S06E19 of Connection Problem: Cookies and Climate

Black and white rabbits by Kōno Bairei (1844-1895).

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"It’s clear that something strange is happening."

— Geophysicist Phil Livermore on Earth's magnetic pole moving faster than usual
 

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Hello, and first of all, thank you…

…for the kind (and not ridiculing at all, even though it would've been well-deserved!) messages that pointed out that 20 years are not, in fact, 10% of a century as my headline last week suggested. Turns out I was tired and my brain didn't work, so there's that. Thanks for being so gentle.

This week’s dispatch features some ad tracking and some climate change — and some overlap of the two. Overall it skews a little more climate-related than usual, even though of course you'll have noticed how that topic has been edging more and more towards the top of the list here, too. How could it not: It's inseparable from all the other issues, and of such a scale that not discussing it would be the omission to end all omissions. Other topics include FB being their worst self, as usual; ad trackers operating pretty much illegally at large scale; and a somewhat worrying class/economic-based lens to analyze and model the shaping of policy.

So, 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 & project updates

Since I re-introduced project code names last week, let's go with those: Autonomous Antelope is going strong, entering the final sprint phase. Bamboozling Badger is wrapping up, results soon to be published. Colorful Caribou is being reviewed. Daring Dandelion is slowly getting underway. Eerie Eraser is in the experimental test balloon stage of things: It has the potential to be a really exciting new thing, but/and it’ll take a few weeks to know if the project has legs.

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These cookies are bad for you

Two cookie/online advertisement bits side by side:

(1) Cookies & Privacy

Researchers found that incredibly many pop-up providers — that's providers of cookie consent pop-ups — configure their offerings illegally.

Some highlights from that thread:

• 5 pop-up (consent management platform) firms have about 58% of the UK market: QuantCast, TrustArc, Crownpeak, CookiebotCybot, OneTrust
• "Only 11.8%(!) meet even the most basic(!) legal UX reqs for valid consent: no pre-checked boxes, explicit consent, reject as easy as accept"
• In many (!) cases, the clicks either outright ignore/falsify user choices, or are otherwise don't do what a user would reasonably expect, and it's full of dark patterns.

In other words: User choices are deliberately obfuscated or outright falsified. That's pretty worrying in its blatant disregard for both users’ privacy and the law. I hope the strategic litigation orgs will get on that sooner rather than later.

I hate that we have to use a blunt instrument like GDPR and hefty fines to get companies to respect the law but if it takes a few multi-billion Euro fines to establish the ground rules, then so be it.

Or we could just get rid of data brokers all together; between their horrendous data practices and the unintended negative consequences of contributing to the micro targeting of political ads, I think there’s a pretty strong case to be made that they’re a net negative to society. But that’s a conversation for another day.

Also: Facebook is bound to make record profits selling the proverbial pickaxes to those who use them to profit from hollowing out democracies and moving them ever closer to autocracies — they're certainly trying (NYTimes).
 

(2) Cookies & Climate

Well ok, slightly inaccurate since this refers to online advertising generally and not just to cookies but:

“Online advertising consumed between 20.38 to 282.75 TWh of energy and 11.53 – 159.93 million tons of CO2e was emitted to produce the electricity consumed. (...) Invalid traffic associated with online advertising resulted in 2.65 – 36.78 million tons of CO2e emissions."

This environmental impact assessment of online advertisement studies data from 2016, so the carbon footprint of online ads has almost certainly gone up significantly since.

So: ad-blocking against climate change? As I’ve said on Twitter, I'm not opposed to ads per se, and recognize the role they play in funding (especially) online culture. But the tracking part? That's not part of that social contract, yet a huge part of producing this ridiculous carbon footprint. Banning tracking ads might help fight both climate change AND slow the undermining of democracy through micro-targeted disinformation campaigns.

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Climate futures

I found this short intro to Costa Rica's Green Deal (NYTimes) pretty interesting. They’re certainly doing many things right. (Costa Rica has been big on ecotourism for a long time, even though I remember that a lot of stuff branded as ecotourism was maybe just a tad aspirational back when we visited a few years ago…)

Somewhat related in that it also explores options for coping with climate change, Dezeen has a nice write-up of Superflux's excellent installation Mitigation of Shock, "a vision of a typical Singapore home in 2219, with features including homemade hunting tools, snorkelling equipment and a mini hydroponic farm."

Superflux has consistently been putting out A++ work over the last few years. It's super impressive. Even more so if you take into account that it's a relatively small design studio founded by a couple who also have a child, and in a space that's not exactly flush with money for interactive installations.

So, so, so good. Mad props to Anab & Jon & their team.

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Elite panic / panic about panic

Elite panic: Elites opting out of collaborative measures to fight disasters, such as climate change. I wasn’t familiar with the term, but as an analytical lens it might make sense.

The article also links to this academic paper (by Lee Clarke and Caron Chess): "Elites and Panic: More to Fear than Fear Itself" which has this beautiful turn of phrase in its abstract: "Attributions of panic are almost exclusively directed at members of the general public. Here, we inquire into the relationships between elites and panic. We review current research and theorizing about panic, including problems of identifying when it has occurred. We propose three relationships: elites fearing panic, elites causing panic and elites panicking."

So, yet another term of othering — or in the most benign reading, at least third party effect: I'm not panicking but those people are going to panic! — this time more along the economic spectrum. This might become important reading as we move further into climate change to predict and model policy development.

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Blind spots in the Seeing Room

Dominic Cummings’ Seeing Room isn't just cringeworthy and politically more-than-dubious but also a category error that's based on lack of knowledge, implicit assumptions and unprofessional projection, as laid out expertly by Rachel Coldicutt — who's been on a roll. She doesn’t seem to slow down even during her sabbatical!

Related and also linked from Rachel’s piece: Inclusive leadership works better and here's six traits of inclusive leadership identified by researchers. TL;DR as a reminder, they are: Visible commitment, humility, awareness of bias, curiosity about others, cultural intelligence, effective collaboration.

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OpenDoTT roadmap

The super smart PhD researchers over at the OpenDoTT program — the PhD program about Open Design of Trusted Things — have been posting their research roadmaps and first thoughts on the OpenDoTT blog. The program has five folks digging into IoT at the level of the body, the home, the community/neighborhood, the city and (meta level) a trustmark for IoT. So far, they’ve published their first thoughts on community/neighborhood, smart cities, and trustmark, and the rest should be online within a week or so over on the OpenDoTT blog.

I’m happy and humbled to continue to work with those researchers as an industry supervisor, specifically with Namrata around her exporation of trustmarks in IoT.

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Exploring the Dweb

I realized I want to learn more about Dweb, the decentralized/distributed web. Since it seems all the cool kids think there's something important going on it's time to suspend disbelief and dive in to see where this is at. Spoiler alert: Early days but seemingly going places.

To be honest I thought it was all very beta at this point. And it kinda is, but at first glance it looks like the tools are already pretty advanced (even though the desktop client of IPFS is still at a 0.1 version number). So that's terrifying and/or exciting!

And while it'll take some time to really grok what's going on and how everything works, it's pretty accessible overall: From first opening of the documentation to putting the first "hello world" into my newly created repository it took me under 20 minutes. That's pretty good!

Also, Dietrich Ayala published a solid intro series a year and a half ago already - still worth reading.

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Miscellanea

• Outside of Berlin in Brandenburg, to build a new Tesla factory, forests are being cleared (article in German) first of historic ammunitions and then of trees. I generally lean anti-car but within that category pro electric, so I'm a bit ambiguous on this one.
• John Deere’s restrictive tractor DRM drives farmers to buy vintage tractors (VICE) because they can be repaired.
• Dietrich Ayala has begun re-creating the Kowloon Walled City in VR.

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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)

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What's next?

Still wrapping up a whole bunch of writing and research. If possible, I’ll take a few days off afterwards before new projects kick off. In parallel I’m open 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), smart cities, 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 and blogs at thewavingcat.com. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.

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