S03E05: Connection Problem
Welcome back!
Sitrep: It's Monday, 11 December 2017. Outside there's the first bit of snow (it doesn't yet stick in the city). First day back at work after taking the last two weeks off to get the family all settled. Large cup of green tea in front of me. Catching up on everything but my reading; keeping an eye on some of the more interesting articles drifting by in the twit streams was just about the level of keeping up with The World Out There that I managed these last few days. Slowly getting back into the flow.
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Meta: Renaming this newsletter to Connection Problem (working title).
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Promo: Since you're here you're likely aware that M and I have a Small Independent Apparel Label where we produce small batches of minimalist and very versatile trousers that travel extremely well (ZephyrBerlin.com). We just had a new small batch of the men's model made, with but one crucial, improved detail: Upgraded front pockets. It's a bigger deal than it sounds. Learn more here.
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ThingsCon: ThingsCon has been on fire, and I've been suffering some major FOMO. ThingsCon Amsterdam, the most bad-ass of all ThingsCon events happened last week, and I just started to catch up on the talks, but that's not all: The first-ever ThingsCon Nairobi just happened as well, and it was sold out, and from a distance it looked amazing. (We haven't even had time for our team debrief, so all I know is via Twitter and some backchannels whispers as well.) 👀
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The Internet of Sneaky Things: Over the last few weeks, a few Amazon announcements have popped up on my radar that combined draw a somewhat disturbing picture:
- Amazon delivery people can unlock your front door through Alexa, or rather Amazon Key (The Verge)
- Amazon "employs" gig economy workers for deliveries, and they can be approved in as little as four hours (Gizmodo). I'm not saying that part time freelancers are thieves, but I think it's fair to assume they have a weaker connection to their employers, and hence understandably less loyalty; also, it's apparently easier to sneak into a part time freelance gig than into a long term employment if one was criminally minded.
- Alexa's backup security camera that allows you to keep an eye on these delivery people has bugs and been shown to be fooled by security researchers (Mashable)
So you have a system that allows people with minimal background checks to enter your home while you're gone, and the only security measure is buggy in a way that won't even give you notice when disabled. All together now: 👏What 👏could 👏go 👏wrong?
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Not cool, surveillance marketing: Given our New Life Situation, I'm not officially in the market for buying diapers in industrial quantities online. What I'm not at least in the market for is seeing diaper ads like anywhere ever. Stay out of my 'grams, sad late capitalism!
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Kudos? No thank you. The Kudos Project, a side project by a bus-sharing startup, tries to eliminate tipping and have personal ratings follow service workers around. Never mind that this is the actual, terrifying plot of an old Black Mirror episode (S03E01), it's also dumb, horrible, annoying. I can't tell if they're incredibly cynical or just totally blind to why this is a horrible idea. Either way, bro away.
Post-internet: Bruce Sterling delivered some bad-ass final remarks at ThingsCon Amsterdam on the balkanized post-internet and opportunities it might open up. (Bruce's talk, all talks.)
Talking about the theme of sovereign (national) cyber spaces as pioneered by China (Great Firewall and all), Bruce points to plenty of regionally and politically fragmented spaces aiming for cyber sovereignty: Russia, Brexit, US, Europe (with Internet 4.0).
"This is the balkanized post-internet being born in front of us", he states, and that's incredibly depressing because it's so obviously true and we lost that fight so badly and now we got all this mess that we made and have to clean up so that others might have the same chances we had and, I guess, squandered. Sigh.
In his kinda-sorta chipper-because-what-else-can-you-do-when-you've-seen-what-I've-seen kind of way, Bruce sees this as a chance, almost (highlights mine):
"You're going to have to put your extremely complicated European house in order. (...) You don't really have any idea what you do. You never had the initiative before. (...) You got to get your shit together and pull that off. The initiative is in your hands. That's an unusual thing." He adds: "If you're capable of doing something, you can do it now." Because there's literally such a power vacuum as the US and some of the other usual power centers are so busy with themselves that they couldn't care less what happens outside their walls.
This is a really interesting angle. I mean, of course it is, that's the whole point of a keynote. But it really resonates with my understanding of how Europe has been handling All Things Digital. Lots of reacting, lots of let's-wait-and-see, lots of yes-but-maybe-not-quite-as-fast. Maybe we'll have to finally bite the bullet and get out there and build better, and more assertively.
(He also talks about augmented ubiquity and a bright fog of nothings, but I'll have to listen to that part again and do some serious googling.)
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Shifting focus: Been trying to map out my shifting work focus over time. After all, I look at the impact of emerging technologies, so by definition things are in flux. Here's a first draft of it:
You can clearly see the shifting focus (Bruce refers to this as the semantic drift).
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Burn the bitcoins before they burn us: Bitcoin could cost us our clean-energy future. File under "thanks but no thanks". In related news, I'm a bit worried by how many non-tech friends ping me about my opinion on investing in crypto currencies. By now my position should be clear: I'm not for it, at the very least not for now. They're currently not just not useful but actively harmful. I didn't invest in them consciously, and so I have zero regrets about short term gains not realized. I guess history will judge us harshly for burning up precious resources for no good reason whatsoever (i.e. short term speculation or moving money out of China). And even not taking into account all the money launderers and criminals, oh boy do crypto currencies make for strange bedfellows.
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Discontents: Umair Haque wrote a piece on how our thinking in the world may have failed us. And while I have some serious issues that he builds his argument in opposition to some straw man "intellectual" who's never quoted, just assumed ("There is the intellectual, saying, 'you fools!'"), which is a lazy and I daresay unfair line of argument, there are some good points to be had here:
"The truth is that stuff doesn’t really make us fulfilled (...) very much at all. What does? Not goods, things, objects, stuff, which have certainly grown in quantity (...) but services, which are often called “experiences.” Which services precisely? Well, basic public services, like healthcare, transport, education, information, and so on. If you don’t have these, then you live in constant tension, anger, fear, worry, because you are never quite sure if, when you get sick, how you will be able to pay for it, how you will educate your kids, and so on. So while the volume of goods, whether TVs or cars, that the average person can afford has grown by leaps and bounds, so what? To really escape our discontents, we must feel safe, secure, strong, powerful, at least, over our own little lives."
Because yes! Safety—physical, mental, financial—is a big deal and our current system leaves too many without any of these. The shit show that is global politics in 2017 has a great chunk of the population (of any population, really) in constant anxiety, or denial, or retreating to their happy place. Did I just hear someone cough "late capitalism"?
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Dear Lazyweb: If you share photos or photo albums with your loved ones, what's your setup? I like to have local, sorted files for archival reasons (aka "backup") but also, a system that makes sharing easy would be great. Any pointers to a thing that works for you are greatly welcome!
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On that note, I wish you a fantastic week. Talk soon!
Peter
ps. If you want to get in touch, reply to this email, drop me a line here, or ping me on Twitter.