Notes: rewilding, recovery, transcendence
I love Tom Forth's response to the Aria call [X thread] "Request for Opportunities - as a spark of inspiration for new PD candidates, we pulled together a list of "why aren't more people working on this?!" topics that've been floating around the @ARIA_research slack." - he looked at what companies in Britain are already working on these problem statements:
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and it turns out it works, he finds a bunch of companies obviously working on the things that Aria are suggesting as new research areas.
Why not turn everything into RSS? https://docs.rsshub.app/
(the following links have been maturing for some time...)
Jon Crowcroft notes an aspect of AI sustainability which has not been much discussed:
1. it has taken 32 years (give or take) of the WWW to get to where we have all the material avaialble today, including millions of websites, blogs, scientific and other academic open access materials and wikipedia and so on, as well as huge numbers of photos, songs etc - this represents a massive investment by 100s millions of people over more than a generation.
2. really useful data out there has been curated (a.k.a. wrangled) so that it doesn't have too many lacunae or errors, and may be statistically representative - it may also be accompanied by meta data (describing its meaning, but perhaps also labelling features in the data with meaningful tags - especially useful, for example, in medical images or satellite images of earth, but also just simple stuff like names of people in pictures, and GPS/location data of a photo or movie. This also took both time&effort, but also expertise - humans spent a while using their knowledge, and possibly skills, to add that extra information.
Of course, a special class of data is code - and open source repositories have a lot of that, associated with meta data ("documentation") and labelled (e.g. with commit logs describing bug fixes or features added, by whom, and when)
... By absorbing this mass of material into a model, what is really being done is absorbing the prior information that gives more than a slight hint about the model that was in the minds of the users who created the original content. That is to say, their labour is being appropriated, not just the fruits of their labour.
So if you want another common-crawl's worth of data, be aware a lot of people will quite like to be paid for their effort next time around. And can you afford a payroll with 100M expert employees working for 32 years? Really?
Ciaran Martin wrote - near the start of the year - about the cyber attack on the British Library.
The perpetrators are in Russia. They will likely never appear in a British court. We have to work within this reality.
... But, like all comparable democracies, the British state is configured to treat this type of incident as an arrestable and prosecutable crime. ... For the first time in human history, it is possible to inflict sustained, large-scale criminal damage on another country without the perpetrator or a single accomplice setting foot in it.
We have consistently underestimated just how much cyber crime breaks our model of policing.
... Harm happens in cyberspace because we have a three decades-long legacy of weak security in our software, hardware and wider digital infrastructure.
... There are no really transformative options until new systems come along. There are only mitigations. These mitigations require a lot of high quality technical and human resources. So they are expensive. They also require a lot of skilled people, as well as management attention and sponsorship. But it’s hard to explain the benefits of these measures to hard-pressed management facing many other pressures.
... consider the British Library in this context. It is a very important national institution, for sure. But if you’re tasked with identifying the most important national IT networks for protection against attack, the British Library will not get anywhere near the top of the list for attention. As we have seen, no one gets hurt or dies if the BL goes down. The health service will still function. So will the banks. The lights will still be on. People’s bills will still be accurate. The data of vulnerable populations will not have leaked. And so on.
... Constrained by public sector budgets and salaries, it will find it hard to source the people and capabilities it needs for cyber security.
... our more immediate cyber security problem is that by crippling these so-called ‘normal business’ networks an aggressor can hugely harm a society without that much effort. We now know you can shut down a crucial oil pipeline in the United States not by attacking the pipeline, but by shutting down the ordinary software systems that support its administration. It turns out you can cripple the entire healthcare system of a rich EU nation not by touching hospital equipment or systems but by locking out the network of the body that allocates doctors appointments and schedules surgeries. And it turns out that you can bring part of the British academic sector to a crashing halt by taking a massive library catalogue offline.
... here are two planning assumptions on national cyber risk for the next five-year Parliament:
a devastating, highly sophisticated, threat-to-life cyber attack against the UK in the next five years is unlikely, and if it happens, its impact will be mitigated so long as we continue to ensure that safety-critical systems are not wholly dependent on computer networks;
by way of contrast, serious economic and social disruption, including an incident that could threaten public order or safety arising from a cyber operation (the disruption of healthcare administration, the criminal justice system, or food or oil distribution being some examples) is very likely.
... Ransomware highlights our digital vulnerabilities to others who have motives even worse and more strategically damaging than the criminals. And if there is no effective system backup that can easily be deployed, or no way of restoring the old system in some way, - in other words, if there’s no way of recovering quickly - then we’re stuffed. Recovery capability is paramount for national security.
... Planning for the loss of a key network, and being able to recover quickly from it, needs to be a core part of good public and corporate governance that every organisation models and practices.
The way to get to this point is not to indulge in the classic British tradition of holding a what-went-wrong-and-who-can-we-hang-out-to-dry inquiry. This is not the Post Office IT scandal. There is not a single allegation of malice, bad faith or wilful negligence. Instead, an organisation with a reputation for being well-run and held in high public esteem found itself without the systems and plans in place to recover from being the victims of criminals. They deserve sympathy and support.
But we have to figure out why. What constraints were there, (and what incentives weren’t), that prevented this otherwise capable organisation from protecting itself and recovering quickly? Where else is this a risk? And what can be done about it?
What does 21st century infrastructure look like in your community? Alex Howard is collecting examples, and I enjoyed the variety in this photo essay. (Alex has been thinking, doing, writing and sharing on important civic issues for years - I recommend supporting his work with a subscription!)
Mountain bikers in Wales are paying the government to rewild their area (thanks to Michael for the link):
their jointly developed “Future Forest Vision” will not only bring back biodiversity to the site, it will flip the conventional business model for rewilding on its head—showcasing a completely new way to make nature-restoration efforts economically viable. While farmers and other private landowners often receive government subsidies for rewilding, Bike Park Wales is the first example—in the UK at least—of a private company paying the government to rewild public land.
If you have a new build property with a new garden, here's how you might rewild it.
Gavin Starks suggested that we could reframe things away from the reduction focus of climate work, and instead rise to zero, with a definition of value that captures the whole ecosystem. "I believe we need to come up with some kind of umbrella language that isn’t about “climate” [tired] or “oceans” or “plastics” and… it’s not the word ‘sustainability’ [expired] or the SDGs [too big]. Instead, could we be outcomes-based?" I can see that this could be more relatable for industry and economics. And it doesn't limit the end point to zero - what a limited ambition! - but sets our aims for a thriving ecosystem, regenerated etc, as high and getting higher.
There are a lot of words for the intersecting movements around - well, whatever it is. I enjoyed this thread which introduced me to more:
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| https://social.gfsc.studio/@oluOnline/112695250191471039 |
I've been finding post-growth more appealing than degrowth; perhaps it's also a less divisive term.
Via Adrian McEwen, I ended up reading Dil Green's 2019 manifesto for how to transcend capitalism. (Dil was one of the drivers of the Festival of Commoning.)
We seek not to destroy capitalism, nor to reform it, but to transcend it – to consciously and rapidly evolve past it. We acknowledge its current hegemony, and accept that this arose as a result of its dynamism, adaptability, and ability to offer value to those who built it (while also recognising with horror its inherent violence towards the people and places which it so forcibly transformed). But the law of diminishing returns has set in, and the future negatives now dangerously and imminently outweigh any historic positives.
We will enact and intensify social relations that produce a human culture which supports the abundance of the biosphere, in confidence that this will require human flourishing that transcends what is considered possible under capitalism.
... Transcendence requires us, simply, to build the best possible future, starting right here, right now. Where it can, it avoids unnecessary conflict, without being naive about the inevitability of resistance. It works with the deep structures of what is in place (in the knowledge that these can only be transformed, through interaction, over time), while engaging to the minimum with superficialities, and actively mitigating its injustices. In this way we waste as little time, space and energy as possible, achieving maximum systemic change impact.
Do you know how local decisions are made, and who holds power, in your area of the UK? Geoff Mulgan poses some tricky questions (and has the answers). Then MySociety can tell you who is in post at all those levels in an experimental feature. You can also check out local climate sentiment on the Climate Coalition's local intelligence hub. (The General Election was ages ago of course; I found who came second in each constituency fascinating.)
Nathan Schneider (always very thoughtful on ownership, and governance) writes about Web3/crypto and I found the angle of amnesia really interesting, especially in how it maybe also affected Web2:
The class of technology variously referred to as Web3 or crypto has been heralded as a democratizing force for economics and governance. This essay argues that, to the extent such hype is justified, it is only partly due to the affordances of the technology itself. Perhaps more important is the amnesia it has induced, as an innovative paradigm whose novelty inclines people to neglect once-stable norms. In both economics and governance, crypto offers opportunities for greater democracy, but following through on them is guaranteed by neither the technology nor the amnesia it invites."Ever wonder why the cheap junk flooding Amazon has keyboard-mashing brand names like MOFFBUZW?" This (2022) X thread has the reasons.
The most salient opportunity that crypto presents, more than any particular technical feature or affordance, arises from the amnesia of innovation: that deer-in-the-headlights effect as a new technological paradigm shines brightly enough that people freeze and forget to apply once-stable, and still applicable, social contracts to it. Much as gig platforms made regulators forget labor laws (Cherry 2015–2016) and cloud services did not face the same privacy rules governing older telecoms (Zuboff 2019), the strange new tech of crypto has made space for breaking and remaking norms about how networked assets are to be owned and governed. What once seemed (but did not have to be) fixed is now (by no particular necessity) in flux.
As Langdon Winner put it, in the final paragraph of his seminal essay “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” (1980, 135):In our times people are often willing to make drastic changes in the way they live to accord with technological innovation at the same time they would resist similar kinds of changes justified on political grounds.... There is a tendency among some crypto enthusiasts to imagine that, thanks to the marvelous new technology at hand, a green solarpunk paradise of abundant wealth and close-to-effortless coordination is at hand (e.g., Wenger 2016; Swartz 2017; Owocki 2022). It is an echo, amplified with a new kind of hyper-volatile money, of the “solutionism” familiar from the heyday of Web2 (Morozov 2014). The disappointments of Web2, combined with a steady stream of Web3 cataclysms (White n.d.), give cause to dismiss such utopianism. Yet it remains undeniable that Web2 produced a kind of rupture with its round of innovation and amnesia—reshaping society, economics, and politics in ways we are still grasping to understand. The result is hardly utopian. To a greater degree than early enthusiasts expected, the rupture was shaped by external forces: venture capital, racism, colonial power relations, and authoritarian politics, for instance.
This material/immaterial distinction, despite its enduring relevance, is increasingly unstable and obscure. Even the most inherently physical things, like clothing and food, can cross the threshold, the way so much labor has. In this week’s episode of the New Models podcast, the hosts describe Shein’s ultra-fast fashion as the “divirtualization of data”—the company takes search terms, digital tags, and word clouds and converts them into physical products, which are then purchased online, shipped to the customer, unboxed, and then promptly “revirtualized” as social media imagery or purely symbolic objects. Shein makes real clothes that people wear on their bodies, of course, but its supply chain, as described above, evokes the image of a contracting material world, with the information still embedded in physical objects being squeezed out of them and thereby liberated to circulate freely. Shein isn’t importing the internet into the physical world; it’s reframing that world as an array of objects and processes that haven’t yet become digital but soon will.
... For a cheeseburger made in a ghost kitchen, the brand that is slapped on at the end is an ingredient as essential as the bun. ... Anbernic is what Rob Horning calls a perfunctory brand...“the brand is almost nothing, i.e. a minimum viable coordination point that aggregates (ideally positive) impressions of a product and makes it discoverable.” All it requires is a meaningless, SEO-friendly name, a logo, and “perhaps a 100% lore-free ‘About Us.’”
This long read by Ted Gioia on the state of culture (via Sentiers) looks at art and the sort of distraction we find in infinite scrolling. I found the distinction and framing helpful:
But I also agree with L M Sacasas that the table and example further down Gioia's article are not so compelling. They think that compulsion is a better framing than addiction; we are not addicted to our devices, although we are driven to seek out personal connection and to learn.
Diane Coyle on how digital technologies affect our daily lives, from an economic point of view:
a comprehensive assessment of the AI revolution’s costs and benefits must also account for its impact on what economists call the “household account”: our personal (unpaid) time and valuable but non-monetized domestic work. Moreover, while AI may help companies reduce costs and boost profit margins, these gains are not necessarily shared with consumers. For example, are stores using automated checkouts charging lower prices or providing better service than their less automated counterparts?
In fact, there seems to be little evidence that these technologies have actually benefited consumers. While the digital economy has provided us with valuable free services, it has also enabled companies to extract money from users by obscuring prices and quality through overly complicated designs, “dark patterns” – interfaces meant to manipulate users into making poor decisions – and potentially collusive algorithmic pricing models.
But the real question is why digital innovation has not led to meaningful improvements in domestic productivity.
.... As MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson has argued, a new “GDP-B” metric is required to capture the benefits of free digital services such as online search and email. Similarly, we need a measure – let’s call it “GDP-H” – that accounts for activity in the unpaid economy. The goal of such a metric would be to provide an accurate picture of economic activity. At present, we overlook much of the value that technology creates or destroys simply because it is not monetized. While measuring the frictions created by today’s digital technologies remains challenging, they take up an increasingly large portion of our daily lives.