S06E23 of Connection Problem: Giant Dams & Green Belts

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Heya,

Reading the headlines of the last couple of days — Trump and Johnson grabbing ever more power; a neo-nazi party causing a solid crisis across Germany’s political party spectrum, with lots of rolling heads; China teetering on the edge of we-don’t-quite-know-what-the-next-step-might-look-like and global supply chains slowly, if only partially, coming to a halt — it seems we’re deep in a Gibson-esque Jackpot pre-cursor moment.

Let’s not get deterred by that, though. Where there’s change, there’s opportunity for positive change. Be gentle with one another. Onward and upward!

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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

Projects: Colorful Caribou is undergoing review. Eerie Eraser is slowly getting more concrete. Autonomous Antelope and Bamboozling Badger are both headed into the layout stage, both to go public around the end of February.

Writing: My attempt at writing 20 blog posts in 20 work days is ongoing (overview), if at a somewhat slower pace. The most recent post: App In, Driver Out: Why Digital Concierge Services aren’t Quite the Future.

Taking a break: Heads-up: In March, I’ll be traveling a fair bit: First a vacation break, then some other stuff. I might or might not publish this newsletter then; we’ll have to wait and see how it goes. All I know is that I’ll likely be less responsive then — so if there’s stuff to discuss, please hit me up before then if possible, or bring some extra patience 🙏

Ignite Berlin: Speaking of time management. Since 2010 or so, I’ve been involved in running the Berlin chapter of Ignite talks, Ignite Berlin. For the last few years, it’s been three of us running the show (sometimes more, sometimes less regularly): Claudia Rauch, Yasmina Haryono and myself. And we’ve had a blast, with dozens of amazing speakers. But it’s time to step back and let someone else take over. For reasons to banal to go into, there’s no website right now, but we have the Twitter account and domain ready to go. If you’re interested in keeping up this amazing community event, let’s chat? I recommend a team of 2-3 people, roundabout. That’s been shown to be a solid backbone for events that size.

Office search: And finally, it looks like I’ll be looking for a new office. Details and timeline are still in flux; probably 1-2 people, preferably long-term, preferably in or around Kreuzberg. If it’s a share or sublet situation, a nice community working on relevant stuff is key for me.) Classic coworking isn’t an option because of confidentiality.) Any leads very much appreciated!

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Media

NGI Forward published a report on Digital Trustmarks, summarized on the Nesta website (A trustmark for the internet?), both of which feature my research and ThingsCon’s Trustable Technology Mark heavily. It’s a great report — if you’re looking for a really solid overview of the opportunities and challenges of a trustmark for digital products, I recommend it. I also took this as an opportunity to share not just those two links but also a bunch of other related stuff in a quick blog post. Only relevant if you’re into trustmarks, though, so I’m not going to include more of that blog post here.

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Dams, dams, dams

Apparently there’s an idea floating around to build a giant dam to enclose the North Sea (Guardian). And I mean, a giant dam. If you picture a map of the North Sea, with Great Britain on the top left and continental Europe on the right, we’re talking about two lines: One going straight down from the South-Western tip of the UK to France, and one from Northern Scotland to Norway, via the Shetland Islands.

Here’s Hannah Cloke, a professor of hydrology at the University of Reading:

“[Cloke] added that it was “good that we’re thinking outside the box. I think it is really important that we keep thinking about these ideas, because the future looks very scary. If you look back into the 1940s in the UK, the Thames Barrier probably seemed equally ridiculous. It depends what happens in the next 20-30 years, how bad it gets, and then perhaps we will need something like this.”

However, Cloke cautioned that a dam may not be the best use of the money. “Maybe we should be thinking about making populations resilient to flooding in different ways, and also think about what we can do to stop the climate getting worse – invest in keeping ourselves safe in the long term.”

The authors acknowledge that over time, their project would eventually turn much of the North Sea into a vast tide-free freshwater lake, radically changing its ecosystem.”

It might not, in fact, the point or even a good idea to build that dam. Here’s what Dr Sjoerd Groeskamp, oceanographer at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research and the person who co-led that study, has to say about it:

“Ultimately, the description of this extreme dam is more of a warning than a solution, Groeskamp states. ‘The costs and the consequences of such a dam are huge indeed. However, we have calculated that the cost of doing nothing against sea level rise will ultimately be many times higher. This dam makes it almost tangible what the consequences of the sea level rise will be; a sea level rise of 10 metres by the year 2500 according to the bleakest scenarios. This dam is therefore mainly a call to do something about climate change now. If we do nothing, then this extreme dam might just be the only solution.’”

So there’s that.

But also, through this dam I learned about Atlantropa (aka Panropa, Wikipedia), which was an idea even more batshit crazy than that giant dam above — because of both the scale and some of the potential political implications. Turns out that German architect Herman Sörgel, from the 1920s all the way to his death in the 1950s, pushed for a giant engineering project called Atlantropa that would build dams all around the Mediterranean Sea for hydroelectricity and to to lower the surface of the sea by up to 200 meters, freeing up space for settlement. This makes the North Sea dam idea tiny by comparison.

Now, I’m a little hesitant to say much about Sörgel because I have not read the book he wrote about Atlantropa; a quick online search indicates that he might have been a bit of a weird engineering genius who saw this as a pacifist project. He appears not to have been a supported of the Nazi regime but wasn’t above pitching the idea to them (unsuccessfully). Here’s also Atlas Obscura’s write-up for some more details. So, with this little bit of political context, I’d think it’s fair to say that damming up whole oceans is a bit of an odd idea. Let’s not, maybe?

A bit thank you for the pointer to Atlantropa to Bodo Tasche.

By the way, a fun footnote regarding big dams in popular culture: I recently watched The Expanse, which I found to be a pretty fun political sci-fi series. For me, two things stood out that I really enjoyed: First, it feels much more diverse than most other series, period, and in a way that makes it seem effortless and just part of good world-building. Second, and in the same spirit of effortlessness this is never really addressed in the TV series or the books I think, every shot of Earth just happens to show the then-current water levels. And those just happen to be much higher than the cities, turning the cities into dammed-in holes in the sea. The fact that it’s never mentioned makes it all the more powerful. Just the new normal. Here’s a couple of screenshots I found, showing The Expanse's version of NYC and Copenhagen:

Image: The Expanse Wiki

Image: Reddit

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The European Green Belt

Speaking of dams, how about other separators, namely greenery? Germany is turning 62 military bases into wildlife sanctuaries (Independent). “Together the bases are 31,000 hectares — that's equivalent to 40,000 football pitches. The conversion will see Germany's total area of protected wildlife increase by a quarter.”

And that’s great, obviously, but holy moly, it’s not just an individual case. This is going to be part of the European Green Belt (Wikipedia):

Image: European Green Belt initiative

The Green Belt appears to have grown out of former military no-go zones: “The route of the Green Belt follows the course of the borders which during the second half of the 20th century divided the eastern European communist countries and the western capitalist countries.” (Here’s the initiative’s website.)

I had no idea! 🤯 But here’s a giant development I can get behind. (Can we get a cycling route to go outside, alongside this, without disturbing the larger project? Pretty please?)

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India’s fight against encryption

Across the world, we see two competing efforts, often within the same country: A fight to force end-to-end encryption to avoid all kinds of havoc, from spying to ad tracking to cybersecurity to messing with communications. On the other a push to build backdoors into encryption so that law enforcement can read along. (To follow the state of the debate around encryption backdoors, I recommend Bruce Schneier’s continuously excellent coverage of and contributions to that debate.)

So, encryption and India. Alas, it looks like India is taking things a step or ten further than insisting on backdoors, which would have been bad enough. India might ban encryption outright, and enforce “traceability” (The Interface):

“In India, though, things are moving very quickly to make end-to-end encryption illegal. The country has sought to exert more control over the internet (…) Among the requirements is that any post be “traceable” to its origin. And in what is believed to be a world first, the rules would require tech companies to do the investigating — to deploy their sophisticated tools to track a post’s spread on their network back to its point of origin, and then turn that information over to law enforcement.”

This is, frankly, outright terrifying. Encrypted and anonymous communication are both essential for a healthy democratic society, and banning them is a clear political signal that the government is on the move to be increasingly authoritarian.

(Found via Martin Tisné.)

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Miscellanea

• A profile of Noah Brier that focuses on his knowledge management setup. I’m a sucker for workflow descriptions.
• “1,000 True Fans? Try 100”, writes Li Jon on the A16z blog. Always 10x-ing it in VC land, I guess. I call BS: Offering high-end classes to people who spend $1K+ on them isn’t fandom, it’s a type of specialized B2B offering.
• Stiftung Neue Verantwortung on Data Trusts. Good policy brief right there.
• The most detailed photos yet of the far side of the moon: 👀 (MIT Technology Review)

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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: Sourdough (Robin Sloan), The Shortest History of Germany (James Hawes)

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What's next?

Sprints on a few projects that are due to wrap up, then off for a bit. Then I’ll be open for new collaborations.

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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