New Frontiers

This blog’s great for giving me a place to explore various thoughts and ideas about the world we live in and the ideas I come across. And sometimes it’s just useful as a place to mark things that I’m thinking about.

Here’s one of the latter:-

There have been plenty of comments likening the growth of the cryptocurrency industry to the Gold Rush in the US in the first part of the Nineteenth Century. It’s been a common refrain that the real riches in the mania were earned by those selling the picks and shovels, as opposed to the prospectors seeking the gold itself (often unsuccessfully). In investment terms, it’s known as the pick-and-shovel play: invest in the underlying technology needed to produce a good or service rather than the final output.

There are parallels with crypto: just take a look at the money that the Exchanges have been pulling in as an example (see Coinbase and Binance revenues).

But, as is often the case, perhaps the money is actually a distraction here. The wider narrative is that the realm of human experience is actually expanding far faster than we can explore – via an exponential explosion in the number of digital (as opposed to physical) connections that surround us. Cryptocurrency is acting as a signpost, the honey in a sense that will attract the coming billions. But just as importantly, it’s a necessity for that new world to function. Hence the early stages of mania we’ve seen so far: it’s impossible to believe that a currency that has demonstrated itself to be uncensorable and self-sovereign will not be kept alive by humans who value such features.

Because the headline-grabbing (at least in the early days) story of using your Bitcoin to buy beer and bread really isn’t the point here. With the broadening of our digital horizons, we’re seeing markets emerge everywhere. And as humans are building out each of those ‘everywheres’, we’ll soon be able to live more fully inside them (for better or worse) because of the valuable rewards that are now available to those who carry out the hard graft building these new digital worlds.

Fifty years ago, it was all about the Race For Space. But today the picture has changed. It’s much more of a race to build out the space that connects us all via our mobiles and laptops. And being able to pay someone to do the heavy lifting changes that equation forever.

Ten Years on Twitter

Today is my 10th birthday on Twitter. A decade, eh? Time flies…

I actually had an account before my current @dugcampbell handle. But in the early days of Twitter, I mainly used it to gather information – something that hasn’t changed in the last decade. Indeed, I’ve actually gone back to take a look at the first tweet I ever posted – and it was a whole 13+months later that I actively started posting using this particular account.

I’ve never been one for sharing too much publicly online. So those early days of Twitter very much involved consuming, rather than creating. But over the years, the platform has become ubiquitous and remains my first port of call for information.

Twitter’s had a rocky history right from the very start. And it took until the end of 2018 for it to turn a profit for four consecutive quarters for the first time (‘Twitter is now consistently profitable’). But it’s still here.

That’s not to say it can rest on its laurels. Like any social media company, achieving sustainable revenue was only ever one small part of the challenge. The next is dealing with the question of free speech. Partly of course that’s down the fact that they’ve admitted censoring messages from certain accounts in the past. They admitted making mistakes when relying on algorithms that penalised certain politicians for the activities of their followers on the platform, for example.

But there’s a real storm brewing over accountability – more specifically whether Twitter will be held to be a platform or a publisher (in the traditional sense). I like Albert Wenger’s summation of the challenges that face any digital facilitator of public debate. Is it actively censoring or suppressing speech unlawfully? Or is it somehow failing in its duties – to prevent the direct harassment of individuals, to minimise hate speech, to guard against misinformation and manipulation? Or should it be held to standards that are far more subtle – such as ensuring that no individual is trapped in a filter bubble, nor is he or she getting fed comments that are offensive to their beliefs?

That a huge topic in itself. But for today, I think it’s all about Twitter itself. The one thing that I can say without any shadow of a doubt is that this is the platform on which I’ve spent a decade learning about all manner subjects that I’d never have even heard of before; meeting people around the world who share my interests, and sometimes even my views; and generally providing me with a curated feed of news that, with careful and regular account maintenance over the years, continues to bring me things that enrich my experience of modernity beyond any other that I’ve come across.

The web is changing. I believe strongly that we’ll be moving away from such centralised models in the very near future. So I don’t know if it’ll still be there in another 10 years’ time. But for the past decade? Well done, Twitter. You’ve played a blinder.

 

Google Breaches GDPR (Shock, Horror)

Sometimes it feels like this blog is at risk of turning into a list of evildoings by Big Tech. But it’s hard to avoid mentioning some of the stories as they arise. The biggest risk is that, much like data breaches, we’re becoming dulled to the severity by the frequency of such episodes.

Even so, it’s worth taking a look at the record fine of €50 million levied by the French regulator CNIL on Google yesterday. It’s an important decision because, apart from being the biggest fine under the new GDPR regulations, it also strikes directly at the heart of the business model that Google, Facebook, Amazon and many others rely on for their particular brands of surveillance capitalism.

The decision stated that people were not sufficiently informed about how Google collected data to personalise advertising. In other words, Google had not received valid consent because:

“Users are not able to fully understand the extent of the processing operations carried out by Google.”

I’m also interested to see that the complaint was raised by an individual privacy campaigner and a privacy organisation, invoking Article 15 (requiring companies to respond to individual’s requests for personal data). In essence, they argued that Google were forcing users to agree to new privacy policies.

Unsurprisingly, having the option to personalise adverts pre-ticked when users created an account wasn’t exactly compliant with the spirit of GDPR…

The question is, where do we go from here? Clearly this is a good start. But the fine – huge as it is – is nowhere near the maximum possible under the Regulations of 4% of its annual global turnover (which would equate to somewhere in the region of billions of dollars when it comes to Google).

I suspect we’ll see many more of these sorts of cases start to pile up over the next few years. But I struggle to believe that real, lasting change will come as a result of regulation as a result. The financial moat is still so vast around companies that scaled by being able to monetise this type of user tracking that I think this simply translates into an increased cost for those businesses (lower margins) rather than a seismic shift in business practices.

And I’m not convinced that the answer lies with those who are looking for more decisive action from regulators – along the lines of actively breaking up these companies. Because all that’s likely to do is, as Zuboff points out, leave us with many smaller companies still fuelled by surveillance capitalism.

It’s time for a paradigm shift in modern digital business models. With this scale, incremental change just won’t cut it. But at least this is a start.

Fighting The Inevitable: Surveillance Capitalism & The Decline of Civilisation

As anyone who follows this blog knows, I read a lot of books. But there’s one that I’ve had on pre-order for a long time that I can’t wait to delve into when it finally gets released at the end of the month.

So far, the indications are excellent that Shosana Zuboff’s ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ has all the markings of a classic text and required reading for anyone who’s online in any capacity in this modern age. Zuboff is the academic who first coined the term ‘surveillance capitalism’  a number of years ago and this book, her first in many years, is already being talked about as having an impact on contemporary socio-economics that is comparable to that of Adam Smith’s ‘The Wealth of Nations’ all those years before.

Once I’ve managed to finally get my hands on the book, I’ll dig into it in far greater depth and share a few more detailed thoughts. But in the meantime, as a taster during her pre-release book publicity tour, I urge everyone to read her interview from The Guardian yesterday (‘The Goal Is to Automate Us’).

The backdrop of course is a story that is becoming more well-known – particularly within the last 12 months. Billions of us are using ‘free’ digital services without any clear understanding of how our data on that platform is actually being used elsewhere. And what’s more, for purposes that often run counter to our explicit consent. With the result that with every passing day, vast powers are accumulating unfettered to such an extent that we are now facing a hugely dangerous period for the way in which humans interact with each other in modern society.

“The combination of state surveillance and its capitalist counterpart means that digital technology is separating the citizens in all societies into two groups: the watchers (invisible, unknown and unaccountable) and the watched. This has profound consequences for democracy because asymmetry of knowledge translates into asymmetries of power. But whereas most democratic societies have at least some degree of oversight of state surveillance, we currently have almost no regulatory oversight of its privatised counterpart. This is intolerable.”

As she points out, we even use the unfortunate term ‘digital natives’ today. Ignoring the lessons of history, the well-known story is playing out all over again. The lives of the ignorant natives are being slaughtered by those wielding power that today exceeds in reach anything that mankind has seen before.

“Once we searched Google, but now Google searches us. Once we thought of digital services as free, but now surveillance capitalists think of us as free.”

As technology has increasingly provided us with new capabilities, we’ve ignored a far more perfidious problem. It’s a challenge that naturally follows from the fact that every digital activity leaves information in its wake. And that information is likely to be far more valuable – in aggregate – for the surveillance capitalist than the benefit that accrues to one user who’s happy at getting to use that ‘free’ service’ in the first place.

As this vast sea of personal data continues to grow inexorably with every passing day, we need to start asking some difficult questions about the knowledge that’s being created as a result. Who owns that knowledge today? The individual or, as it is today, the company? Who makes the decision about who should be allowed to use that knowledge moving forwards? And how does everyone else catch up if it’s all being sucked up by companies that are getting bigger and bigger?

Only a few know the origin story I suspect. Because it’s easy to forget that Google wasn’t originally that interested in advertising as a business model. Until it realised that it could trawl this information for knowledge about what specific users were likely to do and suddenly start predicting just how successful adverts would be in front of certain users (as measured by click-through rates). The dawn of a new world that prayed to this new god, targeted advertising, had arrived. After all, who was really being harmed if companies simply used information that users never intended to share, quietly, secretly – if the result was that that user ended up with better, more successful advertising (defined as being ‘more profitable for Google’)…

Zuboff raises a crucial point here. Today, of those individuals who can see the scale of the issue that we’re collectively facing, most live under a shared illusion that the benefits of modern technology are entirely inseparable from surveillance capitalism. In other words, whilst people may understand on some basic level that they are the product, there’s an insidious belief that this is the essential price of entry in the modern world. But that’s simply not the case:-

“The tech leaders desperately want us to believe that technology is the inevitable force here, and their hands are tied. But there is a rich history of digital applications before surveillance capitalism that really were empowering and consistent with democratic values. Technology is the puppet, but surveillance capitalism is the puppet master.”

This is a real live issue that we live with every day at MaidSafe as we’re building the SAFE Network. Doing nothing and simply letting the current digital inequality continue is not an option. Choosing to simply collectively sit on our hands today and do nothing would be disastrous. We will continue see our democracies shot through and pulled down as the information asymmetries grow ever wider between citizens and massive multinational technology behemoths who are today wielding more power – without ever having been elected – than many nation states. Yet it’s hard to believe (even if you are in the minority who argue that democracy isn’t the optimal state for civilisation) that people are simply content to sit back and have their lives increasingly governed by the decisions of  leaders of large technology companies.

At the same time, the surveillance and tracking has become so insidious that it is increasingly encroaching and permanently damaging the personal and private lives that every human should be entitled to as a fundamental human right. If the real rules and laws of the world are increasingly being set by companies for whom surveillance consolidates their power base, why are we passively accepting that the commercial interests of these organisations double up as the  best possible alternative we have to organise an inclusive human society around the globe?

“On the strength of its annexation of human experience, this coup achieves exclusive concentrations of knowledge and power that sustain privileged influence over the division of learning in society. It is a form of tyranny that feeds on people but is not of the people. Paradoxically, this coup is celebrated as “personalisation”, although it defiles, ignores, overrides, and displaces everything about you and me that is personal.”

There’s no doubt that this is a story is approaching the end game – but it’s not a result that any but a tiny minority of the world can be in favour of. Yet it’s a world that will only be visible, for most, in the rear view mirror, after the options have been closed down. We need to work together to act in our collective best interests. We either all make a decision to make these changes now before the cost of making such changes becomes a price that exceeds any of our abilities to meet it. Today’s the day – or digital inequality will continue to accelerate at a pace that won’t be recoverable within either our lifetimes or that of our children’s.

If nothing else, the first step might be reading Zuboff’s book when it comes out in a week or so. Then let’s have this conversation again. And again. Until everyone knows just how high the stakes are.

The Power of Myth

I’ve just finished reading a great little (155-page) book by Karen Armstrong called ‘A Short History Of Myth’.

Mythology is one of these areas that fascinates me but that I always seem to push back from digging into any greater detail – hence the bookshelves filled with a few classics (such as my namesake-but-no-relation Joseph Campbell). I think that attitude is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of myth in society over the millennia. And loathe as I am to say it, perhaps it shows a bit of snobbishness towards stories that are clearly untrue, when there’s so much raw factual ‘knowledge’ out there just waiting to be hoovered up.

But what the book has shown is that this is the common mistake that people make towards myths – particularly over the last century or so, as learning and technology has accelerated.

For me, the key point of the book is this:-

“Myth must lead to imitation or participation, not passive contemplation. We no longer know how to manage our mythical lives in a way that is spiritually challenging and transformative.

“We must disabuse ourselves of the nineteenth century fallacy that myth is false or that it represents an inferior mode of thought. We cannot complete recreate ourselves, cancel out the rational bias of our education and return to a pre-modern sensibility. But we can acquire a more educated attitude to mythology. We are myth-making creatures”

The approach towards the origin stories of religion is also fascinating. Part of the problem, as Armstrong views it, is that from the time of the Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century, the rational approach to the world took hold. This was a huge improvement in many ways. But as she says:-

“By this time, people were reading the cosmogonies of Genesis as though they were factual….Creation stories had never [in the past] been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion”.

In many ways, the problem is becoming even more acute today. Practical improvements that have been based on research have revolutionised lives – but they overwhelmingly fail to give humans the sense of significance that they require. Or to put it another way:

“logos achieved such spectacular results, mythology was discredited”.

I’ve always been a huge fan of Neil Gaiman. But on a rational level, it’s always been slightly mystifying why he is just as successful as he is. Literally everything he touches, across every genre – novels, screenplays, audiobooks, graphic novels etc – wins awards. Pretty much without exception. His book signings go on for hours upon end – I know, because I’ve been to a couple of them.

But it’s clear what the attraction is. Each of his stories is heavily based in a mash-up of mythologies, modern but informed by the hundreds of years of the very best stories that have come before and been successfully taken in and shared by many thousands if not millions of people across the ages.

“Before the modern period, it was generally taken for granted that there was no ‘official’ version of a myth. People had always felt free to develop a new myth or a radical interpretation of an old mythical narrative”.

That is, I believe, exactly what’s happening with Gaiman, amongst many others. There’s a human yearning to learn the lessons of humanity via the method of mythology. So I can’t imagine that fan base disappearing any time soon.

The (Many) Senses

Always love starting the day with a run and learning something new. Today’s instalment came courtesy of a recommendation – Professor Barry Smith on Russell Brand’s ‘Under The Skin’ Podcast.

What did I learn? Things like:

  • We commonly think of five senses (sight, sound, taste, feel, smell). It turns out we’ve slightly underestimated that one…..in fact it’s between 20-30 (depending on different viewpoints). For example, the sense of balance.
  • Heavier dishes will make the creamy pudding within it taste better and more luxurious. At the same time, sugar water tinged with red colouring will taste sweet, whereas green colouring will taste sour – i.e. our visual sense overrides our tastebuds.
  • Experiments have shown that the sound your shoes make when walking can change your posture – the less you hear, the less bouncy and energetic your posture (which made me wonder, running as I was with earphones on, exactly how much impact that has had on my running gait over the years). They built special shoes for this experiment – but it’s a similar thing to the sensory deprivation chambers that some people have these days.
  • Washing your hair with shampoo that has the smell of apple will actually make your hair feel softer to touch (!)

The interview is full of nuggets like that. I’ve not watched the video of the interview but if that’s easier, here’s the link.

Linux and the Open Source Software Movement

I’ve just finished reading ‘Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary’ by Linus Torvalds. If you don’t know anything about Linus, it’s worth finding out. Or at least learning about the impact that the software project that he started in his bedroom has had on the world.

Put simply, Linux, his operating system, is now ubiquitous – wherever you are in the world, it’s likely you’re using it on a daily basis. The book was published in 2002. And today, the Linux project has only grown in influence, and become the foundation of some of the most valuable technology in the world – not bad for ‘free’ open source software…

Open source software is an approach that had many scratching their heads in the early days. Many commercial companies just couldn’t believe that a genuine business could be built on the foundations of software that others had developed for free and that they didn’t own. But, as history has proved, that belief has only shown them to have vastly underestimated the power of the open source philosophy.

So, what’s open source? Put simply, it’s software development where anyone can participate in either the development of the project or its commercial exploitation. And it brings with it one huge benefit: the more people that can review the code, the higher the chances are that any bugs will be squashed.

It’s an alien philosophy to much of the commercial landscape in different sectors, even today. But it’s not difficult to understand. There are different variations but in essence, anyone is entitled to change, improve or exploit the software’s source code (i.e. the fundamental programming instructions that underpin the software). But every change that they make has to be made available for everyone else at the same time.

You often hear the phrase “standing on the shoulders of giants”. It’s a statement that is most commonly attributed to Sir Isaac Newton in 1675 which is apt, because it relates to scientific research. And what is computer programming but an extension, the evolution of modern science? In the same way as researchers made new discoveries in science thanks to the discoveries of those who came before them, the same applies to open source software: instead of barring access to the best and brightest minds on the planet to your project, you open the doors to everyone from day one. The reward? Everybody is then able to collectively benefit from each incremental step forward – result in a vastly accelerated pace of innovation.

If you don’t work in technology, perhaps you’re wondering – why would people work for free? In most cases, open source software development is a collaborative project that’s driven by the efforts of volunteers. It’s not as if they are being directly remunerated for their hard work.

Note: we’re now potentially starting to see this change with some fascinating cryptocurrency experiments whereby the incentives are weighted in such a way that developers can earn a token for early work carried out on a protocol will potentially appreciate greatly in value over the coming years. Indeed, in many ways, cryptocurrency is exactly the way in which you bootstrap development of such projects that were, until now, pretty much unfundable.

But it’s this drive to contribute that is the source of the magic itself. As an individual coder, open source projects are where you have the opportunity to make your mark, regardless of background, location or training. And you have the opportunity to work alongside the brightest minds on the planet in the areas that truly fascinate you.

And the result? Most rational people around the world would choose to use the ‘best’ software (however that is defined). Which they can then take as the foundation for building things that are best suited to the precise context (users) that they want to address (develop a product or service for).

Suddenly you have a better product. The foundational software is built to much higher standards than a team toiling away in secrecy would ever be capable of building. Which means you’re freed up to focus on building the best possible services on top of those existing solid foundations. If your goal is to make money, knock yourself out. The open source movement doesn’t prevent that. It simply facilitates that as an option after you start developing on the best version of that software that the world has to offer at that particular point in time.

In many ways, open source is Darwinian in character. It represents survival-of-the-fittest in the world of code. But it also brings some interesting challenges for certain businesses. Imagine your organisation pays developers to work on open source software. The chances are that someone outside your organisation is going to come up with code that’s better written than the code you’ve paid for (i.e. written by your employees). That is, ultimately, A Good Thing. But engendering a culture that supports that – i.e. dealing with that ‘talent’ delta – really comes down to having an ‘open source culture’ in your DNA.

The best code wins.

It’s often mentioned that there’s a little bit of an anti-establishment feel to much of the open source movement. That’s a great thing. After watching the cryptocurrency scene for a number of years, it strikes me that this leads to  a heuristic that we should all be following: if you see the best and brightest being drawn to an open source project, it’s an indication that there’s something exciting going on. And where the passionate work goes, the most significant innovation usually follows.

Today, Linux-based Android has c.70% of the mobile market. In terms of the overall market for operating systems, Android (based on Linux) has edged ahead of Microsoft. So this free, open source software is now running the majority of the world’s technology. Quite a statistic. Which must be shocking to those who could never have imagined that businesses could be built on top of ‘free’ foundations.

The project that I’m involved with is entirely open source (you can check out the GitHub repo and download the code if you like). And the areas of technology (and, for that matter, scientific research) that interest me greatest are all open source.

Why wouldn’t you want to see the largest number of people possible working on the same goals?

Leadership Tips

Some great advice on leadership in this tweetstorm that’s well-worth reading for anyone who’s involved in leading (arguably that’s everyone – or at least everyone who works to earn a living).

I couldn’t agree more with this quote in particular:-

“It’s a myth that people are promoted to leadership positions. Leaders don’t wait for titles. They simply start behaving like leaders wherever they are and then the organization simply recognizes them with a title.”

Why You Should Delete Your Social Accounts

Earlier this week, I read Jaron Lanier’s ‘Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Accounts Right Now’. It’s a short book at only 146 pages but it packs a punch, delivering a number of compelling arguments against social media.

1/ You are losing your free will.

Social media is designed to use rewards and punishment in a way that’s altering your daily behaviour. This is behavioural modification on an epic scale by unelected leaders who are now starting to regret their actions. Or, as ex-VP of User Growth at Facebook Chamath Palihapitiya said:-

“The short, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works”

2/ Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times.

It’s a fact that negative posts drive increased engagement from users. The algorithms that power the growth of social media platforms thrive on engagement. Yet as the situation deteriorates as a result of such misaligned incentives, people are increasingly demanding that the very same people should get increasingly involved in solving the very problems they were responsible for causing. Its akin to asking the turkeys to vote for Christmas…

3/ Social media is making you into an asshole.

Humans have two basic settings: we act as individuals or in a pack. When we’re in a group, we’re ruled by the pack. We seek the approval of the group in order to validate our existence. But in a disembodied online world, one of the only ways to get that validation is by seeking feedback by provoking a reaction. Welcome to Troll Central.

4/ Social media is undermining truth.

Even if you think you’re aware of the problem, you are grossly underestimating just how much of online conversation is false, driven by fake social media accounts that comment, support and attack specific points of view. Believing that most of what you read online is genuine and represents the sincere view of a real human is a fundamental error that creates imbalance across the system.

5/ Social media is making what you say meaningless.

Fake news is replacing real news on these platforms – for the simple reason that there is so much fake news being shared and interacted with, that the platforms – which use such metrics to define successful content – are actively supporting inaccurate narratives in the face of less engaging truths.

6/ Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy.

It is impossible to understand the context of anything that has any form of subtlety when it is reduced to a pithy soundbite, devoid of its context.

Furthermore, with people increasingly viewing the world through their own personalised news feeds, there are no longer any shared experiences. So with any significant event, we are understanding less than ever before of what that event actually means to each individual.

We each have our own filter bubble which influences our experience of the world. And it’s impossible for any of us to experience the world through the filtered history of others.

Platforms are designed in a way that encourages increasing numbers of people to attack your ideas more freely.

7/ Social media is making you unhappy.

Individuals are becoming increasingly isolated whilst the world becomes more connected. Platforms see engagement rise with the level of outrage. By participating, we’re encouraging precisely the opposite behaviour to the type that most people want.

8/ Social media doesn’t want you to have economic dignity.

The online advertising model and the growth of the gig economy has increased the reliance of society on these platforms to a ridiculous extent. By doing so, “we have enshrined the belief that the only way to finance a connection between two people is through a third person who is paying to manipulate them”. Total nonsense…

9/ Social media is making politics impossible.

Lanier’s point is that there used to be a belief that once a country had adopted democracy, there could be no turning back. Yet the indications now are that democracy is under attack. He argues that we should be paying for services instead of simply accepting ‘free’ services – and we should be demanding total control over our own data.

Of course, we all know about some better ways to do that don’t we….;-)

10/ Social media hates your soul.

According to social media and the large tech companies, the ultimate goal in life is to optimise. Continually. To increase your number of followers, rise up the search rankings..

But its a view that obscures the ‘point’ of life and forces the subservience of real meaning to metrics. Scores, let’s not forget, that are determined behind closed doors and huge secrecy within the depths of these new ruling techno-hierarchies that increasingly control the world.

All in, the book’s definitely worth reading. It won’t come as a surprise to many that social media brings with it many problems. But it’s only when you start to focus on what they all represent in their totality that the size of the challenge becomes more readily apparent.