S05E23 of Connection Problem: Policy Week / Facebook’s Power Grab / Nice Miscellanea
It was officially Policy Week over here, with 2 out of 3 events of the week focused on policy first and foremost. Which also means I was still on the road a lot until the beginning of this week, and am now heads-down once more, to emerge only briefly. It’s the final two-week sprint before a long and much-welcomed vacation. So let’s dive right in, shall we?
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Personal-ish stuff
Lots of travel and input that I’m still digesting from my conversations in PEI, Canada; Brussels; and Cologne. But also, the kind folks at IxDA asked me to share some learnings and insights and pointers from co-chairing Interaction in Helsinki in 2016 — for current interaction designers as well as future hosts of this annual conference.
The post summarizing my input is available on Medium. The short of it: Put people — not orgs — first, and be respectful, humble, curious.
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Policy Week
(1) First stop was Brussels for an event by the Foundation for Progressive European Studies (FEPS), Call to Europe. I’ve had the pleasure of working with FEPS for a while now, and it’s an excellent group they convened there. I was wearing the ThingsCon hat, representing civil society together with Marleen Stikker (founder of WAAG Society) and Paul Keller (of rightsstatements.org and formerly Kennisland, and who co-authored the excellent Vision for a Shared Digital Europe that I keep dropping here).
Some of my key takeaways: Everybody’s trying to find the balance of reigning in corporate power and protecting individual freedom; of fostering innovation while protecting vulnerable groups and getting an out of control hyper capitalism back under societal control.
Also, some talk about how the pendulum might swing back towards some heavy funding for strategic directed research. Remember renewable energy subsidies, or the development of 2G? Those were examples of strategic directed research, which is just a fancy way of saying society puts their money where their mouth is and invests in an area but also with strategic goals in mind rather than just throwing some money at an industry. It says we want innovation in this field and with this type of outcome. And it can lead to things like super cheap near-infinite energy or a simple, powerful, global networking standard. This kind of directed research got really out of fashion for a while, but it seems like it might make a comeback sooner rather than later. Good!
(2) The second stop was the only non-policy event — I headed from Brussels to Cologne to meet with the whole team, which now counts 9 people. How did that happen? It’s so, so good to see. 🙏 Futures were mapped, plans made, breakfasts had. This is going to be an excellent ThingsCon year.
(3) Then finally back in Berlin, on Wednesday I participated in a panel at a consumer protection and cyber security event at the kind invitation of Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, a Berlin think tank. Here I pushed for responsible tech esp. where data and/or microphones are concerned, and for regulation in the (quite many) spaces where we see market failure.
Our host, the smart and ever-helpful Jan-Peter Kleinhans pointed out the security risks in long-lived appliances once they’re connected. Just put a chip in it is a really bad strategy if you don’t plan to provide security updates for a very, very, very long time.
Too bad I only learned today about this beautiful example in which German discounter Lidl sold kitchen appliances (referred to as Thermomix clones in the article) that as a display used off-the-shelf Android tablets. The problem: They had microphones built in and ran on a 6 year old version of Android with no security patches in some years. In other words, this is the nightmare scenario we have been warning about for, well, years.
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Facebook makes a power grab
Maybe it’s about time we talk policy on all of this and get our act together, too. Cut to Menlo Park: To much fanfare — and a little ridicule — Facebook has announce to launch their own crypto currency Libra to allow for direct financial transactions within and across their apps.
According to Facebook, this serves to offer financial services to the unbanked. They lean very heavily on imagery and examples of the global South, but the promotional video ends (ominously?) with “this is just the beginning”.
Something tells me that’s not the primary, let alone only goal here. But hey, I don’t even have to say it in my own words. Allow me instead to bluntly quote the Financial Times via David Meyer’s Connected Rights newsletter. They describe Libra as
"a glorified exchange traded fund which uses blockchain buzzwords to neutralise the regulatory impact of coming to market without a licence as well as to veil the disproportionate influence of Facebook in what it hopes will eventually become a global digital reserve system. (Boldness in business award incoming.)”
That’s right: FB tries to become financial global infrastructure. Let me be very, very and unambiguously clear: this is bad and must not happen. Any one company doing this would need to be exceptionally trustworthy and have groundbreaking governance in place. But FB is not trustworthy enough — repeat: not nearly trustworthy enough — to take that role. This is a power grab of the first order, a way to dig in and build an even stronger moat of too big to fail.
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Speaking of infrastructure…
It seems as if infrastructure-like services are breaking down all around us because of the price dumping in their workforce. I’m writing this anecdotally but I’d be surprised if there wasn’t by now research to back this up (and I apologies for not being able to dig for it, today’s schedule doesn’t allow for it). The barely-minimum wage outsourcing and subcontracting is ruining the things we've come to take for granted, like postal services and package delivery, or grocery delivery. The quality control just went out the door, because how could it not.
Just so there's no misunderstanding: I don't mean that these poor low-wage staffers aren't doing the best possible job in their context, I'm saying the price dumping needs to end. Aggressive cost savings for maximized profits = why we can't have nice things.
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It’s the capitalism, stupid (natch!)
With the last most recent financial crisis just about a decade away, there’s been a steady undercurrent of capitalism critique across all of my radar. But it still felt like a conversation that happened more towards the fringes: in artist circles, in subcultures, in academia. It seems that now we’re seeing a phase change. This conversation is now front and center.
Wherever you look, in the mainstream-iest of mainstream sources — if they're even a little bit political — we're back to the really big questions. That's pretty exciting.
I linked to 2 of them last week:
- The Guardian dug into the negative environmental impact of billionaires
- ZEIT’s op-ed about how capitalism is divorcing from democracy
This week, there are two more that lean in a similar direction.
Turns out even some investors are now getting cold feet about the environmental impact of their investees, so this heavy weight alliance (representing some 10 trillion USD) demands more transparency and better environmental impact reporting from the biggest global companies:
“The investors involved in the campaign include pan-European asset managers Candriam and Amundi, and the NN Group as well as Taiwan’s Cathay Financial Holdings and the Washington State Investment Board.
Sophia Cheng, the chief investment officer at Cathay Financial, said: “Climate change, deforestation and water security are critical challenges that require immediate action.”
“Cathay believes that investors can play an important role in encouraging their investee companies to disclose environmental information – this campaign should improve corporate transparency and help investors better manage these environmental risks and opportunities.””
And ZEIT prominently featured another op-ed saying that capitalism has sped up and globalized to a degree where it increases economic inequality, undermines democratic institutions and makes nation states much more vulnerable.
10 years ago, these conversations would have been impossible to have. Now they’re front and center. I think we might just have witnessed the start of a really interesting party that might take us through the next decade (and hopefully won’t end in a hangover of sorts).
See also: The pope declares a climate emergency and the big corporates all applaud and make no commitments to change whatsoever. (The good old kiss of death?)
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Whose AI ethics?
We see a lot of effort (and funding!) going into AI ethics. But AI ethics research needs to answer two questions: Whose ethics, and who’s funding the research? (FastCo)
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Nice Miscellanea
- According to the New York Times, Europe’s night trains are in a state of rebound: After years of routes being shuttered, the mix of travel romanticism and carbon-induced flight fatigue has sleeper trains on the up again. I love a good sleeper train and I hope that this comes to pass.
- Famously, the streets find their own uses for technology. But it seems like the streets also find their way around technology, as this article on Hong Kong’s protesters going digitally dark indicates. (The strategies used here seem a little very word-of-mouth and maybe not super effective, but hopefully it’ll do the trick.)
- Little Printer prints again.
- Learnings from the Berkman Fellows program.A 2015 reflection of things learned running the Berkman Fellows program. I enjoy a good fellowship program, and I’m a total sucker for “what we learned from doing XYZ” type blog post. So this is right up my alley.
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Currently “reading” with minimal progress: How to Do Nothing in the Attention Economy (Jenny Odell), Exhalations (Ted Chiang)
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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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What's next?
Final sprint to get some projects where they need to be before a vacation in about two weeks time.
That said, have a lovely end of the week!
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: my own