S06E10 of Connection Problem: An internet of excellent things
Hi, hello, bonjour,
I hope this finds you well and you’re having a great week. On my end, the week is all taken up by conferences, workshops, meetings. So it might just be a slightly shorter edition than other weeks. There’s hope, eh?
Enjoy.
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If you'd like to work with me or bounce ideas, let's have a chat.
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Personal-ish update
Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) — the German social democratic political foundation — kindly invited me to a panel about smart cities and how to make them better from a citizen perspective. It was part of their big annual conference, Digital Capitalism. Which has been really good so far! (I’m writing this part during a break while still at the event.)
The panel was convened and moderated by Justin Nogarede (of FEPS, who I’ve been working with recently), and also included Elvan Korkmaz, Member of the German Bundestag where she’s one of the experts on both digital agenda and digital infrastructure; so it was a real pleasure to meet her; Katharina Meyer, of Prototype Fund fame and overall exceptional person; and Hans-Martin Neumann of the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) who brought a lot of first-hand experience. Good times! Also, I guess we all have our work cut out for ourselves. So it’s really good to see good people working on challenging issues. Thanks for the invite! The website has a live stream, so I’m confident the videos will also be made available at some point.
Also, a question to the smart people reading here: A participant asked for good examples of cities specifically addressing workers’ rights as part of their smart city initiatives/departments. We more or less drew a blank; if you’re aware of something, I’d love to learn about it!
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The internet launched a couple of excellent new things this week
I’ve only had a chance to take a quick peek but they all look excellent, so I didn’t want to keep them to myself:
- How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables looks like an excellent essay collection.
- Some Thoughts is a collection of conversation starters around smart city issues curated/convened by Bianca Wylie & Co.
- Net Positive is a net-art inspired/themed history of the development of the current world wide web, told through a bunch of Quartz articles, I guess? The format looks a lot more net-arty than the final result appears to really be but it looks like that’s going to be an hour well spent.
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The Geopolitics of Facebook
Matt Stoller has a very good newsletter, called BIG. It’s about anti trust and tech. This week, he focused on How Autocracy Comes to America: Big Tech and National Security. It’s not a short read, but well worth it. Highlights mine:
“Today I’m going to write about a very dangerous theme floating around in military and big tech circles, which is that big American tech monopolies are good for national security and should be weaponized and controlled explicitly by the American national security apparatus. The relationship between corporate power and global geopolitics frames the historical debate over antitrust, as I discuss in Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. (Buy it. Yeah, I’m not going to be subtle.) The argument has been with us since before World War One, and is with us today. Last week, for instance, Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech on free expression, and yesterday he testified to the House Financial Services Committee on the need for Libra. Both times he implied that Facebook was essential to protect us from China. What is interesting is how certain parts of the national security world may not be so averse to how Zuckerberg thinks, even if they don’t trust him specifically. And so it is back to that debate we must go.”
Indeed. I remarked this last week, too: That Zuck positions FB as a geopolitical tool rather than a consumer product. Which might me a lot more accurate, and (in my interpretation) yet another reason to kill it with fire break it up. Stoller has a much, much deeper historical analysis to offer though, and it’s very much worth reading.
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Walking stalking
Wifi system identifies people through walls by their walk. “This novel video-WiFi cross-modal gait-based person identification system, which they refer to as XModal-ID (pronounced Cross-Modal-ID), could have a variety of applications, from surveillance and security to smart homes. For instance, consider a scenario in which law enforcement has a video footage of a robbery. They suspect that the robber is hiding inside a house. The new technology could determine if the person inside is the same person in the video.
I truly applaud the research success here and the technological achievements. Also, this is a horrible, horrible idea that must never be commercialized. Not, and especially not for the security context. Also, how long for a call for national gait data bases? This is the worst.
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Climate change is an infrastructure problem
A World We Built to Burn by Quinn Norton (via Sentiers) is one slightly depressing and very, very good quick read on how we need to first recognize some simple new realities if we want to move forward as a society. Namely, that some of the implicit assumptions we just held at the societal level are profoundly wrong and harmful now. Like, humans need to move into easier territory, away from the water, into much denser settings:
“We have to retreat from the shore, stay out of the wild places, and be careful with our water. We have to use less energy, less land, and take better care of each other at the global level. The faster we figure that out, the better our chances are.”
I love the way Norton tightly links climate change and infrastructure thinking. You can’t solve one without solving the other first: You can just create better conditions and then hope it’s enough to get the other, more complicated bits right:
“This is a story of climate change, but it’s also a story of messed-up political priorities that date to when our great-grandparents were still getting used to the idea of electricity. It’s a story of disrespect and exploitation of the land, of failures in capitalism, regulation, and political will, of people who don’t want to live with the consequences of their decisions, and people who have to live with the consequences of other people’s decisions.”
“Climate change, and more generally, the wider range of the planetary stress we’re living through now, is an infrastructure problem.”
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ThingsCon Rotterdam tickets are up!
ThingsCon, or rather our annual ThingsCon conference, is coming up (Rotterdam, 12-13 December) and I think it’ll be a real blast. Until the 31st, there’s a super discount, the kind that’s both a lot cheaper for you to attend and that really helps the organizers plan. (Much like pre-orders are the most important for a book, early ticket sales are the most important for conferences.)
Just a few of the speakers and workshop hosts of a true killer line-up: Marleen Stikker, Tracy Rolling, Alexandra Deschamp-Sonsino, Klasien van de Zandschulp, Mirena Papadimitriou, Cayla Key, Namrata Primlani, Tijmen Schep, Geke van Dijk, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Rob van Kranenburg, Lorenzo Romagnoli, Davide Gomba, Jeroen Barendse, Cristina Zaga, Heather Wiltse will all be there, and many more.
If you’re considering to join, the right moment to buy a ticket is TODAY.
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Cultivating a healthy culture between funders and grantees
Cultivating a culture of trust in a funder-grantee relationship matters! The Trust & Transparency report by SimplySecure around questions of philanthropic funding & the grantees receiving it is full of great actionable insights.
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Flygskam
Of course you’ve heard of flygskam, the Swedish concept of being ashamed to fly for ecological reasons. The term was all the rage a few months ago (but hasn’t, it seems, led to reduced flying, so: sigh). I’ve been curious to find out how much I’ve personally flown, though. And just in case you want to find out for yourself, if you happen to use Dopplr Tripit, you can hook it up to a service called OpenFlights to get some stats. (It’s a little messy, but doable.)
The data import didn’t work 100% but roughly, according to Tripit/Openflights I’m at 329 flights since around 2010, which makes for 833K km flown, or roughly 20 times around the world, or a return trip to the moon. (But only 1% of a one-way trip to Mars, which is a solid reminder that going to Mars for anything other than research is a truly silly idea.) So that’s… depressing? I’m not looking forward to explaining to our kid when he’s a teenager that oh hey, we knew it was bad but it was also cool, so that’s that, right? Ah well. Still, I’m a sucker for travel stats, and if you’re too, that’s a pretty straightforward way to get some.
And by the way? That stop over in Honolulu... I didn't get to leave the airport. I still beat myself up about that.
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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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Currently reading: The Beauty of Everyday Things (Soetsu Yanagi), Lost Japan (Alex Kerr), Babylon’s Ashes (James S. A. Corey)
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What's next?
In November, I’ll be doing something at the Edgeryders Festival (Berlin edition) as well as at a Körber Stiftung event (Forum Offene Stadt) in Hamburg. And in December, of course the annual ThingsCon conference in Rotterdam. Overview here.
Enjoy your day!
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