S06E11 of Connection Problem: Transparency Without Accountability Is Nothing

Hullo,

This episodes ships a couple of days early. I’ll be in workshops the rest of the week, so today is the only chance to send this all week. I trust it won’t wreak havoc for your weekly routine. Feel free to let it sit there until Thursday — or later! You can also archive it right away, I promise I don’t take offense. It’s OK!

Speaking of events, if you happen to be in Hamburg on Friday, I’ll be at Forum Offene Stadt, jointly hosted by Körber Stiftung and Open Knowledge Foundation, to discuss the future of cities (smart & open & inclusive & data-sovereign, hopefully). Come swing by!

×

If you'd like to work with me or bounce ideas, let's have a chat.

×

Personal-ish update

In between other things, I’ve had the pleasure of diving into applications for the current Prototype Fund round of grants. It’s a fund for developing open source civic tech project. No strings attached, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education an Research. The team kindly invited me to be part of the jury for the current call around “engineering trust” (I had been on their jury once before, in their inaugural funding call). It’s like jury duty, only more fun!

So there’s soon going to be winners announced, and it’s the kind of funding program I wish we’d see more of. The one thing I’d hope for is that in the future, the scope gets broader - away from only software development to also include other interventions.

I say this based on my experience with ThingsCon and a lot of activities we’ve seen in those circles for the last 5-6 years: Not everything worth doing manifests in software code! Sometimes a framework (an analytical framework, not a software development framework!) or a convening or a speculative design prototype can be as effective as — if not more effective! — as a bit of code.

This isn’t an easy ask, I’m aware. It’s already hard to create an environment where software tools can slot in easily. Creating an environment where less standardized formats can be applied meaningfully is likely to be harder — but also potentially more rewarding. Certainly it would be much more accepting for diverse inputs, which in itself is a goal worth striving for, I’d think.

Until then, let the judging continue. Opens next application…

×

Internal docs as a glimpse into the organizational soul?

There was a bit of a minor outcry across my (admittedly hyper-zoomed in) radar regarding Sidewalk Labs’ smart city development application for the Toronto waterfront.

An internal document had leaked, a few years old. It predates the Toronto application. That’s worth pointing out, as of course we shouldn’t measure orgs by what they once thought too much and rather by what they say and do instead. But of course internal docs offer a window into thinking and culture, and so it’s relevant, and worth paying attention to.

From The Globe and Mail article linked above:

“The book proposed a community that could house 100,000 people on a site of up to 1,000 acres, and contains case studies for three potential sites in the United States: Detroit, Denver, and Alameda, Calif. It also includes a map with dots detailing many other potential sites for Sidewalk’s first project, including a dot placed on the shores of Lake Athabasca in northern Saskatchewan. From the beginning, generating real-estate value was a key consideration for Sidewalk. The company presents “enormous potential for value generation in multiple ways,” according to the document: “As a global showcase, as an adaptable testbed for innovation, as a generator of new products, and as perhaps the most ambitious real-estate development project in the world.””

The bold passages above highlights the global scope of ambition, and the central role that real estate development plays in the overall business model of Sidewalk Labs’ plans. This is also mentioned repeatedly in the later proposal, so it seems safe to assume that their thinking on these questions hasn’t changed.

To recap: Testbed and showcase for tech to later be exported, and real estate development are the drivers of the business model.

This makes total sense, and it’s a little sad in that real estate is the most uninspired (and in this context, a problematic) business case. Between their claims of affordable housing and driving up real estate prices, there’s simply not much cred for sustainable urban development here. I’m not a fan, but so far, so boring.

Where it gets more interesting is this (again, quoting The Globe and Mail):

“Sidewalk’s early data-driven vision also extended to public safety and criminal justice. The book mentions both the data-collection opportunities for police forces (Sidewalk notes it would ask for local policing powers similar to those granted to universities) and the possibility of “an alternative approach to jail,” using data from so-called “root-cause assessment tools.” This would guide officials in determining a response when someone is arrested, such as sending someone to a substance abuse centre. The overall criminal justice system and policing of serious crimes and emergencies would be “likely to remain within the purview of the host government’s police department," however.”

So there’s a lot going on there. First of all, Sidewalk Labs want campus police instead of real police. This follows from their logic that this neighborhood would not in fact be public space but what they refer to as “publicly accessible space” (something I touched upon in this blog post back in July when Sidewalk Labs published their plans).

Publicly accessible space is public space’s ugly little brother. It’s a horrible euphemism for something that used to be public and now its not. Something that was in the commons, and now it’s not. Something that was available for everyone to contribute to and gain value from, and now is built around a logic of extraction. It’s the story of hard core neo-liberal value extraction manifested in a piece of land.

Now, the idea that Sidewalk Labs picks their own police force and changes the rules from government policing to private policing isn’t a new story per se, but it is still a horror story of a state disempowered and reduced to a shadow of itself. To be clear, I want the legal and justice system to address root causes rather than swat at the symptoms of crimes, but to leave that level of governance up to a private corporation is just negligent.

But my main point is one that may seem a little semantic, but I think is worth stressing: Serious crimes and emergencies would “likely to remain within the purview of the host government”:

1. This is just a different way of saying: We keep the government out, but if things get bad, we want them to pick up the pieces. We only own the parts that are easy and cheap.
2. The fact that they refer to the “host government” and not “the government” shows a certain way of thinking that I find deeply problematic.

Are they parasites leeching on the government? The snarky ones among you might nod along with this, but I’ll go out on a limb here and say that’s not what they mean. More likely, they consider themselves just guests that can pack up and leave, to some degree. Most likely it is indicative of their ambitions of scale: This is template language: Toronto is just the first example but really it’s a stand-in for things to come. Insert host government name here. It’s a commitment never to really commit to this place particularly, or any other. One foot in the door, one foot outside.

There are many interesting ideas in Sidewalk Labs’ proposal. Except where they talk about governance and legitimacy, where confidence in their thinking crumbles quickly. This doesn’t bode well.

×

Miscellanea

• Just Enough Internet: Why public service Internet should be a model of restraint. Rachel Coldicutt, CEO of Doteveryone, gave (and wrote up) a very useful presentation on how public services (internet or broadcast) shouldn’t try to compete with commercial offerings on the metrics that those commercial entities measure. After all, different goals and purposes require different metrics. This totally resonates with my thinking; back in the early 2010s (or before than even?) I briefly had a role in a public broadcaster and they all wanted to have more reach, more clicks, more page views. Advertisement metrics — but they weren’t selling advertisement. So they would optimize for the wrong metrics. Equally, as Rachel points out, where commercial internet is so much about collecting tons of data on user behavior, public service internet could do the opposite. “How can digital public services be part of a strong and resilient society?” Yeah, Rachel’s thinking on this is great and she’s very eloquent on this issue.
• The Pentagon’s AI Ethics aren’t bad, apparently. I’ve only read the summary and skimmed parts of the original draft document (linked from the article above) but it appears that they kinda nailed it, especially when it comes to safeguarding against mission creep and changing contexts through shared tools/algorithms. We live in such weird times.

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

×
 

Currently reading: The Beauty of Everyday Things (Soetsu Yanagi), Lost Japan (Alex Kerr), Babylon’s Ashes (James S. A. Corey)

×

What's next?

In November, I’ll be speaking at Körber Stiftung’s & OKFN’s joint event event Forum Offene Stadt in Hamburg, and I’ll be doing something at the Edgeryders Festival (Berlin edition). In December, there’s the annual ThingsCon conference in Rotterdam which I’m very excited about. For all other presentations and talk as they come in, see the overview here.

Enjoy your day!

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. 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? Please feel free to forward your copy or send folks to tinyletter.com/pbihr. If you'd like to support my independent writing directly, the easiest way is to join the Brain Trust membership.