S06E02 of Connection Problem: Next-gen resistance<
Hello friend,
Thanks for all the feedback to last week’s installment — which clocked in at a record-breaking 2,596 words, thank you for indulging me. There’s a lot of interesting stuff happening around the globe, so let’s try and keep it short this week & jump right in.
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Personal-ish updates
As you might know, I’m entirely fascinated by all things to do with the smart home, and — in maybe a slightly unhealthy way — the ways they fail and cause interesting or unexpected types of mayhem. So. A while ago, we decided to upgrade our home audio setup (am I still allowed to call it stereo or hi-fi?) after having made a somewhat awkward transition from an old, wired (but otherwise beloved) hi-fi system to bluetooth speakers. Let’s face it: bluetooth speakers, for all their strengths, suck compared to just about any other option. But at the time, it didn’t seem like easy converters from wifi to hi-fi would be widely available. (Mistake!)
So, wanting great sound but also to go mic-free in the living room, we settled on a Bang & Olufsen setup. Which is pretty good! Except if you also hook up a line-in from, say, a TV or games console, in which case you need to dig deeeeeeep in the speaker’s app settings to disable a delay; so that was new to me. Also, that delay at some point kept reappearing, meaning to use the PS4 I’d have to either configure that pesky delay every time (kill it with fire!) or switch off the speaker.
After a dozen times I pinged customer support, and this is where it gets interesting, in a very this-is-why-this-industry-still-feels-so-awkward way:
- This type of B&O speaker software has an auto-update feature that can be on or off; but no alternative way for users to update the software at all. (Customer service confirmed this.)
- Customer service had me cycle through the whole routine (switch off and on; factory reset; plug in a network cable; reinstall the app), to no effect.
- Customer service can be allowed remote access to update the software.
We tried all of this, and no software update transpired. All the while, the speaker app insisted the software was, in fact, up to date (it wasn’t).
To me this is interesting primarily because it highlights some of the challenges that a lot of companies are facing once they enter the field of connected products. The logic of being able to push software updates remotely is a powerful one, but you really has to learn how to work with it, and build in strong safeguards. A friend who had worked on a similar product for another company shared how that other company had only enabled software updates directly through the user just so they wouldn’t have to build in these layers of fallback plans. In our case, B&O literally has to have people on staff trying to update our software because the software’s built-in auto-updated is shoddily designed. Think about the cost to the company, not to mention the frustration on the side of the user (it me!).
Smart speaker makers, here’s a niche I bet will grow heavily over time: Wifi-enabled speakers that can stream music but have no microphones built in. I know a ton of folks who want to stream their music but/and don’t need/want their speakers to be Alexa-enabled. Extra brownie points if the software can be updated 🙈
Speaking of smart homes, over on Netzpiloten you can find a new installment of my not-as-regular-as-it-should-be column. I talk about smart mirrors, which are fun and soothing in the way they fail, which they do, a lot.
Also, thanks for the tons of feedback on last week’s call for feedback on the whole impact investment/emerging tech question. Seems like this struck a nerve with a great many of you. Maybe there’s something in the air!
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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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The smart city & next-generation resistance
I don’t want to get too dark here, or dive to deep into this particular rabbit hole. But watching what’s going on in Hong Kong at the moment is fascinating, if mostly in a slightly depressing, morbid way. (Thank you to Patrick for the pointers!)
There’s a lot happening there, of course. Let’s, for the sake of brevity and focus, skip over the obvious political aspects for now, and look at the angle of smart cities and their potential for abuse. It’s something I’ve been talking about for a long time: Smart cities are a great illustrator of how connected systems can reinforce power dynamics, often in unhealthy ways — and how they can truly transform the quality (“quality” not as in “good/bad” but as in “the nature of the thing”) of things like cities.
Here’s a not-so-subtle slide I use to illustrate this:
Smart homes and smart cities are helpful in understanding how IoT or connected, data-driven systems can change the very quality of a thing:
The home used to be a private space (qualifier: in the global West, in the last 150 years or so). Once you add connected microphones via smart phones, laptops, TVs, game consoles, etc., it stops being a private space. It doesn’t matter if anyone really listens in: It’s the potential that makes a formerly private space a non-private space. The surveillance doesn’t have to be enacted for that threshold to be crossed.
Equivalently, if you look at the city:
Urban space is (or used to be) public space. There wouldn’t be absolute anonymity as such — other citizens would see you walk around — but the kind of relative anonymity that comes with not having a record of movements. And if you put on, say, a hat and a scarf you could probably have moved about with a high degree of anonymity even beyond that. However, that changes entirely once we add connected cameras and hook them up to facial recognition, and track movement of cell phones through the city. The key difference is that this is public space, so nobody — not a single person — can opt out. This is applied to everyone; of course any possible negative effects are very likely to disproportionately impact the most vulnerable groups.
So: Data-driven systems turn homes from private to non-private, and public spaces from something citizens can choose to engage with to something forces its surveillance logic onto citizens.
As these things tend to go, these are abstract arguments — until they’re not. And citizens of Hong Kong can right now attest to this. The umbrellas you see in the all the videos? To cover faces against video surveillance. This video of people felling a lamp post? It’s a smart lamp post that now poses a real risk in a political climate that tries to violently suppress opposition.
That is why we need safeguards against surveillance in public space, and hence need to slow down on smart cities. Because political climates and systems can change, and all of a sudden there are actors in charge who don’t respect citizens’ rights and they have an incredibly powerful tool of suppression at their disposal. All of a sudden, that integrated air quality & traffic analysis pole doesn't look as fun anymore. (On a whim and out of curiosity, I just sent a FOIA request to the local Bezirksamt to inquire how they handle these things when they do traffic analysis. Super easy now 🤯!)
And by the way, Western tech companies are very much complicit in this by continuing to run propaganda and disinformation ads, even though it appears that finally (!) Twitter has started taking action, including taking down some several hundred thousand (!) Chinese state-run propaganda accounts.
See also: German history. Maciej Cegłowski’s fascinating reports from the front lines in HK, and his outstanding ongoing reports on Twitter. A Guide to Tactics in Hong Kong. Kate Crawford’s op-ed demanding to halt the use of facial-recognition technology until it is regulated. Misinformation Has Created a New World Disorder.
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From the last link in the article above (which is great), this excellent reminder:
“I often wish the young entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley who enabled communication at speed had been forced to run a 9/11 scenario with their technologies before they deployed them commercially”
In other words, as a rule of thumb when developing a new platform/product: Ask yourself what might bad actors have done with this on 9/11? What in 1933 or 1944? What might they do during the next election cycle?
Because it’s 2019, and that’s why we can’t just have nice things 🤷♂️
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But of course it’s not all doom & gloom of course. In fact, far from it! So on to an…
Unexpectedly upbeat interlude
Through the excellent Switched On Pop podcast I learned about Blinky Bill (link goes to Spotify, here’s also a 2018 profile), a great voice in the contemporary Kenyan music scene. Which reminded me of Falz’s super fun This is Nigeria (Youtube) which I saw earlier this year as part of a super random and overall quite superb exhibition called City Prince/sses in Paris at the Palais de Tokyo, which is always worth a visit. I should add that I don’t know the first thing about afro beats/afro pop, but seriously, how can you not dance along with these two, at least a little?
Equally upbeat, if against potentially a darker backdrop and in a slightly more cerebral way, is to see long-time collaborator and good friend Chris Adams take to Twitter on a crusade to make the internet carbon neutral, one tech worker or hosting company at a time. It seems he’s truly found his stride, and he’s on 🔥🔥🔥.
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Also:
Stakeholder value
I’ve long argued (along with a great number of smarter people) that the focus on shareholder value in esp. the US system is part of the inherent misalignment between corporate action and societal needs: If you have a (semi-)legal obligations to drive up profits short-term for shareholders, it almost by necessity leads to a logic of value extraction of creation. The costs are externalized, the value is absorbed internally and passed on to shareholders.
Instead, I’d argue, we should think about stakeholder value rather than shareholder value. It’s much broader, and takes into account alternative measures like employers, customers, and environmental factors. In other words, it makes it harder to externalize costs and easier to justify making the right decisions.
Who knows, maybe this declaration by American bizniz leaders has a positive effect? Time will tell.
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Miscellanea
- Job alert: Mozilla is looking for a program officer for fellowships.
- Is there a good way to evaluate the impact of civic tech? (Sunlight Foundation)
- Still wondering why there’s no Euro edition of the Wirecutter. How can we get super nerdy reviews but also of products that are easy to source around here? If someone at Wirecutter happens to receive this, can you just add a quick note for region-specific recommendations? If need be, I'll test the stuff in my living room!
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Currently reading: Netter is Better (Thomas Hermann), Four Futures (Peter Frase), Lost Japan (Alex Kerr)
Finished reading: Fewer, better things (Glenn Adamson)
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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:
On Monday, 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 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!), and the equally brilliant and kind Kasia Odrozek. Sign up here.
Plans for first Boston to speak at Hubweek, then New York City are slowly becoming more concrete. 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 have launched their website yet; I’ll share updates when I get them.
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.
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Header image: Unsplash (Barna Bartis)