S06E21 of Connection Problem: VCs & the fossilized internet

Image: The highest resolution observation of the Sun’s surface to date. “The cell-like structures – each about the size of Texas – are the signature of violent motions that transport heat from the inside of the sun to its surface.” More about it, and a video, here. Credit: NSO/NSF/AURA

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Personal-ish & project updates

Still on the sick-kid shift system. Why doesn’t anyone tell you that this is going to happen? (Note: How work is impacted by kids is easily in the top 3 things everybody tells you upfront. Still, argh!) So another slightly shorter installment this week. Did I just hear a sigh of relief? :)

I started reading William Gibson’s new, long-anticipated book Agency. And what can I say? It’s really refreshing. Fun to read, lots of good world-building. Highly recommended. Especially since I can’t tell you how bored I’ve been of physicist-writer hard sci-fi recently. Make it a little colorful. Make it as diverse as The Expanse. Look at other regions than North America and Europe (some interesting stuff out of or set in China these last few years, but also the same flavor of physicist hard sci-fi just painted in red). Anyway, what can I say? Read Agency, it’s very good!

Fun (sad) fact: The next step in the Brexit saga is always reported to happen “Friday, midnight”. Turns out that’s midnight CET, 11pm GMT. Yes, I just googled that. Not sure what to make of that.

Project updates: Colorful Caribou is getting a solid work-over. Autonomous Antelope is in the final stages. Eerie Eraser looks like moving ahead, more on that hopefully next week.

Also, shout-out to Sucuri server security. I’ve been seeing server malware infections these last couple of days. (Nothing dangerous; SEO spam ware, apparently). Sucuri are ace and extremely helpful in detecting and clearing up these things.

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The Museum of the Fossilized Internet

Over at Mozilla, an interesting thought experiment: The Museum of Fossilized Internet. This prototype, conceptualized by Michelle Thorne, Cathleen Berger, Joana Moll & Gabriela Ivens, was just internally unveiled and is delightful:

*Image via @thornet*
 

Here's the idea:

“This museum was founded in 2050 to commemorate two decades of a fossil-free internet and to invite museum's visitors to experience what the coal and oil-powered internet of 2020 was like. Gasp at the horrors of surveillance capitalism. Nod knowingly at the plague of spam. Be baffled at the size of AI training data and lament the binge culture of video streaming.”

This is great. Looking forward to seeing where this is going.

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Is VC worth it?

Is venture capital worth the risk?, asks The New Yorker. It’s a great (long) read. And since the poster children of the recent wave of VC über investments — especially Uber, WeWork — have been shown to be, essentially, vapor ware, it is becoming more obvious that VC funding may not just be problematic in its own right (”but successful!”) and instead be not even be successful. In the words of Fred Wilson (of the well respected VC form Union Square Ventures):

“The massive experiment in using capital as a moat to build startups into sustainable businesses has now played out and we can call it a failure for the most part. Uber popularized this strategy and got very far with it, but sitting here at the end of the 2010s, Uber has not yet proven that it can build a profitable business, is struggling as a public company, and will need something more than capital to sustain its business. WeWork was a fast follower with this strategy and failed to get to the public markets and is undergoing a massive restructuring that will determine the fate of that business. Many other experiments with this model have failed or are failing right now. When I look back at the 2010s, I see a decade during which massive capital flowed into startups and much of it was wasted chasing the “capital as a moat” model.”

VC investment mostly fails, depending on which sources you trust in easily 80% of cases. How come that an industry with such a clear track record of failure is so dominant?

There are, I suppose, two reasons:

• Some of the most successful businesses today (Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.) were built and scaled using the VC model.
• Those investments made a small number of people very, very rich (and a slightly larger number still pretty rich).

But here’s the thing: We have no idea if those companies that made it wouldn't have succeeded without VC, or better ones. After all, they were a first wave of companies using a radically new technology as a vector. It’s quite possible (likely, even?) that they or other, similarly successful ones, would have emerged simply because they were among the first to really leverage the internet.

And even in what’s often called a success story I’d argue that often we see pressures that come with the VC investment logic (scale at all costs, among others) to have had a detrimental effect on the companies by pushing for short-term growth.

So let’s take a look at that and maybe put VC back into the place it belongs - as a place for rich kids to take some long bets, and an option to fund highly unclear research that might or might not lead to anything. A model, in other words, that’s like the lottery: Indulgent play for some, and desperation for others.

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More than facial recognition

“We’re Banning Facial Recognition. We’re Missing the Point,” writes Bruce Schneier. In this excellent piece, Schneier lays out that “modern mass surveillance has three broad components: identification, correlation and discrimination.”

First of all, this analytical clarity is ace, and very helpful.

He talks about the many other ways of invasive surveillance: identificaion by heart beat, gait or iris patterns; correlation based on movement data or ethnicity; etc. etc… Turns out that surveillance has many faces. See what I did there? (Sorry, not sorry.)

Then, of course, there’s data brokers. “There is a huge — and almost entirely unregulated — data broker industry in the United States that trades on our information.”

We need to address identification, correlation, discrimination: “Regulating this system means addressing all three steps of the process. A ban on facial recognition won't make any difference if, in response, surveillance systems switch to identifying people by smartphone MAC addresses. The problem is that we are being identified without our knowledge or consent, and society needs rules about when that is permissible.”

So let’s get to it. And in the meantime, let me finish by channeling Cato: We must remove all data brokers.

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Miscellanea

Artificial artificial intelligence: Pigeons identify breast cancer ‘as well as humans’, says the BBC. Which is kind of awesome, but/and also might turn out to be essentially useless. The pigeons were “unable to recognise the lumps with malignant potential” and hence “may be faithful mimics of the strengths and weaknesses of humans”. (via Johannes Klingebiel)

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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: Agency (William Gibson), The Shortest History of Germany (James Hawes)

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What's next?

Writing for the next couple weeks, then one by one the last few reports should be published soon. Then, maybe, a spontaneous break before diving right back in.

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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