S06E12 of Connection Problem: Technology is (geo)political

Hello and welcome,

Especially to the folks who joined in just recently. Please feel free to reach out and say hi — you can just hit reply on this email and I’ll get your message right away. Also, I recommend skimming this for the pieces of most interest to you as it's a bit on the long side. Enjoy!

— Peter Bihr

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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 updates

I’ve had the opportunity to participate in a number of things this last week that I was both honored & delighted by:

For Prototype Fund, the German public-funded initiative to give grants to open source civic tech projects, I got be a member of the jury. What could be time better spent than handing out grants to projects doing good, important work? The winners should be announced as soon as the paperwork and due diligence clears.

In Hamburg, I had the joy to join Forum Offene Stadt as a panelist to discuss the future of (smart) cities. The event has been hosted for the third time by Körber Stiftung and Open Knowledge Foundation and brings together civil society, government & administration, and the private sector. It’s good to see these gatherings as there’s still nowhere near enough exchange at those intersections, especially where topics around the impact of emerging technologies are discussed.

As some of you might remember, I’ve talked before about the need for smarter social impact investment I see at the intersection of philanthropy and emerging tech (S06E01):

“I'm increasingly interested in philanthropy — esp. impact investment — at the intersection of emerging technology and societal good/public interest. (…) 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. (…) 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. (…) 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.“

Kompakt Magazin (by IG BCE) did a longer interview with me to talk about technology and how we must ensure it doesn’t discriminate against people, and shouldn’t be treated as if it’s pre-determined. The interview is in German: Technologie darf Menschen nicht diskriminieren (online, e-paper)

FOIA Time! And finally, after an audience member at Forum Offene Stadt remarked on a failed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about Duisburg’s smart city partnership with Huawei, I dug into that a little and gave it another try. I can see how the first one was maybe a little too broad/deep, asking for every piece of communications between administration and corporate partner. So I tried another angle, asking for aspects like agreed deliverables; actual development since signing the paperwork against the original roadmap and how it has been diverging; fallbacks in case the corporate partner pulls out once the infrastructure is in place; and questions regarding data rights for corporate partner, administration, and citizens. The FOIA request is currently being processed, you can see it on FragDenStaat.de (again, in German).

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Technology is (geo)political

I'm increasingly worried about tech as an instrument of geopolitics. This isn't new, obviously — think GPS or standardization of industry.

But now, in the face of global populism on one side and the rise in global influence of China and (to a lesser degree) Russia, the spectrum of technology that’s being utilized as part of the geopolitical toolkit seems to be broadening by the day. Just off the cuff, a few examples of geopolitical power wrangling in the guise of a tech debate:

• Social networks/social media as tools to impact anything from election campaigning to misinformation campaigns to the global market of ad budgets.
• Cloud computing, where Silicon Valley companies are so dominant as to be practically the only game in town, leading Europe to announce a “European Cloud” (Gaia-X).
• Some people are now actually defending Libra, Facebook’s planned cryptocurrency, because it helps cement the United States’ position as the world’s last super power as opposed to strengthening China. (To be unambiguously clear for the record: I think Libra is a bad, bad idea and this argument is stupid at best and dangerous at worst. Neither should any privately held company control a large currency; nor should a currency be controlled by any organization that has no governance structure to speak of, let alone a democratic one; nor should Facebook specifically, given their track record of irresponsible behavior, be trusted with anything, really.)
• Artificial intelligence / machine learning (AI/ML), which is widely assumed to be the key technology of the 21st century, and will play an according role for global dominance. Which is part of why every country and their uncle has their own AI strategy, and most aim not just to be competitive but to lead this space; what could possibly go wrong. (Disclosure: I’m currently involved in a project studying the European AI ecosystem.) Here, it takes on absurd levels of techno-colonialism like Zimbabwe uploading databases of citizen facial photos to Cloudwalk, a Chinese provider of facial recognition systems, as part of the Belt & Road initiative.
• We see variations of similar dynamics in the roll-out of 5G networks and smart cities, too.

It's a mess, and not the creative/good kind. It’s a kind of cold war — or maybe more of a warm war, as this is an active conflict that’s luckily not fought with bullets or killer robots but through global influence.

If you build the digital infrastructure (comms networks, IoT, smart cities) or the brains that increasingly supercharge it (AI/ML) or even just the media for collecting and disseminating and analyzing information and data (social media, online surveillance, analytics), then you have a strategic advantage over your potential opponents: And because we’re talking data-driven, network-logic issues, we can expect exponentially growing gaps in capacity and capability. Who has the most data and the best infrastructure has a moat that’s going to grow ever faster.

So everybody’s scrambling to get there first, to establish that beach head. China with its centralized structure and the speed made possible by not having democratic oversight, and a billion citizens to build databases from. The US with a few decades head start in their research and capacity for commercial roll-out powered by Silicon Valley’s unique history and lax data protection rules. Highly dynamic economies like India and Brazil and Kenya through their local takes on things. And somewhere in between, and/or off to the side, the EU: A true economic powerhouse but with a mix of decentralized structures that favor slow, inclusive decision-making and strict data protection rules, and with big pots of public funding to go around, but much less of a successful track record of commercializing the results of the joint European R&D efforts. Add to this the specter of Germany’s history of abuse of centralized data collection and we see the predominant thinking based on discussions of values as the region’s unique selling point.

Which might be good. I hope it’s good. It’s a little hard to tell how much of the talk by European politicians is aspirational vs grounded in reality. But with a global shift towards a more critical stance of ubiquitous, overly dominant Silicon Valley tech platforms, and propelled by reasonably good experiences with the recent launch of GDPR as a privacy regulation with global ambitions, Europe seems a little more self-confident for the first time in a while. (Hopefully that’s for the better; we’ll have to see.)

Long story short, when you read tech news these days, I recommend pausing for a second to reflect on the geopolitical impact of what’s discussed. There are stacks of agendas at work. Piles of them. Tread lightly.

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Speaking of which: Europe’s Facebook alternative?

Since we were talking about misplaced geopolitical ambitions, two leading politicians of the Green party just proposed launching a European social networking site (article in German) to break Facebook’s dominance in the space.

Alas, it’s a little painful and cringeworthy to read. For one, I think the idea of just replacing a broken thing with another broken things is pretty silly; we need a true alternative that’s based on data minimization, not yet another social network after the same basic model. (Or better yet, make targeted advertising and the tracking that powers it illegal! What we’d give up is so minimal compared to the unintended negative consequences it would barely register!)

The proposal, floated as an op-ed on a mainstream German news & entertainment site, starts strong: a non-commercial alternative built by GDPR-required privacy-by-design standards. Social networking not under the controlling logic of a Silicon Valley corporation. So far, so good. Then it doesn’t stop, though, but tries to be the one and all solution that solves all our problems, and then some:

• Financed as part of the public broadcasting levy, it’s supposed to attract users by providing all the public broadcasting content in one place. Which a) the broadcasters have never managed before, so it’s hard to believe they would now, but also b) broadcast content isn’t what people go to social networks for. Should they somehow manage to integrate all the European-wide, public broadcasting content in one place, I’d use that media site all the time, but so far you need to trick your way into as much as streaming the BBC from Germany, because of licensing issues. So whatever they’re considering here is pretty far from the current legal situation.
• It’s supposed to fight misinformation and fake news through better curation and quality control, which seems awfully vague to me. Who’s controlling what’s right or wrong there? After all, this would be a government-run platform, so the term censorship potentially applies here.
• And of course this platform also should be the leading messaging platform, so secure that even schools, teachers, parents and students use it as their main platform for exchange. Which, y’know, fine, but culture? Whenever the German government has tried to launch a government communications platform they’ve fallen flat: Anyone remember ePost, the government run email service? I don’t think I’ve seen a single email sent from one of these addresses since they launched. Practically nobody uses the digital ID that you can enable on your government ID card, either. Why? Usability and culture: These things don’t work particularly well (certainly not as well as some commercial alternatives) and while there’s a lot of trust in public broadcast quality there’s little in having government run secure messaging.

I wish I had better things to say about this proposal. But it genuinely doesn’t feel like a big gamble to say that this is dead in the water. There are some interesting ideas here but in this particular manifestation it just reeks of public broadcast logic shoehorned into the terminology of social networking — and it doesn’t compute.

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Governance innovations

A quick pointer to an excellent, illuminating Twitter thread on "governance innovations that deal with platforms and data, (especially in the urban sphere)." So much good stuff in this discussion. (Thanks to Monique van Dusseldorp for the pointer.)

This spawned this thread of my own as well, in which I explore some of the debates “around data that could potentially collected in public spaces (now or in the future). I'd like to start this with a reminder that in a democratic society we cannot just choose how to do this, but if and under which conditions”

In related news, and because three’s the charm, a quick shout-out to a third Twitter thread which appears to have blown up to a size that there’s a good chance you’ve noticed it flying by at some point. It’s about misplaced trust in algorithmic decision making, via the example of Apple’s credit card determining a couple’s credit score (spoiler: he was deemed 20x more credit worthy than she was, which was not representative at all of their income situation or credit history). It’s algorithmic bias at its best, and the way the human oversight failed at every step along the way is very illuminating in that it highlights exactly how and why these things go wrong and need meaningful oversight by humans, and ways for redress. (Someone built a great algorithmic bias reading list to get you started.)

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Welfare zombies

World stumbling zombie-like into a digital welfare dystopia, warns UN human rights expert: This caught my eye not just because of the excellent headline, but also because it’s from the UN Human Rights office of the high commissioner, aka a reputable source. It brings up an angle I find utterly fascinating and am a little embarrassed hadn’t even occurred to me:

“Alston said, the digitization of welfare systems has very often been used to promote deep reductions in the overall welfare budget, a narrowing of the beneficiary pool, the elimination of some services, the introduction of demanding and intrusive forms of conditionality, the pursuit of behavioural modification goals, the imposition of stronger sanctions regimes, and a complete reversal of the traditional notion that the state should be accountable to the individual.

“Digital welfare states thereby risk becoming Trojan Horses for neoliberal hostility towards social protection and regulation," said the UN Special Rapporteur. "Moreover, empowering governments in countries with significant rule of law deficits by endowing them with the level of control and the potential for abuse provided by these biometric ID systems should send shudders down the spine of anyone even vaguely concerned to ensure that the digital age will be a human rights friendly one”.”

It’s a quick read. Maybe a bit removed from any of our day-to-day work (YMMV) but it feels like there’s a lot wrapped up in this that’s worth paying attention to that might apply to other areas of society and life as well.

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Miscellanea

• Built to last: Voyager 2 was launched 42 years ago. “We’re certainly surprised,” Edward C. Stone, the mission’s project scientist, said of the probe’s longevity during a news conference on Thursday. “We’re also wonderfully excited by the fact that they do. When the two Voyagers were launched, the space age was only 20 years old. It was hard to know at that time that anything could last over 40 years.” Sometimes it takes some luck; but also, it's great to see things built to last can last so much longer than expected. No over-the-air software update will break this one.
• Very Large Indeed: There’s Growing Evidence That the Universe Is Connected by Giant Structures, a fascinating overview of recent research around the way that galaxies are connected across vast distances: “These discoveries hint at the enigmatic influence of so-called “large-scale structures” which, as the name suggests, are the biggest known objects in the universe. These dim structures are made of hydrogen gas and dark matter and take the form of filaments, sheets, and knots that link galaxies in a vast network called the cosmic web.” We barely understand them, apparently, but already they’re leaving dents in the most basic accepted theories about the structure of the universe.
• Lasers in your smart home: Hackers Can Use Lasers to ‘Speak’ to Your Amazon Echo or Google Home — a little closer to home (literally!), and similarly mysterious, security researchers have found that they could trick smart home devices via lasers. The lasers simulate spoken voice, and could remotely trigger device commands even through windows, even though it’s very poorly understood how and why. In the meantime, security researchers give solid advice: ”Don’t put a voice-activated device in line of sight of your adversary.”

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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), Persepolis Rising (James S. A. Corey)

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What's next?

Still in November, 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

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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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