S04E04: Square pegs, round holes
Sectors of divided Berlin
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Hi there.
Still working my way back to an Every Friday Schedule. It'll be another few weeks before we get there 😱 — until then, this newsletter will go out less frequently, and occasionally on not-Fridays. Apologies; but that's just the way it is right now. But hey, this is the day before a bank holiday in Germany, and as such as Friday-ish as it gets. October 3rd is Reunification Day (or German Unity Day according to Wikipedia, which somehow sounds worse). 28 years since the Berlin Wall officially fell for good. See also this not-exactly-even-handed news reel from 1962 about the first anniversary of the wall, the visuals are memorable to say the least. Yay to no walls.
There's some good stuff to think about in this edition, I think. Enjoy.
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As always, a shout out to tinyletter.com/pbihr or a forward is appreciated!
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Personal-ish Updates
Turin. We just spent a few days at Casa Jasmina with some core members of the ThingsCon community. What a lovely crowd. I wouldn't mind spending time with any of these folks full time rather than a (nominally) 20% project. To great collaborators!
Welcome screen on Casa Jasmina's experimental dashboard, and a ThingsCon haiku by Dries de Roeck
Trustmark. The ThingsCon Trustable Tech mark is coming along nicely. I've managed to convince the first official launch partners (soon to be disclosed) to join the fun, and the first companies to apply. The first external company also just reached out to us, rather than the other way round, so that's super exciting. I'm getting positively giddy about this.
ThingsCon. Our annual conference is coming up. Tickets are available, Early Bird at this stage. Come join us in Rotterdam!
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Square Pegs, Round Holes
It's easy to go astray when discussing digital transformation. In fact, the term itself might not be helpful; we might be better of just calling it transformation, or even just future proofing.
Very, very often the term digital transformation is used to signify the making-digital-of-formerly-analog-processes: your letters and files and paper records, your calls and face-to-face appointments.
But this means just slightly iterating on an old model—which might be fine, or might not be, but it shouldn't be the default to assume this is the best way to go. The path forward should be deliberate, and not too overly based on arguments along the line of "here's what we've done in the past".
In many cases, the best way forward might be about radically reforming organizations, or creating new ones. These two articles side by side (both found me via Patrick Tanguay) combined shed some light on the issue:
"Dominant organisations are prone to stumble when the new technology requires a new organizational structure,"
…writes the Financial Times on why big companies squander good ideas. See also Making government as a platform real by Tom Loosemore, one of the masterminds behind the good old UK GDS team:
"If you want a natively digital nation, or a state, or a city, or whatever, my message today is you actually need to be bold enough to create some new institutions; institutions that are of the internet, not on the internet."
Meaning that "iterating existing public institutions is not good enough. We have to create new ones."
There's so much I want to quote from this long read that it would resemble plagiarism, so let me end on these two:
1) "There’s a much, much bigger prize up for grabs. I believe that the first nation, or city, or state that creates new institutions with the values, sentiment, business models and culture of the internet is going to win big. Not just because it will have better, cheaper, more efficient and more empathetic public services that meet user needs, but also because those institutions will provide a new foundation, a new digital infrastructure serving the whole of society. They will support new ideas in enterprise, culture and government that were previously unimaginable."
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2) "Data is the new foundation of our digital nation. It should be authoritative, canonical, easy to test and check, and have integrity. And for personal data, only available to services that have gained the consent of the user or citizen."
Yes please! Bold, 21st century thinking + a focus on infrastructure & sustainability & public good = win!
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Amazon Pre-Prime
On Twitter, I quipped that I wanted Amazon Pre-Prime, a service where Amazon would ship me everything they knew I'd order eventually. It was a silly pun. However, I hadn't taken into account the hive mind. Turns out that of course this idea has already been explored (of course!) via AI, at least conceptually. (Thanks to Johannes Koponen for the pointer.)
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Amazon's One Weakness
A related note, purely anecdotally, about Amazon. I'm solidly and quite happily invested in Amazon's ecosystem. I order everything at Amazon. And I'm increasingly convinced that one of Amazon's biggest liabilities is going to be… DHL.
This is based purely on personal experience, so take it with the giant grain of salt that n=1 always warrants, but: We've been trying out Amazon subscriptions for baby-related stuff. Not small amounts, either. But DHL's delivery has been so flaky for months that I just cancelled the whole slew of subscriptions. It was too much hassle to go pick up the majority of the packages at the post office whenever the at-home-delivery would invariably fail, be delayed without notification, or simply wouldn't even be attempted by the delivery driver. I'm absolutely convinced that its own fleet is Amazon's best chance not just to cut costs but also to guarantee the necessary quality of service.
I've been wondering, but as far as I can figure out ramping Amazon's fleet up accordingly wouldn't add more traffic to the city, either, as the number of packages delivered total is zero sum, unless I'm missing something?
Either way, DHL just cost Amazon a solid amount of recurring revenue, and me a whole lot of mental bandwidth and time. Not cool, DHL. Not cool.
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Walkable Cities
What would a truly walkable city look like?, asks The Guardian. (Spoiler alert: BETTER.)
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Facebook's Shadow Profiles
Just a few quotes out of an article well worth reading in whole, about Shadow Profiles that Facebook collects and shares with advertisers without any meaningful control or consent by users:
- "Ben can’t access his shadow contact information, because that would violate Anna’s privacy, according to Facebook, so he can’t see it or delete it, and he can’t keep advertisers from using it either."
- "when a user gives Facebook a phone number for two-factor authentication or in order to receive alerts about new log-ins to a user’s account, that phone number became targetable by an advertiser"
- "advertisers can literally specify exactly which users should see their ads by uploading the users’ email addresses, phone numbers, names+dates of birth, etc"
This is insanity. Every single one of these would be really bad. Together they just reinforce what has become obvious for quite some time now: That Facebook's culture is rotten to the core, and the organization blatantly disregards privacy, data protection, trust, and consumer rights.
Also, if we don't radically overhaul online advertising we'll be so much better off without it, period.
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Brain-to-Brain Interface
The first “social network” of brains lets three people transmit thoughts to each other’s heads. The social network bit to me kind of misses the point; this outlines direct, brain-to-brain communications. Let's not put it into the same pot as Facebook and Insta, yes? So…
Super low resolution but fuck yeah, this is amazing. "A key idea is that people can change the signals their brain produces relatively easily. For example, brain signals can easily become entrained with external ones. So watching a light flashing at 15 hertz causes the brain to emit a strong electrical signal at the same frequency. Switching attention to a light flashing at 17 Hz changes the frequency of the brain signal in a way an EEG can spot relatively easily."
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Tech-Investigative Journalism
A fantastic team (ex Pro Publica and Wikimedia Foundation, among others) take on tech reporting with a solid dash of data journalism. All reporting will be CC licensed, too. It's called The Markup. Excellent!
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Small bits and pieces
- IEEE launches an ethics certification program for autonomous and intelligent systems, specifically to reduce algorithmic bias.
- Two pieces of writing about Chinese retail, which I find super interesting. Axios has horribly clickbaity headlines so let's just call them big picture and corner store.
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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 working on the Trustable Technology mark, trustmark for IoT. He tweets at @peterbihr. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.
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