S05E06: Politics/Futures/Trust

It's almost spring outside while I'm writing this, a crisp 4C but so sunny it feels much warmer. Nils Frahm's "Encores 2" is streaming over my headphones. A week of taking care of the little one by myself is coming to an end tonight: That was a first, and I'm very happy both of us made it unscathed, with some remote event call-ins and Skype calls being the only victims.

×

×

Know someone who might enjoy this newsletter or benefit from it? I really appreciate any forward or shout-out to tinyletter.com/pbihr. Want to support my independent writing? Join the Brain Trust membership.

×
 

Politics of Hope (and Excitement)

The ever-brilliant Alek Tarkowski kindly shared with me a draft document that his ​Centrum Cyfrowe, Kennisland and ​Commons Network have been working on around the re-framing of digital policy for Europe. While I can't share it (I don't think it's finalized and public yet) I will share this: This is an exciting document that I hope, and am confident, will make quite a splash once it's out there. I already asked permission to share the draft with some others working on complementary efforts; introductions were made. Fingers crossed for collaborations to come.

Between this, and the US debate about the Green New Deal, there are silver linings all 'round. Exciting progressive proposals left and right; well, mostly left obviously, but you know what I mean. Big, bold, visionary political efforts. Maybe 2019 is the year that gets us out of this political valley of tears and into a new, more coherent progressive narrative once more. It's been a while. This feels fresh and interesting and good.

×
 

Futures, Go!

Speaking of futures: Stop Shouting Future, Start Doing It, says the ever-capable Anab Jain. She sees a strong desire by all kinds of decision makers for radical alternative visions of the future, as imagined by artists to shake up engrained thinking:

"CEOs, scientists, economists, technologists, governments, policy makers (…) are searching for those beacons-of-hope, beacons to guide us towards “better futures”. There is a hunger for alternative visions, ideas, experiments. Radical imaginings that grasp the interconnected nature of complex systems; help navigate uncertainty; and shake up present day dogmatism."

However, often these visions are used only at the very superficial inspiration level, i.e. they're discarded as interesting but irrelevant. The org goes back to its normal way of running things, or simply pours these visions of futures into its well-established funnel of productization and monetization, hence killing it:

"Designing alternative lexicons and resisting the urge to seamlessly embed such work inside “strategy” and “roadmaps” is key to such work. Because imaginative experiments don’t — and shouldn’t — immediately align with existing structures (be they policies, products, services, financial models). Their very intention is to demonstrate alternates."

Amen to that.

Following this, and last week's conversation about the role artists could play in innovation around new technologies, it's important to remember: Data driven strategies — as they are used en masse across the industry to inform strategy — are mostly useful for optimization. Qualitative, exploratory, experimental strategies are for rethinking, reframing, coming up with really new approaches. Always look at the groups that live the future relative to you, and learn from them. This, too, is data, but it usually won't be quantitative as much as qualitative because the n is too small. Data is about the past; imagination and experimentation is about the future.

×
 

Trust, and what standards?

Over on Medium, I wrote a first end-of-fellowship wrap-up post (there might be others) that also shares the state of the Trustable Technology Mark.

Speaking of standards and trust: On the occasion of Valentine's Day, Mozilla analyzed a bunch of intimate(ish) connected products to see if they met Mozilla's Minimum Security Standards:

"Of the 18 products we reviewed for this guide, nine met our standards. Among these nine: a smart vibrator that uses encryption and features automatic security updates. A Kegel exerciser that doesn’t share user data with unexpected third parties. And a fitness tracker that allows users to easily delete stored data."

A Kegel exerciser that doesn't share user data with unexpected third parties? Let that sink in for a moment. Not sharing data with unexpected third parties is now officially Worth Mentioning. How did it ever come to this? How could we ever let it come to this?

Keep in mind that these are minimum standards. Our own Trustable Technology Mark looks at the other end of the spectrum, the maximum or really the proverbial gold standard. We haven't found many products that meet it yet. In other words, there's work to do!

In related news, Rashida Richardson, Kate Crawford and Jason Schultz (who's a collaborator on the Trustable Technology Mark) published an exciting research paper: Dirty Data, Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights Violations Impact Police Data, Predictive Policing Systems, and Justice in which they find essentially no evidence that there are any effective measures taken to prevent bad policing practices from badly corrupting the data sets that inform predictive policing systems. Hence there are clear…

"(...) risks of dirty data within such systems. The implications of these findings have widespread ramifications for predictive policing writ large. Deploying predictive policing systems in jurisdictions with extensive histories of unlawful police practices presents elevated risks that dirty data will lead to flawed, biased, and unlawful predictions which in turn risk perpetuating additional harm via feedback loops throughout the criminal justice system."

Take just these three examples they found and highlighted:

"(1) Chicago, an example of where dirty data was ingested directly into the city’s predictive system; (2) New Orleans, an example where the extensive evidence of dirty policing practices suggests an extremely high risk that dirty data was or will be used in any predictive policing application, and (3) Maricopa County where despite extensive evidence of dirty policing practices, lack of transparency and public accountability surrounding predictive policing inhibits the public from assessing the risks of dirty data within such systems."

×
 

Shift trust to the blockchain? (No thank you.)

Bruce Schneier has an excellent piece up on trust, the blockchain, and how they relate. More specifically, what the blockchain can and cannot verify reliably.

"What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust [cryptography, protocols, software, computers & network]... absolutely, because they’re often single points of failure." 💯

Thinking the blockchain can replace trust in institutions is like thinking that eating peanut butter off of a plate that says "lose weight" on it might help you lose weight. In reality you're just spreading the peanut butter from one container to the next, but the content is the same. (How's that for a gross and over-extended metaphor.)

There are at least two structural weak points that make trusting the blockchain inherently risky:

1. The point of "data in": Do you trust the data entry? If, say, you blockchain-verify a ledger of carbon capture, the very first step of verification, the human expert on the ground who says "yes this has really happened" is the part where corruption might likely occur, much more so than anyone tampering with the records — yet it's the part that the blockchain won't help verify at all. (For the record, I think Nori, the example linked above, seem great; I also believe they would seem even more promising without the blockchain.)
2. Governance: Who controls the blockchain? You might remember the DAO disaster a few years back where someone successfully syphoned $50m USD or so in DAO tokens off of the Ethereum blockchain - and "too many Ethereum community members, including some of its most prominent leaders, suffered losses, having traded their ether for DAO tokens. They felt that action had to be taken to reverse their losses. The Ethereum leadership was able to coordinate with the network stakeholders (…) [to shift control] of the siphoned-off funds(…) to a group of trusted leaders." They just changed the rules because they were impacted, demonstrating effectively that the immutability of the blockchain is not guaranteed.

Cue Maersk: IBM and Maersk struggle to sign up partners for their cargo shipping blockchain service because — wait for it! — they don't trust the governance mechanism: Maersk co-owns the platform with IBM, their competitors do not.

×
 

Miscellaneous

1. A Smart City Innovation Tour In Asia: China, Singapore, Japan & South Korea, a bit of a fluff write-up of an innovation tour by the organizers, about examples of smart city policy (highlights mine): "China taught us a different approach adopted by the government in its pursuit of Smart City solutions. It’s one of collaboration with big corporations with specialized expertise and strong government support in the form of regulations and data access." Well, I guess that's one way to put it.

2. I tried to keep my unborn child secret from Facebook and Google (WIRED), a great article that may have crossed your radar already and that has the telling URL /the-internet-hates-secrets/ is about the author's story of expecting a child and keeping "the existence of our unborn child a secret from the online economy’s data-hungry gaze." Which, spoiler alert, turns out virtually impossible. For every page you read on the web, the web reads you back many times over.

3. A fascinating piece of how structurally women's contributions were kept out of academic publications and no author credits were given (The Atlantic): "In the 1970s, women accounted for 59 percent of acknowledged programmers, but just 7 percent of actual authors. That decade was a pivotal time for the field of population genetics, when the foundations of much modern research were laid. “Based on authorship at the time, it seems that this research was conducted by a relatively small number of independent individual scientists, nearly all of whom were men,” the team writes. But that wasn’t the case." It's going to be good to see history rewritten, this time with all the credit given where it's due.

×
 

What's next?

I'll be wrapping up my Mozilla fellowship by the end of the month, so there's some wrapping up to do. We're planning a ThingsCon event for May, a small invite-only affair to have a peer-level in-depth discussion of better economic models for connected technology. (If you're interested in joining, please let me know and I'll send you on an invitation.) I'll be headed to Lisbon for an EU event around IoT, SMEs, and artists - not quite sure what to expect but it should make for interesting conversations.

×
 

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.

×
 

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

Yours truly,
Peter

×
 

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!

×
 

I owe thanks to Gianfranco Chicco for pointing me to this fountain pen by Taiwanese product design studio YStudio. Ever since I picked one up I've been rediscovering the joy of writing with a fountain pen. And what a lovely rabbit hole that is. The pen is all brass, and it looks much better in real life than I managed to capture with the photo, and it feels even better in your hand than that.

Pictures: Utagawa Hiroshige's 41st station, Miya. From The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (Public Domain). My own.