S06E18 of Connection Problem: 10% into the 21st century
Pink Flamingo from Birds of America (1827) by John James Audubon (1785 - 1851 ), etched by Robert Havell (1793 - 1878)
As we say in German: Frohes Neues Jahr!
We’ve completed the first 10% of the 21st century. The progress bar is just slowly beginning to fill up: It promises to be one of those old school progress bars that sometimes seems to stall, then leap ahead. We’re not in linear progression here. Everybody strap in. This decade, too, will be an interesting ride.
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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 & random updates
There was a time, back around maybe 2008-2012 or so, where many of us used code names for projects for which we couldn’t name clients (yet). It was fun. More fun than vaguely referring to “a think tank” or “an international foundation” or something along those lines. Which I do all the time, but also for the time being I’m bringing code names back, because, as I said, more fun. Does it spark joy? Oh does it ever. Thanks for indulging me.
So: In Autonomous Antelope we've crossed the rubicon and are in the heavy writing phase. Bamboozling Badger is being undergoing final copy-editing and layouts. My Colorful Caribou draft is ready, fine-tuning still ongoing. Daring Dandelion is about to kick off: a small scale, somewhat atypical collaboration for my me but right there at the intersection of policy & tech. Not sure if or when I can talk about this publicly, but there it is. And finally, Eerie Eraser is a collaboration where we explore a simple analytical framework/evaluation tool of sorts for smart cities. More on that soon, if we can get it in shape for prime time.
See? Better already.
Also, the ThingsCon talks are up. I’ll just somewhat unceremoniously drop this Youtube playlist here because that seems the easiest way to access them.
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Media mentions
Super nice to see Bruce Sterling's shout-outs to ThingsCon’s 2019 edition of our annual RIOT report, The State of Responsible IoT” on his personal blog and on WIRED.
Also, one of the odder but also more interesting lists I’ve had the opportunity to contribute to, Coda interviewed me for predictions on authoritarian technologies for 2020: What to expect from Authoritarian Tech in 2020. There I talk about Smart Cities as technological Trojan Horses for surveillance technologies. How’s that for an end-of-year prediction list, eh?
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My Edgeryders Fellowship is a wrap
My Edgeryders fellowship is a wrap. I wrote it up over on the blog. This fellowship, like the one at Mozilla before, allowed me to pursue more independent research — this time into smart city policy and how to make it work for citizens first and foremost. I’ve really turned into a huge fan of the fellowship model, and not just because I’ve had the privilege and frankly luck to benefit so directly from it: Fellowships are a powerful model that allow to also bring in independents like me; it might be one of the few ways to do that short of hiring/contracting. And the idea of independent research — think of it as free range research, largely self-directed and not tied to specific outputs — allows for really interesting, valuable outcomes.
A huge thank you for the lovely time to the whole Edgeryders team and community, and especially for Nadia E. for inviting me and John Coate, the OG community manager from The Well who turned this into an all-round enjoyable, positive, life-enriching exercise. Thank you!
Oh yes, and finally most of my Edgeryders interviews are up. Better late then never! The missing ones will go up very soon, too: Interviews with Jon Rogers, with Marcel Schouwenaar, with Michelle Thorne.
Related: CAT Lab founder J. Nathan Matias (formerly MIT Media Lab) on Why We Need Industry-Independent Research on Tech & Society. This is a slightly different, more institutional kind of research than I mentioned above but it’s spot on and I’m glad Nate and his team are on it. I had the chance to meet him a couple of times ages ago and I have no doubt this is as promising a project as it gets. Because yes, absolutely, the type of funding you can get massively impacts the kind of research you can do.
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The Low Carbon Design Institute
Close friend and long-time, many-times collaborator Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino (@iotwatch on Twitter) has been working quietly on the prototype for a new design education program/institute, the Low Carbon Design Institute:
We will offer 20 people the opportunity to take part in a pilot of a new design education. The program will include talks and on-site visits on topics such as: carbon emissions, carbon counting, manufacturing, farming, supply chain, local economic development, renewable energy, waste production, recycling, reuse, repair and more.
It’s hands down one of the most promising, interesting things out there to me right now. And from experience I can tell you that I’ve had the privilege (and again, luck!) to be part of a number of convenings that Alex put together over the last decade or so. Not one of them was boring or not worth the time, obviously; but more than that, most brought together groups that continued to produce (formally or informally) impact for years to come. The connections built in these convenings, and the ideas percolating out from there, have been actively shaping my thinking for years.
If you have the chance to participate, I highly recommend you do so. Maybe more importantly, if you have the means to support the development of the program (financially or otherwise), I urge you to reach out to Alex directly (or me, if you’re more comfortable with an intro). This is one to watch, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned into a real powerhouse for some time to come. But first comes this prototype, this test balloon. One step at a time.
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A city for autonomous vehicles
A while ago I read a paper that stipulated that smart cities are just corporate storytelling. It… resonated. When I saw the announcement for the Woven City, a blank slate smart city project by Toyota and BIG I couldn’t help thinking of that paper.
Look, don't get me wrong. This ticks all the boxes (renewable energy, parks, an adapted version of the Barcelona Superblock); but it’s pretty boring and predictable: It’s a car maker smart city, so autonomous vehicles are pretty much at the core of it. It's vanilla and a bit cliché. We can do better.
As far as I can tell from the promotional video rendering, it’s about neighborhood scale (walkable) but somehow full of lots of small autonomous vehicles driving individuals up into buildings that look like shopping malls on ramps.
A slightly interesting idea is the underground delivery system that looks like a bunch of autonomous rolling suitcases that ascend into your kitchen etc. via elevators, a contemporary take on the dumbwaiter. But again, this only works in brand new developments, and technology that's inherently impossible to retrofit into existing infrastructures mostly bores me. Make it work with the real world, will ya?
Image: Screenshot of the promotional video. There’s a mysterious fog in a great number of these renderings.
The most futuristic — or at least provocative — thing in this video rendering is the dinner scene near the top, where it looks like we see a three-generation household (grandfather, father, kids) with three (!) kids. Given Japan's notoriously low birth rate, a truly out there projection if ever there was one. But let's be honest: That probably wasn't their intention.
Related, via Alex DS, this article on CityLab on Robert Moses and the low parkway, a bridge that is criticized for being so low as to deny passage to the buses that would serve low-income neighborhoods: "The low-bridge story is a microbiography of Moses, a tragic hero who built for the ages, but for a narrowly construed public. It also shows how something as inert as a stone-faced bridge can be alive with politics and meaning."
Those two bold quotes could, of course, hardly be more on point even if they were written specifically for a big chunk of current smart city projects: aiming to build for the ages (or at least with big ambitions until the next software update), but for a narrowly construed public, yet alive with politics and meaning.
How about we build more humbly but for a broader range of people and uses instead? Again: We can do better.
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New planets?
NASA found a roughly Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone, only around 100 light years away (Space.com). Exciting, of course. It’s in the Goldilocks zone, which sounds fun and evocative because space researchers are never one to let a sticky name go!
But having undergone a fresh sensitivity training against space optimism by reading some Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora and the Expanse series (can you call it an octology?), I can't help but hear one of Aurora's characters repeating in an endless loop, talking about newly discovered planets in the habitable zone: "They're either going to be alive or dead, right? If they've got water and orbit in the habitable zone, they'll be alive. Alive and poisonous. (...) The dead worlds, those'll be dry, and too cold, or too hot."
But it's interesting nonetheless, very much so, and of course worth exploring. Just not Musk-style for settling there. As one of the scientists sums it up: "It's exciting because no matter what we find out about the planet, it’s going to look completely different from what we have here on Earth.” So let’s watch and learn and get our own house in order so we can keep watching and learning.
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Can we cover melting glaciers in artificial snow?
Snow machines and fleece blankets: inside the ski industry’s battle with climate change (The Guardian). Turns out the Alps, for reasons unknown, heat up faster through global warming than the rest of the world. Which means melting glaciers, eco disaster, and… shorter seasons for the hugely profitable ski tourism industry.
Since that industry is in fact so ridiculously huge (frankly, I had no idea about the scale!) and there is totally a market for perfect snow…
[Pierre Mattis] began building his snow-making factory, or atelier neige, installing a 70km network of pipes beneath the mountain that now, after years of expansion and improvement, can cover 65 sq km of slopes in artificial snow at the touch of a button. It is one of the most sophisticated snow-making operations in the world.
Which sounds ridiculous and amazing in equal measures. But of course…
This technology comes at a major financial and ecological cost. Today, one in every 20 euros spent anywhere in Val d’Isère goes into the snow factory, covering energy costs, staffing, maintenance and upgrades (a hidden “artificial snow” tax that is continually increasing). Although snow machines are becoming increasingly efficient, a typical snowmaker still uses about the same amount of energy as a boiler in a family home. When multiplied into the tens of thousands across the Alps, snowmakers become something of a self-defeating invention: they worsen and sustain the climate problems they’re supposed to solve.
So, expensive, huge energy consumption. But quick insert here — turns out you can hack that, too!
Less-moneyed resorts rely on a cheaper source – snow farming, whereby snow is gathered or made in January and February, when manufacturing snow costs less than in warmer months. The snow is then placed under a 40cm layer of wood chippings, which absorb and release moisture and keep the snow cool, compact and manageable during the summer months. The wood chippings are then removed at the end of October, allowing the snow to be deployed on the slopes in time for the skiing season.
That’s right: anti-cyclical snow production, and then just put a blanket over it. How simple can it get?
But back to the connection of snow cannons and glaciers: They’re now testing if you can cover glaciers up not with blankets (the size and mobility of glaciers would make that extraordinarily hard) but rather with… snow, dropped from…
a “snow rope”, stretched in a zigzag pattern across the width of the glacier, hundreds of feet across. Acting like a sprinkler system, the rope could deposit snow from altitude while the glacier trundled conveyor belt-like beneath it.
This approach seems somewhat controversial, mostly because it is available to regions with rich luxury resorts and probably less so in poorer areas where the glaciers are melting. But snow appears to be enough to keep glaciers from melting:
in the summer of 2017 Oerlemans and his team sprayed a 2.5 metre-deep blanket of artificial snow over a small section of the Diavolezzafirn glacier, one of the Morteratsch’s diminutive neighbours. The experiment, which ran to the autumn, was successful: further melting was prevented, and in some places the ice even grew.
Physics are weird! But maybe they can buy us some time? Look, Google must still have a few hangars full of balloons from their Wifi Loon project, right? Maybe we can throw in some blimps or drones or whatever. Let’s make some snow and throw it on those glaciers. Maybe we can make it using renewables, though?
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Peak Emissions?
Peak Emissions Are Closer Than You Think – and Here’s Why (BNEF). I frankly don’t know enough about the topic and the author seems to take a very market-driven approach but somehow comes out optimistic. I certainly learned a lot. It’s not a short read, but well worth it. I marked too many things to quote, but here are a couple that I liked:
Professor Grubb uses lots of fancy economics to forecast what might happen next. I’ll paraphrase: in a logistic curve penetration, the first 1% takes forever; from 1% to 5% is like waiting for a sneeze –it is going to be explosive, you just don’t know when it will happen; 5% to 50% happens much faster than you think – that is when the restructurings and bankruptcies happen.
Every publicly-quoted coal company [in the US] has gone through Chapter 11 since 2016, as has privately-owned Murray Energy, whose CEO, Robert Murray, wrote the blueprint for the president’s energy policy. Not one new coal plant has been built since 2015. None are being built today, and it looks like none ever will be again.
The picture I have painted is a bit like the IEA’s Stated Policies Scenario: these trends, which should see emissions from fossil fuels peak by 2030, are what I see happening even in the absence of significant further policy in favor of climate action. But, of course, there will be further climate policy – and lots of it.
Germany, of course, is shamefully not at all anywhere near going coal free. Yo German gov, how about getting on that?
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By the way…
I did a bit updating and cleaning up on the website, like here and also this might or might not lead up to something, I started a kind of longer-term reference list to complement my website.
I'm not 100% sure where this will lead, but I've been missing a simple, effective way to collect a) references that I find useful in public without them getting bogged down in blog posts and publications or clogging up the navigation menu; and b) do maybe also distill some key positions to make it easier to triangulate where I'm coming from if you want to know but are too busy to read the whole back catalog and too shy to ask.
The first (a list of references) seems like a good place to start, the second might or might not happen. It'll be a useful tool for myself if it works, and so maybe to others as well.
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Miscellanea
Cambridge Analytics is truly the gift that keeps on giving: Fresh Cambridge Analytica leak ‘shows global manipulation is out of control’ (The Guardian), “Company’s work in 68 countries laid bare with release of more than 100,000 documents”
I recently signed up for the newsletter by a quantum computing company called Rigetti. I have no idea how legit this is, but the idea that you can rent quantum computing capacity via the Amazon cloud now (for research purposes; none of this is anywhere near ready for production yet)? Welcome to the 2020s.
The New York Times' Privacy Project looks ace: Novelists, poets and artists imagine life in the age of surveillance. Haven't checked it out in detail but seems very much worth the time.
Uber disrupted the market, and now fails that market because the economics were all pretty much fake. Of course - every Uber story except the founder’s ends in tears.
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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 Smart Enough City (Ben Green), Medallion Status (John Hodgman)
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What's next?
I’m wrapping up a whole bunch of writing and research. If my schedule permits I’ll take a few days off after the last submission. After that I’m looking for new interesting collaborations and projects, so if you have something that you’d like to discuss, let’s chat (just hit reply)!
Yours truly,
Peter
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Who writes here? Peter Bihr explores how emerging technologies — like Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence — can have a positive social impact. 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 an Edgeryders Fellow (2019). He tweets at @peterbihr. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.
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