Fortnightnotes: biodiversity, physicality, cybersecurity, community
NationBuilder - a nice example of how legally connecting bits and bobs gets you targeted advertising not for products, but for politics.
Fascinating notes from a Harvard workshop about public interest internet - politics, standards and infrastructure. Thanks Niels ten Oever.
PwC’s recent Responsible AI Diagnostic Survey of more than 750 senior business executives through September 2019 found that only 34 percent think their use of AI is in line with their organisation’s values.
UN entities are not subject to GDPR, it turns out.
Cybersecurity for cars is a huge industry - growing to $2.3b in 2025! Maybe car companies should have spent money upfront on securing their designs, rather than paying startups to fix problems later. (via Beau Woods).
Cybersecurity for shipping. A fascinating tale of investigating how vulnerable systems are.
An investigation into how Boeing's financialisation links to the 737 MAX crashes.
An article from early this year by Deb Chachra, on the importance of physicality and recognising that digital is not wholly virtual, these days.
Simultaneously, with the rise of the Internet of Things, the digital world is no longer safely contained behind a screen. Instead, it is starting to intersect with the physical world in unprecedented ways. Designing these systems requires a healthy respect for the intransigence of matter and all the complexities of its interactions.From here I found my way to Matter Battle, from 2011. Turns out 3D printers have not changed much :)
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But no matter what our graduates end up doing, I want them to have a healthy respect for other people’s work, following the adage that “no labor is unskilled labor.” This holds true equally for traditionally feminine labor like sewing, knitting and embroidery, and cooking, to say nothing of childcare or housecleaning, and also male-coded work like farm labor, construction, and maintenance. Asking our students to work in the physical world offers them an early lesson in appreciating the abilities of the people who might build or repair what they design.
Matter does not have undo!
Because Matter Battles are ultimately about the inescapability of physical laws, they constantly remind us that no matter how high tech your implements, there is always room for basic failure. Robots fall down. 3D printers get their nozzles gunked up. Laser cutters burn their lenses. And CNC machines still require raw material to be roughly screwed into place before it is worked on. High tech tools always have low tech components somewhere in their workflow.
Audrey Watters is someone whose work I've admired since I worked in educational tech. "Ed tech's Cassandra" has written a great article about tech and criticism. Being critical about tech startups is often seen as a cultural faux pas (although, it is notable that it seems OK to be critical of people who are critical!).
The danger isn’t only that many people are afraid to challenge the orthodoxy. The danger is that many do not really think all that differently. Many in Silicon Valley (and more broadly those working in science and tech and in elite university labs) believe they’re all The Very Smartest Men, and if nothing else, they’ve convinced themselves to that end.Bill Thompson summarises Epstein matters nicely - how will we make the structural changes needed?
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I care much less that we were all supposed to be nice about the startup. I care that this was a startup — like far too many in ed-tech — that, with its normalizing of surveillance, was poised to hurt kids.
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As Benjamin Doxtdator suggests in his brilliant and scathing review of a recent ed-tech book Innovate Inside the Box, “innovation” stands as an empty antithesis to “criticism” (which he invokes alongside critical pedagogy, critical theory, critical race and gender scholarship, critical code studies, and so on). It’s not simply that the Silicon Valley positivity machine only rewards positive ideas. (“We build things,” someone once told me. “You just tear things down.”) Without a grounding in theory or knowledge or ethics or care, the Silicon Valley machine rewards stupid and dangerous ideas, propping up and propped up by ridiculous, self-serving men. There won’t ever be a reckoning if we’re nice.
As we reflect on Epstein’s involvement in the technology world, I hope we can use this opportunity to ask whether the research programmes, products and platforms that have come from those who were willing to associate with him are doing harm or good, and begin to look for healthier options that aren’t drawn from the current intellectual monoculture.
Matt Locke has coined a new term!
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| https://twitter.com/matlock/status/1171462884695539713 |
I must have read this Nadia Eghbal article at the time it came out, but it came up again recently via a Brendan Schlagel piece which also discusses small social networks. What struck me this time was the visceral descriptions of what happens to niche communities which are 'discovered' by others.
While some communities haze their newcomers, others resist being defined at all. Ribbonfarm’s Venkatesh Rao, for example, frequently downplays the term ‘postrationalist’ as well as the very idea of fostering a community around it, despite the fact that many people are clearly attracted to the same watering hole. I tend to interpret this dismissiveness as a way of saying, “We don’t want to become a ‘thing’ because ‘things’ are destroyable by outsiders.” Avoiding labels is a way of keeping hidden cities away from the colonizers, like a nomadic tribe on the move.
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We’re not used to thinking about the passive consumer experience of social content as an explicit choice, but maybe we should. You can visit an online community, can enjoy reading through the interactions of people you might otherwise never get to know, without interfering with their magic. You don’t have to become a member of that community to eat their croissants.
That being said, if you’re sharing something you’ve found, it’s not really possible to tell your audience how to behave. And recommendations still move through pneumatic tubes rather than evaporation ponds. One tweet, post, or article from someone with a big enough audience is like sunlight on a magnifying glass, concentrating screaming hordes of people onto a single, unsuspecting point that spontaneously combusts into flames. I can’t quite blame some communities for wanting to avoid press, even good press.
... There’s that classic sign in national parks that reads, “Take only pictures, leave only footprints”. Online, it’s possible to be a lurker, to enjoy the fruits of someone else’s labor without jumping in. But how do you know when to move from observing to participating? When should you write about a topic, versus respecting a community’s intentions to stay off the radar?
A great visual piece about re-wilding the UK. Really fascinating on what might be possible and the impact this might have on carbon, biodiversity, resilience to extreme weather, and access to nature. (Part of the Green New Deal for Nature report from CommonWealth).
The Guardian has a good overview of the challenges to biodiversity and conservation, and the need for a more inclusive and participatory approach. It's easy to forget biodiversity when focussing on carbon issues, but pollinating insects, for example, are pretty important for life.
The tragedy of the commons after 50 years - Hardin coined a catchy phrase, but Ostrom's work on commons management should be the thing we take forward.
There's some great ideas in Vinay Gupta's article about how we organise consumption of goods, and the role of data. Unfortunately it's incredibly long. The idea of having universal richer data about items to enable better reuse, resale, recycling is a nice one - especially if we can combine details such as part numbers, information like item size, and qualitative intel about the product. It could also be a way to avoid the 'lemons' market where sellers know which, say, second hand cars are good and which are bad, but the buyer cannot discriminate.
Finding a space between nihilism and over-optimism - Mary Heglar reflecting on different positions in climate communities.
Dark Matter Laboratories write about cities, growth, private and public gains. This dives into land, property, and the downsides of a land value tax.
As land has proved to be one of the main ways of creating wealth, it means that it now accounts for over half the UK’s wealth — making dealing with it a political hot potato. Governments know that building public infrastructure makes the value of the nearby land go up, and that the extra value goes directly to private landowners. In fact, they’ve even write reports on it — a TfL study looked at eight new infrastructure projects (including Crossrail and Crossrail 2) and their effect on nearby house prices. They found that if you added up the amount the houses within just 0.5km of a new station would increase over 30 years, it would come to around £87bn. That’s enough to pay for Crossrail almost five times over.Only a small proportion of this value is clawed back by the government; through things like stamp duty (3%); community infrastructure levies (4–12%); and direct over-station development (5–10%). Government also knows that taking action to try get more of that land value back will wipe huge amounts off the UK’s wealth. Not something any politician is eager to do.
The article goes on to look at the High Line in New York as an example, with some great visualisations.
All in, the High Line’s three sections combined cost was $187m — with public funds covering around 77% of this (from a mixture of New York City, federal and state government). The rest was raised by Friends of the High Line, a non-profit organisation set up to promote and maintain the walkway....
In the case of the High Line, property taxes only captured a tiny amount of the value that the project directly contributed to. If we solely look within 500m of the park their combined market value has gone up by $9.1bn between 2007–2018, yet if they’d gone up by the Manhattan mean, they would have only hit around $5.7bn. That means for properties within 500m of the High Line, it has contributed to $3.4bn of additional value, whilst property tax revenue has only gone up by $103m.
To reiterate — the High Line cost $187m to build, it contributed to an additional uplift of $3.4bn for nearby properties, yet the government has only received $103m in additional property tax. The rest went to private landowners. This begs the question as to what point the public should consider itself paid back, and at what social and economic cost should be deemed acceptable along the way. Viewed this way, the High Line is less a piece of public infrastructure, and more an infrastructure for privatising the public wealth.
The final part of the article looks at ways public infrastructure could be funded which lead to more public benefit - community shares, co-operative investments, etc.
How costs have changed over 50 years - analysis in the Guardian. Really interesting to see what's gone up, and what's gone down relative to what you'd expect from inflation. Houses and public transport are expensive; food is cheap; electronics and flights are also very cheap. Hmm.
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| Image from James Webb https://twitter.com/JamesWebb/status/1173676993688158208 |