Weeknotes: geo-engineering, consequences, funding, a poem
A dire warning reported in the Guardian:
The climate emergency is already hitting “worst case scenario” levels that if left unchecked will lead to the collapse of ecosystems, with dire consequences for humanity, according to the chief executive of the Environment Agency.
Warning that this is not “science fiction”, Sir James Bevan said on Tuesday that in recent years several of the “reasonable worst case scenarios” had happened in the UK, with more extreme weather and flooding.... “The net effects will collapse ecosystems, slash crop yields, take out the infrastructure that our civilisation depends on, and destroy the basis of the modern economy and modern society.
“If [this] sounds like science fiction let me tell you something you need to know. This is that over the last few years the reasonable worst case for several of the flood incidents the EA has responded to has actually happened, and it’s getting larger."
David Finnigan on geo-engineering and personal moral hazard:
[Geoengineering] has led to one of the most intense (and heated) debates in climate science. For over a decade, researchers, activists and funders have argued - not about whether to deploy the technology, but about whether to even study it. Is it a 'a terrifying solution whose time has come', or a hubristic techno-fix which will do more harm than good?
The fear is that even knowing how to do it will inevitably lead us to do it. This is the 'moral hazard' of argument of geoengineering (what a phrase). Critics argue that funding the research will give governments and fossil fuel companies an excuse to continue burning fossil fuels, by offering the suggestion of a quick fix. In other words, given the prospect of a medicine that could abate some of our symptoms, governments and businesses will choose to continue making us sick.
On the one hand, that seems absurd. On the other hand, as someone who's lived through the last thirty years of climate politics, that seems... pretty plausible to me?
... I was half-certain that solar radiation management projects would be first introduced by stealth, and if that happened, I would be furious.
It turns out that I was complete correct about the introduction by stealth, but completely wrong about my own reaction.
Coming soon: This year, Now Play This will take place on 25 - 28 March 2021 as an
online festival full of games, workshops and conversations that you can
join from around the world.
The four-day programme will explore the relationship between play, games
and the climate crisis. What can playful art teach us about agency,
resources and cooperation? Can games inspire us to relate sustainably to
each other and to the environments around us? Is games culture
complicit in this crisis?
 |
| https://nowplaythis.net/ |
I saw a bunch of comments on Twitter objecting to the term “unintended consequences” when it comes to the use of data and tech. The words we use matter and it’s useful to examine them. I understand the objection to “unintended consequences” when it’s used to describe consequences that arise from people, purposefully or through lack of thought, ignoring adverse consequences of tech and the people who point them out. But I do think that there are sometimes consequences to new technologies that are unpredictable, simply because we live in a hugely complex and interdependent world, where even with the best consideration, will and preventative action in the world, shit happens. Unknown unknowns. I’m going to try using “ignored consequences” and “unpredictable consequences” for these two types of outcomes in future.
I'm going to try using these two phrases too.
A fascinating lecture by Diane Coyle on progress, data, and more.
 |
| image from Diane's lecture |
Dan Hon notes (highlight mine):
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are stupid and interest in them is more about finding new and exciting ways to add scarcity where scarcity didn’t exist, so in that sense the whole horrific mess is less about software and blockchain and so on and more about the creeping (by this point, a fucking enormous tidal wave) of finance eating the world, not software — the software is just helping.
Bill Thompson is correct in this post about Facebook's Oversight Board - there is no meaningful "see the algorithm" and even if there was, it wouldn't help.
I continue to find myself more skeptical about open - in that whilst it is essential in many things, it is not a universal unalloyed good. So it was interesting to see the launch of Open Future:
We believe in openness, but also believe that it needs to be imagined anew. Today, openness increasingly functions as not just a challenge to concentrations of power, but also their enabler. Openness, once a rebel vision, is now part of the status quo - one that needs to be questioned.We believe that open sharing and the commons still hold great promise. Yet we need to evolve the mode of operation and adapt to a changing environment that has become increasingly centralised. We need a new vision of open, resilient against abuse and unintended externalities.Bryce Roberts announced the end of IndieVC, which supported different kinds of business to most tech venture capital; turns out that institutional investors (the kind which put money into VC funds) don't like it much. Zebras Unite comment:
VC cannot be “fixed.” VC is a specific tool used to drive a specific type of growth for a specific kind of company. It can produce harmful outcomes if outsized returns are prioritized over the company’s sustainable growth. If we want new outcomes, we need new funding models. Indie.vc was one of them. These models exist and they have names: revenue-based financing (like the 1863 Fund), character-based loans (like the Matriarch Fund), worker-ownership conversion (like the Main Street Phoenix Fund), and equity injections (like the Community Equity Fund). These emerging products on the market serve the chasm Bryce identified (and more are invented every day). Let’s pour our effort into connecting these capital innovations.
Drew Austin on community, highlight mine:
One of the concepts that has evolved the most in the past year is that of “community.” We all have a sense of its historical meaning, which could vary considerably but almost always implied a shared physical context. More recently, and especially this decade, community became a popular marketing term, largely because community is something scarce that everyone wants; however, this deployment of the term was frequently empty, usually referring to “a group of people who share a characteristic” and in practice bearing little relation to the word’s established meaning.
... Internet users were already seeking something more intimate than the Hobbesian plains of social media, taking the relationships they had formed on the clearnet and porting them to various private enclaves... These enclave-based internet communities are closer to the word’s traditional meaning, but they still aren’t quite communities. An important aspect of a true community, I think, is that you can really only be a part of one at a time.
... Online, in contrast, I can join 100 communities and participate in all of them.... But I’m still only in one at any given moment, even though I can create the illusion that I’m present in all of them just by posting more frequently. And the more communities I join, the more thinly I spread myself, diluting my involvement in any single group.
... I do think “community” is a misnomer for the groups that inhabit most digital spaces, and that we’d be better served by a more accurate word for what these new social forms actually are... On social media, we tend to amplify certain aspects of our personalities and conceal others, and in these environments, it’s usually more accurate to describe individuals’ presences as personas rather than personalities... Maybe the word for internet communities, then, should be something like “persona”—not as robust or mutually exclusive as a personality, but still incredibly valuable, and native to its own environment.
Thanks to Matthew Somerville for sharing this graphic and the source paper “Covid-19 contagion via aerosol particles comparative evaluation of indoor environments with respect to situational R-value”:
A nice illustration from Tom Forth of why not everything is open source-able - in this case, a successful app to provide local rubbish collection info is closed source, because of the costs of using the UK's postcode address file. But there's more:
I mention the centralisation of digital services in the UK because it's important to completing this story. It is why I have realised that I cannot, for now, launch an update to my bin apps that I think would improve lives. It is why, I suspect, I never will be able to.
The UK government restrains this activity in four ways, so I thought I would spell them out.
By defunding local government it denies it the resources to fund the bin app notification system that I have built, submit it to rigorous security testing, and deploy it within a proper system of oversight.
By failing to make the UK's postcode address system open, it makes it illegal or prohibitively expensive to share code for my bin apps, and most other local government digital services. This mean that councils cannot easily pool their funds and collaborate on digital service development.
By continually intervening in areas of local government competency, such as tip bookings, it makes the private investment that I would otherwise secure to make my bin app notifications a reality too risky.
By imposing conditions on how local government should do digital innovation it makes services that would compete with the centre unfundable.
We are not doing great on open government -
The Open Government Partnership [OGP] of 78 countries representing some 2 billion people has placed the UK government ‘under review’ for failing to properly deliver a plan for transparent, participatory, inclusive and accountable governance.
In a letter to Minister Julia Lopez, Sandjay Pradhan, CEO of the OGP details the UK government’s failure to produce a plan to the required standards for a second consecutive time. As a result, and despite being one of the eight founding member countries of the Open Government Partnership in 2011, the United Kingdom has been placed ‘under review.’
Nick Hunn on the depressing state of innovation funding here, expressing a problem I've observed in almost all my interactions with this sort of funding:
Over the years, Government funding for innovation has become more and more bureaucratic. There was a time when the Design Council awarded Support for Innovation grants which were fairly open ended – you just had to make and sell something. Now we have competitions, forcing people who would probably never consider working together to form unholy alliances to try and get the money. A consequence of that is that a whole industry has grown up around funding applications for Government technology schemes, not just for the UK, but also the wider European Horizon initiatives. They help to put together consortia and proposals, but for a price – they’re probably responsible for creaming off around 20% of the funds. Once you’ve been awarded funding, the management reporting is sufficiently onerous that it takes up a further 30% of the money. In order to have a chance of getting funded, you need to focus on what you think the judges want, rather than the product you actually want to develop, so the outcome is that only about 10% of the grant is ever useful. It keeps people employed, but it rarely does much for research and innovation.
... many applications feel like life-support for zombie companies that only manage to hang on because of these grants. Some companies have become particularly adept at winning multiple grants and seem to exist solely for that purpose.
... We remain good at the oddball and bleeding edge stuff; not always so good at commercialising it, but getting better.
A sad note from Alex Fleetwood (incidentially in a great thread on closing/finishing companies, which everyone talks about far less than starting them):
 |
| https://twitter.com/ammonite/status/1361747095460405249 |
Maddie Stone writes about France's new repairability index:
In a world first move last month, France began requiring makers of certain electronic devices, including smartphones and laptops, to tell consumers how repairable their products are. Manufacturers selling these devices in France must give their products a score, or “repairability index,” based on a range of criteria including how easy it is to take the product apart and the availability of spare parts and technical documents.
...Manufacturers grade their products using worksheets that integrate five criteria: availability of technical documents to aid in repair, ease of disassembly, availability of spare parts, price of spare parts, and a wild-card category for repair issues specific to that class of products.
... By 2024, the repair index will transition to a “durability index” that not only tells customers how repairable a product is but also describes its overall robustness.
 |
| https://twitter.com/rorymathews9/status/1362336874505908226 |
The Green Homes Grant has not gone well.
However, according to recent government data, just 6.3% of the £1.5 billion budget for the Green Homes Grant scheme in 2020/21 has been spent and 86% of homeowners reported having a ‘poor experience’ with the application process.
... It has also been revealed that Ministers awarded the contract to run the programme to ICF, a large American consulting corporation based in Virginia, but details of the value of the government contract have not yet been published, leading to widespread criticism and anger that a key plank of the plan was to create work and jobs for the UK, not US economy.
Simon Wardley has an idea for a different kind of carbon trading, not a carbon market, but focussed around citizens.
A startling fact from Bill Janeway's 2019 "Can capitalist democracy survive?": in the UK, private-sector union membership has fallen to 13.2%, from 52% in 1980.
Thanks to Hetan Shah, I now know that R&D Tax Credits excludes social sciences! Maybe this will change.
Thanks Rachel Coxcoon for this carbon footprint tool for communities in England.
There were 3000 instances of violence against shopworkers in Cambridge's Co-ops alone in 2020. Grim.
Henry Smith at the Centre for Ageing Better writes:
A new report from the Church of England’s Commission on Housing, Church and Community has highlighted that around eight million people of all ages live in overcrowded, unaffordable or unsuitable homes ...a staggering 91% of homes don’t meet even the most basic accessibility standards that make them ‘visitable’ by most people including wheelchair users, never mind suitable to live in. ... Currently, 40% of households aged 65 and over lack one or more of their required adaptations to suit their needs...
 |
| https://twitter.com/davidjmadden/status/1365040982287413249 |
The thread for the original tweet contains the instructions for billboard hacking.
There are many good thoughts in Donella Meadows's Dancing With Systems.
Rich Bartlett on social justice movements, and different paths and ways of thinking from "the most visible currents of social justice activism" -
One of the defining characteristics of metamodernism is a commitment to multiperspectival thinking. If metamodernism is a game, the objective is “who collects the most perspectives wins”. ... To move towards a more just and liberated world, we need to cultivate multi-perspectival thinking. We need to understand why people believe what they do, not as a step on the way to converting them to our perspective, but to be enriched by the mutual exchange of knowledge...
Thanks to Lee Vinsel for sharing this poem by Baron Wormser - A Quiet Life, which starts:
What a person desires in life
is a properly boiled egg.
This isn’t as easy as it seems.
Worth reading.