My Response to the WELL's State of the World: 2015
I just read the WELL: State of the World: 2015, which is always an enjoyable read, but this year I wanted to respond.
I’ve been nomadic for the last four + months traveling through Asia (China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar) and I’ve been thinking a lot about the poorly distributed present, and what it’s future might look like for the majority of the world. Needless to say, it’s been a bumpy and a weird ride.
Some of the issues touched upon by Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, and Jon Lebkowsky have been on my mind during this travel, and I see them as being uniquely important to people in this part of the world. I wanted to share some pull quotes (in italics) and quick thoughts.
Every day, I see people in local streets, with handheld devices, casually using global services. You can use a local map to venture from your doorstep to the florist's shop, and there are extremely accurate, very up-to-date local maps of practically all cities now. But none of those local maps are "local" maps in the sense, that they're owned, created or controlled by local citizens. No, they're all global maps.
It’s been surreal to discover how useless Google Maps is in places like Beijing and Yangon. In places where your phone battery died long ago and your phone’s frequency doesn’t even register, old-fashioned asking for help has been invaluable. That is to say, as Sterling’s Stacks become more ubiquitous, they still are incredibly unevenly distributed. So while the dichotomy Sterling points out is meaningless in Yangon, as the next billion comes online, this misbalanced power relationship will become more problematic to the majority of the world.
We’re already nervous about what it means for Google to be in the pocket of every westerner, what happens when it’s in the hand of the next billion in Asia and Africa? We will be asking this a lot more in 2015. This gold mine of untapped big data is being hotly pursued by Google, Facebook, and Huawei alike, as Sterling points out:
The appearance of Chinese Stacks in a Western contest quite interests me. In 2015, the Chinese Great Firewall will be trying hard to buy-into startup capitalism. How will that work out, this year? The Chinese have got cash galore, and it's hard to pretend that the Politburo is any more intrusive than Facebook/Google/Apple/Amazon/NSA.
As Samsung and iPhone and Facebook loses major ground to Chinese competitors, especially in this part of the world, the largely localized nature of the so-called Great Firewall is going to extend far beyond China’s borders. As Nathan Freitas pointed put already, this issue is akin to the voluntary adoption of Facebook’s real name policies and surveillance being adopted around the world, placing the international users at the whims of a paranoid, over funded US government branch. How will this affect the average user outside of China? Likely the same way it affects them now, with the US government, not very much, until it does in a catastrophic way. Who knows what this will mean ten years from now when everyone is under the legal purview of US and China because of what’s in their pocket. One thing is for sure; the US government has no grounds to preach from.
Of course, Sterling brings back his old people afraid of the sky, and of course it’s still a huge problem, and of course nothing has changed. When Los Angeles actually runs out of water, not just those poor people in the rural regions, then some movement might happen on Global Weirding. But, as I’ll discuss later, the rest of the world has seen been sold the middle class dream and they want it bad. Water wars are going to come, but not en masse and not at once and not in 2015. In terms of climate change, we are the self-aware version frogs in a boiling pot of water. People who are too powerful are making too much money to care or be affected.
Doctorow also talked about this using the framework of corruption, adopted from Lawrence Lessig’s Root Strikers. I believe reframing this as corruption is a powerful and smart move that I hope catches on. That, and truly innovative work like the Rolling Jubilee.
Crowdsourcing medical solutions
This is so western-centric. You can’t find a doctor to perform a standard procedure on half of the planet and here we are talking about crowdsourcing medicine with big data and a new app. Access to medicine, sterile / functioning equipment, mosquito nets, you know, the nuts and bolts of base-line medical care would be a radical shift in how the majority of the world experiences medicine. Oh, and not facing a life of crippling debt after the hospital visit would be nice too. Ever techno-solutionist approach largely forgets how the majority of the world actually functions, from Bitcoin to medical apps.
Whether by cryptocurrency-obsessed hackers or just good business acumen, near frictionless (and fee-less) transactions are coming. As to whether this will result in a new era of radical accountability, I seriously doubt it. I actually expect that this will likely give the 1% an even easier means of moving their billions into a new crypto version of an offshore bank account allowing our schools and infrastructure to fall further into ruin. Code all you want fellas, I can’t imagine a real law being passed that would make this technology societally meaningful.
But this distributed blockchain code is interesting, and in 2015 I expect some fascinating programs to finally get some testing in the real world, not just on an obscure subreddit. How could we apply this type of code to something like NGOs, long plagued by distrust and corruption? How could we use everyone’s new phone for anonymous but completely transparency micro-payments? Sending money or withdrawing money internationally is going to become much easier if not free in 2015. A few banks are already doing it, but without any fancy new code.
Completely deleting content online (censorship) could become a little harder to hide or enact with the likes of Namecoin; we’ll see in 2015. Of course, what the technologists don’t want to discuss is that Wikileaks and Cryptome have had their troves of sensitive data just sitting online years, and so what? Nobody reads it, and nothing changes when anyone does. Maybe in 2015 we will all admit there needs to be a lot more than a leak to make a truth matter. Maybe. I figure it’s just as likely that in 2015 the press largely forgets the name of Edward Snowden.
Distributed and encrypted cloud storage like Storj and MaidSafe will be a reality in 2015. Oh wait, it has been ever since Freenet launched back in 2000. Maybe in 2015 we’ll see if any of us take the time to actually use them. Condoleezza Rice started working for DropBox shortly after the Snowden revelations and if that didn’t tank the company I don’t know what would cause people to adopt a whole new system of storage. When will the crypto-kids learn UI and front end design? That’s right, when this type of work actually has any hope of a business model.
This is all to say, all this technology is very exciting and will continue to be ignored, unused, and not solve the deep political issues of 2015.
Practical backlash against 1% and hyper-neoliberalism... 2015 could be the turning point; waiting to hear the alarm ring.
I wish I could muster any optimism for this one, but I seriously doubt neoliberalism will be facing any serious opposition anytime soon. Despite loving the energy and believing in the movements, I’ve seen first hand how ineffective Occupy has been from Wall Street to Hong Kong, and that’s my generation’s claim to activist fame aside from Anon DDoSing.
Today’s political power (big money) is networked and reconstituted globally, and the majority of the world is hungry not out to crush the system, but rather for a piece of the pie. In any major city across the North America and Europe, all the way to Bangkok, to Shenzhen, Ho Chi Minh, to Beijing I see shopping malls which all look nearly identical and packed full of people.
Yangon, Phnom Penh, Chiang Mai and many other million + cities in the developing world aren’t that far behind – literally billions of people are daydreaming of the day they too can step inside the archetypical shopping mall of the neoliberal dream. Until that changes, we’re doomed and protests against the 1% or morally bankrupt neoliberalism have little real power. Sure we put on a good show in #ShutItDown, but did you see Black Friday? #ShutitDown was a sideshow to a sale at Walmart.
To add my own thought, in 2015 we are going to see more well-intentioned but ultimately destructive policies like The Right to Forget proposed or passed around the world. Until the EFF crew and their ilk offer a viable solution for hate speech and trolling the greater public is going to start demanding changes. Trolling threatens free speech online, and deserves to be meaningfully addressed beyond hiding behind the First Amendment. I’d look at rethinking how we flag or report unwanted content, as Kate Crawford and Tarlteon Gillespie have.
In Myanmar and around the world hate speech has contributed to ethnic violence and even killing. In Myanmar, work like the Flower Speech campaign seeks to counter this legal hate-speech without denying it's existence is important. Meaningfully engaging the trolls and steering the conversation is hard work, but academics like Susan Benesch have found it more successful than deleting the content // or censorship as the EFF would call it.
Of course, 2015 had better not try and place that kind of onus, as it always has, on the victims.
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