Welcome to a new season of my weekly newsletter, Connection Problem. If you’re one of the members who joined recently, or if you have simply forgotten why you receive this and from whom: This is written by me, Peter Bihr, and you might have found me through vectors such as ThingsCon (a non-profit about responsible tech and esp. IoT), The Waving Cat (my company working on the intersection of emerging tech, societal good & policy), or through Twitter.

Whatever brought you here, welcome — or welcome back!

This being the first installment after a longer summer break, there’s a lot of ground to cover. But rather than give in to completionist tendencies I’d rather just pick up a few of the more interesting threads of the last few weeks. So this week’s installment might meander a bit; join me on a stroll that hopefully will offer a mix of some sweeping vistas and some closer glances at things we encounter along the way.

Good hunting!

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Personal-ish updates

After a longer-than-usual summer break, I’ve been diving right back into the fray, freshly energized. Lots of moving parts, lots of collaborations, so that’s excellent. Also, some weird days where I jump from interviewing someone for one project to being interviewed for someone else’s research to interviewing someone for another project 🤯

Also, Postscapes has updated their Top 100 IoT Experts list, on which they’ve kindly been including me for a long time now. According to the list, I’m right there in the Top 20, along with some good friends and long term collaborators like Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino and Rob van Kranenburg.

I’m honored. I also can’t help scratching my head a little because I thought that Rise.Global, the social media ranking site that powers this list, would base their rankings mostly on data analytics platform Klout, which I certainly killed my account for (is Klout still around?). But apparently they use the very-similar looking Kred, which I’m not sure I can opt out of. It’s really a bit depressing to see these profiling/surveillance companies go crazy. So I guess, thanks and/or maybe curated list would be even better?

But I also know that Trevor, the fantastic person behind Postscapes, has his hands full as is, so I understand the impulse for something quick.

In much the same vein — and honestly, largely just as much powered by the visibility and safety I can afford through privilege rather than by actual competence — I’ve been getting kind of a flood of conference invites for this fall. Which I’m totally honored by and grateful for! But also which I largely simply am unable to accept. Between work (I’m essentially self-employed, meaning I need to sell a reasonable amount of time rather than giving it away for free), trying to split raising our young kid as equally as possible between my partner and me, and an overall attempt to cut down on travel (especially flights) means I’m in an ongoing process of configuring what works, what’s worth the immense time investment of attending a 2 day event including travel times, etc etc. (Yes, this is me playing the tiniest of violins, I know. It's just that as someone who has organized a lot of conferences myself I'm aware of how it feels to be on the other side of these messages.)

So here’s what I’ll try to do more actively, and I’m writing this here so that you can help keep me honest: I’ll double down on not just RSVP’ing no but rather to suggest, whenever I have a meaningful name to offer, an alternative speaker who isn’t like me a straight white dude but rather a women, person of color, non-binary, etc. This is a small contribution I can make to level the playing field at least a little, and I’m convinced most events will be better off for it.

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If you’d like to work with me or have a chat to explore collaborations, let’s chat! 

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Impact investment at the intersection of emerging tech & societal good/public interest

I'm increasingly interested in philanthropy — esp. impact investment — at the intersection of emerging technology and societal good/public interest, because I believe that it's a powerful point of leverage for the excellent and important work that happens outside — or at the very edge of — the market in this area. And I said so on LinkedIn, which I figured is a solid platform for surfacing orgs who might do this kind of thing, or like to get into it.

I don’t think there are many orgs that are in that space (that I'm aware of, at least) that have a strong profile for this kind of work in Europe.

When I found one a few months ago, I even applied for a role there; this might not seem like a big deal, but for me, it was: This was hands-down the first time in a decade I saw an org that I found attractive and interesting enough to consider putting my company on hold for. Having invested over a decade in building up the network and expertise, this would have been a major transition for me, and one I’m not taking lightly. But to see that there are organizations (at least one!) that seem to get this pretty new space, that excites me! It really does.

I don’t have much investment expertise, so I don’t know my way around this part particularly well. But I do know emerging tech. I know a ton of people and orgs in that space, including a great many who are mission-driven and work in spaces that are highly relevant but don’t necessarily lend themselves to commercial approaches. I know what it’s like to run a minimally-funded non-profit, and having run my own business and advising orgs of all stripes and sizes on their strategy I know my way around that part, too.

Which leads me to this question that I asked on LinkedIn (to much feedback 🙏):

Who are the foundations / orgs I should be talking to, esp. with a footprint in Europe? I'm especially interested in those who are looking to build up their footprint and profile and where my expertise and network around responsible tech would make a difference.

I’d be interested in helping the right foundation / philanthropy set up a program around emerging tech and societal good/public interest.

Any leads/intros/conversations are welcome. This is very much an early exploration, a work in progress. Might lead somewhere or nowhere: But it’s something I find tremendously exciting.

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Platform economics

The other week, Deliveroo announced they’d close down operations in German within the week. Needless to say, drivers were not exactly happy, and a paltry one-off payment didn’t do that much to change the overall mood. However, some drivers reportedly (RBB, report in German) considered forming a driver-owned co-op. Which would be amazing! I love a good co-op. The current status is visible here: Something is up and running. If it’s a collective or one person is a little hard to tell. (Thanks to Teal Starsong for the pointer!)

The fact that a company can just pull the plug within a week, and due to its sketchy (non-)employment structures doesn’t need to take care of their newly-unemployed quasi-staff is both horrible and also run-off-the-mill platform economy BS.

Cut to Mozilla’s Internet Health Report, where Nathan Schneider, co-iniator of the Platform Cooperative Consortium at the New School in New York (where, fun fact foot note, his co-initator Trebor Scholz kindly invited me to speak in maybe 2010 or so), discusses some of the underlying issues and their consequences:

“We are in a major accountability crisis with the online economy. Companies are taking on utility roles, but we don’t have a choice of whether to use their services because there are no meaningful alternatives. We see people agonizing about giving away their data, but not really doing anything because they have no other choice. Community ownership is an opportunity to build accountability into platforms. It is a vehicle for users to gain a voice and build democracy into companies. Maybe it can even lead to a rejuvenation of the democratic sphere.”

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Berlin’s digital strategy without civil society input

So it transpires that Berlin’s government commissioned Ernst & Young to develop the city’s digital strategy. Which, y’know, couldn’t be more uninspired, but whatevs. But it seems that E&Y doesn’t exactly play nice with our civil society, which is a hugely active scene here (Netzpolitik, in German). Instead rather frames Berlin’s digital ecosystem to look like a list of their own potential clients.

See also:

“If I still have faith in this city (Berlin), then, in spite or because of it being “over,” it is because a significant part of its character rests on the idea that people can want otherwise. Other than all-hours work, other than straight living, other than hyper-capitalism. Less than “newness” or “edginess,” what I experience is a feeling of spaciousness. For me, in this strange moment, it still provides."

— Hannah Gregory

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Facebook trouble, Illinois edition

“In a landmark decision that must be sending shivers down the spine of Silicon Valley, the Ninth Circuit today ruled that Facebook must face a class action suit claiming that its facial recognition practices violated an Illinois biometric privacy law”, NYTimes tech editor Natasha Singer tweets, and follows with an excellent summary of what makes this special and what it might mean. TL;DR:

It's also a landmark decision because the judges ruled that the Illinois law gives Facebook users there "the right not to be subject to the collection and use of such biometric data." Imagine a world where Americans had the right not to be subject to data collection.

Look, I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I think very little of Facebook’s rotten culture blatant lack of respect for digital rights regarding privacy. Any court ruling in favor of privacy over FB is worth a high five.

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The inverted yield curve

Inverted yield curve warning! Everyone’s favorite curve is back!

I found this Twitter thread really accessible and helpful. But this, really, is what everyone seems to be trying to communicate, and the image that my mind conjures whenever I read of the inverted yield curve:

Depending on your settings, this smiley/frowny face might not animate in the email version. Use your imagination to flip the mouth upside down, it’ll probably look better than the animation that way!

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Smart home cargo culting

the Brilliant control panel, a sort of universal remote for smart home devices that’s about as large as a typical light switch and can work with most existing products and networks, seeks to upend the market by arriving, pre-installed, with new homes. Diehl sees the controller as a perfect way to communicate a home’s high-tech features to potential buyers. “With Ring and Nest, you need to download an app to see how something works, and if we wired a home with, say, Apple HomeKit, buyers would be stuck with Apple products,” he says. “With Brilliant, it’s a conversation starter because there’s a screen there. You can touch something and just understand the home is smart.” (Curbed)

If I understand this right — and I’m not sure I do — then this is essentially the smart home controller dashboard that looks like the real deal but is the kinda-sorta off-brand ok-but-not-excellent flavor in this category. The model that signals smart home and is a smart home but likely is not the smart home folks are looking for.

I'm fascinated by the idea that this might be used to convey smarthome-ness rather than for its original features.

That said, it might very well be that builders, developers or electricians end up being the entry vector for most smart home things beyond a smart voice assistant - which I’m fairly confident will turn out to be an awkward interstitial on the long path to a more integrated and elegant smart home.

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Miscellanea

A 3-5 year sofa: “I would say a $1,000 sofa is probably a three- to five-year sofa.” No super new insights but an interesting look into the economics of mid-tier furniture and how to gauge quality. Where is all the good affordable furniture?

Kind of Bloop: 10 years ago, the inimitable and ever-lovely Andy Bayo released Kind of Bloop, an 8bit tribute album to Miles Davis’ milestone jazz album Kind of Blue, released 60 years ago today. Little did I know that the album cover he used got him into a world of legal (and financial) pain. Outdated copyright so often is the reason we can’t have nice things. Both albums hold up really, really well.

Tech geo politics: Huawei Technicians Helped African Governments Spy on Political Opponents. (Not a surprise.)

Stackenblocken: Seems early stage, but like a nifty fresh idea: A Swiss company proposes to store excess grid energy by stacking concrete blocks, then generating energy when needed by letting the blocks fall, equivalent to water falling through in a hydro plant.

Short term memory: “On geological timescales, human civilization is an event, not an epoch.” The Anthropocene is a Joke (The Atlantic, via Sentiers)

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Currently “reading”: Fewer, better things (Glenn Adamson), Netter is Better (Thomas Hermann)

Finished reading: Exhalations (Ted Chiang)

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If you'd like to work with me in the upcoming months, I have very limited availability starting in October, so let's have a chat.

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What's next?

I’ve got a few events coming up over the next few months. Currently, this is what I’m planning with:

I’ll happily be part of panel organized by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) on digital participation / fairness / consumer rights panel: Sicherheit, Selbstbestimmung, Fairness, Teilhabe – Handlungsempfehlungen für eine Verbraucherpolitik im digitalen Wandel (Berlin, 2 Sept)

Scheduled tentatively for 5 Sept, our next ThingsCon Salon will focus on public interest technology and feature the ever-brilliant Katharina Meyer who wrote this fantastic German-language piece on public interest tech as part of her missions to bring the term to Germany (which I very much support!).

In early October, it's likely that I'll be in first Boston, then New York City to speak at Hubweek. Friends and collaborators, if you want to meet up when I pass through your fair cities, ping me! (Just hit reply, or use your channel of choice.)

And finally, I’m invited to speak at a brand-new event in Copenhagen that doesn’t appear to launch their website until next week, so I’m not sharing a name yet (that might not even be correct anymore).

At all of these, I’ll be speaking, like mostly these days, about responsible/fair/public interest/social good/ethical/choose-your-adjective tech. More specifically, about smart cities. This is mid-November.

I’ll update this here in the next installment as well as on my website/speaking as I learn more.

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. Peter was a Mozilla Fellow (2018-19) and is currently an Edgeryders 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!

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Pictures: Kindfolk (Unsplash), Night in Shimagawa by Negoro Raizan (1922, cropped)