Weeknotes: tech for good, theories of power, climate change, job roles
As ever, loosely grouped into topics in no particular order.
A helpful clarity from the Prepared:
Diane Coyle's thoughts on recent and upcoming books and reports on growth, stagnation and degrowth.
Via Ian Brown, a great FT review of books about what to do about climate change. More for the reading list!
Via Heather Leson, the idea of a theory of power:
Patrick Meier highlights how 'tech for good' is broken. Patrick works with drones for aid, so this is a very frank and reflective piece:
Patrick goes on to look at tech ethics with a 'tech for good' lens. The contrast between responsible technology development, and tech for good, is something I touched on previously here, as well as at Doteveryone over the years.
I liked this piece about how to manage recruitment and jobs in a changing world; some really compelling ideas for startups and growing organisations. (HT Cassie Robinson).
The Zebra movement is growing up in 2020, and its leaders are setting up structures to support the interest and local activities around the world. It's a combination of a co-op and a new investment fund.
Rich Bartlett on how groups pursuing new ways of working together aim high (and then agonise about failure to deliver):
Anab Jain calls for a more than human politics, in a super talk covering colonial histories, revolution, climate change, multi-species anthropology, and some of Superflux's work on experiential futures.
The Register on the latest survey of open source security. It's easy to imagine open source as just files you grab and reuse, but the code needs to be the code you think it is, so developer process and security are important. The more infrastructural the code, the more critical it is that you get the right stuff from the right people.
Whilst it's really a workshop at the upcoming RSA security conference, the supply chain sandbox page is a good overview of cybersecurity things to think about for your digital/physical supply chains, covering counterfeits, various risks and taints.
Via John Naughton, a David Spiegelhalter paper Should we trust algorithms? which succinctly captures much of what my work in recent years has been getting at. Starting of course with trustworthiness guru Onora O'Neill:
Matt Webb is thinking about new kinds of role:
I'd not read Mike Berners-Lee's latest book, There is No Planet B, so it was good to attend CCLS's lecture for a whistlestop tour of it. He was mostly preaching to the converted, but had a few salient points which feel worth noting.
Mike framed the anthropocene as "a chance to live better, if we don't blunder into living worse." A key challenge is the totally unclear timescale; another is the enmeshedness of inequality, biodiversity, pressures on food and housing, antimicrobial resistence, and other issues along with climate.
The book's title is a reference to the fact that whilst it might be a cute idea to move somewhere else - be it Mars or elsewhere - the energy bill to move the world's population would be so epic that it is entirely unfeasible.
The global fossil CO2 emissions curve since 1960 suggests there's been no improvement, even though we noticed climate change - because as carbon or energy savings are made in one place, they expand in others. A global, systems level shift is needed (and you can see this in Extinction Rebellion's call for systems change).
He focusses on food, and land and sea, more than energy. Based on a calorie breakdown, we'd get a huge gain simply by stopping feeding human food to animals; no need to go vegan or even vegetarian. There's enough food for everyone, if we do this. Interestingly, it turns out crustaceans are pretty high carbon intensity per calorie.
Mike talked a little about growth - the need to revisit how we think about this, economically and politically. It's maybe OK to grow biodiversity, or empathy - but not GDP.
We need to adjust our relationship with tech. Which technologies do we adopt and when? We need to consider against the wellbeing of people and planet, even if they are convenient and offer an efficiency improvement, which have traditionally been the tech adoption drivers.
He described the world as "too fragile" for business to "make money and do no harm, or do good on the side". Business can no longer be money-first; evidently the investment communities Mike works with are receptive to this idea.
Moving on to solutions, Mike offered a disclaimer that his background means he can't really talk about values. However, he proposes new thinking skills alongside values of all people being of inherent equal value; respect for the world, including all its life forms; and respect of truth for its own sake.
The thinking skills humanity needs -
Mike was still positive about individual action. We can imagine more, conceive of a better world, beyond just buying an electric card.- imagine food, happiness, homes, fun. Role model it the best you can. Develop the thinking skills and demonstrate them. Find our own areas of influence and push for this change now.
He specifically called out the school climate strikes, and XR 'at their best' as great examples of intelligent protest (although he also noted that XR could maybe do more to engage different communities, perhaps with free food for those in areas of food poverty for instance). As usual at Cambridge climate events, there was a call from an audience member for divestment and stopping taking funds for research into fossil fuel extraction.
Overall he was optimistic. The move to citizens assemblies and juries will be helpful for high quality decisions in this complex space. We need to transcend the political divides here.
Also this week, I ended up in various conversations about where we need to decarbonise most (heating, especially domestic, transport including haulage and marine as well as aviation). This was a nice Twitter thread about the challenges of electrifying UK domestic heating.
A deeply grateful shout out to Abbey Kos who gave me some super feedback a year ago, which I was reminded of this week. I always associate Abbey with McSweeney's, and here's a good example from this week: Jokes I’ve Told That My Male Colleagues Didn’t Like.
A helpful clarity from the Prepared:
I also found myself ruminating on how workshops like Savage's are wondrous, enchanting places - and how fabrication (the act of converting materials into parts and assemblies) looks almost nothing like manufacturing (the act of making a thing, over and over again, in a repeatable and predictable way). I love both of those things, and each of them is visually fascinating, but I try to be cognizant of the spectrum between them.Also via Spencer Wright a nice article describing the reasons why generative design may not be the future of all design.
Diane Coyle's thoughts on recent and upcoming books and reports on growth, stagnation and degrowth.
Via Ian Brown, a great FT review of books about what to do about climate change. More for the reading list!
Anatol Lieven... begins by arguing the fundamental obstacle to effective climate action is not a lack of technology or money but the dearth of motivation and mobilisation of elites around the world. Too many countries, he argues, are lumbered with “residual elites”, ruling groups shaped by past conflicts who are unable to adapt to the great challenge of climate change.I found the idea of residual counter-elites intriguing too, eg "green attitudes to migration were formed on the left of the political spectrum before mass migration to Europe existed, while their position on nuclear energy is derived from Cold War campaigns against nuclear weapons."
Via Heather Leson, the idea of a theory of power:
the critical distinction between a ‘theory of change’ and a ‘theory of power’, and the need for organizations to ground their work in the latter.
‘Theory of change’ has no set definition. So it’s likely that a lot of organizations already include a deep analysis of their power within that frame.... But I define them like this:
Theory of Change: How it’s going to work.
Theory of Power: Why it’s going to work.
Your theory of change should lay out what you’re going to do. Your theory of power should lay out why anyone will give a fuck. Too often, theories of change ignore the harsh realities and limitations of whether you are truly able to effect negative or positive consequences for your target. They focus on pressure points and levers vs. your capacity to actually apply the force required to win.
Patrick Meier highlights how 'tech for good' is broken. Patrick works with drones for aid, so this is a very frank and reflective piece:
It’s safe to say that our work with Flying Labs has garnered more attention about inequality through technology than it might have if we were an organization about inequality alone (c.f. Adebe et al. 2020). As Adebe and team rightly note, technology can “offer us a tractable focus through which to notice anew and bring renewed attention to old problems.” While the core focus of our work is very much on the broader problems of inequality, injustice, racism, discrimination, and the digital divide, framing these problems in part as a technology problem can help leverage resources and attention that might not accrue otherwise (Adebe et al. 2020).These are excellent points.
But this is a double-edged sword. “The significant risk, of course, is that a focus on the technological aspects of a problem can restrict our attention to merely those aspects. A computing [or technology] lens can have the effect of masking and pulling political capital away from other and more insidious facets of a problem, as well as other (non-technical) means of addressing it” (Adebe et al. 2020)
...
The “Technology for Good” sector is broken because technology alone is not the solution. The sector ought to be rebranded as “Not the Solution for Good” since it mostly fails to address deeper patterns of injustice and inequality.
Patrick goes on to look at tech ethics with a 'tech for good' lens. The contrast between responsible technology development, and tech for good, is something I touched on previously here, as well as at Doteveryone over the years.
Because technologists in the Global North are part of a broken political, economic, and social system that colonizes the public sphere through the use of technical rationality. Many of them are as much a product of this system as they are a victim of said system. Many recognize full well that the system is broken, which explains why they “love to see all the discourse around ethics in tech.” But at the same time, they note that “calling out tech workers who are just trying to earn an income and raise their kids for not caring enough about ethics leaves a bad taste in [their] mouth.” These self-aware technologists from the Global North must be included in the collective effort to fix the “Technology for Good” sector.Boom. As they say.
This, too, though, poses a risk as most technologists from the Global North are often not self-aware and thus look at problems in the Global South through the lens of technology alone. In doing so, they inevitably silence the plurality of perspectives. This paternalistic approach explains why “technology for good” projects in the Global South are often ineffective, unsustainable, and, at times, even harmful. To this end, and to paraphrase Adebe and team, a synecdochal focus on technology must walk a pragmatic—and tenuous—line between overemphasis on technical aspects, on the one hand, and due recognition of the work technology does to reinforce social systems, on the other.
I liked this piece about how to manage recruitment and jobs in a changing world; some really compelling ideas for startups and growing organisations. (HT Cassie Robinson).
Negotiated joining is a way to apply maintenance by design to organizational structure.Oli Sylvester-Bradley writes about the tools needed by different kinds of groups and communities, in a piece setting the scene for Open:2020 (tickets on sale now - London, June, open tech and co-ops and more). I'm in so many Slacks (and have some muted telegram and WhatsApp groups for communities I'm really not paying attention to, plus the Discords and Mattermosts I'm not bothering to log in to follow), not to mention email lists, and communities have so many forms, needs and abilities to access the tech they need. The question of which tool is right for a community needs some thought as migration always comes with pain, and Oli's separation into different group types is helpful - chatting, working, trading. I suspect 'working' might have two phases - exploring and doing, perhaps - but that might reflect my experience in more liminal communities where the tension between these two hasn't felt productive, to me.
Essentially, negotiated joining builds an organization in which members’ individual roles and the overall role structure are both malleable and responsive.
... The conventional approach to hiring is thus all but baked into how most organizations work—but for the organization (whether a for- or non-profit, a startup or established corporation) trying to prepare for an uncertain future, there’s probably no worse way to find new members.
...
The opposite of the soft and adaptable organization is a rigid organization with an optimized structure of predefined, stable member roles—in other words, any organization that hires conventionally, into conventionally static roles.
When the environment is stable or predictable, the highly adapted, rigid organization is undoubtedly more efficient. And the rigid organization may even be robust or well-designed enough to withstand small environmental changes with only minor performance declines.
The problem: small environmental changes don’t prompt the organization or its members to continually respond and adapt, because performance takes only a small hit. The way the organization works remains largely the same—and so the organization builds up failure debt. (This is another possible reading of Clayton Christensen’s innovator’s dilemma: as boiled frog syndrome for organizations).
The Zebra movement is growing up in 2020, and its leaders are setting up structures to support the interest and local activities around the world. It's a combination of a co-op and a new investment fund.
Rich Bartlett on how groups pursuing new ways of working together aim high (and then agonise about failure to deliver):
 |
| https://twitter.com/RichDecibels/status/1230903922707124224 |
Anab Jain calls for a more than human politics, in a super talk covering colonial histories, revolution, climate change, multi-species anthropology, and some of Superflux's work on experiential futures.
Whilst this idea of creating alternate experiential futures sounds great, it’s quite an uphill battle. We find that the desire to package these futures into neat solutions and roadmaps is overwhelmingly strong. But more than that, we have learnt that it is very difficult for people to not jump to immediate conclusions. There is a tendency to see this particular instantiation of a future presented in front of them as the future, and therefore a ‘prediction’, or be completely dismissive of it as it doesn’t align with their ideological worldview. The possibility of sitting with the discomfort of uncertainty and being open to multiple views of the world is difficult. ....
In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway, offers yet another such perspective that favours de-emphasising human exceptionalism in favour of such multispecism. What I have understood with the idea of staying with the trouble is the opening of possibility space. If you can move beyond quick fixes, we become open to the strange and the unknown, the ambiguous and the uncertain, the weird and the provisional....By seeing the self not as an individual hero, but as one among many — human and non-human — a new kind of tentacular, multi-kind, multi-species politics of care might emerge. A politics which does not rely on oppositional, binary, artificially constructed world views, one that is not obfuscated by the right and left or the neoliberals and communists, or whatever it is that you choose to follow. A politics that gives us a new kind of relational agency to help us imagine alternatives for living with and through global warming. A politics which allows us to invent new practices of more-than-human care, humility, imagination, interdependence, resistance, revolt, repair, and mourning.
The Register on the latest survey of open source security. It's easy to imagine open source as just files you grab and reuse, but the code needs to be the code you think it is, so developer process and security are important. The more infrastructural the code, the more critical it is that you get the right stuff from the right people.
Whilst it's really a workshop at the upcoming RSA security conference, the supply chain sandbox page is a good overview of cybersecurity things to think about for your digital/physical supply chains, covering counterfeits, various risks and taints.
Via John Naughton, a David Spiegelhalter paper Should we trust algorithms? which succinctly captures much of what my work in recent years has been getting at. Starting of course with trustworthiness guru Onora O'Neill:
I'd forgotten these and it was good to be reminded of them. David's final summary is excellent - applying to all machine learning systems as well as algorithms in general:Trustworthiness demands transparency, but not just ‘fishbowl’ transparency in which huge amounts of information are provided in indigestible form. Transparency does not necessarily provide explainability—if systems are very complex, even providing code will not be illuminating. Fortunately, Onora O’Neill has again made a major contribution in developing the idea of “intelligent transparency” (Royal Society, 2012), in which she argues that information should be
- accessible: interested people should be able to find it easily.
- intelligible: they should be able to understand it.
- useable: it should address their concerns.
- assessable: if requested, the basis for any claims should be available.
Finally, whenever I hear claims about any algorithm, my shortlist of questions I would like to ask include:I feel that question 5 is particularly important. ... Such humility is rare and to be prized.
- Is it any good when tried in new parts of the real world?
- Would something simpler, and more transparent and robust, be just as good?
- Could I explain how it works (in general) to anyone who is interested?
- Could I explain to an individual how it reached its conclusion in their particular case?
- Does it know when it is on shaky ground, and can it acknowledge uncertainty?
- Do people use it appropriately, with the right level of skepticism?
- Does it actually help in practice?
Matt Webb is thinking about new kinds of role:
It's pretty clear to me that in 10 years time, sustainability will have to be a VP role, if not a C-level role, and "circular transformation" (I just made that up, you can have it) will be a phrase for the 2020s just as "digital transformation" was for the 2010s.A nice article going over issues around maintenance and durability of consumer electronics. Nothing especially new to me, other than the end:
I didn’t call and say, “My wife’s phone isn’t working.” I called and said, “My wife can’t log into her iCloud on her phone.” That may seem like a small difference, but I think it’s a significant one in terms of how Apple responded to this. It’s the difference between, “I’m having trouble with something you no longer support,” and, “This problem could cost you money now if you don’t fix.”
Technology is going to keep evolving and over time we are going to reach theoretical limits of devices. But if they’re talking to the cloud and people are paying money to access those cloud services, eventually those devices are going to matter less to our tech companies. The cloud is going to matter far more—and it’s going to be in their interest to keep these devices functional in the long haul because their profitability will continue to matter even as the device ages.
I can’t imagine that Netflix will unceremoniously kill another generation of smart TVs without thinking really hard about it—because killing the next gen of smart TVs will hurt a lot more than killing the last one. It will cost them money.
I hope the pendulum shifts in this way. Because that is how planned obsolescence will lose.
I'd not read Mike Berners-Lee's latest book, There is No Planet B, so it was good to attend CCLS's lecture for a whistlestop tour of it. He was mostly preaching to the converted, but had a few salient points which feel worth noting.
Mike framed the anthropocene as "a chance to live better, if we don't blunder into living worse." A key challenge is the totally unclear timescale; another is the enmeshedness of inequality, biodiversity, pressures on food and housing, antimicrobial resistence, and other issues along with climate.
The book's title is a reference to the fact that whilst it might be a cute idea to move somewhere else - be it Mars or elsewhere - the energy bill to move the world's population would be so epic that it is entirely unfeasible.
The global fossil CO2 emissions curve since 1960 suggests there's been no improvement, even though we noticed climate change - because as carbon or energy savings are made in one place, they expand in others. A global, systems level shift is needed (and you can see this in Extinction Rebellion's call for systems change).
He focusses on food, and land and sea, more than energy. Based on a calorie breakdown, we'd get a huge gain simply by stopping feeding human food to animals; no need to go vegan or even vegetarian. There's enough food for everyone, if we do this. Interestingly, it turns out crustaceans are pretty high carbon intensity per calorie.
Mike talked a little about growth - the need to revisit how we think about this, economically and politically. It's maybe OK to grow biodiversity, or empathy - but not GDP.
We need to adjust our relationship with tech. Which technologies do we adopt and when? We need to consider against the wellbeing of people and planet, even if they are convenient and offer an efficiency improvement, which have traditionally been the tech adoption drivers.
He described the world as "too fragile" for business to "make money and do no harm, or do good on the side". Business can no longer be money-first; evidently the investment communities Mike works with are receptive to this idea.
Moving on to solutions, Mike offered a disclaimer that his background means he can't really talk about values. However, he proposes new thinking skills alongside values of all people being of inherent equal value; respect for the world, including all its life forms; and respect of truth for its own sake.
The thinking skills humanity needs -
Mike was still positive about individual action. We can imagine more, conceive of a better world, beyond just buying an electric card.- imagine food, happiness, homes, fun. Role model it the best you can. Develop the thinking skills and demonstrate them. Find our own areas of influence and push for this change now.
He specifically called out the school climate strikes, and XR 'at their best' as great examples of intelligent protest (although he also noted that XR could maybe do more to engage different communities, perhaps with free food for those in areas of food poverty for instance). As usual at Cambridge climate events, there was a call from an audience member for divestment and stopping taking funds for research into fossil fuel extraction.
Overall he was optimistic. The move to citizens assemblies and juries will be helpful for high quality decisions in this complex space. We need to transcend the political divides here.
Also this week, I ended up in various conversations about where we need to decarbonise most (heating, especially domestic, transport including haulage and marine as well as aviation). This was a nice Twitter thread about the challenges of electrifying UK domestic heating.
A deeply grateful shout out to Abbey Kos who gave me some super feedback a year ago, which I was reminded of this week. I always associate Abbey with McSweeney's, and here's a good example from this week: Jokes I’ve Told That My Male Colleagues Didn’t Like.
