Fortnightnotes: bullshit jobs, business and inequality, open source
David Graeber (of Bullshit Jobs fame) spoke at Chaos about managerial feudalism and the caring classes. It's a great talk, describing how everyday people's experience of the workplace is shaping their choices in politics and around Brexit. He also talks about our focus on production activities, using a nice example of a teacup - you make it once, but use it for service and wash it many times.
Graeber recurs in a recent edition of Drew Austin's Kneeling Bus:
Jeni Tennison writes about the problems of individual consent to data use, and ideas of community consent as an alternative. Also a good reminder of the labour of maintaining your online preferences (assuming you have the time, ability and understanding to do so).
It feels like there's some distant connection to these ideas for online community governance in the form of "Modular Politics" [commentable doc].
Sinead Doyle writes about services coming to an end, with the simple and clear example of an old email address. Emails and the app and website logins for services are everyday things, but deeply intertwined in ways which are hard to untangle or change. (There's also a useful point about how to communicate to users about services terminating, too.)
Nathan Matias at Cornell has been writing about funding and research independence, describing how CAT Lab is addressing these issues.
Belinda Bell spoke at a Cambridge Commons event about the role of business in addressing inequality. Bridging business and civil society is important for change-making activism - not corporate social responsibility, but businesses supporting social change through their main work, intentionally. You can get social goods from market-based tools; markets scale in a way philanthropy doesn't. Belinda had some interesting examples of socially-valuable businesses from Cambridgeshire - such as Harry Spectre's chocolates, and various community land trusts. The discussion covered the risk of losing social mission (like the Body Shop), and the importance of thinking about politics and power in designing businesses for change. Despite enthusiasm from young people to start co-ops and social ventures, t's perhaps harder to create social good in a regular business in the current era than it was in the past. On the other hand, we look back to examples like Bournville's worker practices, but miss that we should consider these with a long term eye - Bournville continued to amass prodigious levels of wealth, and the social impact didn't sustain. Modern social enterprises have grown slower than hoped - it turns out to be really tough to profit and do good at the same time.
The group posed some tough questions. Are there any big companies where bad things (dehumanising behaviour, exploitation of different forms) don't happen? Do people really generally want to do good?
There are steps being taken - businesses converting to co-ops; examples of local buying (the Preston model for instance), stories emerging of great small businesses. That may be the grounds for optimism - the UK is good at small enterprises, and they are easier to regulate and support than large ones. Maybe we don't need to scale our ventures, and can create more, good, small ones.
Belinda's closing call to action was that we must retain humility. Not everyone realises that there are problems with inequality, or problems they could play a role in addressing.
Belinda also mentioned efforts to reform the UK Companies Act, so it would provide a better basis for business. One is howdocompaniesact.org -
This week I joined the board of OpenUK.
We refined the organisation's purpose at a workshop this week, settling on develop and sustain UK leadership in Open technology. There's also a clearer vision -
Open source licensing is in an interesting state. There are more projects appearing which seek to use the framework of software licensing to achieve aims which open source perhaps was not designed for. These goals include both 'tech ethics' issues and newer, complex data and software interactions. The Holo project has been progressing since I last wrote about it, and wants a new licence which is both open and which imposes some controls over data handling within Holo's distributed systems. There's a question over whether such a licence is indeed open, as well as the problem of licence proliferation (licences work well when each is well understood and legally proven, so fewer is better). As most software isn't used in isolation, but as part of larger complex systems, the way licences work together (or don't) is important. As well as the Vaccine licence mentioned in the Register article linked above, there's also the Ethical Source Licence - this too seeks to be an open source licence. IANAL, as they say; but law is how software licences work and are enforced, so licence design needs to consider law, and the vague (and evolving) ideas of what might be ethical, or "doing no harm" to certain populations, feel like a stretch to enforce at this level. (Aside from the question of enforcement itself - which usually requires lots of money for lawyers.) I can see the appeal of licensing as a tool to address problems, especially for those familiar with open source, but I'm far from convinced it's a useful way forward in this area. An interesting provocation, though, to raise awareness and get people thinking. There's also the Peer Production Licence, to support nonprofits, co-ops and commons projects, which feels closer to enforceable (insofar as Creative Commons Non-commercial is - reasonably clearly defined), although clearly not open, but sharing some of the motivations of some of the open movement.
Then there's articles critiquing open in other ways, like this one, which I have sympathy with too.
It's good to have some challenge as we embark on a new era for OpenUK. (I've spoken to a couple of people in the last fortnight who are struggling with "for good" projects where they only ever get enthusiastic responses, and who are looking for constructive feedback to help them grow.)
Are we putting too much trust in podcasts?
BIG newsletter by Matt Stoller features some thoughts on manufacturing and tariffs (US focus):
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino is setting up the Low Carbon Design Institute. You can take part in this new form of design education in July - applications open now.
When I first got a Fairphone - a Fairphone 1 - it was a choice between a fairtrade device, and a privacy-supporting one like BlackPhone. I went for the Fairphone because of an interest in sustainable electronics, but it seemed tough to have to pick between that and personal privacy/security. Thanks Linnet for the reminder:
Fallen London is ten years old. I've been an erratic player through that time, appreciating the world building, the writing, the mysteries and the unexpected.
Graeber recurs in a recent edition of Drew Austin's Kneeling Bus:
Last year, I wrote an essay for Real Life about AirPods despite not owning a pair myself at the time. That was intentional and fairly essential to the piece, as I was examining the earbuds’ externalities: how it feels to inhabit public space without an increasingly ubiquitous pair of headphones when everyone else is wearing them. If AirPods offer a near-perfect user experience to the users themselves, what kind of user experience do they impose upon the non-users? (That’s a good question to ask about many things, by the way). Anyway, I finally stopped resisting and have my own AirPods now. They’re mostly good and bad in all the ways I expected. The feeling of activating noise cancellation by squeezing the bud’s stalk for the first time was one of those technology moments that I’ll never forget—feeling the hum of the external world dim as smoothly as a laptop screen's brightness. The feature seems like black magic, transforming physical reality into another device setting; I immediately cautioned myself to use it sparingly. Interestingly, the noise-cancellation toggle, by highlighting that contrast between silence and the textured ambient noise that always surrounds us, has actually increased my awareness of the latter, along with my desire to hear it rather than block it.Definitely a target speaker for a future Festival of Maintenance!
David Graeber’s thesis about technological progress—that we were promised flying cars but got apps instead—seems like another way of saying that it’s easier to modify our subjective experience of the environment than to modify the environment itself. The urban planner in me hates to acknowledge the possibility that we might be giving up on building or maintaining any sort of commons, and are instead channeling our ingenuity into tools that let us shape our personalized realties in increasingly sophisticated ways. AirPods are yet another reminder that today’s seemingly fixed and unchangeable conditions might become tomorrow’s customizable preferences.
Jeni Tennison writes about the problems of individual consent to data use, and ideas of community consent as an alternative. Also a good reminder of the labour of maintaining your online preferences (assuming you have the time, ability and understanding to do so).
It feels like there's some distant connection to these ideas for online community governance in the form of "Modular Politics" [commentable doc].
Sinead Doyle writes about services coming to an end, with the simple and clear example of an old email address. Emails and the app and website logins for services are everyday things, but deeply intertwined in ways which are hard to untangle or change. (There's also a useful point about how to communicate to users about services terminating, too.)
Every service my parents use is tied to that email address. And every single one would need changing, or at some point in the future, it would stop working. Even compiling a list of accounts to check and update was a daunting task.If you find newsletters are useful, but clog up your email inbox, you can turn them into RSS and read them at your leisure. I'm converting my subscriptions now, as my email inbox is more of a to-do or to-reply list and newsletters are a distraction when I'm in tactical mode. (HT The Prepared)
We started with the most obvious accounts: Facebook, Apple ID, and Microsoft. These accounts were active, regularly used, and logged in on multiple browsers and devices. Even so, changing the main email associated with an account is not always easy. Some providers make a distinction between your sign in email, used to identify you when you log in, and your primary email, which might be your main address to receive communications. Often, a service provider won’t allow these two to be the same! So we went through this dance of trying to change an email, failing, navigating to another section of an account, changing a different email (often by adding “+[service name]” to the same email address, saving, trying again and crossing our fingers.
Nathan Matias at Cornell has been writing about funding and research independence, describing how CAT Lab is addressing these issues.
After a century of scandals over corporate influence on research in medicine, public health, nutrition, and climate change, many institutions accept industry money while trying to protect researchers from substantive influence. These mechanisms include undirected gifts, research fellowships/grants, industry labs, consortia like the Partnership on AI, corporate foundations like Google.org, and many others. But remember: even when companies don’t directly tell researchers what to study or alter findings, they set the agenda with topic-specific grants and decisions about which applications to fund.
Good work is expensive, so researchers and institutions take funds from industry while trying to stay independent-minded. Examples include convenors of people and ideas like Data&Society, the MIT Media Lab, the New America Foundation, Princeton’s Center for IT Policy, etc. To work well, these organizations need to be (a) useful enough for companies to invest, (b) critical enough to be trusted by the public, and (c) have institutional protections for intellectual freedom.
Belinda Bell spoke at a Cambridge Commons event about the role of business in addressing inequality. Bridging business and civil society is important for change-making activism - not corporate social responsibility, but businesses supporting social change through their main work, intentionally. You can get social goods from market-based tools; markets scale in a way philanthropy doesn't. Belinda had some interesting examples of socially-valuable businesses from Cambridgeshire - such as Harry Spectre's chocolates, and various community land trusts. The discussion covered the risk of losing social mission (like the Body Shop), and the importance of thinking about politics and power in designing businesses for change. Despite enthusiasm from young people to start co-ops and social ventures, t's perhaps harder to create social good in a regular business in the current era than it was in the past. On the other hand, we look back to examples like Bournville's worker practices, but miss that we should consider these with a long term eye - Bournville continued to amass prodigious levels of wealth, and the social impact didn't sustain. Modern social enterprises have grown slower than hoped - it turns out to be really tough to profit and do good at the same time.
The group posed some tough questions. Are there any big companies where bad things (dehumanising behaviour, exploitation of different forms) don't happen? Do people really generally want to do good?
There are steps being taken - businesses converting to co-ops; examples of local buying (the Preston model for instance), stories emerging of great small businesses. That may be the grounds for optimism - the UK is good at small enterprises, and they are easier to regulate and support than large ones. Maybe we don't need to scale our ventures, and can create more, good, small ones.
Belinda's closing call to action was that we must retain humility. Not everyone realises that there are problems with inequality, or problems they could play a role in addressing.
Belinda also mentioned efforts to reform the UK Companies Act, so it would provide a better basis for business. One is howdocompaniesact.org -
Are the basic accounting principles that have developed over hundreds of years still fit for purpose? The principles upon which accounting and reporting are based have a massive influence on the world we live in, on relative prices and on investment flows. The relationships are becoming ever more critical between business and society, and between financial markets and inequality. We believe that we should be having a wider discussion on the nature of accounting principles. They are a public good and have been socially constructed but they are not generally considered when we think about solutions to global challenges.The key asks of #OperationUpgrade are:
The Companies Act 2006 provides the structure around the environment in which businesses operate, and we believe by changing the wording in various sections, we can create a more rigorous environment which businesses operate, and will allow us as investors, even in our own pensions, to have more power over what our money is invested in, and increase our buying power.
A change to the default model of company purpose set out in s172 of the Companies Act to require all companies to seek to ensure, at a minimum, that their business activities have a positive impact on society and the environment, alongside benefit to shareholders. This would in turn have the effect of changing the nature and shape of directors’ duties to companies; and
A requirement for all companies to produce an annual impact report which discloses the positive and negative impacts each company has on society and the environment. In the case of companies which are subject to audit, the new impact report would also be subject to audit.
This week I joined the board of OpenUK.
We refined the organisation's purpose at a workshop this week, settling on develop and sustain UK leadership in Open technology. There's also a clearer vision -
- Open technology is the norm across UK public services, businesses and individuals.
- The UK is recognised as the leader in education and skills training in Open technology.
- Open technology forms the basis of the UK’s thriving knowledge economy.
Open source licensing is in an interesting state. There are more projects appearing which seek to use the framework of software licensing to achieve aims which open source perhaps was not designed for. These goals include both 'tech ethics' issues and newer, complex data and software interactions. The Holo project has been progressing since I last wrote about it, and wants a new licence which is both open and which imposes some controls over data handling within Holo's distributed systems. There's a question over whether such a licence is indeed open, as well as the problem of licence proliferation (licences work well when each is well understood and legally proven, so fewer is better). As most software isn't used in isolation, but as part of larger complex systems, the way licences work together (or don't) is important. As well as the Vaccine licence mentioned in the Register article linked above, there's also the Ethical Source Licence - this too seeks to be an open source licence. IANAL, as they say; but law is how software licences work and are enforced, so licence design needs to consider law, and the vague (and evolving) ideas of what might be ethical, or "doing no harm" to certain populations, feel like a stretch to enforce at this level. (Aside from the question of enforcement itself - which usually requires lots of money for lawyers.) I can see the appeal of licensing as a tool to address problems, especially for those familiar with open source, but I'm far from convinced it's a useful way forward in this area. An interesting provocation, though, to raise awareness and get people thinking. There's also the Peer Production Licence, to support nonprofits, co-ops and commons projects, which feels closer to enforceable (insofar as Creative Commons Non-commercial is - reasonably clearly defined), although clearly not open, but sharing some of the motivations of some of the open movement.
Then there's articles critiquing open in other ways, like this one, which I have sympathy with too.
It’s time for open to disband.
The leaders have proven themselves morally bankrupt. The community is toxic. Copyright and software licences have failed to control bad actors and to support marginalised creators. The underlying theory is flawed and shallow. It’s time to move on and create a new wave of ethics focused community management tools for code and content.
.... It’s time to build a new movement, one fit for an era of rising fascism and climate justice. A movement that centres marginalised creators and users. A movement based on a theory of change that isn’t childlike and naive in its emphasis on formal legal documents. A movement that focuses on dismantling power structures and building solidarity across diverse groups.
We need to create what Sarah Mei calls “justice oriented software.” Except we need it for more than software. We need “justice oriented” data, “justice oriented” education, “justice oriented” science, “justice oriented” government, and “justice oriented” access to scholarly literature.
... Maybe you thought that’s what “open” meant? I know I did and I suspect that’s what most GLAM sector workers, teachers, and public servants who have been supporting open thought too. I guess that’s our bad for not looking critically enough.I entirely agree that open theories of change are sometimes shallow or wrong. There are also a lot of different opens - in 2014 for instance the Open Knowledge Foundation had 26 working groups. Each has a different mission - a different vision of a better world. Sure, there are some common strands, but the theories of change were/are different not just in type of activity, but in timescale and eventual impact.
Our commitment to openness has foreclosed our imaginations. So long as the problem is defined as one of ‘closure,’ open projects will be blind to other politics, other ways of knowing and understanding how we organise, how we share power, and how we imagine our shared future. The framing of ‘open’ versus ‘closed’ leaves us without the tools needed to confront violent extremism, online radicalisation, rising inequality, and ecological catastrophe.There are other reasons for open, of course; it should be a means to an end, not the end in itself.
It's good to have some challenge as we embark on a new era for OpenUK. (I've spoken to a couple of people in the last fortnight who are struggling with "for good" projects where they only ever get enthusiastic responses, and who are looking for constructive feedback to help them grow.)
Are we putting too much trust in podcasts?
... it is time to recognize that, for all their storytelling power, their ingenious splicing of voices, anecdotes, and arguments, many of the new podcasts have come to resemble something closer to non-fiction theater than to expository journalism. And as long as Big Podcasting is allowed to flourish in the digital Wild West—beyond the remit of informed criticism—we listen to them at our peril.
BIG newsletter by Matt Stoller features some thoughts on manufacturing and tariffs (US focus):
[Jantz] represents the Evangelical Publisher's Association, which sells religious texts. These publishers wanted to avoid bibles being subjected to tariffs. Here’s Jantz:The Verge takes a deep dive into the environmental impact of the Sony Playstation4 (including an unexpected photo of my old Engineering Department).
Chinese printers have developed the technology and the artistry to produce the kinds of bibles people want which is why over 50 percent of the bibles published by ECPA members are printed in China. In fact, more bibles are printed in China than any other country on earth.
This isn’t some high tech industry, it’s printing books.
... While there are some domestic printing options available, the U.S. printers, as has been remarked already, that are comparable to China on price and quality do not have the capacity to meet current demand.
... The people who buy and read the bible would potentially have to pay a much higher price, perhaps higher than they could justify.
....But the point here is [...] about whether we as a society value the ability to produce things. We certainly used to. We could make fantastic airplanes and invent a host of wonderful technologically sophisticated products to improve our lives. And yet today, our book distributors tell us we can’t even print books. There are a lot of reason for that, but the main one is that we have elevated the rights of financiers over the rights of workers, engineers, farmers, artists and businesspeople.
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino is setting up the Low Carbon Design Institute. You can take part in this new form of design education in July - applications open now.
When I first got a Fairphone - a Fairphone 1 - it was a choice between a fairtrade device, and a privacy-supporting one like BlackPhone. I went for the Fairphone because of an interest in sustainable electronics, but it seemed tough to have to pick between that and personal privacy/security. Thanks Linnet for the reminder:
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| https://twitter.com/linnetelwin/status/1214891901737943040 |
Fallen London is ten years old. I've been an erratic player through that time, appreciating the world building, the writing, the mysteries and the unexpected.
 |
| https://www.fallenlondon.com/profile/Dr%20Laurie |