Do we really need to sacrifice privacy for health in the fight against covid-19? The DP-3T protocol can save lives without furthering surveillance capitalism.

• Originally published at n.case.me.
• Download this comic as a .zip!
• Sources: DP-3T, TCN Protocol, Ferretti & Wymant et al

The post How Contact Tracing Apps Can Foil Both COVID-19 and Big Brother appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Peter Harris: 2018 was the year where the twisted intersection of apps, data exploitation, privacy and corporate tech giants went mainstream.

While the issues had been brewing for a while — such as the revelation of addiction design in most apps, the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Mark Zuckerberg’s subsequent testimony before the U.S. Congress — it seems like 2018 was when questioning the tech giants became the norm. A new term called surveillance capitalism also entered the public lexicon.

A recent report from the ICA (International Co-operative Alliance) summarizes this situation well, describing the larger dynamics at play:

As technology shapes and reshapes how people interact, it shapes and reshapes economic activity, including how people work and trade. In line with this, there is a growing trend of work that is funneled through digital platforms owned by just a few large corporations. These platforms offer flexibility and independence, but they can also be viewed as exploitative — extracting the value of the connections made by the 99% for the 1% of outside investors.

The network effects of scale in a digital economy has led to the dominance of these Big Tech companies, which in turn has made it harder for people to envisage an alternative future to the current model. However, alternative futures do exist and for now, it is the co-operative alternative in the form of platform co-ops in particular that is attracting interest.

A movement to create member-owned, technology-based firms has birthed this new genre of startups — the #platformcoop. While no single definition has been found, we would define such an enterprise with the following characteristics:

• Connection of members via networks (the essence of the Internet itself)
• Collective ownership, decision-making and profit-sharing
• Emphasis on fairness and justice for all stakeholders
• Design and business development aiming towards global scalability

These four essential qualities have been the driving force behind the formation of the music streaming service Resonate. A multi-stakeholder co-operative, Resonate addresses inequities in the streaming market, where the work of musicians is often undervalued, and meaningful connections between artists and fans are almost totally non-existent, due to intentional design on the part of the mainstream services.

This combination of unfair economics and artificial separation between member classes is a key characteristic of the gig economy and many of the large scale platforms that have received frequent criticism for their practices:

Today, more and more people manage their work and resources through digital platforms that offer boundless flexibility and independence. However, they can also be exploitative and monopolistic, owned largely by a small number of Big Tech corporations which enable the precarious gig economy, exacerbate systemic inequalities and facilitate data surveillance and data capture. The dominance of this form of platform capitalism, as well as the network effects created, means it is hard to see anything beyond this prevailing model.

However, this must be challenged because other futures are possible — platform co-operativism is a network of trading businesses that might look and feel like the established Big Tech platforms, but are democratically controlled and collectively owned. They are a route to a fairer, more inclusive outcome, that generates tangible advantages for workers and consumers alike.

The above quote, from a joint report by Co-operatives UK and Nesta, clearly defines both the challenges and hopes of this growing movement to create truly fair, digital-based economies.

We long ago detailed the problem with co-ops and traditional startup investors. At the heart of this new Nesta/Co-ops UK report is a profound question — can people-power finance a new wave of community-owned apps and online services?

Given some recent developments both in the UK and Germany, we’re hopeful that the traditional co-operative sector — which represents over $2 trillion in market turnover — is ready to enter the relatively new #platformcoop sector.

With well established markets, enterprises and memberships in a variety of sectors, the time has never been better for the co-op world to fully embrace the digital realm, helping take a wide range of fresh apps and online services to new heights through their investment and support.

A short history of Resonate’s funding and development

Initiated in early 2015, our first two years saw the formation of the co-op, a modest crowd campaign, development of an Alpha version of our #stream2own app and growth of the first 5000 members*.

In the second phase of Resonate, we received an investment** via the RChain co-op, a blockchain platform based in Seattle, WA. Accomplishments included a complete rebranding and new product design, a near doubling of the membership and two-thirds of a new codebase designed to scale to hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of members.

Now firmly in our third phase, we have launched our new branding and #stream2own player, which has been subsequently open-sourced. We’ve also recently started working with several large distributors and labels which is going to dramatically increase the size of our existing catalog.

While we stand on the threshold of significant growth, one thing is profoundly clear — tech startups stand in need of investment and support ahead of development. We remain optimistic that both the Resonate community and the long-established co-op world are committed to seeing a service such as ours succeed.

We invite you to learn more about Resonate by visiting our homepage, supporting our endeavor by becoming a member, or through the purchase of Supporter Shares.

*In this instance we use the term “member” in a general sense, as not all users are technically co-op members. For example, artists earn their member share only after uploading their first song and listeners when they buy a 5 euro membership.

**One of the primary goals of this investment was to launch a token sale, intended as a long term investment vehicle, which was (unfortunately) hindered by the crash of the crypto market in late 2018.

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Smartphones are transforming transit in cities all over the world, and city governments are struggling to figure out how to best manage the change. If the world was looking to New York City’s recently enacted legislation affecting for-hire vehicle companies, then there will be disappointment given that, once again, the city’s political establishment decided to impose an outdated regulatory regime on innovative firms, making life harder for thousands of new taxi drivers while raising the price of rides for millions of New Yorkers and visitors to the city. The law, enacted this summer, caps the number of e-hail licenses in the city for a year and also enables the city to impose regulations on the type of compensation structures offered to drivers.

Who benefits? Politicians argue that it’s existing drivers who received their taxi registration before the one-year moratorium on new licenses was implemented, but if you think they’re the primary beneficiary then there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.

In reality, politicians got behind this legislation because they want to send a message to Silicon Valley, the startup community and their financiers: If you want access to the 8-plus million person New York City market, you’ll have to go through the local political class first, and that will cost you: in form of taxes, campaign contributions, lobbyists, and more.

True to form, the left and right have staked out their normal positions on this issue. For the left, it’s all about protecting the wages and rights of the less-than-10,000 existing drivers, even if that means higher costs for all New Yorkers and more obstacles for people who want to earn money by driving a car. For the right, it’s about protecting businesses and drivers from regulatory controls that will raise prices for consumers, even if that means facilitating the big business takeover of an industry that has been a source of wealth for independent individuals and small businesses in New York City for a century.

Like many issues involving new technology, we need to look beyond the left-wing or right-wing way to manage these technologies, and instead look to the “open source way.”

What do we want? Safe, convenient rides, with low prices for riders, high income for drivers, positive impacts on traffic, and data protection for everyone involved.

The best way to achieve these ends isn’t complex licensure regimes, quotas on new taxis, or putting more surveillance technologies in our cars or on our streets. Instead, New York City should do for its local cab industry the same thing successful industries do for themselves: standardize how information is formatted and exchanged between systems. This makes it possible for information from one app, like Uber, to be read, understood and interacted with by another app, like Lyft or Google Maps.

Making ride-hailing data more standardized and interoperable will have a number of benefits.

First, it aggregates supply and demand, which increases competition in the taxi market leading to lower prices for riders and more business for drivers.

Second, it gives riders and drivers more options, allowing them to use an app with the mission of benefiting New Yorkers instead of benefiting investors in giant tech corporations.

Third, it mitigates a threat many people fear: that Uber, Lyft, and other venture-backed ride-sharing apps are subsidizing their own cab rides to undermine the legacy taxi industry, and then once the legacy industry is dead, they’ll jack up prices. That strategy won’t work if New York City is committed to maintaining a system of its own.

The idea of establishing a “ride sharing” (or “e-hail”) standard isn’t new. It has been discussed and proposed by a number of people in New York City’s tech community for years, including Ben Kallos, a tech-aware City Council member who proposed it in a 2014 bill, and by Chris Whong, now the lead developer of NYC Planning Labs, who proposed it in a 2013 blog post.

Critics of this approach have claimed that the city doesn’t have the capacity to develop its own e-hailing systems, but that simply isn’t true. Generic apps similar to Lyft and Uber exist in hundreds of markets around the world. Even local cab companies in New York City have developed their own apps.

Creating an e-hailing system for New York City would likely involve a three-step process: (a) develop a “ride sharing data standards” body that would bring riders, drivers, city agencies, and app developers together to create specifications for how all taxi-hailing information should be formatted and exchanged; (b) develop and operate a basic, open source e-hail smartphone application that would use these data standards to, like any one of the dozens of ride-hailing apps available around the world, allow New Yorkers to request rides and drivers to fulfill those requests; and (c) create a city-administered server that not only processes information from the current city taxi app but also allows other ride-sharing apps to exchange their information with the server.

This approach would give Uber, Lyft, and other popular apps a choice: they can plug in to the city’s e-hail exchange server and share their rider and driver information with other apps – or go it alone and face the consequences of having less access to rider and driver information than their competitors.

This approach leverages the city’s considerable influence to produce a number of benefits:

By following established best practices from government digital service organizations and open source communities, this system could be produced quickly and inexpensively. And by open-sourcing an app and inviting other cities to use and modify the New York City code, we could join a small but growing community of cities around the world developing and sharing open source software (such as Madrid’s Consul project) that enables them to provide government services faster, better, cheaper, and in a more ethical manner.

The original meaning of “regulation” wasn’t the levying of taxes and fees to penalize innovation — it was to “make regular” through the implementation of transparent business practices and the adoption of standard operating procedures. That is precisely what New York City should be doing, and it can do so by modelling best practice behavior that challenges Silicon Valley (and its New York-based counterparts) to produce better products, for lower prices, in more responsible ways, with more respect for the rights of their users.

Any municipality can throw rocks at Silicon Valley by imposing taxes and creating obstacles to market entry, but few have the capacity and scale to challenge Silicon Valley by creating innovative products. New York City has that ability. Let’s use it.

***
Devin Balkind is a technologist and nonprofit executive who works on civic technology projects in New York City. On Twitter @DevinBalkind.

Photo by BeyondDC

The post New York City Shouldn’t Regulate Ride-Hailing Apps – It Should Compete With Them appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Republished from The Guardian

The office planner on the wall features two reminders: “Technosocialism” and “Indienet institute”. A huge husky named Oskar lies near the door, while the two people who live and work here – a plain apartment block on the west side of Malmö, Sweden – go about their daily business.

Aral Balkan and Laura Kalbag moved here from Brighton in 2015. Balkan has Turkish and French citizenship, and says their decision was sparked by two things: increasing concerns about the possibility of Britain leaving the EU, and the Conservative government’s Investigatory Powers Act, otherwise known as the snoopers’ charter, some of which was declared unlawful this week by the court of appeal. The legislation cut straight to the heart of what now defines the couple’s public lives: the mesh of corporate and government surveillance surrounding the internet, and how to do something about it.

Kalbag, 31, is from Surrey, has a web design background and says she’s “always been a very socially minded, troublemaking kind of person”. Balkan, 41, traces what he does now to his experiences as a small child, designing his own games for a personal computer. It was “the last time when we actually owned and controlled our computers – there wasn’t some corporation somewhere watching everything we were doing, storing it and monetising it.”

Now, they style themselves as “a two-person-and-one-husky social enterprise striving for social justice in the digital age”.

Aral Balkan and Laura Kalbag with their husky, Oskar. Photograph: Lars Dareberg/Getty for the Guardian

Balkan and Kalbag form one small part of a fragmented rebellion whose prime movers tend to be located a long way from Silicon Valley. These people often talk in withering terms about Big Tech titans such as Mark Zuckerberg, and pay glowing tribute to Edward Snowden. Their politics vary, but they all have a deep dislike of large concentrations of power and a belief in the kind of egalitarian, pluralistic ideas they say the internet initially embodied.

What they are doing could be seen as the online world’s equivalent of punk rock: a scattered revolt against an industry that many now think has grown greedy, intrusive and arrogant – as well as governments whose surveillance programmes have fuelled the same anxieties. As concerns grow about an online realm dominated by a few huge corporations, everyone involved shares one common goal: a comprehensively decentralised internet.

Balkan energetically travels the world, delivering TED-esque talks with such titles as “Free is a Lie” and “Avoiding Digital Feudalism”. His appearances have proliferated on YouTube, although he himself uses an online video player that doesn’t harvest personal data. (“If there’s a free and open, decentralised and usable alternative, we try to use it,” he says – he favours, for example, the privacy-respecting search engine DuckDuckGo over Google.) At the same time, he and Kalbag are on a painstaking journey that involves ideas and prototypes aimed at creating a new kind of digital life.

Back in 2014, they came up with a plan for the Indiephone, “a beautiful new mobile platform and a phone that empowers regular people to own their own data”. “One of my mistakes was, I told people about it,” says Balkan. “And then we realised there was no way we could finance it.” Assisted by around £100,000 in crowdfunding, they started work on a new kind of social network, called Heartbeat, whose users would hold on to their data, and communicate privately. Since then, they have launched an app for iPhone and Macs called Better Blocker, purchased by about 14,000 people, and with a simple function: in a much more thorough way than most adblocking software, it disables the endless tracking devices that now follow people as they move around the web.

In the last few months, they have started working with people in the Belgian city of Ghent – or, in Flemish, Gent – where the authorities own their own internet domain, complete with .gent web addresses. Using the blueprint of Heartbeat, they want to create a new kind of internet they call the indienet – in which people control their data, are not tracked and each own an equal space online. This would be a radical alternative to what we have now: giant “supernodes” that have made a few men in northern California unimaginable amounts of money thanks to the ocean of lucrative personal information billions of people hand over in exchange for their services.

“I got into the web because I liked the democracy of it,” says Kalbag, who has just published a book titled Accessibility for Everyone, about innovating in a way that includes those who technology too often ignores – not least people with disabilities. “I want to be able to be in a society where I have control over my information, and other people do as well. Being a woman in technology, you can see how hideously unequal things are and how people building these systems don’t care about anyone other than themselves. I think we have to have technology that serves everybody – not just rich, straight, white guys.”

In the Scottish coastal town of Ayr, where a company called MaidSafe works out of a silver-grey office on an industrial estate tucked behind a branch of Topps Tiles, another version of this dream seems more advanced. MaidSafe’s first HQ, in nearby Troon, was an ocean-going boat. The company moved to an office above a bridal shop, and then to an unheated boatshed, where the staff sometimes spent the working day wearing woolly hats. It has been in its new home for three months: 10 people work here, with three in a newly opened office in Chennai, India, and others working remotely in Australia, Slovakia, Spain and China.

Muneeb Ali (left) and Ryan Shea of Blockstack. Photograph: David Chuchuca

MaidSafe was founded 12 years ago by the 52-year-old computing engineer and former lifeboat captain David Irvine. He has the air of someone with so many ideas he can barely get them all out. Despite spurning money from venture capitalists, his company has come from humble beginnings to the verge of its proper launch.

In a pristine meeting room, Irvine explains a mistake carried over from old-fashioned corporate computer networks to the modern internet. “There’s a big server, and people connect to it. That used to be the way companies work; now, they’ve done the same thing to the internet. Which is remarkably stupid, because they are central points of failure. They’re points of attack. There are passwords on them: stuff gets stolen.” He goes on: “And as the internet was starting, it was clear to me straight away that it would centralise around several large companies and they would basically control the world.”

His alternative is what he calls the Safe network: the acronym stands for “Safe Access for Everyone”. In this model, rather than being stored on distant servers, people’s data – files, documents, social-media interactions – will be broken into fragments, encrypted and scattered around other people’s computers and smartphones, meaning that hacking and data theft will become impossible. Thanks to a system of self-authentication in which a Safe user’s encrypted information would only be put back together and unlocked on their own devices, there will be no centrally held passwords.

No one will leave data trails, so there will be nothing for big online companies to harvest. The financial lubricant, Irvine says, will be a cryptocurrency called Safecoin: users will pay to store data on the network, and also be rewarded for storing other people’s (encrypted) information on their devices. Software developers, meanwhile, will be rewarded with Safecoin according to the popularity of their apps. There is a community of around 7,000 interested people already working on services that will work on the Safe network, including alternatives to platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.

One big question hangs over Irvine’s concept of a decentralised internet: given what we know about what some people use technology for, the encrypted information stored on people’s devices will include fragments of nasty, illegal stuff, won’t it?

“It will. It will. It definitely will. It’s all society’s data. All information,” says Irvine

I read him a quote from the company’s blog: “Even MaidSafe staff don’t know who is on the network, where they are based, what has been stored and where the data is located.”

“No. We don’t know. That’s fine, though.”

Is it? Even if it includes child abuse images, or so-called revenge porn or beheading videos?

“Yeah. I think it’s fine. Because to me, the whole thing here is like … You’re building a road, and you think: ‘How can I be absolutely certain that a paedophile doesn’t drive on that bit of tarmac?’ You can’t. That’s the thing with the internet. When you’ve got these controlled things like Facebook, of course they could clamp down on some of that stuff. But also, it means they can manipulate the whole of society. And we can’t be in that position.”

Irvine adds that MaidSafe’s encryption is no more developed than the kind already used by the net’s criminal elements. “We’re not enabling them. We’re enabling everybody else,” he says. He says he would encourage the police to go on to the network and use the same detection and entrapment methods they already use on the so-called dark web, where users can stay anonymous.

Once MaidSafe is up and running, there will be very little any government or authority can do about it: “We can’t stop the network if we start it. If anyone turned round and said: ‘You need to stop that,’ we couldn’t. We’d have to go round to people’s houses and switch off their computers. That’s part of the whole thing. The network is like a cyber-brain; almost a lifeform in itself. And once you start it, that’s it.”

Before my trip to Scotland, I tell him, I spent whole futile days signing up to some of the decentralised social networks that already exist – Steemit, Diaspora, Mastadon – and trying to approximate the kind of experience I can easily get on, say, Twitter or Facebook. They were largely so underpopulated that there’s been no incentive to go back. Won’t the same thing happen to MaidSafe?

“It might,” he says.

But is he optimistic or pessimistic? “Oh, this won’t fail. It won’t. If you ask me: ‘Will this be the future?’ … absolutely. Not necessarily my version, but a version of a completely decentralised network based on privacy, security, freedom – that will exist.”

One big focus of the conversation about a different internet are cryptocurrencies and so-called blockchain technology, whose most spectacular story so far has been the rise of Bitcoin. All users of a cryptocurrency have their own “private key”, which unlocks the opportunity to buy and sell it. Instead of financial transactions having to be hosted by a bank – or, for that matter, an online service such as PayPal – a payment in a cryptocurrency is validated by a network of computers using a shared algorithim. A record of the transaction is added to an online ledger – the blockchain – in a way that is unalterable. And herein lie two potential breakthroughs.

One, according to some cryptocurrency enthusiasts, is a means of securing and protecting people’s identities that doesn’t rely on remotely stored passwords. The other is a hope that we can leave behind intermediaries such as Uber and eBay, and allow buyers and sellers to deal directly with each other.

Blockstack, a startup based in New York, aims to bring blockchain technology to the masses. Like MaidSafe, its creators aim to build a new internet, and a 13,000-strong crowd of developers are already working on apps that either run on the platform Blockstack has created, or use its features. OpenBazaar is an eBay-esque service, up and running since November last year, which promises “the world’s most private, secure, and liberating online marketplace”. Casa aims to be an decentralised alternative to Airbnb; Guild is a would-be blogging service that bigs up its libertarian ethos and boasts that its founders will have “no power to remove blogs they don’t approve of or agree with”.

Muneeb Ali, 36, is originally from Islamabad in Pakistan and is one of Blockstack’s two founders. He is an admirer of Snowden, who, in March, will be the star attraction at a Blockstack event in Berlin.

An initial version of Blockstack is already up and running. Even if data is stored on conventional drives, servers and clouds, thanks to its blockchain-based “private key” system each Blockstack user controls the kind of personal information we currently blithely hand over to Big Tech, and has the unique power to unlock it. “That’s something that’s extremely powerful – and not just because you know your data is more secure because you’re not giving it to a company,” he says. “A hacker would have to hack a million people if they wanted access to their data.”

David Irvine of Maidsafe. Photograph: Maidsafe

It’s significant that Blockstack isn’t based in northern California: Ali says: “The culture in Silicon Valley isn’t the right fit for us.” Even though the startup has attracted millions of dollars from its backers – who include venture capitalists – Ali insists they are in for the long haul.

Back in Malmö, Balkan recalls that Zuckerberg put out a new year statement in which he tried to sound a note of sympathy with people who have grown sick of an online world controlled by a few big players. “In the 1990s and 2000s, most people believed technology would be a decentralising force,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But today, many people have lost faith in that promise. With the rise of a small number of big tech companies – and governments using technology to watch their citizens – many people now believe technology only centralises power rather than decentralises it.” He mentioned encryption and cryptocurrencies, and said he was “interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies and how best to use them in our services”.

Balkan marvels. “How does that work with a huge entity like Facebook, that just sucks power up?” he asks. “It’s absolute spin.”

He and Kalbag have much more modest ambitions, and that, he says, is the whole point: if we want a more diverse, open, decentralised internet, developers are going to have to wave goodbye to the idea of huge platforms that will supposedly make them rich.

“We’ve kind of been brainwashed into this Silicon Valley idea of success,” he says. “You know: ‘Unless you’ve made a billion dollars and you’re on the cover of Forbes magazine as the next king, you’re not successful.’ With our projects, no one’s going to make a billion dollars if we’re successful – not me, not Laura, not anyone.”

He drains the last of his coffee and checks his phone. “And if we do, you’ll know something’s gone wrong. We’ll have screwed up.”

Lead image: Punk rock internet illustration. Illustration: Andy Martin/Heart

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Theo Bass: European laws have ushered in a new era in how companies and governments manage and promote responsible use of personal data. Yet it is the city that looks set to be one of the major battlegrounds in a shift towards greater individual rights, where expectations of privacy and fair use clash with ubiquitous sensors and data-hungry optimised services.

Amid the clamour for ‘smart’ new urban infrastructure, from connected lampposts and bins to camera-enabled phone boxes, a And how do we ensure that its generation and use does not result in discrimination, exclusion and the erosion of privacy for citizens?

While these new sources of data have the potential to deliver significant gains, they also give public institutions – and the technology companies who help install smart city infrastructure – access to vast quantities of highly detailed information about local residents.

A major criticism has been a lack of clear oversight of decisions to collect data in public spaces. US cities have deployed controversial police technologies such as facial recognition without elected officials, let alone the public, being adequately informed beforehand – something which academic Catherine Crump has described as “surveillance policymaking by procurement”.

Meanwhile the digital economy has flourished around urban centres, with new digital platforms creating rich trails of information about our daily habits, journeys and sentiments. Governments often work with app-developers like Waze, Strava and Uber to benefit from these new sources of data. But practical options for doing so in a truly consent-driven way – that is, not simply relying on companies’ long T&Cs – remain few and far between. There’s no simple way to opt-in or -out of the smart city.

Given the increasing tension between increasing ‘smartness’ on the one hand, and expectations of privacy and fair data use on the other, how can city governments respond? In Nesta’s new report, written as part of our involvement with a major EU Horizon 2020 project called DECODE, we looked at a handful of city governments that are pioneering new policies and services to enhance digital rights locally, and give people more control over personal data.

City governments such as Seattle are improving accountability by appointing designated roles for privacy in local government, including both senior leadership positions and departmental ‘Privacy Champions’. The city’s approach is also notable for its strong emphasis on public engagement. Prior to the approval of any new surveillance technology, relevant departments must host public meetings and invite feedback via an online tool on the council’s website.

Elsewhere cities are becoming test-beds for new technologies that minimise unnecessary data collection and boost citizen anonymity. Transport for New South Wales, Australia, collaborated with researchers to release open data about citizens’ use of Sydney’s public transport network using a mathematical technique called differential privacy – a method which makes it difficult to identify individuals by adding random ‘noise’ to a dataset.

Other experiments put more control into the hands of individuals. Amsterdam is testing a platform that allows local residents to be “authenticated but anonymous”. The system, known as Attribute-Based Credentials, lets people collect simple and discrete ‘attributes’ about themselves in an app (like “I am over 18”), which they can use to verify themselves on local government services without revealing any more personal information than absolutely necessary.

Not all the policy measures we came across are about privacy and anti-surveillance. Local governments like Barcelona are fundamentally rethinking their approach to digital information in the city – conceiving of data as a new kind of common good.

In practical terms, the council is creating user-friendly ‘data commons dashboards’ that allow citizens to collect and visualise data, for example about environmental or noise pollution in their neighbourhoods. People can use the online tools to share information about their community directly with the council, and on their own terms: they decide the level of anonymity, for instance.

Local authorities are more nimble, and in a better position to test and develop new technologies directly with local residents, than other levels of government. As the tides in the personal data economy shift, it will be cities that are the real drivers of change, setting new ethical standards from below, and experimenting with new services that give more control over data to the people.

Theo Bass is a researcher in government innovation at the innovation charity Nesta.

Photo by Cerillion

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Photo by torbakhopper

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This opinion piece by Boyd Cohen explores how a new blockchain layer for mobility could allow shared mobility startups to quickly launch their services and have immediate access to a network effect. Cohen is the co-founder of IoMob, which combines open source and blockchain technology to decentralize mobility, and the dean of research at the EADA Business School in Barcelona.

Boyd Cohen: Shareable readers are well aware of the overlapping interests between the blossoming sharing economy and the need to support the urban commons and Sharing Cities.

Luckily for us urban dwellers, a growing array of sharing economy projects have emerged to help, at least in some cases, reduce our resource consumption, and shift to circular and shared access models. Perhaps no part of the urban landscape has been more embraced by sharing economy entrepreneurs than mobility. And with good reason. Our cities have become all too congested and contaminated by the 70 percent of vehicles commuting as the single occupied variety. Our cities’ physical infrastructures and investments have been spent on enabling personal vehicles to travel, park, and refuel (with fossil fuels for the most part), instead of allocating such precious resources to other and better uses.

The shared mobility space is huge. We have witnessed in recent years all kinds of business models for shared mobility such as bikesharing (municipal or P2P), carsharing, carpooling, parking space sharing, shared access to EV charging stations, and more. In fact, in Barcelona alone, according to Sharemrkt there are more than 50 such shared mobility operators in the city.

The question we ask ourselves at IoMob however, is how can this growing number of shared mobility startups compete with the entrenched larger and multinational mobility companies (Uber, Cabify) and even the more benign, larger peers like Zipcar or municipally run bike-sharing schemes? The current shared mobility marketplace requires that each startup build their own underlying tech for handling payments, user registration, reputation management and the like, while also spending their scarce resources to build their brand and user base. It is an uphill battle for sure.

Blockchain technology offers a powerful alternative to this scenario by engaging a range of mobility stakeholders and an open-source set of technologies for startups. Larger companies and public transit operators — any shared mobility service operator, really — once validated as complying with local laws, could be made visible to any user who uses apps that are connected to the protocol. Instead of requiring each mobility provider to launch their own apps, the Internet of Mobility (IoM) allows for an open ecosystem of operators to share access to infrastructure and user bases. You may ask, for example, why would a larger operator be willing to share their users with a shared mobility startup? For a couple of reasons:

1. It supports customer retention by ensuring customer needs are met.

2. A previously established agreement between the providers — or one approved instantaneously — allows the provider offering access to their user to get some revenue based on previously agreed relationships with mobility providers. This would establish how much commission is transferred for each shared customer.

We don’t believe all mobility providers will embrace an open, transparent ecosystem, at least not in the beginning. But you can imagine over time the network effect for having a range of public and private mobility services sharing users in a city.

One step towards this has already begun, and is referred to as Mobility as a Service (MaaS). MaaS models are great in that they aggregate a set of public and private mobility services in a package for residents who can pay a monthly fee for a set amount or unlimited amount of services in a given month. We embrace MaaS models, which can easily be connected to an IoM protocol, as a great improvement over existing models. Yet, blockchain and IoM allows for an even better model. Embracing open protocols and open source software, shared mobility startups and established mobility providers can share access to users and the base tech in a way that is not exclusive. MaaS models tend to be run by private companies using proprietary software and partnering with the largest mobility services in the city. This leaves little room for mobility innovation or for the startups to gain access to the local mobility market.

We have even begun envisioning how you could blend MaaS and our open IoM thinking in the following way: Any validated mobility operator could work with an open hub aggregator to develop a monthly pricing package based on each user’s personal travel patterns. In this model, a new user could go to a website, either describe their travel patterns or have the system track them for a period of time, and then discover any mobility service, large or small. A drop-down menu would give users the option to pick and choose any service and see how much it would cost to add that service to a monthly package. Think of it as a Personalized Mobility as a Service (PMaaS).

Blockchain technology poses the potential to decentralize and democratize our economies. The Internet of Mobility could significantly enhance urban mobility users’ experience, while creating a vehicle for shared mobility startups to launch innovative services more rapidly and gain democratized access to urban mobility users.

Graphic courtesy of Boyd Cohen

Photo by mripp

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Two hundred people per second now climb onto a dockless bike somewhere in China; the blue dots (above) denote transactions in Shanghai.

Considering that dockless bike sharing platforms were only launched two years ago, in 2015, this growth rate is remarkable.

The biggest company, Mobike, already operates more than seven million bikes across over 160 cities globally – and a merger with its biggest rival, Ofo, is in the offing.

For its US launch Mobike (above) has teamed up with AT&T for its networks. Qualcomm will make the GPS-enabled smart tags attached to each bike. And iPhone maker Foxconn will manufacture the actual bikes.

Negative side effects have accompanied this explosive growth, of course; entrances to subway stations, for example, have been blocked by piles of carelessly dumped bikes (above) .

Beijing and  Shanghai have banned the addition of more bikes until their users learn, or are compelled, to use designated parking areas. Wayward user behaviour may well be just a blip; penalties (and inventives) cxan easily be added to dockless bike software.

When sharing platforms enable new relationships between people, goods, equipment, and spaces, the notion of mobility as a discrete economic sector no longer makes sense.

News that Ikea is buying Task Rabbit is further confirmation of this convergence

The bigger story now unfolding (above) seems to be one of system transformation – a peak-car tipping point – that’s been slowly ‘brewing’ for a very long time.

(I don’t believe the concept of  “Personal Era” is a timely one – but I’ll come to that in my next post).

For the physicist Ugo Bardi, the decline of a complex system can be faster than its growth – an insight he attributes to the Stoic philosopher Seneca, who wrote:  “Fortune is of sluggish growth, but ruin is rapid”.

This could surely be true for a global mobility ecosystem based the private car.

After 100 years of spectacular growth, the Mobility Industrial Complex now confronts three potholes in the road ahead that could each on its own,  prove fatal.

The first is energy. Americans now use as much energy on one month as their grandparents did in their entire lifetime – and that rate of increase is accelerating with the advent of  ‘cloud commuting’ and ‘smart mobility’.  The Stack now runs on about seventeen terrawatts a day.

(The chart above is from The Cloud Begins With Coal, by Mark P. Mills)

The second un-driver of mobility is cost. It now costs 91c to travel one kilometre to travel in your own car,  but less than half that (30c/km) if you share. In some Chinese cities, where dockless bike systems are marketed like an app, you can use one for free.

The third pothole awaiting modern mobility – and it’s a big one – is complexity.

There are more lines of code in a high-end Audi than in a Boeing dreamliner – a costly feature will feel more like a bug if the coming software apocalypse turns out to be real.

“Sustainable smart mobility”, in this context, is turning out to be different in degree, but not in kind, from traditional transport and infrastructure planning. It tweaks the means, but not the ends.

Because neither the ‘need’ for perpetually growing mobility is questioned – let alone its biophysical possibility – the road on the downside of Seneca’s Cliff will be a bumpy one if a new story

In part 2 (to follow:) Smart Mobility at the Service of Civic Ecology

ADDENDUM

This writer has learned the hard way that people read things when they are ready to read them – not when they are written. In the hope that the time is now right, the articles below may, now, be useful.

From Bike Chain to Blockchain: Three Questions About Cooperation Platforms and Mobility (2015)

Until now, transportation has been planned to ‘save’ time. In this age of energy transition, would a better criterion not be, how to save calories? Who should own mobility sharing platforms: private companies? cities? us? What kind of ecosystem is needed to support the sharing platforms we want? 


Cycle Commerce: the Red Blood Cells of a Smart City (2015)

India’s many millions of bicycle and rickshaw vendors embody the entrepreneurship, sustainable mobility, social innovation, and thriving local economies, that a sustainable city needs.As an ecosystem, they’re also part of the metabolism that makes a city smart. That said, cycle commerce is a challenge for a city’s managers. Many different actors are involved in bicycle commerce – often with differing or downright conflicting agendas. Managing this kind of urban constellation is hard.

Cloud Commuting (2014)
A two-year project in Belgium proposes new relationships between people, goods, energy, equipment, spaces, and value. Its design objective: a networked mobility ecosystem. Mobilotoop asks, ‘how will we move in the city of the future?’  – and does not worry too much about the design of vehicles. ‘Cloud commuting’, in this context, is about accessing the means to move when they are needed (such as the micro-van, above) rather than owning a large heavy artefact (such as a Tesla) that will sit unused for 95 percent of the time.

Caloryville: The Two-Wheeled City (2014)
Something big is afoot. E-bikes in China are outselling cars four to one. Their sudden popularity has confounded planners who thought China was set to become the next automobile powerhouse.  In Europe, too, e-bike sales are escalating. Sales have been growing by 50% a year since 2008 with forecasts of at least three million sales in 2015.

Cycle commerce as an ecosystem (2013)

At a workshop in Delhi, Arjun Mehta and myself posed the following question to a group of 20 professionals from diverse backgrounds: What new products, services or ingredients are needed to help a cycle commerce ecosystem flourish in India’s cities, towns and villages?

Green Tourism: Why It Failed And How It Can Succeed (2013)

Packaged mass tours account for 80 percent of journeys to so-called developing countries – but destination regions receive five percent or less of the amount paid by the traveller. For local people on the ground, the injustice is absurd: if I were to pay e1,200 for a week long trek in Morocco’s Atlas mountains, just e50 would go to the cook and the mule driver who do the work. The mule, who works hardest, gets zilch. Can green travel be reformed?

From Autobahn to Bioregion (2012)
A few years ago, Audi’s in-house future watchers noticed an unsettling trend in visions for the future of cities : an increasing number of these visions did not contain cars. Urban future scenarios seemed to be converging around car-free solutions to problems posed by debilitating gridlock, lack of space, and air pollution.Wondering what this trend meant for a car company such as itself, the company launched its Urban Future Initiative to establish a dialogue.

The Gram Junkies (2011)

Gram junkies are those fanatical hikers and climbers who fret about every gram of weight that might be carried — in everything from titanium cook pans to toothbrush covers. Excess weight is not just an objective performance issue for these guys; they take it personally. In the matter of mobility and modern transportation, we all need to become gram junkies. We need to obsess not about speed, or about exotic power sources, but about the weight of every step taken, every vehicle used, every infrastructure investment contemplated. 
http://designobserver.com/feature/the-gram-junkies-in-transportation-design-the-key-issue-is-not-speed-but-weight/24178

Is an environmentally neutral car possible? (2010)

The future of the car has been electric for what? Five years now? Ten? The answer is 110 years, for it was back in 1899 that La Jamais Contente (The Never Satisfied) became the first vehicle to go over 100 km/h (62 mph) at Achères, near Paris.Since then, as we produced hundreds of millions non-electric cars — and despoiled the biosphere in the process — all manner of non-petrol cars, including electric ones, have come and gone.

A tale of two trains October (2010)

The fundamental problem with high-speed train systems is not that they burn too much of the wrong kind of fuel. The problem is that – like the interstate highway systems that came before – they perpetuate patterns of land use, transport intensity, and the separation of functions in space and time, that render the whole way we live unsupportable.


From my car to scalar (2006)

To a car company, replacing the chrome wing mirror on an SUV with a carbon fibre one is a step towards sustainable transportation. To a radical ecologist, all motorised movement is unsustainable. So when is transportation sustainable, and when is it not?


Photo by fireflythegreat

The post Is Peak Car Headed for Seneca’s Cliff? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Indonesia is one of the world’s hottest and fastest growing digital markets. “With around 90 million Internet users and more than 281 million active mobile phone subscriptions, we can anticipate the development of the digital ecosystem in Indonesia that will lead the growth,” Shinta W. Dhanuwardoyo wrote in “Strategic Review: The Indonesian Journal of Leadership, Policy and World Affairs” last year. “E-commerce has been one of the vital driving forces of Indonesia’s digital economy.”

Unfortunately, this growth has been uneven, and not all Indonesians have access to this burgeoning digital economy. Although it’s improving, only a little more than half of Indonesia’s population has regular internet access, and outside major cities, broadband access is severely limited. Smartphones — the most common method for accessing the internet in Indonesia — are almost all either manufactured abroad or domestically by international companies.

Koperasi Digital Indonesia Mandiri (KDIM), a cooperative based in the country’s capital, Jakarta, is trying to bridge this digital divide. It’s developing a locally-produced, low-end smartphone for Indonesians left out of the digital boom. It’s also building a platform for users to access services from other cooperatives on their phones.

“Unlike commercially distributed phones, this smartphone can only be obtained by becoming a member of the cooperative via its website, after which one needs to pay Rp 100,000 (US $7.48) per month for one year,” The Jakarta Post reported.

The phone had its soft-launch in late March, and will be available for all members in the coming months. We spoke with Adie Marzuki, chair of KDIM, to learn about how the organization uses the cooperative model to bring digital technologies and services to underserved Indonesians.

Can you tell us about how KDIM started, and why you decided to form a cooperative rather than a regular, for-profit company?

KDIM was initiated by two organizations, APJII [Indonesian Internet Service Providers Association] and MASTEL [Telematics Society]. We believe that we need to build inclusive economy for Indonesia. We have a very huge market here — more than 80 million smartphones users in the [Indonesian] market right now. But we still we have 60 million of our population un-served — this means that 60 million people in Indonesia have never had a smartphone. That’s why we need to have a domestic smartphone industry that serves the underserved in Indonesia — and that’s why we are creating an entry-level smartphone. They are not served by the current industry right now.

photo courtesy of KDIM

For that, the model of a cooperative makes the most sense. It is a fundamental economic system in Indonesia. We have the power of population, that’s why we built KDIM as part of an inclusive economy, so that we can leverage our numbers.

We don’t have power of capital — but we have power of the people.

What are your operating costs? How did you raise the capital to start the cooperative?

Our operating costs covered by collecting membership share from members. Membership share is a term used to refer to the contribution required for a person to become a member of the cooperative. The initial funding/equity capital [was] provided by the founding members, which consists of KDIM members of APJII and MASTEL.

Indonesia has many cooperatives. Can you tell us how you are similar, and different, from other cooperatives in the country?

We are the first Indonesian digital cooperative. There are other efforts to support the un-served people, but they are not in the digital industry — we thought that now, we need to engage all the population to emerge in the digital life, and benefit from it.

We created KDIM based on our own formulation — this is a completely new model for Indonesia. Other cooperatives in Indonesia are all in conventional businesses. We want to work with them, and we are asking the other cooperatives to follow in our way, and we are ready to serve them and give them the platform they need.

We are not trying to make our cooperative the biggest cooperative — we are offering the other cooperatives to use our platform to benefit and go to the digital era.

Once consumers become members of the cooperative, do they have to remain involved in the cooperative for as long as they’re using the phone? What do your members gain besides the phone itself, and how are they involved in KDIM?

Our members will use the phone itself as their membership tool. Members will benefit from the use of the phone as we have digital advertising system embedded in the platform. Members also gain points when they use the apps in the phone e.g. digital transaction, purchasing, and other digital activities, which are provided by the KDIM phone. Their points will be reflected in annual closing book, and members will redeem their points in rupiahs. In our annual meeting, each member will have one vote.

What’s your current membership base, and what are your medium-to-long-term goals? What kind of impact would you like KPIM to have on the country’s technology sector?

Currently we have 25,000 members. Of those, 5,000 of are directly, KDIM members, and the rest are from other cooperatives. Our medium-term goals are to invite lots of other cooperatives to benefit from our platform, while still allowing them to use their own cooperative brand. We will give white label B2B services to other cooperatives while we also inviting more members to join. Our long-term goal is to have our own digital industry ecosystem, which will serve all the 49 percent digitally un-served sector of society.

We are hoping our business model will inspire other tech players to be more inclusive and eventually close Indonesian digital divide. We haven’t officially launched yet, and we are aiming for an official launch of our phone in May, probably before the start of Ramadan.

Photo by AdamCohn

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The hypnotic documentary Hypernormalization, by British director Adam Curtis, takes its name from a concept developed by Soviet writer Alexei Yurchak. In his book Everything was Forever, Until it was No More, Yurchak describes the tense social and cultural atmosphere during the years prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Curtis describes, after decades of attempting to plan and manage a new kind of socialist society, the technocrats at the top of the post-Stalinist USSR realized that their goal of controlling and predicting everything was unreachable. Unwilling to admit their failure, they “began to pretend that everything was still going according to plan”. The official narrative created a parallel version of the Soviet society, a fake reality (like in the home videos of Good Bye Lenin) that everyone would eventually unveil. But even though they saw that the economy was trembling and the regime’s discourse was fictitious, the population had to play along and pretend it was real… “because no one could imagine any alternative. (…) You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it”.

Nowadays, our society is driven by very different forces. We don’t need technocrats to predict our actions; the last advancements in information technology, in addition to our constant disposition to share everything that happens to us, are enough for an invisible —and, apparently, non-human— power to define and limit our behaviour. In his book Social Media Abyss, the Dutch theorist Geert Lovink —founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam— speaks about the dark side of these new technologies and the consequences of our blind trust in the digital industry.

The closest comparison that we have today to the New Soviet Man is perhaps the cult to the cyberlibertarian entrepreneur of Silicon Valley. We are now used to thirty-somethings in sweaters telling us, from the ping-pong tables in their offices, that the only road to success —both personal and collective— lies in technology. To oppose them is no easy task: who is going to question a discourse that has innovation and “the common good” at its core? But the internet today hardly resembles the technology that, in its origins, seemed to promise a source of decentralization, democratization and citizen empowerment. Nowadays, the giants of Silicon Valley —lead by Facebook and Google— have mutated towards a monopolistic economic model and flirt with intelligence agencies for the exchange of their precious data.

Our relationship with the internet seems to be on its way to becoming something very similar to the later years of the Soviet Union. The Spanish sociologist Cesar Rendueles formulates this concern when questioning the capacities of technology to guarantee a plural and open space: “the network ideology has generated a diminished social reality”, he claims on his essay Sociophobia: Political Change in the Digital Utopia. Lovink shares the “healthy scepticism” of Rendueles when elaborating what we could call an “Internet critical theory”. In Social Media Abyss, he inaugurates the post-Snowden era — “the secular version of God is Dead”— as the beginning of a general disillusionment with the development of the internet: now we can say that the internet “has become almost everything no one wanted it to be”. But even though we know that everything we do online may be used against us, we still click, share and rate whatever appears on our screen. Can we look at the future with optimism? Or are we too alienated, too precarized, too desocialized (despite being constantly “connected”) to design alternatives? In the words of Lovink, “what is citizen empowerment in the age of driver-less cars”?

The year did not start all that well. The big political changes of 2017 have been, as Amador Fernández Savater has described, “a kind of walking paradox: anti-establishment establishment, anti-elitist elite, antiliberal neoliberalism, etc.”. But fortunately, politics not only consists of electoral processes. Lovink has spent decades studying the “organized networks” that operate outside the like economy: “The trick is to achieve a form of collective invisibility without having to reconstitute authority”. We spoke with him not only about the degradation of the democratic possibilities of the internet (and the possibilities for coming up with an equitative revenue model for the internet) but also about how to design the alternative.

We may opt for hypernormalizing everything: “nothing to see here, let’s keep browsing”. Any other option involves theorization as we advance on our objectives. The answer lays on creating “dissident knowledges”.

“Radical disillusionment”

Your latest book starts with the idea that the internet, initially portrayed as a democratizing and decentralising force, “has become precisely everything no one wanted it to be”. The once uncontested Californian ideology is now being challenged for the first time, after the Snowden revelations showed us that we have lost any controlled, pragmatic rule over internet governance. What is our next move?

Geert Lovink

I don’t want to make it too schematic, in terms of chronology. But because the internet is still growing so fast, it is really important to ask ourselves: “where are we“? This was really the “beginners” question, but for a while, the discussion turned to what it could become. The Snowden revelations, together with the 2008 crisis, should make us go back to the original question: where is the internet now?

I like to see the internet as a facilitating ideology. This is a notion that comes from Arthur Kroker, a Canadian philosopher working in the tradition of Marshall McLuhan. It is obviously not repressive, let alone aggressive, as it does not cause any physical violence on you. But what it does is that it facilitates.

Since the 2000s and the so called Web 2.0, the internet has been primarily focused on its participatory aspect. Everywhere you go you are asked not simply to create a profile, but to contribute, to say something, to click here, to like… The internet these days is a huge machine that seduces the average user without people necessarily understanding that what they do creates an awful load of data.

The fact that we are not aware of what the data we produce is used for seems to be the problematic aspect. Precisely one of the defining phrases of the book is that “tomorrow’s challenge will not be the internet’s omnipresence but its very invisibility. That’s why Big Brother is the wrong framing”. In the internet, power operates in the collective unconscious, more subtly than a repressive force. In fact, “the Silicon Valley tech elite refuses to govern”, you say; “its aim is to achieve the right for corporations to be left alone to pursue their own interests”. So how do you better describe this?

Yes, you can see that even after Trump’s win. They take the classic position of not governing. This is in a way a new form of power, because it’s not quite Foucauldian. Even though we would love to see that it is all about surveillance —and the NSA of course invites us to go back to this idea—, the internet is in a way post-Foucauldian. If you read Foucault’s last works, he invites us to that next stage, to see it as the Technology of the Self. That would be the starting point to understand what kind of power structure there is at stake, because it is facilitated from the subject position of the user. And this is really important to understand. All the Silicon Valley propositions or network architectures have that as the starting point.

Nowadays, surveillance is really for the masses and privacy is for the upper class

In a way, this invites us —the activists, the computer programmers, the geeks— to provoke the internet to show its other face. But for the ordinary user this other face is not there. And when I say ordinary I mean very ordinary. If you look at the general strategy, especially of Facebook, the target is this last billion, which is comprised of people really far under poverty levels. When we’re talking about the average internet user, we are not talking about affluent, middle-class, people anymore. This is really something to keep in mind, because we need to shed this old idea that the internet is an elitist technology, that the computers were once in the hands of the few, that the smartphone is a status symbol, etc. We are really talking about an average user that is basically under the new regime of the one percent, really struggling to keep afloat, to stay alive.

So when I say invisibility, I mean that this growing group of people (and we’re talking about billions across continents) are forced to integrate the internet in their everyday struggles. This is what makes it very, very serious. We’re not talking about luxury problems anymore. This is a problem of people that have to fight for their economic survival, but also have to be bothered with their privacy.

That is what I call facilitating. When we are talking about facilitating, it also means that we are dealing with technologies that are vital for survival. This is the context in which we are operating now when we hear that the internet has been democratized. It doesn’t mean that there is no digital divide anymore, but the digital divide works out in a different way: it’s no longer about who has access and who doesn’t. It’s probably more about services, convenience, speed… and surveillance. Nowadays, surveillance is really for the masses and privacy is for the upper class. And then the offline is for the ones who can really afford it. The ones who are offline are absolutely on the top. And it didn’t use to be on top. It used to be reversed. These are really big concerns for civil society activists and pro-privacy advocates.

The social in social media

These brings us to the issue of “the social in social media”. You call it an ‘empty container’, affected by the “shift from the HTML-based linking practices of the open web to liking and recommendations that happen inside closed systems”, and call for a redefinition of the ‘social’ away from Facebook and Twitter. Could you develop this idea?

It is really difficult these days to even imagine how we can contact people outside of social media. In theory it’s still possible. But even if you look at the centralized email services, like Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail, they are now completely integrated in the social media model and they are, in fact, its forerunners. However, the problem really starts with the monopolistic part of the platform: the invisible aggregator that is happening in the background that most users have no idea about. Even experts find it very hard to really understand how these algorithms operate.

In this field, where there are a lot of academics but no critics, there is an enormous overproduction of real life experience and practice

Why has there not been any attempt from political science or sociology, at least that I know, to theorize the Social in Social Media? Obviously this is because the ‘social’ in scientific terms has really been reduced to the question of classes. But the idea that you can construct the social… sociology has a hard time to understand this. Historically it would understand that the social consists of the tribe, the political party, the Church, the neighborhood, etc. We know all the classic categories. Maybe when they are a bit newer they would talk about subcultures or gender issues. These are the “new” configurations of the Social.

But the idea that communication technology can construct and really configure the social as such, despite all the good efforts of science and technology scholars, has caught them by surprise. I think this is especially due to the speed and the scale; the speed at which the industry established itself and the scale of something like Facebook, which now connects almost two billion people. If you would have told that to someone 20 or 30 years ago it would have been very difficult to imagine, how a single company could do that.

Something that is clear in your work is the need to take technology seriously. Rather than falling in the trap of “offline romanticism” —or its alternative “solutionism”—, you are interested in “organized networks” that are configured in this day and age, because technology is going to stay whether we want it or we don’t. Against this, you appeal to the importance of theory. “What is lacking is a collective imagination (…). We need to develop dissident knowledges”, you say. What is the role of theory in all this? Isn’t there a sense of urgency to act right now?

The urgency is felt by the young people. I can only point to numerous experiments going on at the moment which could tell us something about the models that could work. What is important now is to write down the stories of those who are trying to create alternative models and to really try to understand what went wrong, in order to somehow make those experiences available for everyone who enters this discussion.

In this field, where there are a lot of academics but no critics, there is an enormous overproduction of real life experience and practice. However, there is almost no reflection happening. This is in part because the people who build the technologies are quite entrepreneurial or geeky and they don’t necessarily see the bigger picture. So that is our task, that is what projects like the MoneyLab network aims for.

The entire industry is not changing fast enough to accommodate the rising group of precarious workers

Internet revenue models

One of the big problems of this lack of theorization, as you point out in the book, is that the internet was not built with a revenue model in mind. We pay for access, hardware and software but not for content, so there are fewer and fewer opportunities to make a living from producing it. You call it “anticipatory capitalism”: “if you build it, business will come”, they tell us. What is even more striking is that your own experience from decades ago seems to point out to no advancements. This lack of direction has given place to a number of contradictions; for instance, freelance work, “simultaneously denounced as neoliberal exploitation and praised as the freedom of the individual creative worker”.

In a way, the internet today has a very traditional financial model. It is essentially based on targeted advertisement, which already existed in the past, but it was not focused on the individual. This caught me by surprise as well because I thought, especially in the early 2000s, that advertisement in an internet context was more or less dead, that beyond the web banner there wasn’t really much else. Of course, there was e-commerce but that’s something different, because then you are purchasing something, there is a real money transaction.

What really remains unsolved —and not much has changed since the 1980s— is the problem of how to pay the people that produce the content. The entire industry is not changing fast enough to accommodate the rising group of precarious workers. We can see some solutions on the horizon, going in different directions, but again we have to fight against the free services of Facebook, Google and all these other companies based on advertisement and data resell, who will always try to sabotage or frustrate the implementation, because, obviously, it is not in their interest that these new models start to work.

The only thing we can say is that, luckily, since 2008, there is something happening in different directions. And the more we try, the more certain we can be that, at some point, something will work out. To just wait until the industry solves it is not going to work because, again, we know the main players will frustrate these developments. Because that will be the end of their revenue model.

These strategies will only work if they becomes ubiquitous, if they are somehow integrated in the plan of becoming invisible

What happens with some of these advancements, like crowdfunding, is that while they are portrayed as alternative models, they still don’t solve the question of how to get paid for produced content.

The thing with crowdfunding, for instance, is that while it can work (and I know it has worked for many friends of mine) it usually only works once. It is very difficult to repeat. I find the Patreon model more interesting, in which people subscribe to you as an artist, or a writer, or a magazine, and have the possibility to fund you over time. That goes back to my previous idea that the internet should have developed itself through the subscription model but it didn’t, and I think that’s a lost opportunity. Even if it catches momentum again in 10 or 20 years, it already means that numerous generations, including my own, have been written off. At the moment, we are still supposed to contribute to the internet, to bring their content online, discuss, organize and so on, without anything coming back to us.

Some of these models, however, can easily get mistaken with an act of charity.

At the moment, when we’re still on defense, every attempt that tries to put the revenue model situation on the table and bring the money back to the content producers, is a good thing. Kim Dotcom, for instance, is planning on launching a kind of revenue model system connected to bitcoin. He is of course speaking to really broad, mainstream culture. On the more obscure side we have this cyber currency experiment called Steemit, which also works with the idea that if you read something and you like it, you pay for it.

First, we have to understand that these strategies will only work if they becomes ubiquitous, if they are somehow integrated in the plan of becoming invisible. Because if they aren’t, if time and again you have to make the payment a conscious act, it is not going to work. These payments, or this redistribution of wealth and attention, in the end, need to be part of an automated system. And we have to fully utilize the qualities and the potential that the computer offers us in order for it not to remain a one-off gift. Because it’s not a gift. We are not talking about charity.

Designing alternatives

So you have a precarious youth, with high levels of disenchantment and short attention spans, living within a system that seems to absorb whatever is thrown against them and come up even stronger after crises.

It feels like social media and the entrepreneurial industry is designed for non-revolt. Because “we are Facebook”: you are the user all the time. Some would say that for us to move forward all we have to do is to stop using these platforms. But is that really the move?

I find difficult to make any moral claims because of how it has all turned out. The exodus from Facebook, for instance, is a movement which already has a whole track record in itself. I myself left in 2010, six years after it was launched. And I was already feeling mainstream then because I left with 15,000 other people! So already by then it felt that I was the last to leave. This discussion has been with us for quite some time now and it feels like, especially here in the Netherlands, it never proved to be very productive to call for this mass exodus.

The one approach I am particularly in favor of is that of the smaller groups, the “organized networks”, that do not necessarily operate out in the open of the big platforms. I say that because, if you start operating there, you’ll see that the network itself invites you to enter their logic of very fast growth, if not hyper-growth. For social movements, this is something very appealing.

Yes, it feels like now it’s all measured by followers, even social movements.

Exactly, we cannot distinguish the social movement from the followers anymore. This is the trap we are in at the moment, so in a way we have to go back to a new understanding of smaller networks, or cells, or groups. It is no surprise that many people are now talking of going towards a new localism, because the easiest way to build these smaller groups is to focus on the local environment. But that’s not necessarily what I have in mind: I can also imagine smaller, trans-local networks.

The point is to really focus on what you want to achieve without getting caught in this very seductive network and platform logic. You must be very strong, because it is something like a siren, you’re bound to the ship and seduced by her; but this type of network logic will not work in your favor, not in the short term or in the long term.

Can you build an autonomous structure that maintains its momentum, that can exist over time?

In a recent article on open!, ‘Before Building the Avant-Garde of the Commons’, you defined the commons as an “aesthetic meta-structure”, or a collection of dozens of initiatives and groups that come together but are also in tension. Is there no place, or no need, for a sort of collective plan?

That’s when we enter the debate about organizing. Some people say ‘yes’, and the obvious answer to that is the political party. The political party is not a network, it is not a platform. Of course, there are many ways in which to do this and in different countries there are many traditions on how to operate a political party, but this is not necessarily what I have in mind. I am still trying to understand ways in which to organize the social that might have a political party component but is not reduced or overdetermined by that.

We are not talking anymore of the old division between socialists and anarchists, or the street and the institution. What is interesting now is: can you build an autonomous structure that maintains its momentum, that can exist over time? This is the big issue for both the social networks and social movements these days. Social movements come and go very fast. On the one hand, the speed is exciting if you are into it, it has a seductive side to it, and this is of course related to the network effect. But the frustration is also very big because you come back one week later and it’s gone. You cannot find any trace of it.

The problem, of course, is when the effect stays in the social media and it doesn’t translate into other realms. “When do we stop searching and start making?”, you ask in your book.

Those other realms are very diverse, even in terms of social relations between people, organizational capacities, or even policy, for that matter. The key debate here remains perdurability. Try something that might last for a year, go ahead. That would really transform something. I am talking about those type of commitments, of expression of the Social.

In Spain we had the indignados movement back in 2011. I think one of the successes of that movement was that it showed a lot of people what else was out there. And, while at some point it might have seemed as it was banishing, it actually created all these little networks that we are today seeing translated into a bunch of different initiatives, not all exclusively political —although the discussion has been heavily monopolized by the institution-street dichotomy—. Is there something to learn from these experiences?

Again, what I am interested in is reading what has been going on, and have people outside, but also inside of Spain find out about it. What has worked and what has not worked? Tell the story and share it with others. This is the way forward. One of the problems is to find a trigger, to see where things can accelerate, where can new forms of organization take shape. But again, I think that this only happens if you start to try. If we don’t try and just wait nothing is ever going to happen. This is the same issue as with the internet revenue models: “try something, do it”, because it will not resolve itself, even more so with the more political, social forms.

I still strongly believe in more local experiences because, even the 2011 movement, where there was a very interesting dynamic at play, wasn’t necessarily local. And that experience is still ahead of us. At the moment it feels like things are more defined by lifestyle, by generation or by some kind of general discontent, a very diffused feeling that “it can’t go on like this anymore”. Usually this means that people start to become active when they know they have got very little to lose and they are thinking “the current situation is not going to bring me anything in the foreseeable future”. This is the moment when you can share that discontent with others and start to become active, “get the ball rolling”. And it is possible that these days technology will play a less important role and we forget the whole naive idea that there were Facebook or Twitter revolutions, which we of course know afterwards that it wasn’t quite like that.

What if we take those social media very seriously, so seriously that they become part of the public utilities?

Last year, I listened to Pierre Lévy on Medialab Prado say that it may be a better strategy to use the existing social networks and apps instead of trying to constantly make the public change their platform. Is that too optimistic?

Well, first of all, when the moment is there and people need to do something, it is going to happen regardless. Regardless, also, of what I think or what Pierre Lévy thinks. If you think out of the necessities and the making of history growing out of that the question may not be very important.

The things that I’m talking about are much more on a conceptual level. It means that you need to have a longer term view in which all these things are based upon, and then think of how they can further develop in alternative directions. In technology we know that these concepts are very important. That’s why I emphasize that we need to do a lot of experiments and report about them. Because maybe in the larger scheme, when we are talking about really big events or changes, all these concepts may not be very relevant; but if you take one step down and think in a more evolutionary mode how these technologies further developed, it is indeed very relevant. Just think of what may have happened if 20 or 30 years ago people would have thought more carefully about the revenue model situation, for instance. That may have made the difference for millions of people.

There is another consideration we can make. I understand that Pierre Lévy says we should use the existing technologies more efficiently. But obviously other people say we can only use the social media that exist now in a more emancipatory way if these platforms are socialized, if we really take over their ownership. That is a very interesting and radical proposition that other people have started to work on. What if we take those social media very seriously, so seriously that they become part of the public utilities? This is an interesting development in which you don’t emphasize so much on the alternatives or the conceptual level.

But then again I would say that even if it is socialized, it would be in dire need of radical reform from the inside. I have theorized a lot about that. I think where the social media really fails is that it doesn’t offer any tools and this is a real pity. Google is a bit more interesting in that respect, because it comes from an engineering background… but precisely because of that, Google has failed in social media realm even though they have tried a lot of things. So it is interesting to further investigate how this utility and this invisible nature relates to a more conscious use of the tools they provide.

These are the two directions that are quite contradictory at the moment. On the one hand there is the whole technological development, which is definitely going into that realm of the invisibility; just look at the Internet of Things. On the other hand there is the aspect of democratization and politicization of the tool. These two strategies don’t necessarily have to be opposed, but at the moment it seems quite difficult to bring them together.

Photo by basair

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