Weeknotes: public spaces, glass, corruption, production boundary, post-truth
The last edition was a wall of text, so I resolved to make a concerted effort to post less, more often. Having made this resolution, a full "approximate week" (and a bit) has passed and lo, there is a lot of text again. I'll try to add some pictures (or at least images of things that amused me on Twitter).
What happens to public space, as everything moves outside for safety? Who gets access, for what? Who is affected - by potentially infectious crowds, by noise, by loss of amenity? From Drew Austin in Kneeling Bus:
But the movements of these private businesses into new spaces pose new challenges about who gets to occupy outside spaces that are increasingly in demand. Reopened parks, one of the few place to freely and safely congregate during coronavirus, are frequently packed. Many streets already have sidewalks filled with lines of people waiting to enter stores enforcing a low customer capacity. Add a new range of table service businesses to this busy streetscape, and issues about who get priority come to the fore. These questions have been exacerbated in a summer of unrest when, in the most extreme of examples, racial justice protesters demonstrate against police brutality in city streets where other people sit eating brunch.... Some cities are already clashing with another constituency: drivers and the businesses they serve. The California city of Pacific Grove canceled a plan barring cars from downtown streets to allow space for al fresco dining just five days into its run, after businesses that didn’t offer food service complained the plan was hindering access for their customers.
... Bars and restaurants in European city centers tend to have fewer customers who arrive directly on site by car, but their street spaces are often tighter. Most streets in historic cities such as Paris and Rome do have some free curb space, used more for unloading deliveries than long-term parking. Bars and restaurants tend to cluster in pedestrian-friendly areas where it’s hard to add tables without crowding pedestrians.
Dan Hancox has a long read in the Guardian about crowds, and how they behave, viewing them from inside and out, from joy or from fear.
Also from Drew Austin, perspectives on how we see the world:
In his 2018 book New Dark Age, James Bridle identifies the conspiracy theory as an essential coping mechanism of late modernity. He writes, “Surrounded by evidence of complexity, the individual, however outraged, resorts to ever more simplistic narratives in order to regain some control over the situation.”In our PPE response call on Thursday, someone pointed out that 1 in 1000 British people have died, but it feels like many people simply haven't been affected, because they seem so entirely free of concern now. Does the higher mortality rate in care homes mean so many simply don't know anyone who has been badly affected? There's a BBC write up of one rather close to home Cambridge case, showing how weird Covid-19 is. It's not "no symptoms" or "mild flu" or "die" by any means, but that seems to be missing from much of the media coverage. It's good to see the NHS is launching a service (website) to help people recover over the months.
...Rather than flippantly dismissing the complex information that doesn’t align with empirical reality, now we reinterpret our sensory environment through the paranoid lens of hidden layers and world-enveloping phenomena (perhaps because our previous dismissal burned us so badly).
...While Twitter users were arguing about spring break travelers in March and April (or protestors in June), thousands of nursing home residents and prisoners were invisibly dying, with little effort to build an equally compelling narrative about them. Public space and urban density continue to occupy a disproportionate place in the American imagination as threats, and while they certainly do represent some degree of transmission risk, our desire to focus our ire on youthful recklessness while ignoring our less photogenic but more vulnerable populations might say more about our own projected selves than any objective reality, if that even exists anymore.
Where did all the public funds for PPE go in the end anyway? Many of the local manufacturing projects produced face screens and so on via crowdfunders, supported by local people. Turns out the public funding went to some entirely unlikely companies (with no assets, no experience, etc) - thank goodness for the Good Law Project and others who are investigating and pursuing this question. (Details of the purchases are on TED (the European procurement listings site) - no idea if we keep using that or have a local equivalent for post-Brexit.)
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| https://twitter.com/apps_ltd/status/1279397851613798401 |
I still think we need universal basic services but maybe it's time for universal basic income as well. Diane Coyle writes about the difference between what we need and what we pay for in the New York Times:
Economists call the line between paid and unpaid work the “production boundary.” Increasingly, the ordinary activities of life involve crossing that boundary. When I use online banking to deposit a check or when I book my own hotel room, I am crossing the production boundary, substituting my own unpaid work for the paid work of bank tellers or travel agents....Similarly, many free online products — like TikToks, Wikipedia entries and social media posts — are substitutes for purchased equivalents in the media and entertainment. Millions of us donate our work to amuse or inform others, in a parallel economy in which others pay with their attention.....The digital economy, like the offline household and volunteer economy, is linking us in exchanges that are hard to measure in traditional economic terms, although they create much unpaid value. These activities do create a lot of monetary value for the owners of digital platforms......The striking disjunction between what we pay for and count in G.D.P. and what is valuable or “essential” to our lives is now unavoidable. But so far there seem to be few options for doing something about it, other than applauding essential workers or paying for advertising to salute them.
Those lucky professionals who can work at home continue to be paid, generating profits for the absurdly well-paid owners of their companies, but they, too, are doing more unpaid work at home and spending less money in the “official” economy. It may seem as if lockdown has caused an overall slowdown in all kinds of work, but as long as this shift toward unpaid work continues, income inequality — which was high even before the pandemic — will continue to worsen.
...Increases in the minimum wage, limits on executive pay and tougher antitrust policies, which would reduce corporate power, would not take long to reduce inequality of income....Introducing a universal basic income — usually defined as a guaranteed income provided by the government for every adult and child — would also be a recognition of the value of the essential unpaid work that everyone does, even those who are not part of the “paid” economy.
Via Alex Steffen, this piece by Kate Mackenzie highlights how climate risk measurement may exacerbate inequality, even whilst sustainable finance supposedly makes things better:
It’s tempting to assume that more information about the impacts of climate change leads to greater efforts to quickly cut emissions and build resilience. But the evidence of climate gentrification points in a different direction: Regions and people most affected by climate change will face higher barriers to get financing and investment. The money will simply leave....There’s an awkwardness here for the world of sustainable finance, which abides by concepts such as “doing good by doing well”—but it’s also the home of, and the market for, these new climate data services.... Information arbitrage is a big driver of market activity. If I, as a trader, know or think I know something that others don’t, then I’ll try to profit from that....climate impacts, by nature, are location-specific and climate services technology aims to identify exactly which areas are most exposed. Yet affluence and disadvantage are very strongly correlated to geography and mobility. That’s true within cities and countries and across the world. A second reason climate impact risk information is different is that these services are often drawing upon publicly funded climate science models, combined with commercially gathered information such as locations of assets, supply chains, and financial risk models....Both good and bad information can drive changes in prices as assets in actual or perceived climate-exposed areas are sold off and big capital investments are directed toward safer areas. The potential for opaqueness, and for perpetuating and magnifying discrimination, might have some similarities to redlining—the practice of U.S. mortgage lenders making credit less available, or less affordable, to those in areas that were home to Black communities....Individuals might know their risk of flood or wildfire will rise, but they have no way of predicting second order effects, such as when they can no longer get insurance or a mortgage on affordable terms. It will be similarly hard to predict when larger businesses begin withdrawing services or local governments become stretched by falling revenue and tighter credit. People who’ve built up lives in what seemed like a safe area over many years may find themselves economically and financially stranded.
The Royal Exchange in Manchester staged some of the most memorable and stunning plays of, well, my youth.
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| https://twitter.com/paulmasonnews/status/1278386184365002752 |
Yet more topics to write to one's MP about. Yes, sign the petition too. But writing isn't much more effort, but might have more impact. It's how our democracy is supposed to operate...
For a time, I worked at Polysolar on architectural solar glass. I learned a lot there, about solar panels and the construction industry and the peculiar joys and challenges of the kind of business where you sell big, custom solutions over a longer timescale than most consumer tech. One of the things that was surprising but shouldn't've been was how much glass goes into non-residential buildings - not in windows, but in facades and canopies. So I was interested to see In Abeyance featuring architectural glass, and the material issues of the fancier glasses we keep inventing and using:
Unlike many materials, glass is inherently circular in its lifecycle properties. This inherent understanding of the recyclable nature of glass is understood across the world. An understanding reinforced by the participation in a shared activity of recycling glass bottles of sugary water3. The architectural glass industry has chosen to completely ignore this property of glass as most post-consumer glass is neither reused or recycled.
... In contrast, the steel industry shows the destination that glass should hope to imitate. The structural steel industry reports that 7% of the steel is reused while an incredible 93% is recycled.
... The first is apathy around this subject, at both governmental and commercial levels. The financial incentives to reuse or recycle the material are scant. ...
The second reason is technical. As we have introduced elements to the process, we have painted ourselves into a technical corner [that hinders] the recycling of glass.
... While the glass itself is an inert material and can last for many decades without needing replacement, there are weak points in the system. In the coming decades, the gaskets, seals and frames will near the end of their usefulness. The glass frame will either need to be replaced or removed. While this presents a massive challenge, it also presents an opportunity for those that position themselves.There's a statement signed by, well, many of the great and good I suppose, that we should Build Back Better, in deeds, not just as a slogan. Normal folks can sign it too.
We must replace the era of wanton excess and single use with methods and practices that attend to our inheritance. We should be ready for the challenges we know are coming.
Oliver May's article for New Humanitarian about fraud in aid, via Linnet Taylor:
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Our sector needs more than the incremental changes that follow discreet investigations: it needs a fundamental shift in how we deter, prevent, detect, and respond to integrity incidents.
Firstly, that means being more proactive and recognising the links between integrity and conduct risks. Fraud, terrorist diversion, and sexual harassment and abuse, for example, are often enabled by the same kinds of organisational vulnerabilities, especially around culture, transparency, and accountability.... Modern aid work is technical and complex and needs to be resourced accordingly. We recognise the dangers of running hospitals and airports on shoestring budgets – what prevents us from recognising these dangers for aid? Too many of us accept programme under-management in a volatile, complicated country context.... Managing fraud and corruption risk is a specialist endeavour, for example, while ensuring that local expertise is incorporated at all stages of the programme cycle requires investment in systems and practices. There are also allied challenges to fraud prevention and detection. Current financial reporting practices that encourage a false distinction between ‘operations’ and ‘overheads’ are part of that story.... While we readily speculate on why people commit fraud, we also need to consider how our cognitive errors, biases, and heuristics affect our management of the risk. Corruption is not simply perpetrated, but enabled, whether at an individual or corporate level.
Aid work is not that different from local service provision here, perhaps.
The Festival of Maintenance and the Maintainers ran our first joint online event, about the gig economy, a precarious form of maintenance. It's now on YouTube. The discussion with Katie Wells and Niels van Doorn was great, and I was struck by a few points about how gig work platforms interact with the political sphere. Obviously they are a major lobby force, as many corporations are, but they have tech in their favour - no one wants to be seen as against innovation. They also support people who are partially employed or underemployed, which gives them a lot of political power - if Uber loses its licence in a major city like London, that's tens of thousands of men becoming unemployed, and political suicide for any politicians who caused it. So their own workforce is weaponised, alongside their data - such companies have useful information governments can't access, which can be used as capital in regulatory arbitrage, and shifting to regulatory entrepreneurship. We'll be hosting more online events soon.
The CMA report on Google and Facebook came out and seemed well received by those who understand these issues. There's a nice Twitter thread summary from Thibault Larger. Will be interesting to see what the government decide to do about it.
Open SDG is "an open source, free-to-reuse platform for managing and publishing data and statistics related to the UN Sustainable Development Goals".
This Register article was interesting to me because maintenance, obviously, but particularly the way Linux maintenance has changed over time. In the early days, you could show up and easily end up a maintainer, and the work was perhaps more interesting as things were new. (I recall the days of fiddling with ARM Linux around 2000-2002 and I guess it was like that then.) Now you need a lot more stability and dedication, which seems scarce; and the older generation are, well, getting older. There's all kinds of other issues relating to this community discouraging minorities and being unpleasant, but I think the evolution bit specifically is interesting. Maybe a more diverse community would bubble up more maintainers? I wonder also whether there are other codebase stewardship models that don't require that small number of individuals who are 'leading', more or less - something more collaborative, that still gets the work done?Using a reporting platform such as Open SDG facilitates countries and organisations to:
- Gather, disseminate, and track national or local data on the SDG indicators, including identification of data gaps.
- Improve access to official statistics and metadata.
For countries, a national reporting platform also enables them to:
- Report country national data to be harmonized for international purposes (i.e. UN global indicator database).
- Improve communication between data providers, National Statistics Offices (NSOs), custodian agencies, and other stakeholders.
I hear this boring (safe, stable results, routine forms of work and testing) vs creative (new, experimental, interesting, fast) dichotomy a lot in tech. This article made me think more about the fundamental differences with care, where good care is routine, repeated, reliable - and that this can itself be fulfilling, because you are tending something you care about. Perhaps this aspect isn't considered enough when thinking about how to encourage more tech maintenance?
Shannon Mattern shared her 2015 piece on library logistics. This particular logistics centre serving New York and Brooklyn is called BookOps. BookOps! What a great term - edgy, action-orientated. We should have more terms like this to help activities seen as unexciting (I'm thinking of maintenance things here partly) present themselves honestly but more catchily.
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| https://twitter.com/DrSJFine/status/1278297177425612800 |
This week's Talking Politics podcast was about Brexit, and was really informative about the constitutional issues we face now.
A vintage Shannon Mattern article on dashboards for cities.
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| https://twitter.com/scottjenson/status/1279174063982653440 |
It's slightly depressing to see how many people's experience of games are these things; no wonder many people view gaming negatively. On the other hand, maybe the mindless clicking is what folks need to get through their commutes etc.
TechCrunch interviews Tim O'Reilly about venture capital - and why it currently makes less sense for more founders.
My partner Bryce decided two funds ago [to] look for companies that are kind of disparaged as lifestyle companies that are trying to build sustainable businesses with cash flow and profits. They’re the kind of small businesses, and small business entrepreneurs, that have vanished from America, partly because of the VC myth, which is really about creating financial instruments for the wealthy.
... It’s breaking the business model isolationism of Silicon Valley that says: Only things that fit this particular profile are worth investing in.
... That’s what we have to really think about. It’s not: How do we get more Black and brown founders into this broken Silicon Valley model? It’s: How do we go figure out what the opportunities are helping them to grow businesses in their communities?
... As I said, I’ve been really disillusioned with Silicon Valley investing for a long time. It reminds me of Wall Street going up to 2008. The idea was, ‘As long as someone wants to buy this [collateralized debt obligation], we’re good.’ Nobody is thinking about: Is this a good product?
So many things that VCs have created are really financial instruments like those CDOs. They aren’t really thinking about whether this is a company that could survive on revenue from its customers. Deals are designed entirely around an exit. As long as you can get some sucker to take them, [you’re good]. So many acquisitions fail, for example, but the VCs are happy because — guess what? — they got their exit.
... you know that VC returns have actually lagged public markets for four decades now. It’s a little bit like the lottery. The only sure winners are the VCs because the VCs who don’t return their fund get their management fees every year.
What makes a man, in the year 2020, register a twitter account, (possibly) buy a bunch of followers, then spend a couple of months building up something like a brand identity, before launching into the world a badly written, obviously untrue story about a bunch of stereotypically clueless Little Englanders, their witty writer neighbour, his accomplished, glamorous French wife, and a whacky mayor? Why now – when Brexit as a political controversy is all-but done, and a post-Brexit UK is now being torn apart by a pandemic? And why the enthusiasm for it: why did so many people seem excited by the story? Why were they taken in?
I do think this might be slightly inaccurate - I don't think all (most?) fans thought it was real. There's a place for fiction, and this was an entertaining thread. Nonetheless:
In a previous article for this website, I argued that post-truth is not about facts, but about desire; that people are receptive to fake news and social media posts when the lies these stories are reporting fit, somehow, their ideas about how they would like the world to be. It is clear, I think, that the R.S. Archer story chimes perfectly with the desires of a certain sort of (often quite obsessive) Remain-supporting British voter. Like liberal American ‘Never Trump’ types, this political tribe typically sees the world in very clear-cut terms, where they – self-consciously sophisticated, well-educated, and comfortable with other cultures (even if their views of said cultures are often highly stereotyped themselves) – are always sensible and right, and their opponents are always stupid and deluded, with no deeper explanation for their political choices ever needed. Archer’s story, in particular, is rife with thinly veiled classism, especially with regards to the idiot son, a cartoonishly thick pillock who works, we are told, as a tire fitter. Indeed: so heavy-handed is Archer’s characterization that it is tempting to read the whole enterprise as a way of sending up Remainers, who have been so utterly and enthusiastically taken in.
... At any rate, there is clearly something about the story which Archer’s target audience find somehow comforting: the story feels like a retreat into old certainties, of the sort that existed before the pandemic cleaved everything in two. A number of accounts have even explicitly commented that they feel its reality or otherwise hardly matters: people seem happy to suspend their disbelief about it, because they would prefer to live in a world in which they can feel like it might be true...
(HT @direlog)
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| https://twitter.com/APHClarkson/status/1279478784752844801 |
All the Lego computer interfaces. I've been interviewing for more or less (mostly more) technology-oriented jobs recently. Aside from the pandemic, I am rather fussy these days as to whom I will work for and what on, so this is a slow process. It's made me reflect on how I position myself, as a tech generalist, or more specifically, a deep/emerging digital tech generalist, I suppose. There's so much to read and learn, and lately I've been reading more things outside tech, or on the edges, which feels more appropriate for the decade to come as well as more useful in broadening my outlook. Generalists need to be broad, although I sometimes think I'm not exactly a generalist, or a T-shape, but more of a comb - a range of unlikely moderately deep bits of knowledge amidst the breadth. Anyway, I wonder if I should be reading more tech stuff, and if so, where I should find it. What or who is good without being too narrowly specific, or focussed excessively on news? I read tech news anyway, but it's not giving me much in the way of intriguing spots I feel should go here. Ideas welcome.