Internet of Things – P2P Foundation

Texting Cows, AGTech & the Future of Farming in Germany

ARC2020 — Mon, 09 Apr 2018 07:11:04 +0000

Automation and digitisation are rising in farming and the broader agri-food sector. Germany – industrial powerhouse of Europe – seems an obvious place to embrace AGTech. From precision farming and data ownership to embodied energy and cost, what are the opportunities, the impacts and the implications? And how are agroecologists responding?

Helene Schulze: When the body is ready, the text is sent. Cows equipped with vaginal thermometers are now alerting farmers by text when they are in heat. So far, 5000 German farms have signed up to this Connected Cow system, as developed by Medira Technologies and Deutsche Telekom. And there are others similar systems emerging too, as the Internet of Things beds in.

There are ever more vocal fears that automation will put the labour forces of entire industries under threat. Increasingly robots, drones and machines are taking on jobs previously done by humans. Frequently they do them better and agriculture is no exception.

The idealised image of the small German farmer, ploughing away endlessly in the fields is outdated, as Ralf Hombach, business analytics expert at PwC explains:

‘increasingly the famer adopts a supervisory and controlling role.’

The PwC study (German) showed that of the cross-section of 100 farms analysed, 54% had already invested in digital technologies. 40% planned to either continue investing or begin investing in such technologies in future.

Drone spraying sugar cane. Photo by Herney

What is agricultural technology or AgTech? Where should we be worried? What can we expect in the years to come?

Ever since tractors were first fitted with GPS (or global-positioning-systems) at the start of the 21^stcentury, one can observe the boom of the agricultural technology, or AgTech, sector. Frequently it is heralded as the third wave of agricultural modernisation, after mechanisation from 1900-1930s and the growth and development of agrarian genetics during the Green Revolution, 1930s-1960s.

AgTech incorporates a range of technological and scientific developments to be used in farming. This includes ‘smart farming,’ i.e. hardware such as drones and robots but also software such as sensors, image recognition or machine-to-machine communication. Smart farming incorporates a whole swathe of different tools and functions from milking machines to satellite-driven soil and crop assessment.

Farm worker Derek Search powers an ATV across fields at Forage Systems Research Center. The ATV is equipped with sonar reading sensors that measure pasture growth. The data is ran through a computer that allows producers to manage nutrient applications. photo by Kyle Spradley CC BY-NC 2.0

The underlying intention is to increase the quality, quantity and efficiency of agricultural production through implementation of these various technologies; applying fertiliser where fertiliser is needed, milking the cow when she so requires. The idea is that this encourages the better allocation of resources such as pesticides only to those parts of the field that require it. It can save time for farmers, theoretically encourage pro-environmental farming strategies and produce a lot of food. So can AgTech innovations be a way of feeding the world – sustainably?

During the Seventh Framework Programme and now as part of Horizon2020, a research and innovation programme, the EU has sponsored a variety of AgTech projects. One example is the rollout of Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) technology. Primarily these are sensors used for monitoring the health and wellbeing of animals. Collected data includes GPS location, body temperature and activity. As outlined at the start, Medira Technologies and Deutsche Telekom collaborated to produce Connected Cow. Here a cow is equipped with a vaginal thermometer which alerts the farmer by text message when the cow is in heat. So far, this has proven popular among the 5,000 farms initially equipped with this technology. It could well be incorporated in efforts to ensure better animal welfare in livestock rearing, as is under debate in Germany.

The fears that AgTech will eliminate the agricultural workforce have not yet actualised in Germany. A recent study (German) by search engine Joblift analysed job offers in the German agriculture sector over the past two years. It found that the past year brought consistent growth for the agricultural job market. 4% of jobs fell into the AgTech category and, despite automation, there were 20% more jobs in this sector than in the year previous. The AgTech branch is growing four times as fast as the rest of the sector.

1/3 of the jobs listed are from companies with over 1,000 employees and, due to the initial cost of AgTech, it is a sector spearheaded by big agribusinesses. The agricultural sector has very low margins and so necessarily hefty investments in innovation are difficult for small farmers. That said, the farm hack movement has seen citizen farmers taking the initiative in a myriad of open and affordable ways – some examples are below.

Photo (c) Kyle Spradley CC BY-NC 2.0 Brent Myers and Bill Schlep plant corn for variety testing at the Bradford Research Center. They have utilized GPS mapping systems and computers to know where certain seeds are plotted in the field.

However, for some companies AgTech is financially lucrative terrain. Globally, the market was worth E3.2 Billion in 2016, according to AGfunder, a Californian based crowfunding platform. 363 million of this was spent on farm management and sensor technology, the Financial times reported last month.

Die Zeit newspaper reports Bosch has already made a billion Euro turnover in selling smart farming technologies. With this sector projected to continue growing, the company hopes to double this turnover in the next ten years. Other large agribusinesses are doing the same. Bayer has teamed up with the Institute of Geography and Information Studies at Hamburg University to work on the development of new field analysis tools. They have also partially taken over Proplant which had produced a milk cow assessment app. Bayer says it is working on ‘further strategic investments’ using satellite, drone and sensor-gathered data in the coming years.

Predictions of the future of smart farming see the increasing collection of big data to drive real-time decision-making on harvesting, planting and yields, for example. Since this field is still dominated by agribusinesses, there is growing concern about how this data is collected, what it is used for and who has access to it. Fears concern a monopoly of valuable information in the hands of the already powerful global agribusiness firms, data which could be used to differently charge farmers for the same product, for example.

However, with the rise of open source data initiatives across the world there is the chance, if strategically thought out soon, for collaborative, open systems where all stakeholders have access to huge data stores. This has the potential to democratise the supply chain network, redistributing power from the information-rich agribusiness firms and giving greater negotiating ability to smaller farms, new entrants or start-ups. This requires work on generating the institutional and regulatory infrastructures to ensure accessibility and affordability in data creation and sharing.

While there are a number of threats to farming and farmers in Germany, German farmers are not yet being eliminated from the labour force by robots. And we can likely expect exciting developments in AgTech in the coming years. This technology may have positive socio-economic and environmental effects, working against inequalities in the current food system and minimising the environmental impact of the sector. However, this requires forward planning to ensure frameworks are in place which allow accessibility to AgTech and its use for social good.

Helene Schulze has just completed an MSc Nature, Society and Environmental Governance from Oxford University. Her dissertation focused on seed saving. She helped organise the 2017 Oxford Food Forum. She has also interned for Sustain: Alliance for Better Food and Farming.

Cross-posted from ARC2020. LEad image by Sanint.

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Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz on the End of Ownership in the Internet of Things Era

Michel Bauwens — Sat, 30 Dec 2017 11:00:00 +0000

Republished from Motherboard’s Soundcloud:

The internet of things, End User License Agreements, and Digital Rights Management are increasingly being used to give electronics manufacturers control and ownership over your stuff even after you buy it. Radio Motherboard talks to Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz, authors of The End of Ownership about what we stand to lose when our songs, movies, tractors, and even our coffee makers serve another master.

From the book’s website

If you buy a book at the bookstore, you own it. You can take it home, scribble in the margins, put in on the shelf, lend it to a friend, sell it at a garage sale. But is the same thing true for the ebooks or other digital goods you buy? Retailers and copyright holders argue that you don’t own those purchases, you merely license them. That means your ebook vendor can delete the book from your device without warning or explanation—as Amazon deleted Orwell’s 1984 from the Kindles of surprised readers several years ago. These readers thought they owned their copies of 1984. Until, it turned out, they didn’t. In The End of Ownership, Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz explore how notions of ownership have shifted in the digital marketplace, and make an argument for the benefits of personal property.

Of course, and other digital goods offer users convenience and flexibility. But, Perzanowski and Schultz warn, consumers should be aware of the tradeoffs involving user constraints, permanence, and privacy. The rights of private property are clear, but few people manage to read their end user agreements. Perzanowski and Schultz argue that introducing aspects of private property and ownership into the digital marketplace would offer both legal and economic benefits. But, most important, it would affirm our sense of self-direction and autonomy. If we own our purchases, we are free to make whatever lawful use of them we please. Technology need not constrain our freedom; it can also empower us.

The Financialization of Life

Michel Bauwens — Sun, 10 Sep 2017 08:00:00 +0000

Not everyone is aware that technology is not neutral, and that design decisions reflect interests and values. This is of course very clear with Bitcoin and the Blockchain, which carries within itself a vision of human society that is based on isolated individuals that make contracts with other. At the P2P Foundation, we’d like to point out the underlying struggle for the vision of society. Do we want a society based on subjects, that are controlled by a ‘sovereign’ be it the surveillance state or the netarchical platforms? Do we want everything in life to be a transaction, as the market totalitarians propose? Or do we want to be citizen-commoners, co-creating shared value in freely associating communities? These differences matter, and Salvatore Iaconesi has written a brilliant analysis of the potential dangers of uncritically applying the blockchain to human life.

Originally published on Medium.com

A recent article about the BlockChain appeared on the Italian version of Vice’s Motherboard and raised a series of interesting conversations, and was soon followed up by another one.

In that article I was called to express a series of opinions about what was happening with BlockChains and cryptocurrencies, from the point of view of an organization such as the one I lead (HER, Human Ecosystems Relazioni), which deals with data, complex connections between sciences, technology, society, design and art, and the social, political, cultural and psychological implications of these connections and interactions.

In my job, everyday, I deal with multiple points of view which confront with these impacts brought on by data, blockchains and cryptocurrencies, with a wide variety of subjects from hyper-technical ones, to entrepreneurs and investors, to policymakers, up to the ones beyond suspicion, “ordinary” people who have to understand what an artwork which uses the blockchain does, or who deals with culture, museums, the city’s neighborhoods. People who — whether they like it or not — have to do with these technologies and practices. A large variety.
I have the maximum respect for the blockchain. It possibly is the technology which bears the highest potential for radical innovation and transformation today. With all its limits and problems.

My critique is not technical, but psychological.

It moves across the domain of perception and of comprehension of reality.

In this domain — the one of the psychic processes which are engaged and shared by people and their relations as they interpret the world to understand how to orient themselves and how to act in it — technologies like the Blockchain are a disaster.

Why?

On the one hand, they are a very powerful agent towards the “transactionalization of life”, that is of the fact that all the elements of our lives are progressively turning into transactions.

Which overlaps with the fact that they become “financialized”. Everything, including our relations and emotions, progressively becomes transactionalized/financialized, and the Blockchain represent an apex of this tendency. This is already becoming a problem for informality, for the possibility of transgression, for the normation and normalization of conflicts and, thus, in prospect, for our liberties and fundamental rights, and for our possibility to perceive them (because we are talking about psychological effects).

On the other hand, they move attention onto the algorithm, on the system, on the framework. Instead of supporting and maintaining the necessity and culture of establishing co-responsibility between human beings, these systems include “trust” in procedural ways. In ways which are technical. Thus, the necessity for trust (and, thus, on the responsibility to attribute trust, based on human relations) progressively disappears.

Therefore, together with it, society disappears. Society as actively and consciously built by people who freely decide if and when to trust each other, and who collectively agree to the modalities of this attribution.

What remains is only consumption of services and products. Safe, transparent and all. But mere transactionalized consumption. Society ends, and so does citizenship: we become citizen of nothing, of the network, of the algorithm.

These are not technical issues, but psychological ones, perceptive ones. And, thus, even more serious.

Technology is not neutral.

I can use a hammer to plant a nail or to smash it on your head, that’s true. But what is also true is that as soon as I have a hammer in my hand, everything starts looking like a nail.

This is the same for Blockchains. As soon as I start using them, as soon as I start imagining the world through them, everything starts looking as a transaction, as something which is “tokenizable”. And this is a disaster, in the ancient sense of the word (dis-aster, without stars for orientation).

Technology creates us just as much as we create technology.

We are starting to design systems which are, on the one hand, completely open and transparent. Which is a good thing from one point of view, and a problematic thing to do on the other. (unless the complete transparency of “The Circle” scenarios is something we feel comfortable with).

From another point of view, these systems are progressively being associated to identity systems, meaning that all the advantages and freedoms deriving from the fact that digital identity is anything but univocal and fixed are progressively being lost. Byebye anonymous, temporary, shared, multiple, plural, identities. Goodbye all the freedoms that come with them.

What derives are “citizenship” sytems (not “existence”, not “inhabitantship”) which are literally trustless, “without the need for trust”, in which trust is in the peer-to-peer network, in the automation, in the algorithm.

Institutions and other people disappear, replaced by an algorithm. Who knows where trust is at/in! It is everywhere, diffused, in the peer-to-peer network. Which means that it’s nowhere, and in nobody.

In a weird way it is like in call centers: they are not really useful for the client, and they completely serve the purpose minimizing bother for the companies, letting clients slipping into the “procedure” (which is synonym with algorithm), and avoiding them from obtaining real answers and effects, in their own terms outside of procedures.

These are all processes which separate people from each other, from institutions, organizations, companies, through the Procedure.

Citizens of everywhere. Citizens of nowhere and nothing.

From a philosophical and psychological point of view it corresponds to a powerful addition to a process which is already taking place on a large scale: the transactionalisation of life.

Everything is turning into a transaction: our relationships, emotions and expressions; our ways of producing, acquiring and transferring knowledge; communication; everything.

As soon as each of these things become the subject of a service, they become transactions: they become an atomic part of a procedure.

Because this is what a transaction is: an atom in a procedure, in an algorithm. This includes the fact that transactions are designed, according to a certain business, operational, strategic, marketing model.

This means that when our relationships, emotions, expressions, knowledge, communication and everything become transactions, they also become atoms of those business models whose forms, allowances, degrees of freedoms and liberty are established by those models.

With the Internet of Things these processes also arrive to the objects which fill our daily lives, to the elements of the environment and to the environment itself.

This means that we will be surrounded by transactions, within ourselves and in everything around us. It will become truly difficult to think of something that does not correspond to a transaction.

As said above: this will bring on issues for informality, the possibility for transgression and for our freedoms and rights.

Many of these these will simply disappear, as we lose capacity to conceive them outside of the “procedure”, of the transaction that embodies them. Whether it is purchase or an emotional expression, it will not make any difference.

Furthermore, speaking of transactionalization and its equivalent, financialization, the issue of access will also arise from the fact that there will be a limited amount of subjects who will have the resources to sustain the cost of the transactions which are needed to have rights and freedoms, or to pull themselves out of the procedures themselves. And of course there will be people who don’t have these resources.

These reflections have long been outside of the discussions which are going on about these new technologies. Hackers, activists, researchers, philosophers, antropologists are talking about the blockchain, as well as governments, organizations, companies and banks themselves. Yet none of these doubts are yet on agendas. There is a mono, singular narrative, which is interpreted for activism, business, governance, exploitation.

Investments, from above (with governments, financial institutions, investors) and below (with crowd based operations, evangelism, activism and also with the desire to exploit and to access funds and resources, to abandon the state of crisis) are happening.

And yet we must consider.

The Blockchain is the first tentative answer in years to the extremely centralized models which are de facto ruling us today, whether we talk about energy, environment, finance, welfare, governance.

The Blockchain is all about distribution of power.

And yet, this same distribution is its weak spot, if our objective is to collectively create a society with more freedoms, solidarity and opportunities for relation, emotion, communication and knowledge.

Because this distribution of power does not require conscience and desire, and the responsibility of these conscience and desire. Because these are in the algorithm, not in ourselves and in our relations.

It is not the algorithm serving us, and what we want. It is the algorithm turing us into itself, making us become like it.

What can we do?

The most important thing we can do is, probably, that we need to realize that these are not technological or technical issues.

Design only arrives up to a certain point. The design and production of services, products and instruments does not address a class of issues which are aesthetic, psychological and which deal with sensibility and imagination.

For example, in our practice we often talk about the Third Infoscape, which is originated from the concept of the Third Landscape.

As in the Third Landscape: where “technicians” see “weeds”, the Third Landscape sees opportunity, biodiversity, an open source media which is a reservoir for the future of the planet, which does not require energy to maintain, but produces energy, food, knowledge, relations.

As Marco Casagrande describes, the entire territory becomes a form of knowledge, with all its conflicts, dissonances and polyphonies. This is not a transactional (or transactionalizing) vision. It is a thing in which data and information are not laid out geometrically, formally, as in gardens, but more like the woods and wild nature, in which multiple forms of dimensions, boundaries, layers and interpretations co-exist by complex desire, relation and interaction, not by design.

It is a different kind of technology, a different kind of science, with a different imagination to support it.

The Third Infoscape, just as the Third Landscape, is not a matter of technology or technique. It is a question of sensibility, of imagination and of aesthetics.

The problem? It is current science and data. Which we are now using as something absolute and immutable. As a society, we are now using Science and Data like once we used Religion and Magic.

The Blockchain is one direct effect of this.

It is the procedure that “liberates” us from trust, from having to trust, from having to trust others. It compels you to trust, because it is the algorithm itself which embodies trust. And, by doing that, by forcing you to become like it, transforms all into a transaction.

To make trust exist, it transforms all into itself.

We need a change in sensibility and imagination, not disruptive services.

Lead image from Wikipedia

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Unleashing the potential of data to transform health and care

Annemarie Naylor — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 08:00:00 +0000

Future Care Capital seeks a step-change in health and care and believes that a concerted effort to unleash the potential of health and care data could significantly improve outcomes for everyone in our society.

This report explores how the United Kingdom (UK) might support data-driven research and innovation to transform health and care. It also makes plain that, to achieve this, the UK needs to blaze a trail in the development of ‘data ethics’ to proactively build trust whilst safeguarding individuals.

Full Report – Unleashing the potential of health and care data

Executive Summary – Unleashing the potential of health and care data

In brief – our key recommendations

National context: enabling responsible data sharing and building public trust

Empower the Information Commissioner’s Office to tackle data-driven exploitation and discrimination to build public trust.
Introduce new sanctions to tackle the re-identification of data subjects from anonymous data sets, where consent, legitimate interest or contract is lacking.
Invest in technologies to positively impact social care services and task the Care Quality Commission with championing the digitisation agenda, including planning for a data-driven inspection regime to improve standards.
Streamline information governance modelling for Integrated Digital Care Records to expedite data sharing at the local level across health and care organisations.
Increase investment and support for data controllers to unleash health and care data in a standard and anonymised form, where there is a value in secondary analysis by third parties.
Expand the opportunity for data subjects to contribute health and care data to integrated records and other data sharing initiatives.

Pushing the boundaries: creating a culture of data philanthropy in a digital Britain

Establish a new National Health and Care Data Donor Bank, to coordinate data from the public and help improve the alignment of research to clinical need.
The Ministers for Digital Economy and the Third Sector, working in conjunction with the Open Data Institute and NHS Digital, business and the third sector, should develop a suite of tools to stimulate ‘data philanthropy’ in the UK.
Introduce a national Government programme to pilot the development of new health and care Data Cooperatives, Data Communities and Data Collaboratives to promote a culture of data philanthropy through the demonstration of tangible health and care outcomes delivered by a range of ‘trusted vehicles’.
The Government should explore the development of a ‘gift aid’ style scheme for health and care data, encouraging individuals to make health and care data donations to better enable research and innovation.

Establishing a health and care data advantage: investing in skills, business and infrastructure

Establish data-driven business clusters for new health and care enterprises backed by Government. These clusters should also offer skills training to help prepare the future workforce for the increase in demand for data-related job opportunities.
The Government should explore the scope to introduce tax and other incentives for businesses prepared to enter into Joint Ventures with a National Health and Care Data Donor Bank to help place future services on an affordable footing.
The new Chief Data Officer and National Data Guardian should be tasked by Government with contributing to the development of a strengthened and/or dedicated ‘data privacy shield’ for health and care data, applicable to any future trade negotiations outside Europe, to safeguard the public whilst improving the UK’s competitiveness.
The Government should support the establishment of ‘Living Labs’ to encourage innovators and entrepreneurs to develop new technologies to transform health and care outcomes. A ‘Living Lab’ could comprise of private dwellings, a residential care home and/or connected streets, and would involve the deployment of technologies associated with the Internet-of-Things.

About the Authors

Annemarie Naylor MBE is the Director of Policy and Consulting at Future Care Capital. She studied Government and Sociology at the University of Essex. For a large part of her career, Annemarie has work in public policy and economic development working with local, regional and central government.

Emily Jones is a Policy and Research Officer at Future Care Capital. She studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science where she achieved a degree in Social Policy. Emily was previously a Research Assistant at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion.

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Dr Alison Powell for her insight and comments provided on a draft of this paper as well as for writing the Foreword. The team at Anthony Collins Solicitors LLP provided valuable legal input to inform our research. The contribution of individuals on behalf of the Leeds Care Record, Dorset Care Record, Hampshire Health Record and Connected Yorkshire has also been invaluable in the production of this report.

Photo by Community Eye Health

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“Developing dissident knowledges”: Geert Lovink on the Social Media Abyss

Ann Marie Utratel — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 07:00:00 +0000

This post by Jorge San Vicente Feduchi was originally published on La Grieta

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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Podcast: Bruce Sterling on the Casa Jasmina project and the IoT

Vasilis Niaros — Thu, 30 Jun 2016 10:50:47 +0000

“World traveler, science fiction author, journalist, and future-focused design critic Bruce Sterling spins the globe a few rounds as he wraps up the Interactive Conference with his peculiar view of the state of the world from a global perspective, as one who lives in Turin, Belgrade, and Austin. Most recently, Bruce has been an instigator of the DIY – Internet of Things model home project, Casa Jasmina. He also makes an annual ‘state of the world’ assessment, with Jon Lebkowsky, for two weeks every January on The WELL.”

Photo by the waving cat

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