Weeknotes: media, knowledges, decentralisation, care
All my three big successes this week were to do with media. The Festival of Maintenance was featured on Click on the BBC World Service (from 14min25sec) and then in the Economist, which coins a great phrase: In a disposable society, to repair is to rebel. My other success was for my actual paid work at the Computer Lab — regaining control of our long-dormant Twitter account.
Limited progress on figuring out how to support more social entrepreneurship within the University context, but signs that this is needed and that others want to see it happen too. I started a doc for resources(almost empty so far), heard reflections from one College employee about the skills of today’s student activists, and got some useful feedback from Graham Mitchell on my previous post, about the capabilities for co-operative and other change-making in the UK. “The number of effective cooperative development people that I’m aware in the UK numbers perhaps 30–50 across the whole country, and if we’re not careful it will be a dying breed.” Graham also points to the June 2018 NEF report ‘Disrupting Together’ (https://neweconomics.org/uploads/files/Disrupting-Together.pdf) which sets out the strategic challenges for platform co-ops to succeed.
Knowledge also came up at the launch of the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies at CRASSH on Friday. David Edgerton gave the inaugural lecture, on turning the global history of ‘technology’ upside down. As ever, it’s refreshing to go to a seminar from a discipline with different language and discourse styles to remind you that not everything is done in the same way. David challenged the predominant historical and social science perspectives of innovation and of technology development, which tend to focus on ‘centres’ and treat the peripheries as less creative or inventive. He suggests that not only are the peripheries not as dull as they are framed, but that the centres are less creative than they are described as and are often pursuing imitative paths. He also challenges the narrative of technology history, which focusses on a very small number of technologies (nuclear, space, computers), because that’s what innovation funders have supported and therefore like to see explored and written up.
I can’t bear to call the new centre “gloknos” but it feels like there will be potential links with the work of the Open IP research network. I loved the bookmarks — a mix of Bruegels, and Royal Society engineering drawings:
This week I also finally wrote up the two ideas around co-operative technology that I’ve been discussing with folks in recent weeks. It’s not a great write up of the more ambitious option, which deserves more thought and more structure.
This one talks about distributed computing and mentions Holochain and RChain, these emerging systems which nod to blockchain and distributed ledgers, but seem to be doing something different to most of the chains. I think. Being back in academia is fascinating in this area especially, as there seems a startlingly large gap between the research happening in these areas and even the ‘emerging technology’ end of the blockchain industry at large. Blockchain technologies are mostly old, in academic terms, so aren’t research material. There’s not much plausible scholarly evaluation of what seem to be interesting projects like Hashgraph, Holo etc, and it’s incredibly tough to tell the difference between the many beautifully presented and convincing get rich quick schemes and actually carefully designed systems in such a technical and complex space. Perhaps this is all partly because good evaluation would combine technical expertise, economics, psychology and more? There do, just now, seem to be a handful of research-grounded projects starting out, such as Chainspace or Arbitrum. So maybe this will change. (Thanks to Nathan Matias for useful thinking about this!)
The kinds of organisations (or lack of) around these ‘crypto’ spaces are also intriguing. I’d like to think we could organise projects in new ways, with dynamic company/organisational setup and wind up which offered both solid governance and greater agility than traditional organisational processes. (We had to use ink signatures for various bits of the co-op incorporation and banking set up for Digital Life…) At the same time, there’s value in having an understood structure for legal liability, and for knowing who you can turn to for redress. It’s not clear how entirely decentralised organisations play out in these ways (this article highlights some of the new ideas). That’s aside from the tyranny of structurelessness…
The money is weird too. I appreciate the way ICOs work, but seeing nascent organisations giving out quite large sums of money at a stage when you’d normally expect them to be needing the cash themselves to grow and derisk activities is startling. RChain was one of the first I encountered, offering comparatively modest amounts of Ether to the Digital Life Collective and similar groups (but only if we could accept crypto — they wouldn’t give fiat, and at the time finding a plausible wallet which offered organisational accounts was beyond our small board). This week, the UK Hackspace Foundation received an unrestricted donation of $300k — a quite astounding sum in the hackspace scene— from Handshake, a decentralised internet naming and certificate authority system. I can see how Handshake work, just about; the faucet to support open source projects (like the Hackspace Foundation) is a super idea. But that at this early stage of Handshake’s development, to have so much funding to give out still seems weird to me. They still self-describe as “an experimental peer-to-peer root DNS” and you don’t normally expect that sort of thing to have significant sums to spare.
Decentralising things isn’t the answer to everything. There’s value in some centralisation, still, because we haven’t turned all the human aspects of life into things that work wholly decentralised. Nathan’s Hackernoon article is excellent, illustrating the tech hype around decentralisation (which isn’t new), pointing out that we need to be clear what we mean by decentralisation, and not to forget checks and balances. What really matters is accountability, and resilience.
I was also reminded this week of Friedrich Lindenberg’s 2015 post against decentralisation, and the ongoing role of laws, nation states and the public sector, even if some visions of tech utopias might imagine these were gone.
Cassie wrote about care, technology and the different values we seem to place on each, at least financially.
Ellen Pao wrote about tech leaders being trained not to care —
I struggle to believe that these brilliant product CEOs, who have created social media services used by millions of people worldwide, are actually naive. It’s a lot more likely that they simply don’t care. I think they don’t care about their users and how their platforms work to harm many, and so they don’t bother to understand the interactions and amplification that result.
They’ve been trained to not care.
The core problem is that these CEOs are actually making totally logical decisions every step of the way. Capitalism — which drives the markets, investors, venture capitalists, and board members — demands a certain approach to growth and expansion, one that values particular metrics.
Back to my interest in what we measure, and the business and investment models that drive what we measure.
One of the things brought home to me this year is how much the ‘tech ethics’ scene is a small bubble of the tech world. Issues around Facebook may have become mainstream media concerns, and there are new events, books, and articles about tech ethics (and the linked popular fields of AI ethics and data ethics) all the time, but I don’t think this has penetrated to the world of tech development as much as people think. Some folks in the ‘digital’ world, in London for instance, seem increasingly aware of these issues, but there are many people out there writing software who aren’t part of the ‘digital’ scene, and aren’t encountering these concerns about ethics, let alone thinking about how they might address them in their work. The software space is big, even just folks developing systems used by consumers today — think of all the developers in SMEs and big banks and creating apps and websites at corporates which aren’t ‘digital-first’. A lot of those folks will have been trained not to care, too.
(This is partly why we need external checks and balances — hence our work at Doteveryone around regulating for responsible technology, and our recent white paper outlining a vision for a new independent regulatory body that will direct digital technologies for the public good.)
Cassie wrote up our Doteveryone work from earlier this year exploring what communities and social groups need from tech infrastructure. It’s easy to imagine useful apps and websites for local social purposes, and quite a few of these get built (or, at least, piloted). Infrastructure adds so much more, though, new kinds of value through integration and shared services; or it could do, if collectively owned, reliable and thoughtfully designed. It might be less cool and less straightforward to fund than yet another app (which so often doesn’t get maintained), and obviously it’s not free, unlike using the infrastructure offered by big consumer technology firms, but community owned and controlled infrastructure could bring a lot of benefits.
It’s Mozilla Festival next weekend; trying not to get booked into too many sessions, so I can prioritise interesting conversations. I’ll be at the BBC’s Healthy Public Service Internet event on Tuesday as part of Mozfest House. Maybe see some of you there.
I’ve got a side project launching tomorrow. Excited about that — more doing, less talking. Moving fast, and also trying to fix things.