diversify to subscriptions, e-commerce, events and other products to wean themselves off ad revenue.

"In the past, these businesses both didn't have their models right and weren't fully matured," Michael said. "Now they've gone through waves of consolidation. There absolutely has been streamlining and optimization. Many of the remaining companies now have endemic audiences who will open their wallets in a bunch of different ways."

There are mixed feelings among industry participants about how big of a pullback media companies may see in advertising revenue.

TikTok's head of global business solutions, Blake Chandlee, said he's heard there's been about a 2% to 6% contraction in advertising spend so far, though he notes TikTok hasn't seen it.

"I've talked to some other folks, and I think there are some other folks feeling it," Chandlee said in an interview. "We're not seeing the headwinds that others are seeing."

Read more: TikTok exec: We're an entertainment platform, not a social media network

Still, others are being cautious. Snap, the owner of Snapchat, said last month the "macroeconomic environment has deteriorated further and faster than anticipated," causing its shares to fall 40% in a day. Meta and Twitter have instituted partial hiring freezes. Digital media companies Insider and Vice Media are reportedly slowing down hiring.

One digital media executive told CNBC while a smaller slowdown may have already happened, a 20% advertising revenue cutback by year-end isn't out of the question.

The key to weathering a recession is having a product that resonates with a specific audience, said Liontree Growth's Michael. Digital media companies and magazines that have had too wide an aperture haven't been able to compete during economic lulls because brands haven't had passionate user bases.

"Advertisers have asked, what do you stand for?" said Michael. "What are they selling against?"

There's also been a "loosening" among ad buyers willing to move money away from Facebook and Google on moral grounds, said Justin Smith, former CEO of Bloomberg Media.

Smith is in the process of establishing Semafor, a new media start-up for global news. While Google and Facebook have dominated the digital ad space for more than a decade, there's a growing movement among some advertisers who are diversifying ad spend away from the tech giants to support the news industry in the face of Big Tech privacy violations and disinformation.

"It used to be that ad marketers really shunned the news media, especially with digital targeting, because of brand safety. The news was tied closely with negativity, war and famine," said Smith. "Now you're seeing the opposite of that brand bravery. The only true antidote to misinformation is human intervention. This is a multi-hundred-billion-dollar pool. Even a small loosening of that group is big, big money."

Smith isn't concerned with launching Semafor into a potential recession. He said while Semafor aims to appeal to college graduates around the globe, a wider audience than niche sites with passionate audiences, even general interest publications are in a better place now than they were 10 or 15 years ago. He credits the wide adoption of subscription.

"If you look at the last five years in particular, whether it was the pandemic, or the fascination with Trump, or the rise of Spotify and Netflix, there's been a sea change with subscription," said Smith. "There's example after example of cross-category consumer adoption for subscription models for news."

Smith implemented a consumer paywall for Bloomberg News' website three years ago. Today, more than 400,000 people pay for access. Semafor, which will launch this fall, will start as a free, ad-supported service and will stay that way for "six, 12, maybe 18 months," before installing a paywall. Some articles will always remain free, Smith said, similar to many other digital news services.

Smith also said the industry has morphed in ways to better connect audience to reporters, even through down times. Smith is promoting this enhanced bond by directly staffing talent agents, who will be tasked with pairing journalists on products and events outside of Semafor's core business to broaden their reach.

"The media industry is in better shape than it was a decade ago," Smith said. "Strategies are more sensible. Digital adoption is more ubiquitous. Models are clearer. Revenue streams are more diverse. Executives are more experienced. Even though we're probably heading into a global recession, I do think the media business is going to withstand some of the downward pressure in a stronger way than it has in the past."

Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of CNBC.

WATCH: TikTok ad chief Blake Chandlee speaks from Cannes

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Can media companies weather a recession? Executives say they're in stronger shape this time - CNBC

The tech industry's disappointing track record on issues of diversity could have serious consequences when the metaverse comes along.

For years, tens of millions of people of color have endured unwelcome experiences on social media platforms built by mostly white and male tech CEOS, including harassment and hate speech. Many users have also had their contributions regularly ignored or copied without attribution.

If those issues follow users into the metaverse, a concept championed largely by those same mostly white and male tech CEOs, today's online abuse could become significantly more visceral and damaging.

"When you don't have people at the table who have historically suffered harms or abuses, or who have to live with certain things in the back of their mind, then you don't build platforms in a way that protects those people," says Jeff Nelson, the co-founder and chief technology officer of Blavity, an online media company geared toward Black millennial creators. "You build platforms that can be used by people who want to extend harm to others, [and can] do so at scale."

The tech industry has spent a decade publicly reckoning with its diversity problem. Still, Black and Hispanic workers hold just 7% and 8% of computer worker roles in the U.S., though they represent 11% and 17% of the country's total workforce, respectively, according to the Pew Research Center.

If the companies building the metaverse are lacking in diverse voices, Nelson says, it'll be hard to avoid the same problems experienced by today's social media users including more than 80 million Americans of color, according to a CNBC Make It analysis of Pew data.

"If we make the same mistakes that we did with social networking and web 2.0 ... then we'll just bring that problem into this new space," Nelson says. "So it absolutely is a problem."

The metaverse isn't off to a great start. Studies of virtual world gaming platforms, like VRChat, have found evidence of minors being regularly exposed to racist, violent language and harassment in the virtual worlds. Those types of experiences can be full-on assaults to users' mental health, psychologists say.

To Nelson, it's an extension of the existing issues that people of color have faced for years on social media and a sign that metaverse platforms aren't ready for the types of abuse that their users can throw at each other.

He's attempting to force change with Blavity. Each year, his company runs a conference called AfroTech, which helps "bring mass awareness about Black people in tech and entrepreneurship and professional development," Nelson says.

When Covid hit, AfroTech went virtual resulting in what Nelson calls the "first-ever Black metaverse." That's more than just branding, he adds: The more Black people put their stamp on the metaverse today, the more the developers building those future platforms will know that they need to intentionally create more welcoming virtual spaces.

"Creating worlds within the metaverse, creating content, creating art, all those things are efforts that are important to us as we think about the metaverse and making sure that Black people are fairly represented in this future," Nelson says.

There's evidence that some tech giants are listening or, at least, saying they are.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg almost single-handedly turned "metaverse" into the tech world's buzziest concept over the past year. His company has also faced criticism for suppressing the accounts and content of Black creators in the past, leading Instagram and Facebook to take steps over the past year to better support and promote Black creators on the Meta-owned platforms.

Facebook has committed to spending $1 billion each year with "diverse suppliers," including $100 million annually with Black-owned businesses. And Meta says it's keeping diversity in mind as it builds its own version of the metaverse.

"Because companies like Meta are starting to think about this future now, we have the opportunity to help build the metaverse with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from its inception," Maxine Williams, Meta's chief diversity officer, wrote in a blog post in February.

Because companies like Meta are starting to think about this future now, we have the opportunity to help build the metaverse with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from its inception.

Maxine Williams

Chief diversity officer, Meta

Online gaming company Roblox, another firm that's betting big on the metaverse, regularly promotes its creators of color.According to Julian Walshaw-Vaughan, a vice president of engineering at Roblox and recipient of a Blacks in Gaming award last year, the company's business model depends on it.

"Our hope is: If we can provide a platform for anyone in the world to learn important skills as developers and engineers alongside an opportunity to express themselves creatively and easily publish content, this will have an impact on the technology industry at large and result in more diverse and representative shared experiences," he says.

Those types of statements are positive signs for a more inclusive metaverse future. But for Nelson, seeing is believing.

"Frankly, I haven't seen enough," he says.

Nelson says easiest way for tech companies to begin making a difference is obvious: Hiring.

Currently, he says, tech companies often boost diversity in their workplaces by hiring people of color from the same places they get most of their employees: Stanford or the Ivy Leagues. Meta's Williams, for example, attended Yale University, according to her LinkedIn profile.

"[That's] paying lip service to diversity," Nelson says. "Companies are not bringing in people that will challenge culture. They're bringing in people who will sort of assimilate or fit their preconceived notion of how they should operate."

That sort of change might need to happen quickly, as companies like Meta, Apple, Roblox and Microsoft forge ahead to build the web's next iteration even as the metaverse itself could take years, if not decades, to become mainstream reality.

"The metaverse is a perfect opportunity to do better," Nelson says. "I am confident, because it's so early and we're having these conversations [now] instead of us having this conversation five years from now, and it's about, 'The metaverse isn't welcoming. How can we fix this?'"

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Though chip stocks have sold off hard in tandem lately, some chip companies look much better positioned than others to brush off the demand weakness that's forming in a few end-markets.

Likewise, some enterprise tech companies look well positioned to weather potential IT budget cuts, while others could get hit hard.

To be clear: I still don't think we're heading into a major recession. Not only do the job market and consumer balance sheets/spending still look pretty healthy overall, we're now seeing inflation cool off in some areas where it had been running pretty hot (durable consumer goods, raw materials, shipping/freight costs, and to some extent home prices), even as energy and food inflation remain very high. And the easing of some inflationary pressures could very well keep the Fed from getting too aggressive with rate hikes and balance-sheet reductions.

But with that said, the negative wealth effects created by the carnage seen in both equities and cryptos is bound to affect consumer spending some, as well as (along with higher mortgage rates) slow down the housing market. In addition, high energy/food inflation has begun weighing on discretionary spending by lower-income consumers, and though corporate spending/hiring still doesn't look bad overall, there are pockets of softness in areas such as brand ad spending and hiring activity among tech companies contending with business pressures and/or plummeting stock prices.

In addition, there's now a clear shift in discretionary consumer spending away from durable goods (notebooks, TVs, furniture, sporting goods, etc.) towards travel and hospitality services. And the fact that prices have gone up for things such as flights, hotel rooms and restaurant meals means that consumers partial to spending more on services than goods right now will have less disposable income to direct towards the latter.

In a nutshell, such an environment spells cross-currents for tech investors to navigate. The macro environment isn't as bad as some die-hard bears make it out to be -- and certainly, a lot of bad news has already gotten priced into the shares of many tech companies that are facing some demand pressures. Nonetheless, taking a selective approach towards tech longs -- with a bias towards companies operating in markets likely to see demand hold up well in this environment -- arguably makes a lot of sense.

Among chip stocks, companies whose sales skew towards automotive, industrial and/or cloud data center end-markets, such as Analog Devices (ADI) , Texas Instruments (TXN) or Marvell Technology (MRVL) , could see demand hold up much better than companies that are heavily dependent on consumer tech end-markets, such as Qorvo (QRVO) , Synaptics (SYNA) or (as the Q2 warning it shared on Monday drives home) Himax Technologies (HIMX) .

Within enterprise tech, cloud software providers such as Salesforce.com (CRM) , ServiceNow (NOW) and Workday (WDAY) -- many of which now look much less expensive than they did a few months ago -- mightsee demand hold up better than enterprise tech companies whose salesstill depend heavily ontraditional, on-premise infrastructures, such as Dell (DELL) , Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) and IBM (IBM) . Public cloud giants such as Amazon.com's (AMZN) AWS and Microsoft's (MSFT) Azure could also see demand hold up relatively well.

The enterprise software industry's shift towards subscription and consumption-based business models relative to license/maintenance revenue models plays a role here, as does the long-term shift in enterprise IT spend towards software/cloud spending relative to hardware spending. One only has to look at the following data from Morgan Stanley's Q1 CIO survey to see how enterprises faced with IT budget cuts will often prioritize software and cloud spending areas (security software especially) relative to on-premise spending fields such as hardware, consulting and data center construction:

CIO responses on which projects they would cut spending on during a downturn. Source: Morgan Stanley.

As Snap's (SNAP) Q2 warning highlights, online ad players are also vulnerable to budget cuts right now. This particularly holds for companies highly exposed to e-commerce ad spend (impacted by reopening activity and the shift to services spend) and/or brand ad spend (often one of the first things to get cut when companies get jittery about their demand environment).

On the flip side, online travel firms such as Booking (BKNG) , Expedia (EXPE) and Airbnb (ABNB) look well positioned to benefit from rising travel spending -- especially since higher prices spell more revenue per booking.

Some of these trends will probably come into focus more as earnings season begins to unfold next month. Many, many, tech stocks look oversold right now, and with investor sentiment at exceptionally low levels right now, the sector could soon see a bounce. But some tech companies arguably have a better shot than others at maintaining any momentum that forms over the next couple of weeksinto July and August.

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Some Tech Companies Can Weather a Downturn Much Better Than Others - RealMoney