S05E22 of Connection Problem: Shifting Alliances
Welcome back. I’m writing this during a longer train ride from Berlin to Brussels, hurtling through space at a comfortable 240 Km/h (150 mph), past green fields and wind-power farms. Slower than flying, sure, but much more comfortable — and vastly faster than driving. The reason I’m going to Brussels is to speak at the Call for Europe conference before heading on to Cologne tomorrow evening for a day and a half of ThingsCon goodness. More on both below. Onward!
×××
Know someone who might enjoy this newsletter or benefit from it? I really appreciate any forward or shout-out to tinyletter.com/pbihr. If you'd like to support my independent writing, your contributions are much appreciated. The easiest way is to join the Brain Trust membership.
×××
Personal-ish stuff
(1) Last week I was on a whirlwind tour to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, where my long-time good friend Peter Rukavina had invited me and about 50 others to a small unconference of sorts; really it was more of a celebration of a life well lived, and my mind is still reeling from all the conversations in this small select group of excellent humans. I might be sharing some more concrete things over the next few weeks once they’ve stopped fermenting in my head; for now, just a brief glimpse at the man himself with his vintage printing press:
A man and his vintage letterpress
Like so many people in my professional and personal peer group, I first met Peter at or through an event, in this case (as best as I can trace our crossing paths back) it would have been Reboot. (Did I just hear a small sigh of memories reactivated?) Whoever says events are becoming less relevant as a format really lives on a different plain. While this might hold true for big commercial conferences and expos, when it comes to building personal connections, small conferences still are incredible powerful. It’s certainly where I’ve been focusing a fair bit of my attention. Maybe this is a function of scale more than anything, and of filtering out some toxic influences. The smaller, more intimate places — conferences, closed chat groups, small email lists, etc. — is where it’s at. At least for me, right now. YMMV.
(2) Speaking of smaller conversations, just because it came to me through one of these smaller conversations in the form of a personal recommendation (thanks, Matt Webb!): Ulysses is a fantastic text editor! I’ve been doing a good chunk of my writing in Ulysses. (Everything that doesn’t require Word docs that are emailed back and forth now happens in Ulysses.) It’s a little more feature rich than iA writer but not as bloated as others. It has pretty solid UX and solid Markdown support. It’s not entirely without a learning curve, but it’s not steep. It even made me cave on setting up iCloud to sync with my iPad (but it doesn’t require it). It also appears to be a small company out of Germany; the first part, the size, is more important to me than the second. But it’s nice to see a company with a good product and a business model, and it feels great to support this. I hereby officially endorse it.
(3) Last week I mentioned how much I enjoy to see Robin Sloan's experiments with print products. Just now I received one of them, an AI-generated fantasy story in the style of, say, a 1980s fantasy RPG quest. It's so much fun to see an incredibly talented writer see expand his tools — and I'd argue, advance the art — of co-creating with machine learning.
×××
Brussels event: Call to Europe
The reason I’m going to Brussels is an event by the Foundation for Progressive European Studies (FEPS), Call to Europe. I’ve had the pleasure of working with FEPS over these last few months, and was more than happy to join for this event to discuss how to get to a fair digital society in Europe.
I’m part of a session on that exact topic (session 1 in the program), and am happy to represent ThingsCon at the civil society table. My peers in the session are a somewhat humbling crowd:
POLICY-MAKERS
- Birgit SIPPEL, MEP S&D Group, Germany
- Paul NEMITZ, Principal Advisor DG Justice EC, Member of FEPS Scientific Council, Germany
- Paul TANG, MEP S&D Group, The Netherlands
- Evelyn REGNER, MEP S&D Group, Austria
ACADEMICS
- José VAN DIJCK, Prof. of Media and Digital Society, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
- Felix STALDER, Prof. for Digital Culture and Network theories, Zurich University of Arts, Switzerland
- Gustavo CARDOSO, Full Prof. of Communication Sciences, ISCTE University, Portugal
- Seamus MONTGOMERY, FEPS YAN, USA
CIVIL SOCIETY
- Marleen STIKKER, Founder of Waag, The Netherlands
- Paul KELLER, Expert Observer of Europeana Foundation Board, Chair of rightsstatements.org, The Netherlands
- Peter BIHR, Chair of ThingsCon e.V, Germany
If you happen to be in Brussels tomorrow (Friday) and would like to join last minute, ping me and I’ll try to get you in. Let’s do this, shall we?
×××
Anti Tech Alliance?
Read this piece (The Atlantic) on an emerging “anti-tech alliance” and am frankly not sure quite what to make of it. Is this A Thing? Or just a normal reconfiguration of the environment when a small group of players go from underdogs to overlords, and frequently abuse their power? Alexis Madrigal certainly is on to something (he’s very good that way!):
“these changes did not occur in the ether among particles of discourse. Over the past three years, an ecosystem of tech opponents has emerged and gained strength. Here’s a catalog of the coalition that has pulled tech from the South Lawn into the trenches.”
Also:
“Big Tech may survive this scuffle with only a couple of lumps, à la Microsoft in the 1990s. Or something much bigger may be in the offing. But one thing is for sure: After disrupting so many industries and having created so many enemies in consolidating control of the internet, it’s going to be difficult for tech companies to find friends.”
This last bit might be the key point: Finding new allies is going to be harder. Then again, when you control a huge chunk of, well, most things then maybe finding new friends appears secondary. Famous last words, of course, probably sung out loud during the final years of the Roman Empire.
×××
Another Kind of Anti Alliance
Speaking of small groups of players controlling vast resources and wielding too much power: Here are two recent articles going after billionaires. Not that historically billionaires were free of criticism (or millionaires, back before that became too small an achievement somehow). But to see two of these articles pop up side by side in respectable main stream and just barely left leaning media outlets sure feels like a sign of changing tides. They’re both interesting reads, especially for the numbers that provide a pretty clear picture of just how recent the incredible widening of the gap has become, when the ties were severed so to speak, so that these billionaires are now floating entirely freely of earthly concerns, unbound from reality.
Just some small snippets, from the two articles linked below:
“Before the financial crisis, the top 1% held a collective $15bn in cash. Today they’ve got almost $304bn.” (…) “the top marginal tax rate during the time hailed as capitalism’s Golden Age floated somewhere north of 90% in the US. After it had already fallen, Ronald Reagan’s administration collapsed it to 50% when he took office, and it would dip to just 28% by the time he left.“
So that’s a lot of funding taken off the table for the public good right there.
(1) German weekly DIE ZEIT offers an op-ed (in English and German, link here goes to the English version) about how the super rich endanger democracy itself.
“many observers are beginning to question the assumption -- previously taken for granted -- that capitalism and democracy are firm allies.”
According to this author, they are anything but. They come to a dire conclusion (highlights mine):
“We have not yet arrived at a situation where corporate dominance of our politics is complete; otherwise all consumer protection and labour laws would already have been abolished. But that is where we are headed, boosted by continuing growth in inequality and the mutual reinforcement of political and economic power. Democracy in some form probably continues to be the best available shell for capitalism; but the reverse may no longer be true.”
(2) The Guardian looks at the climate impact of billionaires as a class, which is most certainly an intriguing lens: Especially the way in which conservative billionaires are promoting climate change denial, hence dooming the rest of us. (See what I did there? Already, the othering has begone. But y’know, I like to see people behaving decently, and climate change denial is destruction of the first order. So there you go.) Also, yay Bloomberg for supporting the right side of history there.
Turns out the old mantra shared by journalists and detectives holds true: Always follow the money. This might mean that the solutions to some of our underlying societal problems are to be found in deceptively simple approaches: Raise taxes in the places where most money accrues in the 21st century (transnational corporations, super-rich); remove tax havens and loop holes (online and around the world); and reduce the influence on power on politics (finance campaign reform, lobbying reform). Together with the recent push towards regulation (The Atlantic) of the internet we’ve been seeing, this might make for a powerful combo.
(Did someone just say cough peanut gallery cough cough ?)
×××
A one woman alliance
I’ve not been following the US presidential campaign as closely as I usually do, because omfg who can take this anymore it’s still too early in the race.
Obviously, I want AOC to be president, but first of all I have no vote there and second of all she’s not running and not eligible to run for a few more years. But I got to say, in AOC’s absence I’m really into how Elisabeth Warren has been gearing up. Just take a look at her plan for green manufacturing, one of many relatively comprehensive plans she’s been pushing out — and always taking a strong stand, which is entirely unconventional at this stage of a campaign. I find it seriously impressive.
And I can’t understand for even one second how Biden is still front runner, or even Sanders is polling second. This doesn’t feel like the kind of election where an old white establishment dude would still stand a chance.
×××
Boring VR
This company has been making headlines (Gizmodo) creating virtual avatars, or what they call personal artificial intelligence, or PAI. Chinese national TV is involved (Tencent is a funder, too), as are a lot of international celebrities. 3D scans of faces, hi-res audio samples to give the avatar a singing voice, etc.: This has all the trappings of a futuristic thing. Yet if feels so boring, bland, and like the kind of future written by a marketing department in the 1980s:
“ObEN imagines users bringing those PAIs to the mall, where they might interact with mall-PAIs, the digital concierges there. Your favorite celebrity might pop up when you enter the mall, and tell you where the jacket is looking for,” Jain says, describing what could be a scene out of Minority Report. “Any consumer can have a PAI, get the full shopping experience.”
It’s all transactional commerce, or culture-as-a-wrapping-for-commerce. No depth there. Nothing that would create creative friction of any sorts. The whole product seems like the mall they’re planning to deploy inside.
Maybe the origin story might explain why it’s all so sad. And who ever thought this is a thing to bring up outside your company? Oh boy do they need a better PR strategy. Or, y’know, a life. Here’s how the founders supposedly came up with the idea of virtual avatars:
“I thought—what if my kids had my PAI back home?” Jain says. That way, his kids could interact with an avatar that looked, sounded, and behaved like their father while he was away for days or weeks at a time.”
Because outsourcing parenthood by faking it with your kids is totally the kind of behavior you want to see in a tech entrepreneur, right? Right. Sigh.
Which seems like a good time to give a shout-out to the Indie Web movement!
×××
Magic Merino
At the risk of TMI, I’ve been a huge fan of merino for a long time. And while I’m not of the camp of “only wash a shirt every three weeks” (and I don’t think I’ll ever join that camp) it’s fascinating to see not just a bunch of innovation and uptake in the merino fabric space, but also in how these companies make a point educating consumers about what might be an unhealthy and unsustainable range of habits surrounding laundry.
Independently of the laundry bit: Merino tees are the best. I highly recommend trying, or you might be missing out. Just saying. Part of our little rabbit hole with Zephyr was a deep dive into materials, and my life hasn’t been the same since.
For the pants we made with Zephyr, we settled on a slightly technical fabric. But generally, I’m not a huge fan of the more technical side of clothes for the day-to-day. There’s a certain bro-ness to it that just isn’t my jam. (These socks are harder than steel! This t-shirt is super anti-abrasive! Astronauts and special forces wear these PJs!) Merino is the opposite. It's one of those materials that we’ve been really curious to tinker more with. It’s just lovely.
×××
Currently “reading” with minimal progress: How to Do Nothing in the Attention Economy (Jenny Odell), Exhalation (Ted Chiang)
Finished reading: Breach (Eliot Peper)
×××
If you'd like to work with me in the upcoming months, I have very limited availability, so let's have a chat!
×××
What's next?
After Brussels I’m headed straight on to Cologne for a ThingsCon work & plan retreat until Sunday, then back to Berlin. Research and writing is piling up and needs to be tackled, especially since we’re coming up on a longer vacation in July. Until then there’s plenty to do to move ongoing projects into a good state where my collaborators won’t have to do my work for me; I don’t like to be the bottle neck like that. So: Brussels, Cologne, Berlin. That gets us to Sunday, and then it’s back to a two week sprint.
Have a lovely 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 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.
Know someone who might enjoy this newsletter or benefit from it? A shout out to tinyletter.com/pbihr or a forward is appreciated!
×××
Pictures: my own