S05E04: The Fight for Deutungshoheit

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This week's installment comes a little early since I'll be in a workshop the next couple of days. Enjoy!

Today's theme (Deutungshoheit, more on that later for the non-German speakers) was triggered by a whole bunch of conversation I've been having these last few months about things like the concept of open and what happened to it; of the role of technology for society; and other related debates that all, to me, come back to one key aspect that unites them all: We (the slightly over-simplified, collective we of the more-optimistic-than-not early-to-mid-2000s web & tech scene) thought that openness was a strong concept, maybe even a value in itself, not unlike the way free speech might be. Something inherently positive: Make it open and the world will be better for it. But turns out it's just a term like any other, and any terminology can be subverted given the right semantic spin. It's something we see all over the place: openness perverted to mean invasion of privacy; freedom of speech perverted to mean threatening and silencing voices of dissent; even democracy to mean mob rule in some cases, or the majority dominating (rather than protecting) minorities in others.

I've briefly touched on this in the last couple of installments already, but let me re-state this as clearly as I possibly can: There is no term, not a single term, that will ever be shielded against semantic subversion. Whichever term we might try to rally around, it can and ultimately will be subverted by adversaries to the original concept. Any system worth gaming will be gamed. Any by playing to the old rules of convincing people through solid rhetorics and correct facts when the "other side" has moved to the post-factual world and plays by new rules means we've lost the game before even stepping on the playing field. So what do we do about it?

We can't allow ourselves to be caught by our own semantics, and I don't think we should stoop to the same low standards. Instead, we'll have to back up any term we choose with meaning and context: Back up any term by values, principles, even examples if we must. This is how definitions become more resilient, robust, defendable - and hence more meaningful. Definitions plus a strong stand for values. This means getting much more comfortable with ambiguity. You know it when you see it is fundamentally unsatisfying, but might be the best there is right now. It pays to get comfortable with a humanities mindset of qualitative over quantitative: If the last decade was one powered by the binaries of code deployment, the next decade might be powered by the ambiguities that humanities thinking excels at. Humans in the loop, all the way.

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Deutungshoheit / The fight for how to frame of emerging technologies

How new technologies are framed (and hence thought of, and hence implemented) is often determined in their early days. In German, this is called Deutungshoheit - the power to control and define interpretation. Who defines what a thing is and does, shapes how and to what purpose it is used.

Back in my old company we tried to establish Social Media as a part of strategic communications and as a way to make large orgs more permeable. We failed. Others, who wanted to see Social Media as part of marketing and advertising won. It's really that easy: They won, we lost. Social Media now is largely thought of and used for marketing. It has not, as we proposed, upended the old corporate hierarchies and play a part in democratizing communications. (Exceptions exist, of course.) By and large, it's become a way of selling stuff and building brand awareness. See also ➞ Surveillance Capitalism.

With Smart Cities, there is a similar fight for how to interpret and think of and use these technologies — for Deutungshoheit. And make no mistake, this is what informs policy and business models, and thus predetermines many of the opportunities and risks that follow. Only this time, there is a much bigger, more powerful, better organized group on the "other side", however vaguely defined: Smart City technology vendors that have global supply chain and logistics technology to sell, big data and analytics-powered firms, as well as governments with intents of controlling their population (or segments thereof). This makes for a powerful alliance.

If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In this case, data-driven efficiency is the hammer, and everything that moves through the city is the nails.

(Note: I've worked with some of the same companies that sell Smart City tech, if not on Smart City stuff. I didn't meet any bad people or see any bad intentions, but the logic of their offerings, the framing of their thinking, leads towards a specific kind of outcome.)

I firmly believe we need a counter narrative that puts citizens and their rights — human rights, really — at the center. This means focusing not primarily on efficiency, but on accountability, empowerment, privacy, inclusion and diversity. A narrative that puts citizens first, administrations second, and vendors a distant third. A narrative that doesn't jump to foregone conclusion but is open for interpretation, for changes, for being rewritten on the fly based on changing citizens' needs.

It's up to us to write this narrative. But we better hurry; the fight for Deutungshoheit is ongoing, and the Efficiency Alliance is shaping the reality of the ground, one pilot project at a time.

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Surveillance Capitalism, the book

As a quick follow-up to last week's piece on Surveillance Capitalism where I linked to a talk by Shoshana Zuboff, I started reading her book (Amazon, no affiliate link). I'm nowhere near done, it's quite a whopper. But I'm very, very happy to report that it does not appear to be one of those one theme explored in a thousand examples business books that is best consumed through a summarizing interview. This goes pretty deep, and it does not pull any punches. Judging from the first couple of chapters I've read so far, to me this seems to have the potential to become part of the canon of the critiques of capitalism gone rogue, and maybe the first comprehensive one studying this particular set of aspects. And it's still super fresh, published just this month. Even before finishing I feel confident recommending it warmly.

Some quotes to get you started; you'll notice they go from the heavy handed to the somewhat sublime:

• "The saying tells us “If it’s free, then you are the product,” that is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation."
• "surveillance capitalism imposes a fundamentally illegitimate choice that twenty-first-century individuals should not have to make"
• "surveillance capitalism is a rogue force driven by novel economic imperatives that disregard social norms and nullify the elemental rights associated with individual autonomy that are essential to the very possibility of a democratic society."
• "The unprecedented is necessarily unrecognizable. When we encounter something unprecedented, we automatically interpret it through the lenses of familiar categories, thereby rendering invisible precisely that which is unprecedented. (…) the unprecedented reliably confounds understanding; existing lenses illuminate the familiar, thus obscuring the original by turning the unprecedented into an extension of the past."

See also:

• The incredible rise of Pinduoduo, China’s newest force in e-commerce, or what could possibly go wrong if you combined Groupon mechanics of 90% discounts to physical products.
• China’s Digital Silk Road Is Looking More Like an Iron Curtain. The pro-US, anti-China opening sentiment of "omg I saw a Bank of China ad before even the first Pepsi ad" aside, I'm filing this under global shift of power from the US to China, and from governments to corporations. Surveillance capitalism embedded in the physical infrastructure of the urban fabric, for decades to come.
• Beware of Tech Companies Playing Government by Marietje Schaake, a member of the Dutch parliament: "If we’ve learned anything from the scandal after scandal over Facebook Inc’s handling of user data, it is that the private sector’s noble intentions to regulate the internet should be met with skepticism. Without adequate public oversight of algorithms, and with recurring bad practices, tech platforms cannot — should not — be trusted." If it looks like intentional mishandling of data and smells like intentional mishandling of data… (Cue today's revelations about FB paying users $20 under the disguise of research, through a straw-man company, to give up all of their data.)

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If you'd like to work with me in the upcoming months, I have very limited availability, so let's have a chat! I'm currently doing the planning for Q2 and Q3 2019.

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What's next?

The end of this week, we'll be selecting the five PhDs from all the applications for the OpenDott PhD program in responsible tech. (Hence the early delivery of this newsletter; I'll be in an OpenDott workshop the next two days.) Lots of ThingsCon work to do, both in terms of planning, and to get some of our digital infrastructure into place so that all chapters can all work together much more closely. A little more work on a tender my company was invited to, and on the Trustmark.

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I wish you an excellent rest of the week, and a beautiful weekend.

Yours truly,
Peter

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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.

Know someone who might enjoy this newsletter or benefit from it? A shout out to tinyletter.com/pbihr or a forward is appreciated!

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Pictures: Public Domain Review (Wombat sketch by Edward Burne-Jones, 1904), Unsplash (Blake Wheeler).