S05E11: Tech Supra States

Greetings, earthling.

This week's installment does not have one clear thread tying it all together. Instead, it's a little more fragmented; more comments and articles and other signals that caught my attention and might, just might, have some emergent properties and conjure up images and ideas in your mind, and mine. Onward!

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Personal(ish) updates

Towards the end of a slightly out of whack week (daycare centers were closed, fever was had, doctors were visited; not by me, but across the family) and so I'm writing this across several stops at coffee shops in between meetings. (Sitrep, anyone?) Some of these meetings serve a purpose I like to engage in every now and then, and now more than ever: I'm meeting some folks whose judgement I trust to pick their brains about pointers to where I could meaningfully direct my work focus over the next 5 years or so. I've been mentioning here that I'm in a bit of a transition phase after a decade of strategic consulting work, and towards making a more focused effort on using these same skills for more social impact work. But what shape this might take (policy? philanthropy? something else entirely?) I'm simply not sure yet. I have a gut feeling that there are some massive white spots on my mental map there, so I'm reaching out to folks to help me survey the landscape from different perspectives.

(In an only very tangentially related note, I recently read the 1993 Hugo Award winning A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge. The horrible title aside, I found it really good. And there's one thing there that (spoiler alert?) has an alien race consist of multiple bodies, hence having multiple literal perspectives or view points simultaneously. Since I don't have that, I'm asking for input the old fashioned way, over coffee. I highly recommend the book, though. There's some beautiful world building and perspective changing going on in there.)

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Tech Supra States

This opinion piece on The Global Mail titled "Silicon Valley isn’t just a technostate – it’s something much bigger":

"Companies such as Google, Facebook, and Apple have userbases in the billions. Not only is this historically unprecedented, it’s also more people than live in any single country. This – along with Big Tech’s sheer scale, with profits in the billions and with margins dwarfing similarly sized companies – gives them incredible power, which has collided with politics as we understand it, and democratic life itself."

It's an understandable comparison, and some points that seem, dunno, correct? Not sure if this is the right word. They also seem to fail the larger context somehow. (Fortune goes similar astray arguing simply against letting tech companies big as if size was all that matters.) It's right, but besides the point. Companies and nation states aren't really comparable, or maybe just shouldn't be. And nation states, I'd like to add, while long established are also not the be all, end all.

There's a long history in exploring these lines of thought, though. From the corporation states in Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash to the (rightfully much, much, much lesser known) beginnings of thoughts I posted years ago on a possible distributed tribal state for geeks — which haven't aged well; What a different time that was! — to Estonia's e-residency program: The idea of redefining what our largest organizational unit of society is has fascinated for a long time.

Back during my M.A. program in political science I tried pressing professors for help figuring out what if Microsoft wanted to establish a nation state. They laughed, of course, but nobody found a reason it could't work in practice. Here's what's generally considered the things that make a nation state (Montevideo Convention):

"The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications : (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states."

You'll note quickly that these aren't absolutes: There are exceptions to almost all of them The most important really is recognition by other states, and by which states. Ask a Taiwanese person for clarifying insights into the practicalities.

There's no clear point or insight here. Just something to contemplate on as we're headed out of one and into another world order.

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Smart Neighborhoods

The neighborhood — as opposed to building or city — has been gaining some traction in "smart" discussions lately. My good friend and esteemed colleague Prof. Jon Rogers of the University of Dundee has been banging that particular drum for a while, and so it's interesting to me to see that in the Netherlands the Brainport Smart District (BSD) is an experiment with that exact focus. The unique thing here is the focus on data ownwership of citizens and of circular buildings. Dezeen summarizes:

"UNStudio has unveiled plans to create the "smartest neighbourhood in the world" in the Netherlands, where residents produce their own resources and control the use of their data. Brainport Smart District (BSD) will be located in Helmond, a city in the south of the Netherlands, with the construction of 1,500 new homes over the next 10 years. Amsterdam-based UNStudio is planning the circular and "socially cohesive" development in collaboration with its sister company, the tech startup UNSense. They envision the area as a "living laboratory" that produces its own food and energy, manages its own waste and controls its own data."

This is possibly interesting, and UNStudio occasionally land real hits. However, in this case I'm not easily convinced. The mention of a living lab, of in involved partner startup, of building from scratch rather than in an existing community all raise red flags for me. Most importantly, though, the concept of data ownership is inherently flawed (MIT Review, by the good folks over at Luminate). So it's wait and see. But I'd be very positively surprised if this ended up with a really diverse community of inhabitants.

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Historian of the Future

I recently stumbled over this old classic of a text from 1945 published in The Atlantic titled As We May Think. In it, Vannevar Bush outlines his idea of the Memex, a "device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory." The Memex is often credited with being a conceptual predecessor to hypertext, albeit a mostly mechanical one.

I love a good historic tech longread. This one is not just a fascinating document in itself, but also provides some much needed perspective of the times in which the groundwork for much of today's tech was laid, namely war and the post-war years, as these notes from the Atlantic's editor highlight:

"Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge."

Meccano differential analyzer in use at the Cambridge University Mathematics Laboratory, 1938. Douglas Hartree, who visited Bush in his laboratory in 1933, built it based upon Bush's design. (Image and caption: Wikipedia)

Here's just one of many little gems that are interesting in their framing both for what they got right and for how they failed:

"Certainly progress in photography is not going to stop. Faster material and lenses, more automatic cameras, finer-grained sensitive compounds to allow an extension of the minicamera idea, are all imminent. Let us project this trend ahead to a logical, if not inevitable, outcome. The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3 millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice. (…) The cord which trips its shutter may reach down a man's sleeve within easy reach of his fingers. A quick squeeze, and the picture is taken. On a pair of ordinary glasses is a square of fine lines near the top of one lens, where it is out of the way of ordinary vision. When an object appears in that square, it is lined up for its picture. As the scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter and in it goes, without even an audible click. Is this all fantastic? The only fantastic thing about it is the idea of making as many pictures as would result from its use."

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Miscellanea

Minimalist smart phones? I like the idea of having a smart phone that's not optimized for attention seeking. That said, I'm not entirely sure that the Punkt does that and not just replicate a simulation feature phone on smart phone hardware. If you've had the chance to try one (I haven't) I'd love to learn what you think.

Immersive Future Theater? Future Perfect: A Postcapitalist Adventure, a San Francisco event, seems interesting. BoingBoing has some details, but I have to admit I don't fully get what they'll be doing. If you're in SF this weekend, I'd check it out.

Space origami? Nion Berlin pointed me to space origami, which is a real thing, and is about finding the best way to fold solar sails. 👀

Better-structured work days? It's not exactly news that 8 hour work days are a relic of the past. But it's much rarer to see actual research into productivity of alternative models. This one is interesting, and I'll be sure to give it a try. The TL;DR is 50-60 minutes of uninterrupted (!) work followed by 15 minutes of break with no (!) work.

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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!

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I wish you an excellent 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 2018-19, Peter was a Mozilla Fellow. He tweets at @peterbihr. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.

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Pictures: Header & footer, Unsplash (Charlotte Coneybeer, Joel Filipe)