Last week was a shorter week than normal, as Friday the 1st of November is a bank holiday in France, and hence the island. In fact, we have both the 1st and the 2nd, a lot like in Mexico. Many businesses were open Saturday morning, though, and I’ll get to that a little later.

As you know if you read this regularly, I was on the electoral list for the ARIN Advisory Council. The votes are now closed, as of midnight on the 1st of November. Announcements will be made on (or possibly before) the 8th. I have no idea where I stand, but I would like to thank each one of you if you have either voted for me or endorsed me on the elections site.

This week will be a little shorter than normal too. I’d previously mentioned that I’ll be taking a little break to disconnect and relax a little. I can’t promise to not write something, but I doubt I’ll write some of the longer articles that I tend to do.

There’s no structure or particular message to today’s note, just something that has been on my mind and something I see cropping up in discussions, podcasts and other fora. It’s about a typically Internet conspiracy theory, but I think there are parallels, even examples in operation today. Read on to find out more.

PS. The subject merits a lot more discussion and research, but that’ll have to wait for another time.

I don’t know whether you have heard of Dead Internet Theory or not, but it is an interesting idea, if a little flawed, and conspiratorial in nature. The main idea is that the Internet is now mostly automated bots talking to automated bots that make and interact with automatically generated content, all backed by algorithmic control. And here’s the whacky part if the first wasn’t enough, to control the population and minimise organic human activity. This discussion has gained a lot of attention in tech circles, and even in the governance areas of the Internet.

For the record, I will state it clearly, I don’t believe it for a second. However, I do think there is merit in discussing it because from a macro perspective, what is happening in the online advertising worlds, looks eerily similar to the ideas put forward by this theory.

One reason I don’t believe it, is because, like all conspiracy theories, there isn’t a single person who has written an academic paper, book, or official manifesto outlining the theory at its inception. Quite the opposite, it was originally posted on a 4chan paranormal board. If that doesn’t spark scepticism, then I don’t know what would.

Anyway, back to online advertising.

What is becoming clear through legal cases, and what many of have observed for years, including the investigations done by the EU, is that more and more of the “content” for advertising is being driven by and created through automated systems, talking to other automated systems that place bids on placing ads on websites (although this is diminishing), Social Media (exploding), YouTube, that themselves are automated end-to-end until you see the ad on your Instagram feed. And according to Meta, specifically Mark Zuckerberg, this is about to get worse for those of you who choose to use their platforms.

Since Meta’s pivot (read panic) to the Metaverse, that has been nothing more than a money pit and has produced absolutely nothing of value or useful in innovation to the world. But the next high is coming from the irresistible crack cocaine that is Artificial Intelligence.

Well, according to Meta (via 404media), it’s about to get worse. More and more of the algorithmically controlled timeline will be created by bots, monetised by ad-placing bots, being viewed by (many) “click the ad” bots to defraud money on Instagram and the other digital surveillance and billboard machines they are.

Side Note: AI, Artificial Intelligence, is now the accepted term for what is actually Generative Artificial Intelligence, GenAI. I lost this battle a while ago, where I wanted to ensure we didn’t legitimise souped-up autocorrect machines with a branch of mathematics that is very intriguing.

There’s probably some nuance in law that makes this completely legal, but it certainly looks a lot like fraud, and the winner is always Meta and neither the consumer (submerged in auto-generated tripe covered in auto-generated ads) or the small business (paying increasingly for less and less to compete with automated machines that produce drivel, but thousands of times faster).

This is madness.

Have fun and have a great week.

The current climate on the island continued this week with several incidents of violence and general unrest. For me, I was pretty much holed up all week as a barricade in two areas persisted, and it was not practical to pass during the week. I could only get some provisions from the island’s commercial centre late Friday afternoon. Things seemed to have calmed down a little, but the tension is still palpable. All things considered, I should be able to get to my office this week.

Proving what we all learnt during the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home is an entirely viable option for knowledge work, if not for many professions. I don’t think it will ever entirely replace in-person work, but it is clearly an option for businesses that can and are able or willing to take that route. And I would add that it could enable many businesses within and outside the Caribbean to work with people in the region who are highly qualified and highly motivated to work but don’t get the opportunities due to the restrictive size of the markets here and the arcane visa rules, not to mention the dreadful transport links internally in the region. In fact, I personally know some people who work for businesses and clients outside the island, making a decent living. By living here, they become net investors in the local economy, and compared to those who are wrongly accused of contributing to the brain drain, their expertise is still available locally should the need arise. That, unfortunately, is a whole different discussion.

It won’t be easy, and it won’t necessarily be cheap for some organisations, but it does provide opportunities for workers who, for various reasons, might not be able to relocate and work in person on a larger continent.

This discussion merits much more research and analysis—something that goes beyond the throwaway half-studies—and opportunity studies that are more marketing than data —than we have previously seen. I hope to contribute to that one day.

The end of my week was taken up with a two-day conference with ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers. ARIN, remember, is responsible for managing the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses we all use in North America and much of the Caribbean. I was once again a Fellow this time, my second and last time being one. I got to spend time with some of the ARIN staff to learn more about its functions and prepare for the upcoming policy discussions on the ticket during the two days, something I value and thank the ARIN staff for all their work and dedication to helping people like me get more involved.

I won’t do a conference report here just yet as I haven’t had time to consolidate and work on my notes. I have a last meeting with ARIN on Tuesday, and I’ll be writing a report for them soon. I’ll probably adapt that to include here.

I will, however, report that contrary to what you might think, policy discussion is dynamic, passionate and sometimes quite technical. There was one particular item on the list that garnered much discussion, a discussion that still hasn’t finished yet, about the initial allocation sizes of IPv4 addresses. If you want to know more, here is a link to all the information you need to read and analyse it. The TLDR is that there is currently a long waiting list for IPv4, something to the tune of 2-3 years (700+ requests), which is not viable for some businesses starting up or expanding. To deal with this, a reduced initial allocation size has been proposed in this policy amendment, with the primary aim of reducing the waiting list. As with most things in life, it isn’t quite that simple and undesirable side effects or unintended consequences may result. As such, this session was one of the most involved and animated discussions and took longer than initially allotted. A consensus will prevail eventually, but we are not there yet.

I look forward to seeing how it develops and offering comments where possible.

Source: [stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/XQ

The three preceding days were dedicated to the NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) meeting. I was working, so I didn’t get to spend much time on it, but I watched a presentation about the state of IPv6 deployment from Geoff Huston, which gave a lot of food for thought. A subsequent article in The Register summarised the talk very well. I haven’t checked to see if the slides are publicly available, so I can’t share them here until I check. It is best to look at the NANOG website to see if there are.

I’ll be spending some time watching the recordings, and I have downloaded pretty much all of the slides available during the three days.

Reading

With the workload and the current climate on the island, I haven’t had much time to read the articles in my queue. However, I have started to look at a recent (long) article called “Analog Privilege” by Maroussia Lévesque, a doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School. I’m only in a few pages, and there is so much to digest. It can be found here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4528278

It’s part of a long-running theme about how the haves structure things to ensure they don’t have to follow the rules as the have-nots, particularly in the increasingly digitised world.

I’ve long written about the way online advertising is destroying lives and how SEO is essentially fraud, but it is hard to find people willing to speak up and actually show how that is. A recent blog post blew up, gaining a lot of attention on exactly this. Please read it if you are in any way using, relying on, or recommending online advertising systems from Google and Meta. It is not that long, and (unfortunately) it is written pretty much in the style that the SEO monster dictates (although I can forgive them for that).

Of note

A couple of weeks ago, I asked if there were any Fediverse instances in the Caribbean. I recently received an email from one such instance using Soapbox. Thank you for reaching out. I’m just getting my ducks in order, and I’d like to reach out for a discussion, if that is good for you? I’ll send an email soon.

I’ll be taking a break soon, and I hope to get through a lot of reading and note-taking. Forgive me if I skip a week or two over the coming weeks. Even my hyperactive brain needs a rest now and again.

⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️ OH, before I forget. The ARIN elections are still on until the 1st of November. You still have time to write a quick endorsement for me here. It’s very quick and easy.

A BIG thank you to those who have submitted one 🙏

Have a great week.

It has been another week of tension on the island despite an accord being signed by several actors in the discussions. It wasn’t unanimous, meaning the conflict is not over. This will not be resolved until a much deeper discussion is had and a long-term plan is implemented. I’ll let you know how it goes.

There have been no Internet shutdowns so far, and I don’t expect that to happen in the current climate.

This week, I wanted to return to one of the subjects that really ticks me off on the Internet: advertising.

Again, for the record, I am not against advertising. I am against the advertising we have today on the Internet. It crossed a line several years ago and hasn’t been rained in yet. Is that about to change?

I hate online advertising. Or, if I’m being more accurate, I hate what online advertising has become.

It used to be useful. It used to let you know about new products and services without being egregious or overwhelming.

Then came that fateful first banner ad in October 1994 from none other than what became Wired Magazine. It was called HotWired then, back when the Internet was an accessory to a news or entertainment product that was still being printed on dead trees and shipped worldwide.

I was an avid Wired Magazine reader, finally finding a magazine that took the Internet seriously and provided some of the most thoughtful journalism around the Internet and tech-related events. I bought imports of the magazine from the US, as we had nothing comparable to that in the UK, where I lived at the time. Wired UK eventually came to our shores, but it was a pale imitation of the real thing, and, surprisingly for me, it didn’t share that many articles across publications.

Wired set up a digital offshoot of the magazine that ended up having more employees than the magazine proper. It was racking in 20 million dollars in revenue (peanuts compared to today’s standards, but enormous back then for an online business), and even started an online search engine called HotBot.

But the lure of advertising was too great to ignore, and it set in motion a race to the bottom that we haven’t finished yet. New regulations, particularly in the EU, might mean we don’t actually get to rock bottom, but we are pretty much there regardless.

As a side note, Wired magazine was also the online space where I first learnt about cookies and how they would transform the web into something useful. I’m still waiting. Push technology was another one, but that’s another discussion for another time.

It was inevitable that online advertising would become more and more invasive as the years rolled on, with new ad tech being developed at a frightening pace. Developments typically ran three times around the globe before regulation could get its shoes on. There is nothing sacred from advertisers these days: cookies, tracking pixels, cross-site cookies, third-party tracking cookies, GPS tracking, purchase history, browser history, and illicit screen captures of what you’re working on.

The problem is that together, this technology is not neutral, innocent, or safe for many people.

We’ve all heard the anecdote of the ‘grandfather to be’ being informed by a big chain store’s pharmacy before his daughter had the time to announce the news. The ending was happy in this instance, but imagine for a moment a much more sinister outcome, and there are plenty of examples of them, particularly suicide by vulnerable people being subjected to a barrage of unwanted algorithmically generated timelines.

I was reading an article about having a new, clean YouTube account that, within seven days of the users viewing a slightly right-wing video, the algorithm pushed the account deeper and deeper into the world of Neo-nazis, holocaust deniers, and the like. SEVEN. DAYS. Let that sink in.

But why is it this bad now?

It is all about incentives. Two organisations in the Internet space have shown that this makes a lot of money. A LOT OF MONEY. And clearly, money trumps everything else, even 43,000 lives in a genocide that took place in Myanmar, where Facebook are complicit in the promotion and propagation of hate speech and organisation discussions related to the operations carried out by the military.

The chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar stated that Facebook played a “determining role” in the Rohingya genocide. Facebook has been accused of enabling the spread of Islamophobic content which targets the Rohingya people. The United Nations Human Rights Council has called the platform “a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate”.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide#Criticism_and_controversies

Of the approximately one million civilians displaced and still stuck in abject conditions in Bangladesh, a few tens of thousands of children were hoping to get $1M to fund some limited and basic schooling —as asked for by aid agencies— and Zuckerberg told them to what amounts to “Fuck off”. They still haven’t fully acknowledged their part or made any reparations. Very much like colonialism, n’est pas? (Digital Colonialism is another subject I briefly discussed, and I would like to get into specifics and more details sometime).

It makes the old journalistic adage, “If it bleeds, it leads”, positively pedestrian in comparison.

Deep in this is an argument about platform neutrality, enshrined in US law and popularly known as Section 230. Section 230 essentially states that platforms cannot be held responsible for the content flowing through their dumb pipes. After all, it didn’t “produce” the content. It is a law that made sense when our timelines were something more akin to what I see when using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to check up on news articles, blogs and other media (even YouTube). But this is being called into question now, as it should be, because timelines are no longer chronological —without manipulation. They are all algorithmically generated now as “For You” tabs and are even starting to “generate” their own content using Generative AI. That last bit is important, as it, in my mind, unequivocally removes the protection from Section 230. I would argue that forcing unwanted and unasked-for content on a timeline does the same, i.e. if the timeline isn’t chronological (untouched), then it is curated, i.e. content. But that argument hasn’t been won as yet, despite several court cases currently being discussed.

I’ve seen arguments about IRL advertising, suggesting you can’t not see it or ask for it. Two things: 1) They don’t track your every move online or offline. 2)

Legislation has been enacted for many years in the EU, and it was recently strengthened with the Digital Services Act. Unlike the E-Commerce Directive, this act is a regulation and mandates states to implement it, thus harmonising regulation for its members.

Intermediaries (Facebook, ISPs, for example) and other intermediary services can be legally required to remove content should it be deemed more than just cached or conduit data (i.e. unaltered). Providers are exempt from liability:

the DSA establishes a broad liability exemption as long the providers are “in no way involved with the information transmitted.”

Source: https://digitalplanet.tufts.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/DD-Report_2-Christoph-Busch-11.30.22.pdf

In my view, these regulations don’t go far enough and only allow companies like Facebook et al. to continue their surveillance capitalism and profit on the attention economy to the loss of many, mostly those least able to afford such losses. At worst, they allow them to continue feeling genocides and driving the humanity out of the Internet.

In this world, truth is worthless, and lies are valuable.

I have discussed two separate topics: advertising and engagement content. The link, of course, is that the former is entirely responsible for the latter.

We can and should do something about it. I hinted about what to do a little earlier. 😉

I’ll save that for another time.

Reading

An article that popped up only today (Monday 21st October 2024) as I write this goes a long way to describing this feeling that I and many others are having.

More on the same subject from The Walrus.

One more for the road.

I have written this in a decidedly unalgorithmically-generated style from the deepest depths of my meatware. Have a great week.

You can find the podcast and other links here.

This podcast is recorded in French, but using something like a Whisper model, you can get a transcript and then translate it into English or another language reasonably quickly and easily.

Show notes and topics discussed:

French

• La dépendance au cloud pose des questions de résilience.
• Un mix entre solutions locales et cloud est nécessaire.
• L’intelligence artificielle est mal nommée et mal comprise.
• Intel doit s’adapter aux nouvelles réalités du marché.
• La spécialisation est essentielle dans l’industrie technologique.
• La gouvernance d’Internet est en évolution constante.
• Les libertés d’expression numériques varient d’un pays à l’autre.
• Les technologies doivent être évaluées pour leur impact sociétal.
• Les modèles d’affaires doivent évoluer avec la complexité technologique.

English

• Cloud dependence raises questions of resilience.
• A mix between local and cloud solutions is necessary.
• Artificial intelligence is misnamed and misunderstood.
• Intel must adapt to new market realities.
• Specialisation is essential in the technology industry.
• Internet governance is constantly evolving.
• Digital freedoms of expression vary from one country to another.
• Technologies must be evaluated for their societal impact.
• Business models must evolve with technological complexity.

My thanks, as always, to my friend Jean-François Nantel and to Éric L’Heureux for hosting this podcast.

It has been a challenging week and not one conducive to reflection or giving me time to think about what I want to write about here. But as this is an exercise in getting me to write regularly, as much as it is a space for me to think about tech and how it relates to our lives, particularly here in the Caribbean.

If you haven’t been following or don’t get to see news from the French West Indies, we’ve been having a week of unrest and violent protests on the Island after a number of peaceful protests seem to stir up a general malaise in the population, which seems to have been hijacked by a small group of well-organised individuals that set about looting, pillaging and burning shops, cars and just about anything that could be burnt. Roadblocks were set up to disrupt circulation, as is always the mode operator here when there is a protest, and several deaths were recorded.

As its relation to tech? I’ve been surprised. When things started to get out of hand overnight, I was very early in calling a curfew; note: I said “calling”, not “calling for”. I knew the authorities (the Prefecture) would instigate one, and as I write this, an overnight curfew is still in place (Edit: The curfew has been extended until the 21st). At the same time, I also said that the government would block TikTok, as it had shamefully done so during the unrest in New Caledonia. I was wrong. To my knowledge, TikTok was left to function normally and was instrumental in communicating the main revendications of the now popularised protests. I’m not sure why. 🤷‍♂️ The French government didn’t hesitate in New Caledonia, so why did they refrain in Martinique?

I’d like to believe it was because they got a lot of criticism from organisations like Access Now and other human rights organisations for denying access to these platforms. But I’m not convinced that is why, and I’d be fascinated to know the real reason. To be fair, I think it was absolutely on the cards at least at one point, but as things started to simmer down, it was perhaps deemed unnecessary. I still believe the French government will use this tool as it sees fit if things don’t improve. When you’ve done it once, the second time is always easier.

Negotiations for the main requests are due to restart tomorrow (Tuesday), so we have a little respite today, but I have a feeling that things will get a little tense again tonight. We’ll see.

It has also shown that governments are poor at understanding and interpreting platforms like TikTok and others, leaving them entirely flat-footed and with no meaningful response to today’s complex situations. Technology amplifies anything that it touches, and as technology gets further and further into our lives and society, it will amplify anything it touches, good or bad. This is not to exonerate technology as benevolently neutral and therefore devoid of blame. No. Humans make technology, and humans bring all their biases and shortcomings to it. Those amplified biases can be disastrous on a much bigger scale.

An example I gave last week in my rant, and probably many times before, is Facebook’s direct involvement in a genocide that took place in Myanmar. It is something that I wanted to write about a long time ago but I recently discovered this feature-length series about Facebook’s involvement. I urge you to read it.

I have another project dear to my heart that I just can’t seem to kick off yet. It’s about the Amiga computer. One day. One day.

France’s decision to intentionally block a platform shows us that no democratic government is above using draconian and rights-limiting powers to enforce its own policy, good or bad. Some are more willing than others, and each time it happens, it just emboldens others to try.

This begs the question about how it can be avoided and what we can do about it. Given that it is a highly complicated subject, as we can see from the EUs attempts at breaking open encryption in messaging (bad!), arguing one side or another only leads to whataboutisms and evermore polarised positioning.

I can only speak from a personal perspective, and my feeling is that basic privacy between individuals and small groups should be preserved and enshrined in law. Mass communications should be treated differently, in how monopolies are treated differently than smaller-sized businesses. This is because the incentives change with scale.

Distributed social media, like Mastodon may be part of the solution, as its moderation model (where instance holders can decide on what its users can and cannot do or say locally, all the while being subject to federation or not by the outside world) are built-in to the system. I say ‘like’ as I’m not entirely convinced that this is the perfect model either, but it is what we currently have at our disposal. Essentially, these are small local islands of “like-minded” users that can communicate locally and across the entire platform if they are connected and accepted (federated). If you, as an instance holder, can decide to federate or not, and crucially, you can choose to defederate if needed. It doesn’t require a little of the “who polices the police” in moderation policies and implementation. But as I’ve discussed previously, this is work already being done and is publicly available. Many of these operate a sort of small-scale multistakeholder bottom-up governance model, too.

So go and fire up your instance of Mastodon or another Activity Pub system and use the guides I’ve linked to as a starting point.

I recently asked on a region-wide forum if there were any known instances of Mastodon in the Caribbean. I haven’t heard of one yet, but they might be out there, so if you do know of one, let me know.

Reading

Speaking of tech speeding things up and making things easier, it should come as no surprise that the dark side of the web is also benefiting from the AI “revolution” (snarky quotes, btw). LLMs are supercharging Pig Butchering schemes.

As this Wired article outlines:

In addition to buying written scripts to use with potential victims or relying on templates for malicious websites, attackers have increasingly been leaning on generative AI platforms to create communication content in multiple languages and deepfake generators that can create photos or even video of nonexistent people to show victims and enhance verisimilitude.

Google’s 2.5 billion Gmail users are at severe risk of being hacked:

Sam Mitrovic, a Microsoft solutions consultant, has issued a warning after almost falling victim to what is described as a “super realistic AI scam call” capable of tricking even the most experienced of users.

On a subject that is dear to my heart —Internet governance— an unexpected decision by the U.K. government to cede authority of a small group of islands called the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius has caused consternation in the world of DNS. If you remember, Domain Name System (DNS), is one of those essential backbone services of the Internet that without, things would be much more frustrating, especially as we move into the IPv6 era.

The islands in question were given the ccLTD of .io (ccTLD = Country Code Top Level Domain, think .uk, .fr, .bb, and that money-spinner .ai). It turned out to be a money-spinner like the .ai domain, only many years earlier, and .io was the darling of the tech startup world. If you didn’t have a .io, you were nobody.

Just as an aside, .io evokes a computer processing idea of Input/Output, I/O for short.

As nerdy as it was, it was the domain to own for a while, and .io was given to the islands because they were the Indian Ocean territories of the U.K. A 2021 UN decision ruled that the U.K. has no sovereignty over the islands, and hence, the process to relinquish started and is now complete.

The question is, what will happen to that domain now that the Indian Ocean territories as an ISO country code will no longer exist? Not so fast! The ISO-3166 code may disappear, but no timetable has been set. This would also be independent of any decision by IANA (the ultimate decision-makers on the ccTLD) to retire the corresponding domain. They could easily decide to make an exception, as already done in the case of .su.

As for now, all .io domains will remain active, and renewals should happen without interruption of service.

Absolutely no LLMs were harmed during the writing of this piece. Have a great week.