Thought Shrapnel

David Byrne, a talented musician and author of one of my favourite books, has started a great new project:

I imagine, like a lot of you who look back over the past year, it seems like the world is going to Hell. I wake up in the morning, look at the paper, and go, "Oh no!" Often I’m depressed for half the day. It doesn’t matter how you voted on Brexit, the French elections or the U.S. election—many of us of all persuasions and party affiliations feel remarkably similar.

As a kind of remedy and possibly as a kind of therapy, I started collecting good news that reminded me, “Hey, there’s actually some positive stuff going on!” Almost all of these initiatives are local, they come from cities or small regions who have taken it upon themselves to try something that might offer a better alternative than what exits. Hope is often local. Change begins in communities.

The website will include material that falls into some pre-defined categories:

These bits of good news tend to fall into a few categories:

• Education
• Health
• Civic Engagement
• Science/Tech
• Urban/Transportation
• Energy
• Culture

I'm looking forward to following his progress. I'd prefer an RSS feed, but you can follow along on social media or (like me) sign up by email.

Source: Reasons to be Cheerful

Cory Doctorow writes:

There is a war for your attention, and like all adversarial scenarios, the sides develop new countermeasures and then new tactics to overcome those countermeasures.

Using a metaphor from virology, he notes that we become to immune to certain types of manipulation over time:

When a new attentional soft spot is discovered, the world can change overnight. One day, every­one you know is signal boosting, retweeting, and posting Upworthy headlines like “This video might hurt to watch. Luckily, it might also explain why,” or “Most Of These People Do The Right Thing, But The Guys At The End? I Wish I Could Yell At Them.” The style was compelling at first, then reductive and simplistic, then annoying. Now it’s ironic (at best). Some people are definitely still susceptible to “This Is The Most Inspiring Yet Depressing Yet Hilarious Yet Horrifying Yet Heartwarming Grad Speech,” but the rest of us have adapted, and these headlines bounce off of our attention like pre-penicillin bacteria being batted aside by our 21st century immune systems.

However, the thing I’m concerned about is the kind of AI-based manipulation that is forever shape-shifting. How do we become immune to a moving target?

Source: Locus magazine

Great news for the open source community!

The City has plans for 70% of its software budget to be invested in open source software in the coming year. The transition period, according to Francesca Bria (Commissioner of Technology and Digital Innovation at the City Council) will be completed before the mandate of the present administrators come to an end in Spring 2019.

It also looks like it could be the start of a movement:

With this move, Barcelona becomes the first municipality to join the European campaign “Public Money, Public Code“.

It is an initiative of the Free Software Foundation of Europe and comes after an open letter that advocates that software funded publicly should be free. This call has been supported by more than about 15,000 individuals and more than 100 organizations.

Source: It’s FOSS

Last year, I remember being amazed by how black a new substance was that’s been created by scientists. Called Vantablack, it’s like a black hole for light:

Vantablack is genuinely amazing: It’s so good at absorbing light that if you move a laser onto it, the red dot disappears.

However, it turns out that Mother Nature already had that trick up her sleeve. Birds of Paradise have a similar ability:

A typical bird feather has a central shaft called a rachis. Thin branches, or barbs, sprout from the rachis, and even thinner branches—barbules—sprout from the barbs. The whole arrangement is flat, with the rachis, barbs, and barbules all lying on the same plane. The super-black feathers of birds of paradise, meanwhile, look very different. Their barbules, instead of lying flat, curve upward. And instead of being smooth cylinders, they are studded in minuscule spikes. “It’s hard to describe,” says McCoy. “It’s like a little bottle brush or a piece of coral.”

These unique structures excel at capturing light. When light hits a normal feather, it finds a series of horizontal surfaces, and can easily bounce off. But when light hits a super-black feather, it finds a tangled mess of mostly vertical surfaces. Instead of being reflected away, it bounces repeatedly between the barbules and their spikes. With each bounce, a little more of it gets absorbed. Light loses itself within the feathers.

Incredible.

Source: The Atlantic

Here’s another article that was linked to from the source of a post I shared recently. The paragraph quoted here is from the section entitled ‘Consent-Oriented Architecture’:

Corporations built to maximize profits are unable to build consensual platforms. Their business model depend fundamentally on surveillance and behavioral control. To build consensual platforms require that privacy, security, and anonymity be built into the platforms as core features. The most effective way to secure consent is to ensure that all user data and control of all user interaction resides with the software running on the user’s own computer, not on any intermediary servers.

Earlier in that section, the author makes the obvious (but nevertheless alarming point) that audiences are sorted and graded as commodities to be bought and sold:

Audiences, like all commodities, are sold by measure and grade. Eggs are sold in dozens as grade A, for example. An advertisers might buy a thousand clicks from middle-aged white men who own a car and have a good credit rating.

In a previous section, the author notes that those who use social networks are subjects of an enclosed system:

The profits of the media monopolies are formed after surplus value has already been extracted. Their users are not exploited, but subjected, captured as an audience, and instrumentalized to extract surplus profits from other sectors of the ownership class.

I had to read some sections twice, but I'm glad I did. Great stuff, and very thought-provoking.

In short, to ensure Project MoodleNet is a consensual social network, we need to ensure full transparency and, if possible, that the majority of the processing of personal data is done on the user’s own device.

Source: P2P Foundation

“The bigger the dream, the more important the team.” (Robin Sharma)

A marvellous post by Ryan Holiday, who is well versed in Stoic philosophy:

Seneca, the Roman statesman and writer, spoke often about wealthy Romans who have spent themselves into debt and the misery and dependence this created for them. Slavery, he said, often lurks beneath marble and gold. Yet, his own life was defined by these exact debts. With his own fortune, he made large loans to a colony of Britain at rates so high it eventually destroyed their economy. And what was the source of this fortune? The Emperor Nero was manipulatively generous with Seneca, bestowing upon him numerous estates and monetary awards in exchange for his advice and service. Seneca probably could have said no, but after he accepted the first one, the hooks were in. As Nero grew increasingly unstable and deranged, Seneca tried to escape into retirement but he couldn’t. He pushed all the wealth into a pile and offered to give it back with no luck.

Eventually, death—a forced suicide—was the only option. Money in, blood out.

You need to know what you stand for in life so you can politely decline those things that don’t mesh with your expectations and approach to life. This takes discipline, and discipline takes practice.

Source: Thought Catalog

As part of my Moodle work, I’ve been looking at GDPR and decentralised technologies, so I found the following interesting.

It’s worth pointing out that ‘disintermediation’ is the removal of intermediaries from a supply chain. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple specialise in ‘anti-disintermediation’ or plain old vendor lock-in.  So ‘counter-anti-disintermediation’ is working against that in a forward-thinking way.

Central to the counter-anti-disintermediationist design is the End-to-End principle: platforms must not depend on servers and admins, even when cooperatively run, but must, to the greatest degree possible, run on the computers of the platform’s users. The computational capacity and network access of the users’ own computers must collectively make up the resources of the platform, such that, on average, each new user adds net resources to the platform. By keeping the computational capacity in the hands of the users, we prevent the communication platform from becoming capital, and we prevent the users from being instrumentalized as an audience commodity.

The great thing about that, of course, is that solutions such as ZeroNet allow for this, in a way similar to bitorrent networks ensuring more popular content becomes more available.

The linked slides from that article describe ‘venture communism’, an approach characterised by co-operative control, open federated systems, and commons ownership. Now that’s something I can get behind!

Source: P2P Foundation

This made me smile:

The show is called “Fake Theme Parks” and it debuts Friday, January 12 at Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles. Fifty artists created a huge variety of work based on parks from TV, movies, video games, and more.

[…]

Itchy & Scratchy Land, Krustyland, and Duff Gardens are from The Simpsons; Anatomy Park is from Rick and Morty; Brisbyland is from Venture Bros.; Arctic World is from Batman Returns; Funland is from Scooby-Doo; Monkey Island is from a game of the same name (by Lucasarts); Walley World is from Vacation; and Pacific Playland (not pictured) is from Zombieland.

I have unlimited love for the Monkey Island series of games. So much so that I’m afraid that if I replayed them as an adult I’d destroy part of my remembered youth.

Fun fact: Ron Gilbert, the creator of the first two Monkey Island games, wrote a blog post a few years ago about how he would approach making a new version. He’s not going to, though, sadly.

Source: io9

This is a fantastic resource for those who are thinking about their next move. Increasingly, it’s less about a one-way fit of you being right for the organisation, and as much about the organisation fitting you.

With job interviews lasting only a few hours, it is very difficult to know what a new role will be like before you accept a job offer. You must put in some work to get as clear of a picture as possible.

Just as your potential employers will evaluate you, I recommend intentionally thinking through what metrics and questions you’ll use to evaluate them. Here’s how.

Really good advice, and as someone who’s just started a new job, I agree that these are exactly the questions you need to get right.

Source: Quartz

“The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers. But above all, the world needs dreamers who do.” (Sarah Ban Breathnach)

Appropriately enough, it was during a lunchtime run that I listened to the latest episode of Jocelyn K. Glei’s excellent podcast. It featured Alex Pang, writer and futurist, on the benefits of rest for the creative process.

He talked about a number of things, but it confirmed my belief that you can only really do four hours of focused, creative work per day. Of course, you can add status-update meetings and emails to that, but the core of anyone’s work should be this sustained, disciplined period of attention.

Four really concentrated hours are sufficient to do one’s most critical work, they’re sufficient to do really good work, and for whatever reason they seem to be the physical limit that most of us have.

In addition, he introduced terms such as 'deliberate rest' and 'cognitive momentum' which I'll definitely be using in future. A highly recommended listen.

Source: Hurry Slowly

Great post by Seth Godin:

Yes, we frequently sell ourselves too short. We don't ask for compensation commensurate with the value we create. It's a form of hiding. But the most common form of this hiding is not merely lowering the price. No, the mistake we make is in not telling stories that create more value, in not doing the hard work of building something unique and worth seeking out.

Create stuff that people value and that is in scarce supply. Focus on leaving the world a better place than you found it.

Source: Seth’s blog

There’s not much we mere mortals can do about the latest microprocessor-based vulnerabilites, except ensure we apply security patches immediately.

Source: xkcd

As someone who has suffered in the past from depression, and still occasionally suffers from anxiety, I find this an interesting article:

If you are depressed and anxious, you are not a machine with malfunctioning parts. You are a human being with unmet needs. The only real way out of our epidemic of despair is for all of us, together, to begin to meet those human needs – for deep connection, to the things that really matter in life.

Meaningful work is important. Our neoliberal economy is removing much of this under the auspices of 'efficiency'.

Source: The Guardian

Email is an awesome system. It’s open, decentralised, and you can pick whoever you want to provide your emails. The trouble is, of course, that if you decide you don’t want a certain company, say Google, to read your emails, you only have control of your half of the equation. In other words, it doesn’t matter if you don’t want to use GMail, if most of your contacts do.

The same is true of AI assistant. You might not want an Amazon Echo device in your house, but you don’t spend all your life at home:

Amazon wants to bring Alexa to more devices than smart speakers, Fire TV and various other consumer electronics for the home, like alarm clocks. The company yesterday announced developer tools that would allow Alexa to be used in microwave ovens, for example – so you could just tell the oven what to do. Today, Amazon is rolling out a new set of developer tools, including one called the “Alexa Mobile Accessory Kit,” that would allow Alexa to work Bluetooth products in the wearable space, like headphones, smartwatches, fitness trackers, other audio devices, and more.

The future isn't pre-ordained. We get to choose the society and culture in which we'd like to live. Huge, for-profit companies having listening devices everywhere sounds dystopian to me.

Source: TechCrunch

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I’m wondering whether to delete all my social media accounts, or whether I should stay and fight. The trouble is, no technology is neutral, it always contains biases.

It’s interesting how the narrative has changed since the 2011 revolutions in Iran and Egypt:

Because of the advent of social media, the story seemed to go, tyrants would fall and democracy would rule. Social media communications were supposed to translate into a political revolution, even though we don’t necessarily agree on what a positive revolution would look like. The process is overtly emotional: The outrage felt translates directly, thanks to the magic of social media, into a “rebellion” that becomes democratic governance.

But social media has not helped these revolutions turn into lasting democracies. Social media speaks directly to the most reactive, least reflective parts of our minds, demanding we pay attention even when our calmer selves might tell us not to. It is no surprise that this form of media is especially effective at promoting hate, white supremacy, and public humiliation.

In my new job at Moodle, I’m tasked with leading work around a new social network for educators focused on sharing Open Educational Resources and professional development. I think we’ll start to see more social networks based around content than people (think Pinterest rather than Facebook).

Source: Motherboard

As an historian, I find this fascinating:

So why are Spaniards living behind their geographic time zone?

In 1940, General Francisco Franco changed Spain’s time zone, moving the clocks one hour forward in solidarity with Nazi Germany.

For Spaniards, who at the time were utterly devastated by the Spanish Civil War, complaining about the change did not even cross their minds. They continued to eat at the same time, but because the clocks had changed, their 1pm lunches became 2pm lunches, and they were suddenly eating their 8pm dinners at 9pm.

We were talking over Sunday dinner today how some traditions and practices can stick within families and organisations without them being questioned for years. This is an extreme example!

Source: BBC Travel

To have a settled position on anything is anachronistic. There has to be an element of ambiguity in your work and thinking, otherwise you’re dealing in what Richard Rorty called ‘dead metaphors’.

Foucault understood this by never espousing a theory of power:

Herein lies the richness and the challenge of Foucault’s work. His is a philosophical approach to power characterised by innovative, painstaking, sometimes frustrating, and often dazzling attempts to politicise power itself. Rather than using philosophy to freeze power into a timeless essence, and then to use that essence to comprehend so much of power’s manifestations in the world, Foucault sought to unburden philosophy of its icy gaze of capturing essences. He wanted to free philosophy to track the movements of power, the heat and the fury of it working to define the order of things.

By not spending time defending your own position, you have time to recognise and critique what you see you be wrong and insidious in the world:

Foucault’s skeptical supposition thus allowed him to conduct careful enquiries into the actual functions of power. What these studies reveal is that power, which easily frightens us, turns out to be all the more cunning because its basic forms of operation can change in response to our ongoing efforts to free ourselves from its grip.

I'm reading China Miéville's October: The Story of the Russian Revolution at the moment. It's making me re-realise that power is never given, it's always taken.

Source: Aeon