BH 2018

Shall we initiate this very public simultaneous
backchannel?

"Structural Chopstick": Band name or theme of the upcoming Infrastructure Week?

Let's start a topic for while we're having intros; conversations can hive off from here

How about that Isenberg, eh? Wow!

SOB - Governing the Toy
Pepper - Passion on access fear of UTO

Screenshot-from-2018-09-05-13-55-36.png

IMG_2526.JPG

"What's going on how do we stop it?" - Isenberg

What about "Modest Netting"?

http://isen.com/bighook/conduct.html

http://www.capecodtimes.com/article/20090816/NEWS/908160335

Meanwhile, ADD Boy here rarely lasts until Thursday.

Is like Bitcoin -- cash it in quick.

We call it "blockhead." It's like blockchain, but you wish people didn't know where it came from.

plop, i'm in. thx James

IMG_2526.JPG

"encrusted with governance structures" Crocker, on ICANN

Which one is the avatar?

Would be nice if we can make images display larger

@Richard Whitt If you click on the question mark next to your name and then click edit your profile, you can upload a picture.

Thanks James; will do.

@Steve Crocker 's note on free software economics reminds me to mention tidelift.com

(I actually meant which of the two Crockers is the avatar, but good to know how to upload my photo)

Which is working on economic sustainability, security, and dependability in open source on a few levels - happy to talk more about it in person or in another thread

@Christopher Mitchell There's no easy setting for image size. We could probably edit the css of the page during a break. If you are CSS-enabled, go for it. There's a plugin you can click on in the upper right corner of the TV screen to do that. This is, however, a shared server and I can't live-patch the display stuff for fear of messing with the other communities with Zulip instances on this box.

"We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code"

https://www.ietf.org/about/participate/tao/

@James Vasile Yeah, after I wrote that I realized that larger images would push all text off the screen. We need more screens obviously

@Christopher Mitchell That's actually a good idea. Another screen that just shows the images...

At what point would people have been wrong to be both optimistic and pessimistic throughout the state of human affairs? Always reasons for both and anyone with a basic knowledge of history can prove what they want.

"The dystopian future is here now, it's just not evenly distributed yet." - Dewayne

Dewayne's walkaway last year also set off an important reflection on race and gender and our pursuits @Barbara Cherry offered profound insights on the topic as well.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/holo-take-back-the-internet-shared-p2p-hosting

https://holo.host/

Anyone who believes in an efficient market had better be able to produce one, preferably in a cage.

Holo: "With Holo, you share your computer's spare capacity to help others connect to peer-to-peer apps. When people use the apps you host, you can get rewarded in cryptocurrency by the app's creators." https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/holo-take-back-the-internet-shared-p2p-hosting#/

Weinberger: From chaos theory to chaos practice. F!

Andrew O: Still there and still a hero.

We are on a string of irrationalities! The new normal is irrational :)

Andrew reminds me of nassim Nicholas taleb. .. if nassim was a nice guy rather than a jackhole.

Is there a pickle Rick joke here somewhere?

It's funny, but I talked to a bunch of folks back when the bubble burst. They all said they knew the Internet couldn't be doubling every hundred days, but everyone else was saying it so they all assumed somehow they were missing something.

If there were, it would be a Rickles' pick. (Best I can do, Christopher Mitchell)

I'll take it.

@HaroldFeld The trick isn't realizing people are wrong. The trick is predicting when everybody else will realize it.

I do not understand why tech folks insist on saying that no one is doing critique of internet platforms when there is literally an entire field of Science and Technology studies that has been doing little else for decades.

because there's not enough cross-disciplinary interchange for them to hear it.

I mean, the STS folks have been trying to get the tech folks to listen for a long time, but as far as I can tell, there's an unwillingness to listen on the tech side, largely because the STS folks talking aren't paying attention to the right cultural shibboleths.

Absolutely the case that rich STS critique for decades--but a critique that has, for a dense set of sociological and rhetorical reasons, some good and some bad, remained little known outside a relatively cloistered world.

But also because they're offering actual structural critique, which would require real change to enact, and often undermine existing business models.

Nobody wants to hear that they are the problem and the solutions threaten their investments/privilege/etc.

"It is impossible to tell something to a man if his livelihood depends on him not understanding it"

On that point, I thought this was a good conversation... https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/vox/the-ezra-klein-show/e/56013930

Free software. People should own their means of communication. Pro bono legal services. Man, this @James Vasile is a commie!

(Note: "Commie" is a term from the 1950s and 1960s, indicating that someone is a "communist" who follows the dictates either of Karl Marx or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.)

My (out of date) bio: https://opentechstrategies.com/#team

@David Weinberger Mostly a marxist and a squishy one at that...

Interdisciplinary: E.g., Brett's collaborator on his new and excellent book is a philosopher.

Re: commons: frequent BH'er Doc Searls has been working on a "customer commons" for several years.

I am working, slowly, on my first book, and I am so grateful to hear that very thoughtful people in this room have been taking, for instance, 6 years to write hard books.

Doc's Project VRM doesn't get the attention it deserves: https://cyber.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Main_Page

I'd say they're problems of capitalism and power-over, not problems of infrastructure.

@Eleanor Saitta I'm not sure they're really separable concerns. Capitalism and power-over determine the infrastructure that reinforce capitalism and power-over,.

Appreciated, @Sumana Harihareswara :relaxed: Writing, unwriting, and rewriting can be trying, but it's also The Process. In this particular case, The Process has been more than a little bit broken...

@James Vasile Sure, but you can pick which lens you start using to look at the problem. If you start with infrastucture, you start trying to build tools to change systems; if you start with capitalism and power, you start trying to change those directly and let the infrastructure follow. There's still only one system, but perspective changes everything.

https://www.netblazr.com/

As James Williams (new "Stand Out of Our Light" book) puts it: the tech companies say their platforms simply give users what they want. But, is it what those humans WANT to want?

You can't talk just about what individuals want and then also want better social outcomes for communities. You have to actually take the communities seriously, think about what they want, and sometimes let the communities win over the individuals.

@Richard Whitt , This is one of the reasons I'm so interested in (and generally positive about) open platforms/APIs, game mods, standards that enable interoperability, open licenses of all sorts, etc.: When they work, they enable us to decide what we want, putting the work done by others to our own uses. It's an under-appreciated good thing about the Net. (Not under-appreciated by BHers.)

@Wendy Seltzer : The membranes of governance. (BTW, cf. Brett's SciAm post that David I linked to about the importance of metaphors.)

"to decide what we want" -- but generally in isolation. The "we" of the internet is always atomized.

link to the #AI exhibit from labs.rs opening Sept 7th at V&A https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/Ed6aWGg9/artificially-intelligent-display

There is no public internet. And there’s no scarcity mechanism as a forcing function.

To better approximations!

People have been thinking about public squares on the internet for a long time and there are a lot of wacky ideas out there. In the 90s, some proposed interstitial pages as public space so users can be accosted on their way to Macys.com just as they would be by a street protest. We now have intrusive interstitials (we call them modals) but they are devoted exclusively to advertising. In the 90's I laughed at the proposals, but I think they would be preferable to what we ended up with.

Can Hamilton do a song about Lin-Manuel Miranda?

Hello, World!

If I may speak for the World: Howdy back at you!

SMSA and MSA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area

@katherine maher point of clarification. The term "public internet" has a unique meaning in telecom law based on the old "public switched network."

One of the problems of cross-disciplinary discussion is that the same word can mean entirely different things depending on the discipline. It's not a "jargon" issue. It's a _presicions_ issue. Among telecom lawyers, if I say "public switched network" we all know exactly what I'm talking about. I expect there are similar concepts in sociology and other disciplines.

Is there a reason why the telephone wire is always the lowest on the pole? Just curious.

Not sure.

@David Weinberger I suspect it might be because they have the most need to connect to homes/buildings along the way.

"Syntax of the telephone pole" - David I

Now I get it. It's an interference issue. Also an access issue.

Climbing past all the other stuff is a pain

The Pole Stack:

• Electricity
  Neutral
• 40" safety zone
• (fiber optic can be in the safety zone)
• Open prairie
• Telephone (in most states): most convenient place to be.
• Requisite minimal height
• Earth (flat)

Poll attachments -- not since I did tariffs in the 1990s has their been an area so important an so UTTERLY PAINFULLY BORING!!!

delhi telephon poles:
https://www.google.com/search?q=telephone+poles+new+delhi&rlz=1C5CHFA_enCH784CH784&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwihrM_d1aTdAhXMTN8KHa9mAqAQ_AUICigB&biw=1308&bih=780

Now ask me about using one for an eruv.

(I was on my synagogue eruv committee for about 3 years.)

india_elec_3475.jpg

@HaroldFeld Did you get to be below the telephone wires?

Eruv: "an urban area enclosed by a wire boundary that symbolically extends the private domain of Jewish households into public areas, permitting activities within it that are normally forbidden in public on the Sabbath." In many communities, telephone lines are counted as forming an enclosure. (Fact check me, Harold)

For the syntax of telecom/electric infrastructure in NYC, check out @lifewinning's https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/networks-of-new-york/

@Matt Jones I have Ingrid's book and can highly recommend it to all

https://www.fightforthefuture.org/ . Obvie.

V. curious to find out if god is above or below the phone company

what's good for the phone company is good for the lord

There is no pole.
Whoa.

Actually, it has to go over the top, so we use the electric wires.

I suppose i'd be remiss to not also mention i write semi-regularly for The Guardian, mostly on queer and trans issues (and previously the campaign to free Chelsea Manning) but also on tech policy / copyright / privacy / free speech etc https://www.theguardian.com/profile/evan-greer

hm, threading is hard

I was looking for the Daily Show piece on the eruv hat but couldn't find it quickly.

Is this it? @HaroldFeld http://www.cc.com/video-clips/1jsrl7/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-the-thin-jew-line

wireless-provider.png

@James Vasile That's the one! totally hysterical.

http://www.capeandislands.org/people/heather-goldstone#stream/0

citation needed

(Feel better soon, @Heather Goldstone )

Cagle: As a journalist, I don't really deal in hope but in darkness.

"An expert in many things, and not an expert in anything"

https://www.patreon.com/susie

Susie's patreon. I'm a supporter, you should be too: https://www.patreon.com/susie

An expert temporarily? Is there any other kind?

www.otheringandbelonging.org/divided-and-platformed/

http://www.otheringandbelonging.org/divided-and-platformed/

Topic table on journalism models and the love-hate relationship with 'platforms?'

Agile development processes for the development of ethics of machine learning systems - @Alix

"What does it look like to reach a point of technical intuition" -- @Alix

A first post on ‘technical intuition’: https://medium.com/@alixtrot/technical-intuition-instincts-in-a-digital-world-a6bfda669a91

Europe is awesome except for the whole throwing bananas at African soccer players ... for instance.

Not all of Europe. That problem is gone in UK, France, Germany. Really limited to Eastern Europe

And ‘agile ethics’: https://medium.com/@alixtrot/working-ethically-at-speed-4534358e7eed

Not what I hear from Spain but it is third hand

(Apologies for the lack of threading...!)

@Alix I think folks are mostly ignoring threading, which is fine for a 3-day conference.

Phew.

@Christopher Mitchell https://images.theconversation.com/files/166620/original/file-20170425-12650-16jxfww.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=926&fit=clip

@Richard Thanki IAT? (Sorry. I am an expert in nothing.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit-association_test @David Weinberger

@David Weinberger ... Pretty sure blue is better than red. I have exhausted my expertise

The implicit-association test (IAT) is a measure within social psychology designed to detect the strength of a person's automatic association between mental representations of objects (concepts) in memory. The IAT was introduced in the scientific literature in 1998 by Anthony Greenwald, Debbie McGhee, and Jordan Schwartz.[1] The IAT is now widely used in social psychology research and, to some extent, in clinical, cognitive, and developmental psychology research. The IAT is the subject of much controversy regarding precisely what it measures, and the lack of reproducibility of many of its results. - Wikipedia

@David Weinberger Harvard's Implicit Association Test (testing in this case for subconscious association of black faces with negative traits) very dificult to game an attempt at this test

US for comparison https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/user/jaxt/blogposts/images/USMap.jpg

@Christopher Mitchell Oh, I'm not saying it's perfect. Far from it; we have fascists, we run our own border death camps just like the american ones, the whole nine yards. However, many European countries, and in particular the Nordics, are still basically coherent societies. It is possible to be a public intellectual, for instance. Rule of law and social trust are mostly intact. Relatively few people are shot in the street for no reason, and there are consequences when that happens. Infrastructure is maintained, and basic food safety exists.

Voter outreach software is basically redone from scratch every 4 years, once for each major party. They learn nothing from what came before for all kinds of reasons. This has predictable effects on software quality and effectiveness.

Has IAT undergone rigorous examination as a meaningful test? I've heard some criticisms of it but was too lazy to check. I find it compelling.

@Eleanor Saitta thanks.

Red Pine: Bill Porter (born October 3, 1943) is an American author who translates under the pen-name Red Pine (Chinese: 赤松; pinyin: Chì Sōng). He is a translator of Chinese texts, primarily Taoist and Buddhist, including poetry and sūtras. In 2018 he won the American Academy of Arts & Letters Thornton Wilder Prize for translation.[1] - wikipedia

Red Pine is lovely, but he's a very opinionated translator. I really recommend reading a few side-by-side if you can; for the Dao in particular it's great fun.

A heart attack is not the same as a cardiac arrest, btw.

Google is failing at enabling me to find where our nearest automated public defibrillator is

I am https://mastodon.social/@brainwane and brainwane.dreamwidth.org

Very interesting about attacks on core Internet infrastructure. Ostrom said that large scale commons resources could be managed well by nested groups of smaller scale commons management

@Richard Thanki That doesn't apply to fully-entangled systems; they don't decompose hierarchically

@Richard Thanki Interesting Ostrom point. Do you have an example?

http://www.test.com http://www.test.tech ... just testing Zulip

My blog post on the playwriting and on think-tank fiction.... I'm thinking about xkcd and James Mickens, for instance.

It's her 8th principle of commons governance design principles. i'll find an example she uses! I get your point of fully-entangled systems but the physical access level can still be thought of as a tree. maybe polycentric overlapping governance could be useful in fully entangled systems

Very true, sorry for oversimplifying! An overview re: AED effectiveness and Public Access Defibrillation I wrote a while back

I have literally never seen a complete and correct email address validator. I have seen regexes 20 pages long that still don't do it properly.

As far as I can tell, it's simply broken, in the same way that the are no existing libraries that can parse all TLS certificates currently found on the public internet

(It's more likely that we'll fix the latter, but only by changing the format; can't do that for identifiers)

@Ram Mohan If you have a paragraph-length version of your request, regarding open source tools and handling languages/domain names, I would like to forward it and make some connections with relevant folks, if possible

@Ram Mohan If you have a paragraph-length version of your request, regarding open source tools and handling languages/domain names, I would like to forward it and make some connections with relevant folks, if possible

Happy to do it, and would love the intros and connects

@Sumana Harihareswara very interested in your book and thesis on how Open source needs project management and other professional services to sustain and perform. Much needed.

Nasal overflow

@Ram Mohan If you have a paragraph-length version of your request, regarding open source tools and handling languages/domain names, I would like to forward it and make some connections with relevant folks, if possible

Happy to do it, and would love the intros and connects

OMG! @Ram Mohan has discovered that Zulip supports threading! The down arrow in the message little tool bar lets you quote and reply! (Is there a simpler way I'm missing?)

"Sorry to Bother You"

@Ram Mohan If you have a paragraph-length version of your request, regarding open source tools and handling languages/domain names, I would like to forward it and make some connections with relevant folks, if possible

Happy to do it, and would love the intros and connects

OMG! @Ram Mohan has discovered that Zulip supports threading! The down arrow in the message little tool bar lets you quote and reply! (Is there a simpler way I'm missing?)

Good idea David. I am happy to help here as well. Please share same email with me and I will send to my circles.

(This is a different thread than "introductions")

(This is a different thread than "introductions")

And this is an indented response, which is the other sense of threading that I totally ambiguously intended :)

@Ram Mohan If you have a paragraph-length version of your request, regarding open source tools and handling languages/domain names, I would like to forward it and make some connections with relevant folks, if possible

Happy to do it, and would love the intros and connects

OMG! @Ram Mohan has discovered that Zulip supports threading! The down arrow in the message little tool bar lets you quote and reply! (Is there a simpler way I'm missing?)

Good idea David. I am happy to help here as well. Please share same email with me and I will send to my circles.

Universal Acceptance is a foundational requirement for a truly multilingual Internet, one in which
users around the world can navigate entirely in local languages. It is also the key to unlocking the
potential of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) to foster competition, consumer choice and
innovation in the domain name industry. To achieve Universal Acceptance, Internet applications and
systems must treat all TLDs in a consistent manner, including new gTLDs and internationalized TLDs.
Specifically, they must accept, validate, store, process and display all domain names.

The Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) is a community-based team working to share this
vision for the Internet of the future with those who construct this space: coders. The group's primary
objective is to help software developers and website owners understand how to update their systems
to keep pace with an evolving domain name system (DNS).

Software applications that make use of Internet services are built and used in a variety of ways. They
exist at all points along a continuum ranging from embedded firmware in a connected device,
through desktop/mobile/tablet applications, through to software that runs purely in a web browser
environment, the latter often communicating with more software running on remote servers.

All these types make use of Internet identifiers which, while historically represented only in characters
employed by US English (i.e. A-Z, 0-9 and ‘-’), can now, via the IDNA Protocol, be fully multilingual.
These identifiers are:
• Domain names, e.g. example.com or 普遍接受-测试.世界
• Email addresses, e.g. joe.bloggs@example.com or 测试3@普遍接受-测试.top
• Web addresses, or more precisely Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), e.g.
https://uasg.tech/uasg-charter/ or https://普遍接受-测试.top/我的页面

It is therefore important for all stakeholders in development of a software application to be aware
what libraries are available for their chosen development environment to be used for processing
Internet identifiers, and to have a clear basis for assessing those libraries, for technical and business
suitability, with regard to the UA correctness and compliance.

@Ram Mohan If you have a paragraph-length version of your request, regarding open source tools and handling languages/domain names, I would like to forward it and make some connections with relevant folks, if possible

Happy to do it, and would love the intros and connects

OMG! @Ram Mohan has discovered that Zulip supports threading! The down arrow in the message little tool bar lets you quote and reply! (Is there a simpler way I'm missing?)

Good idea David. I am happy to help here as well. Please share same email with me and I will send to my circles.

If solving this were as easy as throwing some developers at it, we wouldn't still be trying to solve the problem. What are the best guesses as to why nobody has written this library and/or why such a library hasn't been popularized across the industry?

Peers Inc is a worthwhile read

@Ram Mohan If you have a paragraph-length version of your request, regarding open source tools and handling languages/domain names, I would like to forward it and make some connections with relevant folks, if possible

Happy to do it, and would love the intros and connects

OMG! @Ram Mohan has discovered that Zulip supports threading! The down arrow in the message little tool bar lets you quote and reply! (Is there a simpler way I'm missing?)

Good idea David. I am happy to help here as well. Please share same email with me and I will send to my circles.

If solving this were as easy as throwing some developers at it, we wouldn't still be trying to solve the problem. What are the best guesses as to why nobody has written this library and/or why such a library hasn't been popularized across the industry?

Best guess is insufficient awareness...

http://www.robinchase.org/peers-inc/

@Sumana Harihareswara @Nithya Ruff , if you hit 'more' on my prior reply, you'll see the (4) paragraph long detail of the problem space

https://www.uasg.tech

One thing Robin's intro up for me is how having working examples like Zipcar makes it so much easier to explain platform-based (or platform-like) networks to non-technical people. ie "Oh it's like Zipcar but for boats.""It's like grubhub but for weed" "It's like spotify but controlled by artists."

"It's like uber, but owned by the drivers"

+1

George Carlin:

Chickens are good people

It's like Uber, but subject to the rule of law

And economics?

Let's not get hasty

Platforms and journalism
open source sustainability
weinberger author therapy
content moderation
manipulation by platforms
understanding the human ape

Should we have a quick round of intros by the newbies, with fuller ones tomorrow?

Gigi - yet another hero in the room

Whole bunch of heroes in the room, to tell the truth. Pretty great room.

Victories elsewhere matter in Washington

(deleted)

@Evan Greer notes: AT&T spends more in the Calif legislature than banks and pharma combined

I mean, we basically think California should lead because we might win and it might stick, and we'll take it wherever we can get it?

Thread on California victory: https://twitter.com/fightfortheftr/status/1035653963339558912

Do we think the CA law will survive a court challenge?

I believe this map is more or less updated with both state legislation and executive orders https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/these-states-are-fighting-for-net-neutrality-is-yours-one-of-them

Won't the CA law be pre-empted?

I think it has a very good chance. The argument is that the FCC essentially abdicated its oversight over ISPs, and thus its attempt at pre-emption is moot. Respected academics like Barbara Van Schewick, and lawyers at EFF et al make a strong case for this

*very good chance of withstanding pre-emption

I believe this map is more or less updated with both state legislation and executive orders https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/these-states-are-fighting-for-net-neutrality-is-yours-one-of-them

But presumably will go to Supreme Court that sides with big biz at every opportunity

possibly. either way, having some rules that we are fighting to defend is a dramatically different negotiating situation from having NO rules, especially if we start to have some rules in 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 states

Strongly agree but a reminder that those who didn't vote in 2014 effectively gave the Supreme Court to monopoly corporations for the foreseeable future

also, each of these state based legislative fights underscores how cross-partisan this issue is with voters. in California we had Republican support in both Assembly and Senate. That puts real pressure on GOP members of Congress, and undermines astroturf operations trying to turn NN into a partisan circus

We need to fight for these rules but regulators are not the long term solution. We need alternative sources or power. Owning networks is that power.

don't disagree with that

I'm "old" enough to remember when Tom Wheeler was enemy #1

And i prob gave Gigi at least one or two headaches :-)

In the end, centralization is the enemy of democracy

We need both robust competition, but also community based alternatives to monopoly-esque platforms

I don't understand why universal connectivity is the single thing that matters when the only thing left to connect to is an abuse factory run by fascists.

Explain more? I assume you mean Twitter et al?

And here I thought the Internet was only good for sharing cat videos.

The Internet is fucking amazing. I am sick of people picking out a few things it does that have negative results and trying to shit on it for it

I think this is a both / and

Well, specifically, platforms that are designed around engagement at any cost.

The Internet has dramatically changed the rules for what is and isn't possible within our corrupt-ass political system

Look at how scientists use it to learn and build on research rapidly

It's one of the most powerful tools we have to hold powerful people and institutions to account, and one of the most powerful checks on authoritarianism and tyranny

but it has a dark side

it's not all cat videos and unicorns with guns

it's also mass surveillance, and targeted advertising designed to make teenagers feel bad about their bodies, using data that tells advertisers what time of day they feel most vulnerable

Engagement as a metric for platform success (which is driven by entirely regulateable investment structures) is the single element that's created a structure where large-scale population manipulation is easy, because that's literally what they sell.

I 100% agree that there's a ton of INternet-bashing going on that's baseless, or based in fearmongering

@Eleanor Saitta yes, i agree with that, tho that pushes me toward what i was saying before: community based solutions to capitalist driven platforms

DEMOCRACY IS MESSY <3

@Evan Greer I want to agree with you, but I think we're far better off trying to change the cost function of parasitic business models; trying to create community platforms top down is basically guaranteed to fail.

The culture's bit flipped on the Net about ten years ago, didn't it? The default switched (at least in the media and in public discussion) from the Net is the new Eden to the Net is Armageddon for culture, decency, truth...

@Eleanor Saitta super interested in this (in a curious, not argumentative way). What does this look like: " change the cost function of parasitic business models;"

@David Weinberger and of course the truth lies somewhere between the two

Technology can be used for profound good or profound evil

@David Weinberger and of course the truth lies somewhere between the two

Or, more messily, in the co-existence of both.

@Christopher Mitchell Yes, it's absolutely amazing that we've got the sum total of all human knowledge in our pockets. However, even if we pretend that the Internet is the most important thing going on in 2018 (it frankly doesn't hit the top three for me), the large-scale structural impact of net-centric technologies is largely currently being deployed for large-scale population control and extortion by rentiers.

i am reminded of early white feminist critiques of hip hop, devoid of deeper cultural understanding or the voices of POC femmes -- the internet is a reflection of our society -- it's influenced by all the inequities prevalent in dominant culture

This is the greatest time in human history to be a seeker of knowledge, truth, and community. It is simultaneously the greatest time in history to be a totally idiot.

@David Weinberger or more frighteningly, the greatest time in history to be a paid manipulator of public opinion

@Evan Greer Well, for instance, make companies directly liable for the cost to end users of breaches. Now, holding data about people has an open-ended cost function, to a degree where continuing to do so is business suicide.

The scale of the technology is very important. I suspect the work my org does on humanly-scaled economy would fit with what @Eleanor Saitta is driving at.

@David Weinberger or more frighteningly, the greatest time in history to be a paid manipulator of public opinion

Indubitably.

I may be incorrect but I think banks got better security when the boards became liable for problems with it.

100% agree scale matters in a huge way here. it also seems like peer to peer technologies may dramatically change this landscape in the coming years

@Evan Greer I wish I remotely belived in that. p2p is frankly a pipe dream right now, and one that I'm actively angry we keep pretending might be the answer, because we refuse to admit that we're talking about technologies that will require tens of billions of dollars of investment to get them even remotely close to parity.

100% agree scale matters in a huge way here. it also seems like peer to peer technologies may dramatically change this landscape in the coming years

From your lips to the decentralized Internet's ears.

I am interested in further conversations about how the Internet is being used for population control. And where it fits in historically.

@Eleanor Saitta I don't even pretend to be a technologist. So i defer. But then .. where do you see hope? Or do you not?

I largely don't see hope. Iff we're pretending we have a chance of driving a sane legislative agenda that's not beholden to the Democratic "center", then it's liability regulations

woh .. where did his come from? I have a LOT of feels about "overpopulation" as a narrative that's used to police and control predominantly poor women of color's reproductive choices. This is a good read https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1050-reproductive-rights-and-wrongs

I'm a fan. our big reason for opposing CISA / CISPA was that killing liability is super dangerous for privacy

@Christopher Mitchell Yes, personal liability is a huge driver. Claw-backs on salary and bonuses for execs and the board too; ten year escrow policies

Regarding TIm's points - ECFiber is building fiber for just a fraction above the cost per home of what Fairpoint is getting to build DSL. Discussed here: https://muninetworks.org/content/transcript-community-broadband-bits-episode-251

But, I have a hard time giving up on hope. I have an 8 year old who is also trans and intend to fight for a world where they have some basic semblance of rights. They have a blog and have already used the internet to connect with other kids who have similar experiences to them. it's hard for me to not see that as dramatically different than the world i grew up in

@David Weinberger I'll believe it when they ship literally anything at scale. I say this as someone who's put a ton of time into tech in the space.

I didn't mean control of the numbers of population. I meant the way Eleanor is saying is that people are being controlled.

aha ::climbs off high horse::

@Christopher Mitchell Attempts at control. I'm not saying it works well, but it's definitely intended.

Fully agree with you @Evan Greer regarding total bullshit of claiming number of humans is a problem ... problems are caused by a small fraction of the number of people.

@Evan Greer Hope is a practice, not a reality. I think it's a very important one. I try to be a realistic optimist, and I think it's entirely reasonable that we could solve this. However, we're not doing it.

Truth

Ooooh 5G! The latest magic pixie dust!

And politicians screaming at tech companies to "Just do something!" about problems that are legit hard to solve is not going to get us any closer to doing anything about this

I have the deep fortune to lead one of the most positive social impact platforms in the world - we’re the sum of knowledge in your pocket people - and even I believe the current state of the internet is deeply problematIc. Not the literal internet; assigning value judgment to standards and packet switching is an absurdist statement. But the application layer of the internet is a garbage ecosystem of privatized and unaccountable dark patterns for manipulation of end user behavior, data modeling for value extraction, and dumb algos that regIster and amplIfy adverse behavior as a positive structural function. The economics of buIldIng for scale are such that edge cases of cultural or identity margins are inefficient and bound for erasure in mass modeling — not to mention the scaling of structural bias in the training datasets that are mirrors of our broader social dysfunction. We have a network built by dominant forces and power structures that replicate the very same, with mass value extraction as the primary use case. Sure, the internet has been a powerful force for many positives. But erasing the structural consequences by papering over them with the individual connective advantages is like having one eye shut - there’s no depth perception.

@David Weinberger I'll believe it when they ship literally anything at scale. I say this as someone who's put a ton of time into tech in the space.

As will I, but I also long ago gave up on predicting that any particular line will remain straight. I've seen too many non-linear openings up into realms of implausible possibilities. So, you're probably right, but.

/rant guess I need to hand in my card

Remember how Wi-Fi, WiMax, LTE, etc. all made wired networks unnecessary?

Harold on 5G - https://www.wetmachine.com/tales-of-the-sausage-factory/so-what-the-heck-does-5g-actually-do-and-is-it-worth-what-the-carriers-are-demanding/

Yay @katherine maher DO IT

@katherine maher yes

@katherine maher 100% agree

i think where shit gets real is when we try to figure out what (if anything? probably nothing is best) The Government (with a capital G) should do about the fact that the market driven top layer of the Internet is trash

@David Weinberger They aren't going to ship because it's 98% a bunch of really cool geek hobbyists who don't actually understand what a real world application is and don't have the luxury of 25 years to go find out.

AT&T turning away from 5G it seems... https://www.telecompetitor.com/att-the-business-case-for-fixed-5g-is-ugly-verizon-seems-to-beg-to-differ/ "AT&T: The Business Case for Fixed 5G is Ugly, Verizon Seems to Beg to Differ"

@Evan Greer that’s what I was hoping to hear from our speakers - what’s the progressive equIty platform for a new admin

Because currently there’s zero partisan coherence and even less policy comprehension

Instead, we get the same connectivity conversation as every year that ignores the entire rest of the stack.

you can imagine how much it pains me to say it, but i'm not 100% sure i disagree with Pai on algorithm transparency

Electricity companies pay for ROW but FCC is about to make it so the very profitable wireless companies get it more or less free

one real concern is that algorithm transparency then allows institutions with the most resources to game the algorithm

@David Weinberger They aren't going to ship because it's 98% a bunch of really cool geek hobbyists who don't actually understand what a real world application is and don't have the luxury of 25 years to go find out.

Well, some are producing protocols, which has its own issues. But see reply to previous msg: things can change quickly. They may not, they may change for the worse, but unpredictability even at large scales seems to me to be an empirical fact of life. At least of my lifetime.

@Evan Greer Algorithm transparency in what context

Skype went from p2p with problems to centralized and unusable. Some evidence against what I wish were happening per @David Weinberger

for platforms of a certain size, i think it's a good question how big

@David Weinberger I've written decentralized system protocols. They're utterly useless on their own. I have never seen anyone even starting to do the work that would make them worth the pixels they're written on.

I’ve not been following. I’m pro first principles but algo transparency is less interesting to me then algo legibility. Most folks don’t have the ability to understand code, anymore than they are lawyers to wrangle the nuances of law. But still, a principle of democratic societies is legibility and accessibility of the intent of the legal code to the general public - we need to understand the code under which we consent to be governed. I’d like to see a similar algo princille

*principle

Yes. 100% this. People want to know "What am I being shown and why"

@David Weinberger I've written decentralized system protocols. They're utterly useless on their own. I have never seen anyone even starting to do the work that would make them worth the pixels they're written on.

What do you think of Protocol Labs? (An honest question. I'm not being argumentative.)

For me, the first principles for ML are consent, legibility, and editability

Oops I forgot active inclusivity

And the reality is that real transparency on this undermines a significant portion of advertising revenue and ... that's a good thing

@Evan Greer word

I feel behind the times, but spell out ML for me?

Hypercapitalization does not genetally end well

Would love to see more documentation of the "extortion" from local gov. There is a lot more talk in the abstract than documentation. I'm sure it happens, but suspect it is more rare than anyone in DC thinks

Oh sorry machine learning. I am not a comp scientist but our AI folks at Wikimedia assure me that ML is the dehyped and more accurate terminology

:relaxed:️

@David Weinberger I generally believe that blockchain/coin structures are useless at best and mostly actively harmful, and I don't see anything there but the same old same old with no applications.

I’ve not been following. I’m pro first principles but algo transparency is less interesting to me then algo legibility. Most folks don’t have the ability to understand code, anymore than they are lawyers to wrangle the nuances of law. But still, a principle of democratic societies is legibility and accessibility of the intent of the legal code to the general public - we need to understand the code under which we consent to be governed. I’d like to see a similar algo princille

This is a really interesting distinction. Thanks. I've often thought that legislators demanding algo transparency simply don't understand what algorithms are.

It feels like there's a parallel to industrialism here -- sure you can create nearly limitless wealth by plundering the earth, but we can recognize that there are externalities that mean that's a very short lived pipe dream

@David Weinberger you’re welcome. Happy to discuss more.

Aren't the cable companies big allies in the effort for more unlicensed spectrum?

@David Weinberger you’re welcome. Happy to discuss more.

Yes!

What does "realistic" mean? I mean, we thought that maintaining the rule of law was realistic, but it wasn't.

@Evan Greer oh heck yes. Climate change for sure. Here’s something I wrote for WIRED on this on the exploitation of the commons. Not my choice of title and softer than I’d share in private, but it’s about the tragedy of the CC Commons. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedia-google-youtube-facebook-support

https://www.publicknowledge.org/tag/Platform+Regulation+Series

Or rather, the foreseen future

News: It's a great day for all of us in India, and I should think the world - the Indian Supreme Court decriminalizes homosexuality, and also guarantees "equal citizenship in all its manifestations" for the LGBTQ community. https://scroll.in/latest/893352/section-377-sc-to-rule-on-validity-of-colonial-era-law-that-criminalises-gay-sex

Yessss! I've been watching my feeds erupt in joy over this. So happy, and so good to finally see another part of the British legacy of hatred fall away!

This is such joyous news to wake up to!!

Jason Livingood!

Harold Feld next

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/05/a-cartoon-intro-to-dns-over-https/

BTW, forgot to mention I'm also figuring out how to comply technically with SB-822 in California! ;-) Not easy, especially with respect to interconnection. The time between Gov Brown's signature and 1/1/2019 implementation will be busy.

https://blog.ungleich.ch/en-us/cms/blog/2018/08/04/mozillas-new-dns-resolution-is-dangerous/

:-)

Awesome awesome awesome. Hope lives.

I'd love to see a practically deployable alternative to DNS over HTTPS that was protocol native but actually provided query confidentiality and integrity, but instead we have people still trying to make DNSSec a thing

Feld: understanding situations in terms of markets makes them more predictable for him :)

Ben Wizner, whose team won the Carpenter case

Good moment to remember and feel grumpy about people making George W Bush seem all cuddly and nice in comparison to trump

Aclu stress test: role of first amendment in 2018

FYI, for those interested in my legal reasoning as to why the Ca legislature won't be preempted, se generally:
http://www.wetmachine.com/tales-of-the-sausage-factory/can-the-states-really-pass-their-own-net-neutrality-laws-heres-why-i-think-yes/

The case on this has only gotten stronger in light of a Supreme Court case on state sovereignty and by Marsha Blackburn accidentally eliminating the statutory language on which the FCC based its authority (oopsie!).

@Jason Livingood Does Comcast have a plan for dealing with interstate issues? SB-822 isn't explicitly limited to California network activity as I read it. Does it apply to traffic that originates, travels, and terminates wholly outside California?

That's what we're trying to determine now. It seems that if traffic is delivered physically outside of CA but some packets happen to end up being routed to or through CA over our backbone (even if not destined for CA), that is interstate and not covered. But if it is delivered physically in a CA datacenter, for local in-state delivery, then that seems clearly covered. Luckily we have 2 local ASNs for CA so if someone hands off in CA we will know it is local if it is for the ASNs. But just for the in-state connections, there are a lot of them.

Per a breakfast conversation: An overview re: AED effectiveness and Public Access Defibrillation I wrote a while back, and (work-in-progress, not sharing publicly yet) my New York city/state FOIL investigation on PAD data

Lev Gonick on connectivity

@Jason Livingood are there other areas, beyond interconnection, that you expect to have to make technical or policy changes on as a result of SB 822?

and i'd love to hear more about the interconnection stuff -- you see it as requiring you to change existing agreements?

Christopher Mitchell, Institute for Local Self Reliance

I cannot stress too much the need to pay attention here to the ongoing and increasingly blatant efforts of Republicans and the Trump administration to browbeat and tame digital platforms to serve their ends by promoting conservatives and Republicans and suppressing alternative viewpoints. This now includes a DoJ "investigation" (I note that despite a vague effort at pretending it's antitrust related, they bypassed Delrahim. Not that Delrahim is soft on platforms, but this is just intimidation directly on the subject of "fairness.")
http://www.wetmachine.com/tales-of-the-sausage-factory/can-the-states-really-pass-their-own-net-neutrality-laws-heres-why-i-think-yes/

To address a number of usual arguments.

1. I don't care how cynical you are -- it CAN totally get worse. We have not even begun to scratch the surface on awfulness. No. Really. Acknowledging this doesn't mean defending platforms or saying things are great now.

2. This worked super well in the 90s and 00s on corporate media. unchecked, it will work here.

3. The enemy of your enemy is not your friend. You will not be at the table. If you want to co-opt this to get the change to platforms you want, then you need to plan how to wrest control of this investigation away from the Trumpies and Republican party.

4. You do not have to defend platforms or embrace them to see this as a threat to freedom and a powerful weapon for he most radical elements of the conservative movement. To quote the musical Chess: "Nobodies on nobody's side."

Oh sorry machine learning. I am not a comp scientist but our AI folks at Wikimedia assure me that ML is the dehyped and more accurate terminology

@katherine maher would love to hear more about this - 3 minute rant, or ... tabletop conversation later.

@Ram Mohan @katherine maher Another word could be: "statistics", which is even less hyped than ML but also more precise.

For me, the first principles for ML are consent, legibility, and editability and inclusivity

These first principles...

@Ram Mohan here is the blog post I was talking about.
http://www.wetmachine.com/tales-of-the-sausage-factory/solving-the-rural-broadband-equation-fund-infrastructure-not-carriers/

@James Vasile Statistical automation, or data-driven statistical automation is what I use. I think the automation part is important too.

Legibility is really difficult in systems that are too complex for us to reason about in a detailed way.

What is the name of that PC Magazine test Christopher mentioned?

@James Vasile @Ram Mohan yep

I 100% agree with this and I actually think the problem is worse. We now have politicians from both parties screaming at platforms / big tech companies / "the Internet" to "JUST DO SOMETHING" about problems that are legitimately difficult to solve. Democrats are using Facebook, Twitter, et al as their punching bag in relation to the Russia election meddling narrative. I've seen well respected leftist nonprofits calling for Twitter to ban Trump. We're seeing calls for censorship increase on the left and it scares the heck out of me

@Eleanor Saitta The automation part is key, yeah. It's not just that we do lots of calculations but we've aggregated these stats calculations past where people can do/see/understand.

I'm notably concerned about how this is going to echo outside of the US. I'm willing to frankly write a lot of the US internally off at this point, because I don't see things getting better until the country decides fascism is a mistake, but this kind of nonsense cannot be allowed to spread.

I agree with @Christopher Mitchell concern. But there is evidence that fixed wireless in rural can stimulate fiber deployment. But our commitment to 100% connectivity is key. We did not reach 97% voice penetration in U.S. by deciding 95% was 'good enough.'

I think this is also our Chris Mitchell: http://sportshotphoto.com/gallery/main.php

What is the name of that PC Magazine test Christopher mentioned?

ookla, https://www.ookla.com/

https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2018-08-01-mass-censorship-is-not-the-answer-fight-for-the/

This, however, is not our Chris Mitchell: https://www.law.com/corpcounsel/2018/08/24/counsel-and-advocate-how-kickstarters-new-gc-balances-legal-work-with-his-companys-mission/?slreturn=20180806092406

He is, though, a hell of a guy and an old friend of mine.

I agree with @Christopher Mitchell concern. But there is evidence that fixed wireless in rural can stimulate fiber deployment. But our commitment to 100% connectivity is key. We did not reach 97% voice penetration in U.S. by deciding 95% was 'good enough.'

Pragmatically, fixed wireless and g.fast are a viable option for a huge part of the legacy copper marketplace .... https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/08/21/1554441/0/en/Sckipio-Gfast-Technology-and-Siklu-mmWave-Solve-Urban-Digital-Divide.html

Legibility extremely difficult in most current ML, which comprise large ensembles of predictive models (if not deep learning), very few of which have any model in the traditional scientific and statistical sense. They are computational stats that violate many of the strictures of statistics....

Under pressure from Democrats, Facebook shut down a protest page for a totally legitimate anti-fascist protest in DC that people who I know personally (including Chelsea Manning) were involved in organizing, because one of theaccounts associated with the event had one admin who was allegedly a Russian agent

@Evan Greer Yes, probably have to revise 100+ agreements by Jan 1st. After Jan 1st we have to have a process in place for connecting qualified edge providers (very loosely defined in SB-822 - nearly any party qualifies). The BGP rules will have to be revised, as will SFI and associated transit policies. As an aside, I find it interesting that Cogent pushed hard for this clause in SB-822, but it seems to me they are likely to be disintermediated in the state (i.e. if a provider can get free interconnect directly, why pay a 3rd party transit provider).

I really appreciate David Kaye on this. https://www.lawfareblog.com/un-special-rapporteurs-latest-report-online-content-regulation-calls-human-rights-default

@Jason Livingood Why not ask CA AG for determination first?

The did it the day before appearing in a Congressional hearing where they knew they were gonna get hammered by democrats. i can't imagine that was a coincidence. There's real danger in these platforms making moderation decisions based on urgency and political pressure rather than really thinking about it from a broad perspective

cool will check that out

This, frankly, is a choice. You can design for legibility if you choose to. It has not been seen as important for commercial deployments, so it doesn't happen, but the theoretical work is all there. It does cost some compute efficiency, but it's frankly a product choice.

@Eleanor Saitta Can you link to some writing on this? I want to know more

I 100% agree with this and I actually think the problem is worse. We now have politicians from both parties screaming at platforms / big tech companies / "the Internet" to "JUST DO SOMETHING" about problems that are legitimately difficult to solve. Democrats are using Facebook, Twitter, et al as their punching bag in relation to the Russia election meddling narrative. I've seen well respected leftist nonprofits calling for Twitter to ban Trump. We're seeing calls for censorship increase on the left and it scares the heck out of me

In my local cohort, free speech absolutism is increasingly considered a naive, privileged position.

@HaroldFeld That's for the lawyers to manage, I guess. My marching orders are basically - be prepared to comply on 1/1/19.

@David Weinberger that’s why I appreciate Kaye’s report, which is grounded in a fundamental rights context

@Ram Mohan here is the blog post I was talking about.
http://www.wetmachine.com/tales-of-the-sausage-factory/solving-the-rural-broadband-equation-fund-infrastructure-not-carriers/

@HaroldFeld struck by this in your post:
"But just as each change in technology has required us to spend money, it should also inspire us to find new ways to bring essential services to everyone that take advantage of the new capabilities of these technologies" - there is a deep vein waiting to be mined here

@Shuli Hallak's work, an example:

This is why real policy formulation is so critical. The debate has been "do nothing" v. "do SOMETHING." Damn Communications Decency Act debate all over again.

I have warned in a variety of contexts that process is critical to legitimacy and that we need to develop policy before a crisis hits. But most folks in policyland tend to follow the old adage: "when it rains, can't fix the roof. When it ain't rainin' the roof don't need fixin'."

http://shulihallak.com/interconnect/

http://shulihallak.com/interconnect/

@David Weinberger That's largely because the free speech absolutists have steadfastly refused to even acknowledge the massive impact that targeted harassment has on people's lives, let alone intentional manipulation (and I mean commercially as much as politices). Until there is some kind of coherent discourse there other than a blanket "you may not in any way impinge", you're going to keep losing ground.

Even in this room people think it's more complex than just "speech = freedom". See, e.g., last year's Nazi-punching discussion.

Legibility extremely difficult in most current ML, which comprise large ensembles of predictive models (if not deep learning), very few of which have any model in the traditional scientific and statistical sense. They are computational stats that violate many of the strictures of statistics....

@Matt Jones can you speak more to "computational stats that violate..." - I don't understand

@David Weinberger That's largely because the free speech absolutists have steadfastly refused to even acknowledge the massive impact that targeted harassment has on people's lives, let alone intentional manipulation (and I mean commercially as much as politices). Until there is some kind of coherent discourse there other than a blanket "you may not in any way impinge", you're going to keep losing ground.

Agreed. (PS: I am not a free speech absolutist, although I was raised as one.)

@James Vasile @Ram Mohan might check out: Lipton, Zachary Chase. “The Mythos of Model Interpretability.” CoRR abs/1606.03490 (2016). http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.03490. and a classic statement of the conflict among statistical approaches: Breiman, Leo. “Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures.” Statistical Science 16 (2001): 199–215. which I cannot recommend enough.

hehe, sure; I can't keep track

@Shuli see https://www.cleveland.com/expo/life-and-culture/erry-2018/09/25ec1e2fa76471/cleveland-foundations-creative.html related to the world of art and tecch

I think this is super key. There is a difference between "You can say whatever you want" and "You can say whatever you want to whoever you want whenever you want as manytimes as you want"

Unfortunately, a nunanced and balanced position between speech and harassment consumes a lot of the available affordance bandwidth for a participation structure, and is always going to be dynamic and evolving. In particular, you cannot optimize both for that balance and to maximize engagement. Maximizing engagement largely means maximizing opportunities for harassment.

It's not just frequency, it's a ton of things.

I actually think the platforms are largely right on this in terms of saying they police behavior not opinions, but they just do it really really badly

As long as the incentive structure around engagement is allowed to stand, outcomes will not change.

I generally agree with that

I think the only real way out of this is community alternatives

So if you want change, regulate liability around holding private data, because that's what enables the incentive structure around engagement.

@katherine maher can wikimedia start a nonprofit twitter plz? :)

@Eleanor Saitta So, basically, any platform that heavily depends on monthly active user counts to keep shareholders happy is going to be trash?

Community alternatives are never going to ship at scale. They do not have the design and development scalability to compete with large, centralized well-funded companies that compete on economies of scale. Every effort there has basially been a joke, and I'm really tired of the net freedom community pretending this is how stuff works.

@James Vasile Yes.

Agree with @Eleanor Saitta on this. @Evan Greer unfortunately we have a “no shiny objects” rule internally :)

@Shuli see https://www.cleveland.com/expo/life-and-culture/erry-2018/09/25ec1e2fa76471/cleveland-foundations-creative.html on art and tech. Cleveland Foundation curating art linked to big data of community consequence....

So we have to give up on scale?

@Eleanor Saitta Public companies can't do it. Community alternatives can't do it. What can?

Or quarterly earnings

No, we have to change the incentive structures.

@katherine maher oh that rule sounds so wise

Liability is a big enough stick to change the economic incentives of targeted manipulation and drive platforms away from engagement as a metric and back to actually creating services.

@Eleanor Saitta Force the externalities back into the business model?

Liability is a big enough stick to change the economic incentives of targeted manipulation and drive platforms away from engagement as a metric and back to actually creating services.
``@Eleanor Saitta Liability of what sort?

@Eleanor Saitta i'm not sure that follows to me -- i love the idea of data liability, but it seems like even platforms that don't use a lot of data (ie reddit) are still gonna wanna maximize engagement for clicks on ads as long s that's the biz model

Liability is a big enough stick to change the economic incentives of targeted manipulation and drive platforms away from engagement as a metric and back to actually creating services.

so, regulation??? not sure the incentives are lined up there, either

I mean, ideally, yes, you'd need to do something about quarterly profit chasing too, but I think the combination of liability and possibly some regulation on return demand from VC money would do it.

@Shuli see https://www.cleveland.com/expo/life-and-culture/erry-2018/09/25ec1e2fa76471/cleveland-foundations-creative.html on art and tech. Cleveland Foundation curating art linked to big data of community consequence....

That's great. Certainly important to use data to visualize social issues. I'd like to focus more on de-mystifying the Internet and help explain how it works.

To scale sometimes means to do something without accountability

@Eleanor Saitta Force the externalities back into the business model?

easier said than done. capitalism is a real thing

I was struck by https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-45140158 on Indian schools teaching digital media literacy due to urgent need

@Evan Greer Yes and no. At least right now, the payout structure is such that you cannot survive on untargeted ads. So you have to actually sell products.

(Urgency: The many lynchings caused by rumors spread on WhatsApp)

@Brough Turner have you or others deployed Gfast over copper? One of my last projects in Cleveland was doing so in public housing facilities combined with fixed wireless Siklu https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/08/21/1554441/0/en/Sckipio-Gfast-Technology-and-Siklu-mmWave-Solve-Urban-Digital-Divide.html I have not tracked more ‘access’ projects related to Gfast

@ram eliminate intermediary liability limitations for breach of private data entirely. Companies bear the full cost of what they hold to their users. Encourages privacy-centric design and makes targeted advertising stunningly expensive.

Also, i'll just say that i don't think FFTF "pretends" that everything is fine and we can just wait for community alternatives to come along, we're looking for opportunities to fight on this, but so far all of the policy options that are coming out of DC are both crap and not even genuine in that the lawmakers aren't actually interested in doing anything they're just using the internet as a football

No denying that

@Ram Mohan

I'm all about this ^^

Thanks David- that is my abandoned site when I couldn't take new clients... my photography is more available here: https://sportshotphoto.smugmug.com/

@Evan Greer Yes and no. At least right now, the payout structure is such that you cannot survive on untargeted ads. So you have to actually sell products.

DuckDuckGo is in my backyard, and they don't do many of the things big search companies do to be profitable. But it's a much harder grind pushing on Google or Bing. They could build out "good" platforms, but at some point they get pushed towards the profit model, too

"edge" worked with telcos to get CISA (formerly CISPA) passed which basically gutted any liability protections they had

@Evan Greer I don't mean y'all specifically, but there's been a generally unrealistic attitude to how easy platforms are to replace from e.g. the open source end of the net freedom world

@Sumana Harihareswara Ookla - speedtest.net see https://muninetworks.org/content/pcmags-fastest-and-local-links-made-them

@Ram Mohan Exactly. But if the risk model changes, they'll look elsewhere for profit. Also, it would be possible to insulate them a bit from the exponential growth demands.

@Ram Mohan Is there evidence the DuckDuckGo is turning away from their privacy-respecting product differentiation strategy?

Yeah i hear that. Though I'm not sure it's like "impossible" at scale. Wikipedia seems like a pretty shiny example, not that it's perfect

Susan's Dangerous Speech project: https://dangerousspeech.org/

@Ram Mohan Is there evidence the DuckDuckGo is turning away from their privacy-respecting product differentiation strategy?

To the contrary, they are steadfast on that path, but it's a hard path

@Jason Livingood Fair enough.

WIkipedia is in a very, very different position, frankly. I do not think it's a useful example here.

There's a lot of money flowing around out there -- how much do you think it would take to set up something that scales and has some kind of donation model that pays for enough engineers to keep it running pretty well?

A few billion

Why is Wikipedia not a good example? You could basically fork Wikipedia and use it as something like twitter

If you want to capture enough market share for meaningful network effects to take over.

That isn't even wrong.

That is utterly not how it works.

@Evan Greer I disagree

FWIW Wikipedia has cost about 500 million over 17 years

Can talk more when on break....

There's a lot of money flowing around out there -- how much do you think it would take to set up something that scales and has some kind of donation model that pays for enough engineers to keep it running pretty well?

@Evan Greer it isn't $$, it's getting to scale and network effect

With a replacement valuation of about 8 billion and a market valuation of about 13

Nathan Matias. Absolutely awesome researcher/activist https://natematias.com/

@katherine maher Yeah. It's amazingly cost efficient, but it's also solving a much cheaper problem and happened at a very well-timed moment.

@Evan Greer It's not a tech-dev budget that's needed. We have FOSS microblog technology that works better than hacking up Wikimedia's codebase ever would. I say that as somebody who has mucked around in Wikimedia's terrible horrible no good very bad codebase.

That makes sense -- you're not talking about the technical cost of building the product but getting 100 million people to use it?

@Eleanor Saitta agree but

@James Vasile HEY.

@Eleanor Saitta well timed moment seems key here

It's a little bit of both; mostly that, but also the degree of design polish and frankly ongoing feature velocity required to back up that scaling also costs actual money.

https://medium.com/@susanbenesch/launching-today-new-collaborative-study-to-diminish-abuse-on-twitter-2b91837668cc

Wikimedia has many good codebases! MediaWiki is .... Less awesome

@Eleanor Saitta sorry! Agree re problem and timing. But I think there are learnings for a social engagement platform from our experience.

@Sumana Harihareswara @James Vasile we like to call it a just-in-time architecture

The moment when I found a bug, went to file it and found your years-old bug report on the same issue was part of the problem.

@Sumana Harihareswara ^^^^

For more on rural broadband, the CAF II Auctions that just ended and fears about fixed wireless, see this podcast I just released - Community Broadband Bits 321 - https://muninetworks.org/content/analyzing-auction-jonathan-chambers-community-broadband-bits-podcast-321

We've seen stuff like Snap and Instagram explode when they were just little puny startups

Because they came along at the right moment and had something people wanted

Maybe this is the right moment, and people want a twitter without harassment

@katherine maher Oh, absolutely! ALthough I do have to say that there are enough unsolved problems on WP that we'd need to do quite a bit better.

On gathering data on what is being censored or taken down: I mentioned https://tagteam.harvard.edu/ to @Susan Benesch as a potential tool

The problem is that the root value of twitter and the root driver of harassment are really tightly related. So a twitter without harassment at scale is... not easy.

@Susan Benesch plugs the film "The Cleaners"

@Eleanor Saitta absolutely. we are publicly and explIcItly a work in progress. That’s also a good design principle for any social engagement alternative

Yup!

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cleaners+movie&atb=v114-6&ia=web

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7689936/

fwiw: the social science research council is serving as the clearing house for Facebook data and money to study facebook data--they want people to apply...moment to leverage pressure put on them... https://www.ssrc.org/pages/announcing-the-social-media-and-democracy-research-grants/

There's also an excellent 20-min documentary on the same subject called "The Moderators." You can watch online: https://vimeo.com/213152344

https://variety.com/2018/film/reviews/the-cleaners-review-1202673932/

On gathering data on what is being censored or taken down: I mentioned https://tagteam.harvard.edu/ to @Susan Benesch as a potential tool

Just in case someone here doesn't know about it, there's also https://www.lumendatabase.org/ from Berkman Klein (as TagTeam is, I believe), a clearinghouse of DMCA takedown notices. It was created by the person sitting next to me (= @Wendy Seltzer )

A friend of mine is working on Tribalism:

Tribalism is a social media behavior analysis engine for American politics. It's been crawling Twitter for the better part of a year, compiling behavioral profiles based peoples' follower networks and tweet content.

As the 2018 midterms approach, we want to do whatever we can to help stem the tide of disinformation, get out the vote, and drive racists, kleptocrats, and their enablers out of office in shame. This data is meant to help target ads in support of progressive and Democratic candidates, build Twitter bots to remind voters about registration deadlines, call out hostile misinformation, and bolster the efforts of others doing similar work.

Agree with @Eleanor Saitta on the problem with what, in my circles, is called "platform cooperativism". These efforts are seriously out-resourced by orders of magnitude.

(deleted)

tribalis.im

Worth checking out this piece "Justice for Data Janitors": http://www.publicbooks.org/justice-for-data-janitors/

I guess part of my thinking is influenced by our model of viral campaigns

It feels like this is the sort of thing you could campaign on

It's still too small scale, we think of getting about 1 - 5 million people to do something as a big win

How do you mean campaign on?

In this context essentially "market"

I mean, yes, you would need to do marketing.

But marketing isn't enough to build large-scale basic infrastructure.

Like, that's what we mean here.

Mirrors of Racism (I think): https://vimeo.com/150728678

Now i'm confused again. I thought the issue with cost wasn't the technical cost

No, that's part of it too.

(Also I 100% acknowledge that I am out of my fishbowl here and y'all all know way more about this from a technical standpoint)

Building platforms that are scalable, that are functional, that are polished, that can operated reliably, etc., takes a huge amount of money.

I just also know i have a really good instinct for when something is gonna fly on the Internet, and i feel like something like this could fly right now in a way that it couldn't have even 1 year ago

Sure.

and lots of luck. many well-resourced attempts fail too

Technical cost is the smaller cost

Yup!

Yes, it'd take luck for sure :-)

yes, it's smaller, but it's still in the hundreds of millions.

Our ASU News Co/Lab: https://newscollab.org

Tech dev is small $ compared to deployment $$$

@James Vasile I'm assuming that dev+ops is one pool of money. The distinction isn't really relevant.

Getting to network effect and scale is the real cost. That's part of the deployment $$$, which is not all tech

It's relevant to the part of the conversation where we're talking about the value of existing codebases as a headstart on solving the problem.

Regardless of the cost structure, I do not see it happening

@Eleanor Saitta ^^^

No. Frankly, that's noise. That's not the cost structure that's going to make any difference.

I'd much prefer system shifts to try to move everyone else, rather than trying to build one single thing that doesn't do all the bad stuff without in any way trying to stop everything else.

One thing that's interesting is whether it's easier or harder for alternatives to go viral now (given existing and overwhelmingly popular networks upon which someone could share the new one)

HIstory of the KKK - including piece about how NY press unintentionally massively swelled its ranks. https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-media-2018-08-31 Too many white people assume the people around them have far lower levels of racial animus than they do. Seems like 2016 was evidence of that...

Oxygen of Amplification report from data and society is very useful on these topics: https://datasociety.net/output/oxygen-of-amplification/

I'd much prefer system shifts to try to move everyone else, rather than trying to build one single thing that doesn't do all the bad stuff without in any way trying to stop everything else.

Yes totally agree with this. We can't just build a Yurt in the woods, because the vast majority of people are still going to be on the existing platforms

This brings me back to the liability thing

@Evan Greer a way to get there is to get some _other_ big reach firm with a social purpose to spread the word and grow the base of users. It's not a need thing, it's a push-into-awareness thing

I mean i think if someone built something FFTF could get 1 million people on it

@Christopher Mitchell The only good thing about recent news is that white people are finally starting to believe POC when they describe their daily lives.

i know that's not enough

Media Cloud (Berkman and MIT Media Lab) is a tool that might help a bit with @Susan Benesch 's questions about the affect on Alex Jones' influence. It enables querying of a huge database of sites to see how terms spread through the ecosystem. https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/media-cloud/overview/

You couldn't get them to use it.

You could get them to sign up, but so what? I've still got an Ello acount too.

heh, me too

from the data & society team @Alix just mentioned:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/01/extremist-ideas-media-coverage-kkk

Signal got people to use signal

I cannot agree strongly enough with everything @Susan Benesch is saying. Data! Yummy, yummy crunchy data! We needs it precious!

@James Vasile Very strongly agree. Same with #metoo - listening to conservative podcasts was fascinating as some like CHarlie Sykes admitted they had too easily ignored this issue because they thought it was bullshit. Of course a day later they were denying racial animus in current society.

Signal got people to use signal

The early users of Signal were strong influencers. It wasn't Signal who did the marketing. Not sure it's a replicable model, but worth exploring

If you want to throw more good money after bad on yet another doomed effort without changing structural incentives, go for it.

I don't. But i'm super interested in learning what it would take

It’s Chris Mitchell’s 40th Birthday today. Happy Birthday Chris!!

Back in reality land i'd be much more interested in getting CISA repealed and passing real liability laws

Counterspeech - knowing when it is or is not effective - is a media literacy issue

But that's so far outside the current conversation it'd be a pretty big lift

https://dangerousspeech.org/

@Christopher Mitchell A persistent human blindspot is that it's hard not to assume the universality of one's own experience, especially when overcoming the blindspot might cost you your privilege. It's understandable, and breaking it down probably requires constant work to change one's own habits of mind, not just a series of epiphanies.

https://dangerousspeech.org/

Though there will be copious inflection points every time there is a data "breach" (spill) etc

https://dangerousspeech.org/

BUt there's already been plenty without real movement from the public, tho we did get some traction around equifax, but only in relation to stopping CISA

In the same way that creating a new product is super hard, getting a good law passed is WAAAAAAAAY harder than stopping a bad one

like maybe 100 times harder

So you talk about it as security regulation, and the second order effects don't get mentioned. And you can look at changing the shape of the VC money via investment regulation, not directly looking at the impact on platforms.

Sure.

But either we get a structural change here or we continue status quo.

i'm a skeptic of investment regulation becoming reality

Only because this country is owned top-to-bottom by oligarchs and exists outside the rule of law.

I firmly believe public policy is all about getting private incentives to align with the public interest. There are lots of levers. Some involve raising costs for behaving badly.

We do this a lot in a wide variety of regulatory spaces. It is complicated, because we are dealing with complex systems. That's why we need to embrace that public accountability and oversight are not "one and done" but, like cooking, constant stirring, sampling and seasoning.

Law helps to establish norms, expectations and independence. Or at least it can. it can also be designed as a tool of tyranny. But as with any tool, effectiveness is strongly correlated with design. But it starts with understanding the incentives.

Yes -- this is why FFTF hasn't been super active on this recently -- we don't see current political opportunity, but are sort of poised for the attack

DuckDuckGo has 0.66% of the US search market. Just saying (as those who, like me, are dodging responsibility say). http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/united-states-of-america

From politico just now, reminding us the current level of conversation:
— Tech takes note of the Section 230 talk: Lawmakers brought up a sprawling list of issues, but one that drew particular alarm from the industry came when Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) brought up the possibility of further altering Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act . The provision protects websites from lawsuits over content posted by users, but Manchin suggested a carveout may be necessary to combat the sale of opioids on social media, similar to a recently passed measure that targets online sex trafficking. "Though evidence shows the epidemic is primarily an offline problem, internet companies are committed to playing an outsize role in fighting this tragedy," Melika Carroll, Internet Association SVP of global government affairs, said in a statement. But Carroll warned against "weakening" Section 230 protections, arguing it "would only make it harder" for companies like Facebook and Twitter to "keep illegal content off their platforms."

Ah, sex and drugs, the great wedges we use to destroy rights.

Open Source. Comcast. https://comcast.github.io/

(the global human rights impact of SESTA/FOSTA, not to mention what it did to the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people, is amazing and wildly underreported, because not that many folks consider the victims human)

DuckDuckGo has 0.66% of the US search market. Just saying (as those who, like me, are dodging responsibility say). http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/united-states-of-america

Large enough to exist profitably, but still, on the fringe. Privacy not enough of a differentiator.

DuckDuckGo is my default browser. It's good enough, most of the time.

Yes, we got totally rolled on SESTA/FOSTA and i think the Internet freedom movement basically dropped the ball on it because the ball was too hot

As an amateur historian, I confess that I see the history of legal reform in the United States (my limited area expertise) as a series of ebbs and flows. We have at times achieved legal and social reforms that were thought impossible. These have failed to create utopia because human beings are imperfect. To quote Ethics of the Fathers: "The labor is not for you to finish, nor are you free to abandon it."

It's a little surprising it hasn't come up yet, given that it's one of the biggest blows to sane platform regulation in the past year.

DuckDuckGo is my default browser. It's good enough, most of the time.

That puts you WAY on the right side of the bell curve on this one, Dan.

As a sideline participant on SESTA/FOSTA, I have my own views about what happened. It deserves a serious step-by-step case study failure analysis in the same way that we have had case study analysis of SOPA/PIPA success.

@Nithya Ruff discussing CodeChix and Outreachy

That could be a good discussion table

Doing that means talking about what the law was actually designed to do and the real politics of a lot of the backers, which appears to be an anathema for at least the democrats.

I think of this "invisible work" as the "volunteer coordinator" problem. It must get done and is critical to the work that we celebrate and recognize.
It contributes to the challenge of long-term success of platforms. the blockchain did a good job of rewarding the miners who build the daily infrastructure. But it is still a challenging problem.

This is the reason I have my doubts about what is called in my world "platform cooperativism". These efforts are always out-resourced. Platform building is enormously expensive and most platforms fail.

Re Free packages, I'd like to know what percent of people didn't think they were missing anything at all. i.e. if you don't see it, do you know you are missing something?

zero rating (fictional version) https://postflaviana.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/non-neutral.jpg non-neutral.jpg

Re Free packages, I'd like to know what percent of people didn't think they were missing anything at all. i.e. if you don't see it, do you know you are missing something?

Links that others are posting to social media will not work :)

Re Free packages, I'd like to know what percent of people didn't think they were missing anything at all. i.e. if you don't see it, do you know you are missing something?

Links that others are posting to social media will not work :)

Until AMP/Packaging means it's just served up from Google

@Robin Chase Platforms are expensive, and a lot of companies go broke building them out when the market is slow to mature. With physical infrastructure that leaves assets at firesale for the next generation of companies to exploit. We saw this with railroads and fiber. Digital platforms tend to fail in ways that destroy the assets (nobody is really using MySpace's platform investment for much these days). Do you have any insight into how this typically shake out in your world?

Aadhar (Indian ID)

Discussed last year by Malavika

@Dan Gillmor DuckDuckGo is my default search engine too.

Caravanmagazine.in is a good source on that IIRC? Although not perfect

Just came across this re network buildouts in India https://www.wsj.com/articles/two-years-ago-india-lacked-fast-cheap-internetone-billionaire-changed-all-that-1536159916

www.fuckoffgoogle.de

There were a few mentions of fusing art / music and advocacy / outreach, while we're on break I thought i'd share some videos from the Rock Against the TPP tour we organized with Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine. Was a huge headache, do not recommend! But had a real impact in reaching people we wouldn't otherwise

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZXiwbzSDTA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA9nIeVvcMw

https://twitter.com/annaridler/status/1036366422870507520

https://playingforchange.com/about/

For at least some of us, hearing that Gigi had signed on to the Wheeler admin was convincing evidence that we were wrong about our assumptions about him.

"It's not just politics, it's the people" @Gigi Sohn

Seeing Wheeler's turnaround on Title II was a huge formative experience for me as an activist.

When he signed the order he said it was the proudest day of his career, and i believed him,

It was an important reminder that often our job as advocates is not so much convincing those with power to do the right thing, but changing the political and cultural environment around them enough that they believe theright thing is possible

savetheinternet_banner_400_x_300jpg.jpg

There was that one time NN protesters blocked Wheeler's driveway :grimacing:

Internet activism needs to be making the impossible inevitable, which requires some degree of understanding or empathy toward powerful people, even as you go after them hard

https://prosecutorimpact.com/adam-foss/ the former prosecutor Gigi mentioned

I am, personally, so so so happy that I got out of NGOland. It was literally ruining my life.

Table topic on NGOs, consulting, and beyond?

I don't actually think the company money is that patient or long-term; I think that's rarer than we might think,

@Gigi Sohn Please circulate a link to the paper on which you asked for feedback...

Agreed Eleanor. Even Google has been, and remains in some ways, caught up in some short-term/overly cautious strategic thinking on the policy front. Empty chairs at congressional hearings -- uggh.

Raise your hand if you don't feel out of your depth here. (Rhetorical request.)

Here's the paper. All comments and criticisms welcome: https://www.georgetownlawtechreview.org/a-policy-framework-for-an-open-internet/GLTR-07-2018/

Google's sometime/increasing tendency to take for granted its progressive "allies" is coming back to haunt now on the platforms debates.

From Richard Thanki's page at Computational Modelling Group: "My research focuses on the role played by infrastructure and shared resources in socio-economic systems, focussing especially on the quantification of abstract notions into models that can yield light on real-world issues." https://cmg.soton.ac.uk/people/rt5g10/