S03E27 of Connection Problem: Good Anthropocenes
Sitrep: Just back from an intense week of workshopping and travel. It looks like there's a sunny, relaxed weekend ahead. I hope you get to kick back a little, too. ☕️
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As always, a shout out to tinyletter.com/pbihr or a forward is appreciated!
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Personal updates
For the trustmark for IoT, I'm super happy I got to workshop for some time with Pete Thomas (University of Dundee, Tom Pigeon) to develop a name and visual identity for the trustmark project. "A Trustmark for IoT" is a bit of a mouthful, and I made a point of not using a project name for fear it might be too sticky to change. So here's the chance to get it right 🙌
Travel: Next up: NYC 6-11 June, Toronto 11-15 June.
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Good Anthropocenes
Through the highly recommended (by me, anyway!) Long Now seminar podcast, I stumbled upon Elena Bennett and her Seeds of Good Anthropocenes research project: A collection of sensible approaches and projects that can help point our way to better versions of the anthropocene. She acknowledges that there might not be the one version of that but various competing flavors, but that's not an issue: The project aims to look at the bigger picture and to get to the stage where we can identify paths forward that are based on scientifically rigorous utopias rather than fictional ones. It's pretty damn good, and I highly recommend the Long Now talk.
Speaking of which, here are some signals (or seeds) of good anthropocenes that crossed my radar this week:
- Costa Rica to ban fossil fuels and become world's first decarbonised society.
- Finland is a great country for libraries, and libraries are great for Finland.. I declare library envy.
- The Toronto Declaration aims to shape the development of AI to be respectful of human rights. (I just emailed the authors to ask for ThingsCon to be included as a co-signer.)
I love the idea of collecting these hopeful, smart, ingenious bits and then try to figure out how to scale up/sideways/deeper.
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Things that caught my attention
The Bill Gates Line: Ben Thompson, author of Stratechery (which I'm very happily a paying subscriber of) about platforms, aggregators, and regulation in the digital sphere. I think this might become essential reading in the space. Also, I like the idea that Bill Gates considers a thing a platform only if the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it. That's not bad (even though I'd add that the value doesn't need to be exclusively economic).
Alligators turn up in unexpected places and that "might represent an unexpected and possibly wonderful development: large predators rebounding from past persecution and recolonizing their ancestral habitats. So ancestral, in fact, that people don’t even realize they once lived there."
Scientists discover an ice ledger of sorts, a historic record of ancient Rome's economic booms and busts thanks to the exhaust of its massive coin-making operation, preserved for centuries in Greenland's ice sheet. F*ck yeah, science!
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I wish you an excellent weekend.
Yours truly,
Peter
PS. Please feel free to forward this to friends & colleagues, or send them to tinyletter.com/pbihr
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Who writes here? Peter Bihr explores the impact of emerging technologies — like Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence. He is the founder of The Waving Cat, a boutique research, strategy & foresight company. He co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit that fosters the creation of a responsible Internet of Things. In 2018, Peter is a Mozilla Fellow. He tweets at @peterbihr. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.
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This picture via the beautiful Public Domain Review. (The one at the top is by me.)