S05E16 of Connection Problem: Russian Trolls, Smart Cities, Vectorialism
Sit rep: I'm home-officing today so that our gas/heating/water measurements can be taken. Someone has to come in and do the reading semi-manually. This is only worth mentioning at all because a few years back, the whole building was updated with a smart(ish) system that is supposed to automatically send consumption data when the company has their base station outside our apartment, i.e. there's a van and it collects gas consumption data, or so I'm told by the guy: Turns out that out of the whole, big building only a total of 6 of the dozens of little meters actual transmit at all. The rest he has to do manually, like in the olden days before the update. Why? He has no clue, the company offers no solution. A fantastic example if, like me, you're into the oddities of smart homes and smart cities.
Summer is here, “here” being Berlin! And with it, the New Normal Climate Warnings: 2 liters of rain in April as opposed to an average of 42. Sand storms because wind + dry, sandy grounds = bad. Forest fires. Yay 21st century! In the meantime, let’s enjoy it for what it is: A sunny, summery spring day. Even the cherry blossoms are still going strong.
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Personal-ish news
It’s a heads-down week. Some upcoming submission deadlines for some writing as well as some project proposals, and since M is out of town my time is kid-crunched: Drop the kid off at daycare, race back, sprint until pick-up in the afternoon. It’s not particularly sustainable. But it works for short periods, luckily.
Also, a pet peeve of mine: I’m a big fan of calendar invites—they help reduce friction, especially across time zones. No more “oh I forgot to put this in my calendar.” However, and this is the pet peeve: I can’t, can’t, can’t stand if someone just sends a calendar invite without having coordinated it first. Just a thing that pops up in your cal, or in your inbox, and the burden to figure everything out is on the recipient; and worse, if the time slot doesn’t work, then all of the sudden the recipient has to do the awkward dance of walking the alleged appointment back. Processes help reduce friction and help people save face — if they’re well designed and used. So I’ll be missing a call today because I was invited by brute force as described above, and got no response when I tried to move it. Ah well. Tell me, is this a weird thing to ask for?
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File under “Hacker News”
The research work that Camille François and her team at Graphika has been turning out on fake news, Russian interference and generally the state of manipulation of social media platforms has been mind blowing. It's simply super impressive. I count myself lucky to count Camille as a good friend, and she’s one of the smartest people I’ve met. It’s no wonder she got to take point in analyzing the social media data that the US Senate Intelligence Committee had made Facebook and Twitter hand over.
Apparently there’s an upcoming piece on MSNBC, trailer linked from here:
I'll be watching the full piece for sure. There’s also a whole back log of excellent and fascinating analysis, though, and not just about the US (Camille is French, her work is pretty much global in nature). Here’s something about next month’s elections in the Philippines. Here’s some background and a report on the Russian troll farm IRA and political polarization in the US. It’s a wild world, and here’s someone trying to shine some serious light.
In somewhat related news, Wired has a little overview of companies that commercialize deep fakes.
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Some links around smart cities, AI, impact
For reasons, over the last few days I’ve been revisiting a bunch of reports and documents around (roughly) smart cities, AI, and their impacts and implications. Many of you might already be familiar with them, but on the off chance that you aren’t, I highly recommend these few; definitively something to keep in your bookmarks:
- Mozilla/Meghan McDermott: NYC Internet Health Report (April 2019, link)
- Vision for a Shared Digital Europe (April 2019, link)
- AI Now: Discriminating Systems: Gender, Race, and Power in AI (April 2019PDF)
- AI Now: AI Now Report 2018 (December 2018, PDF)
- AI Now: Algorithmic Impact Assessment (April 2018, PDF)
Also, Barcelona’s CTO Francesca Bria argues that technology can make cities more open, inclusive and democratic. But only if it's used in the right way (Wired). She’d know - Barcelona has been one of the go to examples for a promising approach to Smart Cities: “The cities of the future, if they want to remain vibrant and democratic, will have to put such elitism behind them, putting their own citizens first – and bureaucrats and big technology companies second. We have tried to do just that in Barcelona in the past four years.”
Barcelona is, of course, also a founding member of the Cities Coalition for Digital Rights that I’ve mentioned before a few times in this newsletter, together with Amsterdam and New York City:
“The shared principles will set the agenda for further policy discussions in coordination with the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) and other participating cities over the next year:
- Universal and equal access to the Internet, and digital literacy
- Privacy, data protection and security
- Transparency, accountability, and non-discrimination of data, content and algorithm
- Participatory democracy, diversity and inclusion
- Open and ethical digital service standards”
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Vectorialism
Excellent, short philosophical thread by Boris Anthony. He’s definitively on to something with this:
“VECTOR-IAL-ISM: The Ownership and Control of the Vectors of Information — the capture, aggregation, storage, transmission, production, creation of Information — and the Power derived thereof — via the manipulation of the levers of Attention & Action/Inaction. (…) "Platform Capitalism", "Surveillance Capitalism", "The Stacks", "Value-flow ('Business') Models of Information Technology", "Attention Economy", "The Return of Fascism" etc etc etc… all clearer via the lens of Vectorialism.”
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Currently reading: Infinite Detail (Tim Maughan), How to Do Nothing in the Attention Economy (Jenny Odell)
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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 firm. He co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit that explores fair, responsible, and human-centric technologies for IoT and beyond. 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, Takeji Asano. Footer, Unsplash (Johannes Schwaerzler).