Unless you’ve not been reading, you’ll have noticed that I have been a bit down on “tech” lately. And it’s true: I do feel a sense of despair when I look at the tech industry from a macro perspective, or at least from the perspective of the numerous articles, blogs, and reports discussing the latest dreadful thing tech has enabled.

Last week was no different, with no less than Apple starting to show colours that it never used to. The TLDR is that Apple has been battling with the EU about its App Store policies related to the fees Apple charges. Not the amount of the fees, although that too, is up for debate, the anti-steering fees, a “Core Technology Fee”, and most egregiously, a fee to anyone and everyone that graces their presence by using an Apple product. Apple decided that —during a period in which it has been widely criticised for its tone-deaf advert for the latest iPad in which it crushed the tools of the creative industry, irking many people in that industry to feel more than a little concerned about how Apple now treats this industry compared to its historical stance for the creative arts— it should bully Patreon into taking a cut from all its users whether they use Apple services, software and hardware or not, purely because that used an in-app purchase on the Patreon app. Of course, Patreon could not use Apple’s in-app purchasing system, but no. Apple closed that door too, even going as far as to threaten to kick the Patreon app out of the App Store if they didn’t switch payment processors to Apple’s own. Then it transpired that the rates Patreon charges its users are lower than those of Apple, which is mafia-ing out of people. To remind you, Apple takes a 30% cut in the first year, and if you can qualify for the Small Business Program (if), that is reduced to 15% for each transaction. So now, Patreon users pay Apple the biggest slice of their earnings for little to no actual service rendered, over and above the service actually rendered by Patreon. This has a name, and it is called rent-seeking. This is a feudal economy and brings us back to medieval times when lords of the manor trashed the commoner’s rights to extract more and more money to gain and sustain wealth. This will not end well for Apple.

This is by no means the only big tech company doing this, and it is precisely this that is contributing to my overall dismay of the industry. And without looking like Old Man Shouting at Clouds, I yearn for us to get back to a time when tech tried to solve real-world problems in the most upfront and honest manner it used to. I’m not naive; I know it wasn’t all like that. But things have shifted completely 180 with companies defaulting to shady business practices and rent-seeking as a strategy, which dismays me.

If this is new to you, I suggest you read Cory Doctorow’s and Ed Citron’s excellent work. You may not agree with everything they say, but you will undeniably notice that things have gotten worse on the Internet for a while and are not improving.

I just had my attendance confirmed for the upcoming 19th Internet Governance Forum. I’ll follow the sessions for anything that catches my attention and report back here when possible. Still, as I’m a remote participant and the meeting’s timezone is many hours in the future, I might have to wait for recordings and transcripts to process.

Reading

Techdirt has a good write-up on a recent report that seems to indicate that LEOs from the likes of Blue Origin and Starlink are causing/about to cause another environmental disaster. If you were around in the 80s, one environmental subject became the centre of attention: the Ozone Layer. Spray cans of various products like hair products, paint, etc., emitted chemicals that contributed to the decay of the ozone layer faster than had previously been observed, which was a significant danger to the planet. Within a few years, the world collaborated, CFCs were banned, and the ozone layer has largely recovered. It is all under threat from the daily decay of SEOs entering the atmosphere as they fall out of orbit and end their useful life. Estimates place around 29 tons of satellites will enter the atmosphere every day. Yes, day. You read that right. Move fast and break things.

Brian Merchant writes a blog called Blood in the Machine. He came to my attention as he single-handedly reframed the definition of a Luddite to what it actually meant, rather than the negative image of a technophobic imbecile that much of industry has progressed for decades. Luddite even came to be used as an insult or a word to suggest that one is not stupid. This is patently false, and Brian’s blog, Blood in the Machine, is a good site to read regularly to give a better perspective on tech. His latest article talks about AI and how there is now a concerted fightback from artists and others who are tired of having their works used, refactored and spat out for profit without so much of a request for use, attribution or, of course, payment. I’ve been looking into legislation around this issue in the Caribbean, and as far as I can tell, there is nothing to protect artists from the greed of the LLMs. Moar data.¹ So it isn’t an issue over there or limited to Silicon Valley. It’s the livelihoods of hardworking-scraping to make a living in very challenging circumstances-artists in the Caribbean. Move fast and break things.

Lastly, I wanted to talk about Worldcoin, the shitcoin pyramid scam disguised as an inherently insecure and fundamentally flawed “digital ID”. Some governments are waking up to this fact, something I have highlighted here before, but so far, precious little has been discussed in the Caribbean. I wish to call on CARICOM and the member states to ban its implementation before proper due process proactively, risk assessment and financial, cybersecurity, privacy and consumer rights legislation are in place to protect people in the region adequately. It has no place here. Move fast and break things.

Not breaking things, but moving fast enough. Have a great week.

If you’ve been following along with what I get up to over the last couple of years, you will have noticed a change in focus. Particularly during the last few months you may have detected a certain amount of ambivalence to the tech industry as it stands today. Some of you might even go as far to say that I have become a little hostile to big tech recently, and, if im being brutally honest, I’d say that you’re just about right regarding that. I think big tech has become a force for bad for the majority of us, something that is diametrically opposed to the original ideas behind tech during its development and rise to everyday use during the 70s and 80s. Big tech is no longer about progressing the world, it is about progressing the net worth of an elite few. That’s not to say that I am totally off tech and what it can do, quite the opposite, I’m actually quite optimistic about the capabilities and the force for good that it could be. But to achieve that it needs to have a crisis that will fundamentally change the way technology is conceived, developed and deployed in society at scale. I don’t think we’re there yet, but I suspect we will get there a little sooner rather than later.

If I had to point the finger of blame at big tech, it would be in two areas. The first is the obvious one and an area that I have written about a lot over the years, Social Media. I’m not against it per se, but its current implementation is a massive global-scale experiment that hasn’t and isn’t going too well. I think society will have to decide whether the type of mass social media is a net good for society or not. But to decide that society needs to understand what social media really is, and I don’t think we are there yet. There are signs of frustration and rebellion, but they are contained and small in nature and based on a misunderstanding of the what and who of the “product”. It’s more subtle than “If you’re paying for it, you’re the product”.

The second area is that of advertising. For the vigilant, this area is intrinsically linked to the first area, as the last sentence of the previous paragraph hints. For the record, I am not against advertising as such. I understand the use of it, and I understand how it can drive awareness and eventually sales, and is vital for businesses that are breaking into new markets or new territories. I’m railing against unfettered, uncontrolled and rabid Surveillance Capitalism.¹ Highly targeted and highly privacy-invading advertising is nothing but a scam, where the advertiser and the person being targeted are at opposite ends of a process where the middleman screws everyone. Don’t believe me? Come on, you should know by now. I’ve cited this EU paper several times because it details just how invasive highly targeted ads are, how they are not as effective as the advertising platforms would have you believe (surprise, surprise), and they are privacy destroying on many levels and will eventually provide a means for you to be targeted in a cybersecurity dragnet.² This type of advertising is a cancer, and it is destroying the internet, and we should all do something to help stop it.

I thought I’d republish a blog post I wrote for the Virtual School of Internet Governance after completing the course earlier this year.^{3 4} If Internet Governance is something you are interested in, or you’d just like to learn a little more about the Internet, its origins, how it’s governed and much more, you should check it out.

See you in the next newsletter.

Blog post:

The internet as we know it is under attack. It is under attack on several fronts, including, most notably, attacks on its openness from various countries out of fear. Governments of many nations are implementing regulations and imposing operating rules on the Internet’s infrastructure, or imposing rules to ensure the Internet fits into their particular point of view. For many years, China has been implementing and enhancing its “Great Firewall of China” with some success ⁵. The United States of America is in the process of trying to ban TikTok over its alleged proximity to the Chinese regime.⁶ It has also, like the United Kingdom, implemented rules to decommission any telecommunications equipment from companies like Huawei and ZTE from being deployed in their respective territories, again from alleged state security fears.^{7 8} Any time there is unrest in some countries, like India, Iran, Iraq, or Venezuela, to name only a few, Internet shutdowns occur to stifle communication, organisation, and dissent.⁹ Even the once liberal governments like the United Kingdom are showing signs of lurching towards the setup and operation of Internet controls that go above and beyond all reason.¹⁰ Some of it is dressed up in the name of being “to save the kids”, but mostly, it is born out of pure fear of lack of control of the unknown.

But whether you think these rules, regulations and operational controls are justified or not, you can’t deny that the Internet as we once knew it is in a state of being manipulated and changed, and not necessarily for good. I suspect the outcome will be a worse Internet than the one we have, and I suspect our freedoms will be further eroded in this new Internet. But despite that, why are we at such a critical point with the Internet? I wish I had a simple answer to that question, and to be fair, I’m not sure if I know or understand why. And I suspect many of us don’t either. The Internet in ten years will be a different animal from what it is today, in the same way the Internet of ten years ago was a different animal.

The Internet, for many, is Social Media. Closed-off, filtered and algorithmically distilled database views on a set of freely offered and surreptitiously extracted data on something like a third to a half of the world. Many users content themselves with this watered-down and safe-feeling view of the Internet, not realising or caring that the “real” Internet is out there. We’ve done a fantastic job in scaring people away from the real Internet by talking about the Dark Web and all the bad things that will indeed happen to you if you ever venture into those neighbourhoods, in precisely the same way that we have ruined the possibility for young people to go out and venture around the surrounding communities for fear of immediate death.

The truth is, as always, somewhere in between and not quite as extreme as portrayed.

As individuals, what can we do about this? How can we be better citizens of the Internet and help others become better citizens of this shared space that promised so much and delivered as much, if not more, good and bad? And how can we participate in making a better Internet for the world and not just for the privileged tech bros that are systematically destroying it while extracting all the wealth from the rest of us?

I’d say that education is at least half the battle. As we become more educated on a topic and more open to understanding, empathy and nuanced discourse follow. I’m an old-timer on the Internet, and I have used it for many years, from the early days when the Internet of the World Wide Web didn’t exist. I saw the birth, use, and mass adoption of many of the systems and protocols we use daily. These are technical elements and something we, as early adopters, were comfortable with without really thinking of the consequences that would eventually and inevitably come with the generalisation of the Internet. Many of us, both young and old, lacked or lack the necessary understanding of the elements other than the technology to truly understand how the Internet has and is affecting the world. We are still in a global experiment that hasn’t been designed with a hypothesis in mind. The Internet just is.

I recently completed the Virtual School of Internet Governance course and obtained the offered certificate to broaden my understanding and take me out of my comfort zone. This online-only self-paced training course is designed to open your eyes to aspects you might not have previously considered. You might even find yourself questioning your knowledge and beliefs, as I did in some topic areas. What you absolutely will do, though, is learn and have access to an absolute ton of information about the origins, the mechanisms, the politics, the social and legal aspects and many other areas that you might not have thought are linked to the Internet. As a free course, the quality, and quantity of information is staggering and staggeringly good. You get to meet and debate with experts in the topics covered, and should you wish to go further, the contacts and exchanges made over the course of the ten weeks will help you develop in the Internet Governance space.

I have made Internet Governance a central part of my work, and it was an excellent follow-up from the ARIN Fellowship.

If we want a better Internet, we owe it to each other to invest in its governance and development.

With gratitude to Glenn McKnight and Alfredo Calderon.

The Future is Digital Newsletter is an ongoing discussion about tech, the world, and my place in it. You are welcome to share it with others who may be interested.

Thanks for being a supporter. I wish you a splendid day.

/committedtodisk

Source: Pixabay

I like the philosophy stating that writing is thinking and that to write clearly, one must think clearly. I do neither. I’m neither a good writer nor a good thinker. What I do, though, is think about the big picture and piece together seemingly unrelated threads into a reasonably cohesive structure that holds up to a bit of scrutiny. Maybe not a peer review, but that’s not why I write here. I write to process my thoughts and flesh those out, sometimes in real-time as I’m writing. It’s not the most scientific of methods, but it favours my type of neurological quirkiness, and, to be fair, the email newsletter format is not the best forum for that type of research. Without this outlet to write about the topics that frustrate me so much, I’d be pretty bored. Consequently, I try to make complex topics seem a little simpler without shying away from the details, with as many supporting links and examples as necessary. For the other stuff I like to write about, this year saw me start (restart?) a new personal blog where I can express other personal thoughts on things that are not on topic here.

On to this newsletter edition. It’s one about regulation (don’t run away yet —it might be interesting 😉), specifically regulation that affects the internet and the coming wave of regulation that we haven’t quite got to grips with yet. The Internet is about to change radically. For better or for worse, I have no idea, and I wish I had a crystal ball and a bit of spare cash to make a huge bet. But I don’t. However, what seems patently clear is that the Internet is about to be regulated by the world’s largest economies. Some have already done so. States like China and Russia have, in all but name, created a walled-off, splintered Internet for themselves and their citizens. The EU has regulated several major issues that have, again in all but name, forced the entire world to fall into line. The United States has continued to shy away from regulation, thereby creating an environment for innovation (or so it tells us). I wanted to discuss some real-world leanings and the aftermath of the GDPR, trying to provide some context and the basis of a discussion topic if you’d like to discuss it. Disclaimer: I’m not a GDPR expert nor legally trained. I’m piecing together various facts and observations from the work I’ve been doing in Internet Governance and my on-the-ground experience with MSMEs.

I hope you enjoy the read. Ping me @virek@mastodon.socail.

The GDPR is dead. Long live the GDPR

They said GDPR was the end for small businesses, at least those that used and dealt with personal information in the EU. They said it would overly burden them and make it difficult for them to function. They said it would further entrench the monopolies. It was bad, bad, bad, as far as the eye could see.

Some wrote about how the “moats” of the big companies would protect them, and hence, regulation would only ensure that those businesses would thrive, having been helped by the regulation from the path-clearing and summary executions of small businesses thanks to the EU. They still write this stuff. They still believe it.

The thing is, they were right, but for all the wrong reasons. So what actually happened?

From my perspective, observing MSMEs in an admittedly small economy, virtually nothing changed. Rien. Nada. Nichts. Zilch. Nothing. Small businesses carried on as before, with no discernable change. There wasn’t a sudden decline in the number of MSMEs worldwide, especially in the EU. It has been pretty constant, with the usual ups and downs since the legislation was implemented. Though not a source, Statista has a visualisation that shows this. There is some discussion on the adverse effects of innovation in the EU as a result of the legislation, but these papers are finding it challenging to determine if any observed fluctuations are a direct result of the legislation or other external factors. From an anecdotal perspective, Europe doesn’t appear to be any less “innovative” than before.

It’s evident that small businesses didn’t sweat it. They knew full well they’d carry on as before, changing things progressively over time. No rush. No panic. There was no immediate rush to entirely change their businesses at the operational level, aside from a bit of thinking about this new risk and what it might mean to them over the coming months and years. Basically, It was business as usual.

How do I know this? For one, I am on the ground next to these small businesses and have been for most of my working life. I’ve seen them shrug at this legislation and tell me point-blank, “… we’ll wait and see”. And I’ve seen them do absolutely nothing. Not even a small audit to attempt to reveal exposure to the risks the regulation inevitably brings. And I know why. They cannot afford it as a capital outlay and don’t have the time to waste. You think large enterprise bosses are busy. Spend some time with MSMEs, and you’ll understand what busy is.

Secondly, as the legislation was being debated and passed from discussion to vote to implementation, there were many thousands of consultants with no experience (and limited knowledge) rubbing their hands together, hoping to make a killing off consultancy fees to help businesses comply with this legislation. Twenty million Euros or 4 per cent of global turnover was a sweet, sweet incentive, or so they thought. Small consultancies, too, thought they’d get in on the gravy train before it left the station. I myself was tempted, but I decided against it, feeling that it would be a hard sell to the tiny enterprises that constitute the French West Indies (who were directly in the firing line) and those in the wider Caribbean caught in the net, so to speak. Something felt off for me, so I didn’t pursue it seriously. Hindsight proves I was right not to invest too much time and energy, and businesses didn’t employ the consultants.

This all begs the question, “Where are we today with regard to GDPR?”

Status Quo. Nothing has substantially changed. The consultants and consultancies specialised have largely crawled back under their rocks, awaiting the next grift cycle, and the small businesses have all magically become compliant (mostly) without doing much.

“Magically” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that phrase.

Gradually and then suddenly¹, all the software, the tools, and the processes that businesses rely on to operate all got updates, patches, and replacements and became compliant. Businesses updated, patched, and replaced software through natural attrition and good governance cycles. The whole value chain became compliant, and therefore, so did MSMEs.

And then everyone carried on as though nothing had happened.

It’s just like the Year 2000 Bug. It was the literal end of the world for some commentators. The banks would collapse, there’d be food shortages, riots, and all sorts of apocalyptic scenarios were being described and subscribed to. I know I was there. I personally certified all the software we used in the company I was working with at the time and worked with the developers to amend any inconsistencies and errors during a six-month test and implementation project. (TLDR: it all worked fine). But just like GDPR, nothing happened. It all just sort of fell into place without issue.

So how did big business entrench its holding on the market? If the legislation’s critics were right but for the wrong reasons, what conclusion can we get from the GPDR since its introduction in 2016?

Some consider GDPR to be a failure, agreeing with the above, but it is because of non-enforcement, not because of a failure of policy.

One can argue on the merits or not of the specifics, but to do so is to ignore the spirit and the overarching aim of the GDPR, thereby completely misunderstanding why the GDPR was introduced. There are two elements to understand when discussing the GDPR and the EU. The GDPR is a blunt instrument to coax businesses into doing the right thing concerning personally identifiable data on individuals. It is explicit in the types of data it covers, but it is a set of principles to guide businesses that collect, process, store, and share that data. Encouraging them to do those things reasonably. “Reasonable”, defined as “don’t abuse the person concerned with your access to that data”. The second element is that the EU is more concerned about defending individual EU citizen liberties than it is in defending state or business liberties. It is often mischaracterised as the middle ground between the free-for-all of the US regulatory environment and the all-controlling of the Chinese model. That’s just too reductive. The EU was set up post-WWII with the explicit aim of regional economic integration that would promote, protect and ensure peace in Europe. Peace through deeply integrated trade. In Europe. Not elsewhere.²

But back to enforcement.

For as long as the GDPR has been in force, companies like Meta, Google, and many others have been abusing our trust and ignoring the GDPR, and to boot (paraphrasing William Gibson), enforcement is already here —it’s just not evenly distributed yet. These companies have set themselves up in European jurisdictions that are not motivated to press for full enforcement for many reasons (Hint: Economic). This has allowed them to continue doing business on the backs of our data, freedoms, and privacy without regard to the idea of the GDPR. And what a lucrative business it has been. Occasionally, the odd slap on the wrist happens, but this is brushed off as the “cost of doing business”.

As I was writing this, the EU announced a 1.8B€ fine for Apple’s anticompetitive practices in the EU’s music streaming business. If I remember rightly, this is a result of an investigation that started in 2019 and has nothing to do with the highly discussed Digital Markets Act (DMA). Apple made 1.05B$ per day in the year ended 31/12/2023.

The Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act enforced this week will likely be enforced differently and more aggressively. Apple’s insistence on removing PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) and bleating about having to comply with the regulation, its subsequent U-turn and the 404 I get when trying to open the Apple Newsroom page that shamelessly tried to defend their indefensible position are signs of the way the wind is blowing.

To paraphrase Game of Thrones (shamelessly): Enforcement is coming.

And, to be clear, I’m not championing any and all regulation as a good thing, and I do think there are aspects of the way the EU regulates that could be a bit more inclusive and less subject to the (literally) thousands of lobbyists employed by states, organisations and businesses, to have a chance at creating better legislation.

Monetisation and the death of the Internet (as we know it)

This is a bit of a rant. My apologies upfront.

Rampant monetisation has completely trashed the internet and been a driving force for a divided, divisive, and less interesting Internet. Just look at how the homogenisation of the design language of all the “social” apps has made them all look the same, ensuring that monetisation mechanisms are simplified and broken down into base elements. If their branding weren’t so visible, most would be hard-pressed to identify if it was Instagram, Bluesky or Twitter (X if you’re that way inclined, but the URL is twitter.com).

When I think of monetisation of the internet, I’m talking about how we, as humans, have been reduced to functional blocks of content creation and content consumption. Nothing more. There is little room on “big-Internet” for the small weird projects of social good, the oddball things that used to exist, and the life-changing discoveries that were easily found previously. And, of course, when I say no room, I mean there is no attention available because attention is being sucked away by the 30-second video clips of abject nonsense and awful or outright dangerous “content”.

This dehumanising of the internet visitor is one of the factors that help explain why the internet has become so polarised and so violent. If we’re not human any more, then we’re not hurting anyone when we’re violently threatening each other. But it’s not reality, and we know it. We feel it. But we cannot control it. Tech, as currently deployed, is dehumanising us, making unpaid productivity modules slotted into the platform’s impossible endless growth targets. These modules have broken us down so much into the basic elements of creation/consumption that they (we) are as expendable as toilet paper.

This is not the Internet I want. This is why I’m getting involved in Internet governance. I’ll keep you up to date.

I’m not the only one thinking about this. Watch this video from Taylor Lorenz, a journalist who recently released a book called Extremely Online.

Generative AI (again!)

I wanted to write about generative AI again, but at over two thousand words once more, I think I’ll bump it to the next newsletter. I’ll give you a little teaser, though. The following was the working premise for discussion:

Generative AI is simultaneously the most significant opportunity for small businesses to get a helping hand and the biggest shit-show we’ve seen since the invention of the Internet (arguably equalling Social Media’s continued destruction).

Until next time.

The Future is Digital Newsletter is an ongoing discussion. Please feel free to share it with others who may be interested.

Thanks for being a supporter. I wish you an excellent day.

/committedtodisk

This is my first newsletter of 2024, and it’s a long one. I look forward to writing more during the year. I won’t promise they will be sent on a strict schedule, but I’m setting an overall goal to get back into the rhythm of writing these long-form posts here and in newsletter form for this year’s subscribers list.

Enjoy, and let me know your thoughts by email or on Mastodon.

I’ve set up a new site to consolidate all the public writing I’ve been doing. I mentioned it before in the previous emails, but I’ll take the opportunity to plug my site again. I’ve added a page with what is essentially my CV to the site; the idea is to give people an easy one-stop shop to see what projects I have worked on over the last few years. The list isn’t exhaustive; it’s more representative.

An Update on the Newsletter Migration

In the last newsletter email, I talked about the distasteful issues and goings-on at Substack. In that update, I said I would be moving to a different platform and that I had my sights on either WordPress or micro.blog. After a lot of research and discussion with the support at WordPress, I took the plunge and decided to go with a WordPress site. That didn’t turn out to be a good decision for several reasons.

Sadly, WordPress’s idea of a newsletter is not really aligned with mine. Secondly, it was a challenging task to get the site up and running and looking the way I wanted it to. I needed to take a few training sessions to get started before I could get the site edited to look like something I’d be happy with. Domain purchased, WordPress plan purchased, I did the transfer and moved across the entire library of articles I’d written on Substack. The migration was easy enough until I reached a limit of subscriber numbers, which, to be fair, was easily resolved but annoying to run into and be taken completely by surprise.

However, I wasn’t happy with the way things work over at the site. Number one, a subscriber has to create a WordPress account to use the newsletter properly, and I don’t think that should be necessary. Secondly, there is a non-optional amount of tracking performed by sites like WordPress (Substack did this, too), which I didn’t want to keep de facto endorsing. I don’t need to see ‘stats’, and I don’t need them feeding the anxiety bucket. I want to write informed and interesting articles, put them out there and see what happens over time. I don’t need tracking stats to know where you’re from, what you read and when, what you had for breakfast or anything for that matter.

All this to say that I have performed a second migration in the space of one week from WordPress to micro.blog. It is a small and independent company I knew about a few years ago, as I was one of the early backers on Kickstarter to get the platform up and running. For some reason, I didn’t find a use for it back then, but recent events made me reevaluate that, and I’m here now.

You should continue to receive the newsletter as previously, but the look and feel will be a little different, as I noted in the last email from Substack (So long and thanks for all the fish).¹ The new platform doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Substack, but I’m okay with that, as I think it is the content that is the most important, not the flashiness. I think it speaks more to who I am and what I do.

The Internet’s Past, Present, and the Movement for a More Open Future

I haven’t been as enthusiastic about the Internet since I first started using it back in 1989 when the Internet was a series of clunky command-line tools like Gopher, WAIS, and a few others. It blew my mind back then that I could communicate in almost real-time with a student in San Fransisco from my university DEC VAX VMS terminal in London, UK. But logging on to baymoo.sfsu.edu became a ritual and a pastime that shaped how I used the internet and thought about the future. Shortly after that, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) started popping up in the UK, and I was one of the early clients of a dial-up service based in North London. I even applied for a job with them and went through an interview (and failed), but I remember seeing the hundreds of dial-up modems they had in the office for the connections from their customers like me. I got myself a ‘real’ email address and sent an email to myself from my university account to that personal account, racing home to check I got it as intended. My car didn’t go as fast as electrons, so I lost that race too.

What set the Internet apart at that time was its truly open nature. Open, as in having not walled off, private, or for-profit-only tools. Tools like GOPHER², WAIS³, and TELNET⁴. This presented an almost limitless opportunity in its time for people to develop new ideas and new applications. The most notable of those is the very system that you might be reading this on now, the web, the World Wide Web, or WWW.

In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee and CERN released the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)⁵ protocol and a rudimentary browser called Nexus.⁶ This transformed the Internet entirely, and its technologies developed into what we have today: visual, virtual spaces on the Internet. It democratised the Internet for anyone able to get online through an ISP by allowing people to create easy-to-navigate, easy-to-use and interactive websites. If you’re interested in the specification of such things, the RFC for HTTP can be found here.

What developed after this amounted to what I would call a Cambrian explosion of websites and innovation on the Internet, which, eventually, made it big enough for the financiers to step in. Slowly but surely, bits of the Internet got walled off. Here and there at first. Little by little, then, all at once. The Internet was no longer an open system. Sure, there are still some open systems, but they are dwarfed by the platforms such as Facebook, Microsoft and Google. All are responsible for intimating and pretending to be open whilst closing down the real openness of the Internet so they could sit in between all Internet things and extract money from anything that happened in either direction —Site to user, user to site.

And that’s where we are today. An Internet with a rich tapestry of site designs, features, and opportunities (primarily for grifters). But it is a sad Internet, one with plenty of bad things despite an enormous amount of innovation and ideas for an open Internet. Most of them are stillborn or are stifled or bought out by giants as soon as they make enough of an impression on the masses and possibly threaten an incumbent. Instagram is the canonical example. It was a lovely app for amateur and professional photographers alike to share ‘olde filtered’ square photos taken using smartphones that had only just gained decent camera parts. It is now a disinformation machine entirely driven by advertising, most of it absolute garbage or downright dangerous. There is only one winner, Mark Zuckerberg. It is now a platform that could be subject to health warnings or regulated to change if some of the proposals to control the platform get implemented. It, and others like Twitter, are being targeted by the EU for abusive privacy practices and flat-out violations of the GDPR. But even that doesn’t stop them trying to squeeze the last drop of cash from people. It’s just a cost of doing business. Take a recent example, Facebook. They recently announced a convenient feature called Facebook Link History. Convenient for who? Facebook, of course. It is essentially a key-logging Javascript injected into every site you visit and monitors everything you type or tap on, including your passwords! It should be illegal. Facebook has ignored GDPR since the law has been in force, believing it is too powerful to be taken down.

You should understand that advertising incentives are not aligned with you, the customer, or the seller. If you want to know more about online advertising and understand how the machine actually works and, importantly, why this type of advertising isn’t as efficient as we are led to believe, I’d suggest looking at this EU Commission document. For the record, I don’t subscribe to the notion that you are the product if you’re not paying for it. This is too reductive of an explanation and doesn’t adequately describe what really happens. Advertising giants are squeezing both ends of the value chain, you and the would-be advertiser, by telling you both lies about reach, accuracy, and the other largely made-up metrics.

I believe we should try to get to a modern version of the open Internet of before. I don’t mean dialling back the clock as it is impossible. I don’t believe in the “things were better before” doctrine either. I’m advocating getting back to a point where anyone could have and, this is the crucial part, control their own plot of cyberspace. A more distributed Internet, one that values quality, not quantity. One that values truth, not who can shout the loudest. In trying to explain what I mean in clear terms, I’m thinking about the British Broadcasting Company, the BBC —one of the world’s oldest and most respected media companies.⁷ The Internet link it promotes on its News programs is www.facebook.com/bbcnews. The site and brand is Facebook. Not the BBC! It should only ever be www.bbc.com/news. It should only ever be a space that they control, not a Facebook walled-garden portal.

I’ve been reading a lot about the distributed Internet, and I believe it is a good start. Note: Don’t confuse the web3, crypto, etc model of “distributed” with what I’m thinking about. That is an entirely different “distributed” and a discussion that has somehow damaged the image of distributed in its meaningful form. I want to write more on that in the future as I think it is at the heart of the reason why, in the Caribbean, we don’t have value in using the ccTLDs, with businesses not benefiting from that visibility and attractiveness as in other regions. Anguilla would disagree with me here, but they are the exception currently riding a wave of popularity. The .ai ccTLD is a hot property currently earning the tiny British dependency millions of pounds in revenue.

Harnessing AI Responsibly: Insights from Training Business Leaders

I wanted to mention a little about the new hotness, AI. I’ve been teaching a reasonable number of business leaders about these tools over the last six months.

It is clear to me that I have been surprised by the interest from such a broad range of managers and business leaders for a product that is so technical and so linked to ICT. The OpenAI hype machine has galvanised the public into believing that these tools can make them one hundred or more times as efficient for 100 times less money than they are spending at the moment (on personnel). This, of course, is not true at all, and I find I have to temper expectations and canalise those runaway thoughts they often have about generative AI and how it will make every person redundant.

For the record, I remain enthusiastic about the technology from a basic productivity point of view. I do think it brings something to the table that can be helpful when used responsibly. I liken it to the automated systems on some cars that ensure the correct security distance between you and the vehicle in front without human input. It’s not self-driving. It is just an assistive technology that needs guardrails and human verification. If an accident occurs where you run into the back of the cat in front (despite the technology being activated), who is responsible? The assistant software in the car or you That’s exactly what we’re dealing with when we use these systems. You, the user, remain responsible, and you, the user, should ensure you use it responsibly.

I don’t think discussing accuracy, efficiency or other measures of “intelligence” is helpful at this stage, as these systems are changing rapidly. To give you an example, I have had to modify the training materials no less than ten times in the last six months. I would suggest a wait-and-see approach before integrating them into fundamental or central processes in your businesses that would provoke significant consequences in the case of error or failure. I would also suggest you integrate human-based verification and validation to the output generated to ensure you don’t fall foul of mis and dis-information, obviously wrong answers, and poor analysis that these LLMs can produce. That doesn’t mean that I don’t support the use of them. Please do. However, please don’t rely on them too much, as you may be sorely disappointed and dissatisfied with the results. For once, I’m bullish on Microsoft’s approach, but I would still exercise caution handing over the car keys to Copilot, ChatGPT, Bard and other LLMs.

Thanks for reading, and I hope to email you again soon.

/comittedtodisk

Tolerating intolerance is not a good strategy

When I started this newsletter, I deliberately chose a name that was both specific and generic at the same time. This choice might have felt anodyne then, and perhaps you didn’t even think about it. The title was there to express the feeling that I had about how digital technology was going to become further and further entrenched in our personal and professional lives. On that front, I was not wrong. And if I think about where we were at that time here in the Caribbean, we were only starting to think about these technologies and how they might be brought to reality in the region, but looking far afield at what had been taking place in the United States and Europe and trying to shoehorn procedures, products and services into the local context. However, the truth behind the generic title was that I chose it for a specific reason.

Despite being generally optimistic about technology, but not a techno-optimist, I always felt there was a risk in bringing technology to bear without the checks and balances to ensure we reap the benefits of the technology while minimising potential adverse effects. In other words, I called it The Future is Digital, but I didn’t outline if that future was good or bad. It was a hedge. It was a guess. And it was a feeling that I’ve been harbouring for a long time now, without being able to put my finger on why. The future of The Future is Digital will go into that over the coming months, and I invite you to follow and share your thoughts along the way. I will make mistakes, have bad takes on an idea, and perhaps hit the nail squarely on the head at times. When you do this kind of work, you open yourself up to the possibility of learning something deeply because writing is thinking. If you don’t like my point of view, or you feel my arguments are not good enough, engage with me. I’m open to discussion and will always remain civil in my replies. Online communication has gone to shit over the last few years, so I’d like to promote a little civility.

When I started this newsletter, I took a lot of time researching how I could get it online in a qualitative and non-ad-intrusive way. I settled on a brand new system offering a compelling argument to host my newsletter. It is free to use until you start charging people for subscriber-only access. At which point, they would take 10% + payment processing fees. I signed up to create a Substack when it was still only a niche platform with a handful of writers using it. I’d never intended to stay there indefinitely and hoped to raise enough money to self-host it elsewhere in the future. I felt it would be best to own and control a host fully in the long run, but that idea was a long way off. Hold onto that notion, as it will become more apparent in my future writing for this newsletter. Oh, and while I’m here, apologies for not keeping up a regular writing schedule; more on that later.

So, where is this newsletter as of today? I’ve written just short of 100 posts over the last couple of years and some several hundred thousand words, with a couple of popular articles:

and (unsurprisingly):

These posts were particularly popular compared to the others and elicited discussion between myself and a few people, mostly offline, given that I am not really that online despite being very “digital”. But to cut a long story short, I am about to embark on taking this newsletter to a different place in two respects. Firstly, I’ll be moving off the Substack platform as soon as possible. Then, I will be making an effort to pick up from where I let it slip over the last couple of years.

Starting with the platform shift. If you are subscribed, you shouldn’t notice any difference, save the look and feel, and perhaps the need to take a quick dip into your spam mail in the event your mail provider marks my new newsletter as spam. Here’s why.

1. Substack and the paradox of tolerance

Karl Popper’s Paradox of tolerance states:

… that if a society's practice of tolerance is inclusive of the intolerant, intolerance will ultimately dominate, eliminating the tolerant and the practice of tolerance with them.

If you’re unaware of what has been happening at Substack, let me indulge myself in giving you a brief overview in complete fear of invoking Godwin’s Law.

Dave Karpf, along with some two hundred or so writers, sent an open letter to the owners of Substack to ask that they clearly state their position when it comes to platforming Nazis. I think most of us can agree that the correct number of Nazis that you should host and tolerate is zero, or if not zero, then as close to zero as it can be. The paradox of tolerance should perfectly explain why that is. Then there was a particularly cack-handed communication roughly translated as “I didn’t know he was a racist”. If we take that at face value, the fact that he didn’t do his homework (which would have quickly and easily determined his guest’s POV), this a remarkably naive thing to have done and a complete failure on Hamish’s part. Then there was a convenient post by a different bunch of Substack writers who seem to be ok with Nazis being invited to the party and promoted by Substack. Then, after the pressure built with public announcements of several high-profile writers abandoning the platform, Substack finally stated its official position explaining that we should be tolerant of things that we are not comfortable with and therefore tolerate Nazis on the platform. It was as bad as it sounds.

The most egregious part of the stated position is the false ideology that is awash in the tech scene, that all speech is equal and, therefore, should be treated equally. In my view, this is so flagrantly naive that it beggars belief, and I am astounded that while writing those words, they didn’t have a moment of reflection to try perhaps to fully understand the gravity of what they were saying. It is like saying that all cell growth is equal, and therefore, we should give cancer a chance because it should be treated equally to any other cell growth. Cancer is cancer, and we deal with it accordingly within the means we have. Nazis, white supremacists and the like are a fucking cancer and should be dealt with accordingly. Cancerous cells will eventually take over the host, fully consume it, and ultimately kill it. So it is with Nazis. They will consume everything until they, and only they exist. It must be stopped at every opportunity.

Substack is a private platform, and I will defend its right to decide where it wants to position itself. This, however, also means that I will defend the right of writers to criticise it and demand a certain amount of reasonable censorship, transparency and equal application. I would also support anyone wanting to go elsewhere and try to put pressure on the other enablers in the value chain. And I would defend Substack’s right to associate with Nazis. But that will not stop me from expressing that I believe by enabling and promoting Nazis, they become Nazis at worst and Nazi sympathisers at best. I will be doing everything I can to help crush this cancer. I will not tell you what to do with your attention and money; that is up to you, but if you agree that Nazis should not be tolerated, then I would recommend that you unsubscribe from any Substack until such time as they start to do their best to eliminate this cancer. That is what I am doing.

You may ask why I am so uncompromising with this. Well, some of it is about the way Substack operates. Substack’s response is all well and good taken in the first degree, but when you look deeper, you’ll notice they do moderate. For example, pornography is not allowed on the platform, and they do a pretty good job moderating that. They also state clearly in their terms that hate speech and calls for violence are not tolerated. Perhaps I’m a fucking idiot, but the last time I looked, white supremacy ideologies were hate speech. I could go on, but frankly, I’m pretty wound up about this and particularly disappointed with what was once a great platform to help (very) small-time writers like me get out there. I’m going to suck it up and shift to a different platform, of which I haven’t decided yet. I’m torn between micro.blog or WordPress. Both have upfront costs associated (unless I accept ads on WordPress). It’s not a lot, and I’ll probably put it down as a work expense, as this venture was always related to my business and is probably partly responsible for my getting several consultancy opportunities.

Substack is treating us like morons and trying to avoid telling the truth about the reason why they’re taking certain decisions. Fine, go ahead and take money from Nazis and white supremacists. Just don’t expect me and a lot of other people to participate, and do expect a lot of us to find ways to stop the cancer from spreading.

2. Picking up from where I left off

The last two years have been particularly challenging for me personally. It is likely the main reason my writing output has fallen off a cliff for this newsletter. I haven’t not been writing, just not here.

I was recently diagnosed with two neurological conditions. I’d actively sought a diagnosis for one of the conditions, so the result didn’t surprise me; it was the other one that hit me unaware, and despite being grateful to have a formal diagnosis, it hit me much harder than I thought it would. And in true style, as anyone who knows me well enough offline, this happened during the world’s biggest crisis since 1918 and the Second World War. Awesome.

I’m unsure what to do with the information besides understanding it in more detail and interpreting how it affects my daily life. That’s what I’m doing, but honestly, I’m a little lost about that. I know there are mitigation strategies, and I have, over time, naturally built up some of them, but they are nowhere near being as effective as I would like. And at 53 years old, teaching the dog new tricks is harder to do. Not impossible, but a little more challenging.

To give you more detail without giving you access to my medical history, two conditions (that may or may not be related) cause executive functioning difficulties in day-to-day life. Charitably, when you have two, it is called twice exceptional or 2e for short. This is the optimist’s view. I prefer to call it twice-afflicted for the moment. And I would add that I call it thrice-afflicted, as the two contribute substantially to a third difficulty (although not a condition, nevertheless, very difficult in its own right). Again, if you know me well enough offline, you’ll know or have suspected some of this already. I have either discussed a subset of this with you. What I haven’t done is open up generally about it until now. But I’m not going to name them online for obvious reasons. (Yes, you, the morally bankrupt advertising industry on the Internet.) Feel free to reach out if you want to know more. I’ll be happy to discuss.

So, in trying to pick up from where I left off, I hope to gather the bits and pieces and develop a couple of plans to help me write more often. I have been doing some of that already, and I’m seeing some of the fruits of that labour. What I don’t promise to do, however, is write about tech in a sycophantic and all-starry-eyed manner that I was perhaps a little guilty of at first.

Contributing to the third affliction is a feeling of disappointment and an impending sense of tech being co-opted by forces that are not true to the stated ideals of its makers. See Substack above. See also the absolutely shameful bunker being built by Mark Zuckerberg in Hawaii for when the shit hits the fan, and he can say, “Fuck you, Jack, I’m alright thanks to me extracting your wealth to my bank account.”

I’ll discuss some of that another time.

Regardless, I hope you have a good holiday. Connect with what is meaningful to you. Connect with family and friends, and enjoy the break. I’ll try to write something in early 2024.

/committedtodisk

A brief look at the state of affairs and a few recommendations

Sorry for the hiatus. I *really* wanted to write more here, it just wasn’t possible.

To make it up, this one is a fairly long one, despite taking an axe to the original draft. 🤣 I hope you like it, and don’t hesitate to ping me if you want me to expand on any areas that I have deliberately kept brief.

Enjoy!

Within the last ten to fifteen years, there has been an almost exponential growth in the use of the internet in the Caribbean. Typically internet use had been lagging behind that of many parts of the world. This dramatic change has occurred rapidly and, unfortunately, without the guardrails typically developed during the progressive adoption of the Internet. The Caribbean has gone from a tiny percentage point in adoption to nearly 70% of the population, totally skipping the progressive uptake as we have seen in the US, the UK and the EU.

Internet use in the Caribbean is primarily through a mobile contract, with more mobile phone connections than people in the region. Many people have two or more mobile phones, often with data connections. And even though mobile internet in the Caribbean remains relatively expensive, with certain caveats, mobile internet usage is greater than that of fixed broadband use and is, for many, the only way they interact with the internet through apps or social networking. Once a subscriber gets a smartphone and a data connection, there is an almost 100% signup rate for social media such as WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram.

As our lives and the economy surrounding us become digitalised with ever-more products, services and processes moving into the virtual world from the physical world, so does the threat of misconduct. In the same way that crime has followed —and, in some cases, driven innovation— our lives are under pressure from actors worldwide that target us based on our weaknesses. The potential for harm is significant, from losing money to becoming unwittingly part of an organised attack on larger targets like state attacks. As the economies of scale of internet use and online life increase, so do the economies of scale of potential for crime.

This has not gone unnoticed, and small businesses and the public are starting to emphasise protection, detection, and clean-up tools in much the same way that we in the Caribbean are aware of environmental and natural disaster risks and planning accordingly. It is estimated that the biggest spenders on cybersecurity over the next three years are micro-sized and small-sized businesses – the backbone of companies in the Caribbean which are estimated to be somewhere in the region of 95% of businesses in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Cybersecurity in the Caribbean is at an early development stage, and specialised service companies that fill the requirements are few and far between. Small businesses and the public need specialised help at affordable costs to ensure they do not fall victim to cybercrime.

Read on.

The Caribbean Context

It will come as no surprise that Cybersecurity is fast becoming one of the most pressing issues for business and society in the coming years. The Caribbean perspective is no different from that of the rest of the world; however, certain specificities make the challenge more delicate and need particular attention.

The distributed and only somewhat-collaborative nature of the Caribbean (the CARICOM members) and the fractured nature of the regional geopolitical situation (French, Spanish and Dutch West Indies sharing the space with the English West Indies) require a more integrated, collaborative and subtle approach.

For the most part, the larger countries in the Caribbean have tended to follow patterns seen in larger countries worldwide. They have become more outspoken in their knowledge and response to the region's cybersecurity issues. As companies in the Caribbean have become more visible to the broader world, thus increasing risk, governments, businesses, and citizens alike have become more aware of those risks and of the need to implement adequate protection systems to fight unwarranted incursions.

There is an increase in risk proportional to the rate of economic development; thus, as the Caribbean becomes more developed, cybercrime becomes a more viable means of extracting money from any unwitting community simply because the perceived potential financial gain is much more significant. Cyber malfeasance is a business! Pure and simple.

Case Study: Costa Rica – State of Emergency

Regrettably, Costa Rica recently saw this when it had to declare a state of emergency after multiple government agencies fell foul to a Conti ransomware attack. Not only had data been rendered inaccessible by AES-256 encryption and an attached US $10 million ransom (subsequently raised to US $12 million), but government data had been extracted over several months and later leaked openly when the government refused to pay the initial ransom demand. As of late April 2022, some 97% of a 672GB data dump was publicly available. Fears for the extent of data included have mounted, and so far, no review has been ordered to determine the risks for citizens and businesses of Costa Rica. But as some of this data appears to have been extracted from health systems, customs systems and other government systems that deal with payments (Social Security and Social Development), the fear is that many may fall foul of the spread of this data in the coming months and years through phishing the general public or through highly targeted attacks on influential or wealthy individuals.

The Trinidad and Tobago Cyber Security Incident Response Team (TT-CSIRT) recently observed a sharp increase in malicious cyber activity targeting local and regional entities.¹ The TT-CSIRT urges all entities (public and private) to adopt a heightened state of awareness.

The Caribbean has been slow to acknowledge cybersecurity threats to the region. A lack of data and measurement has meant that many successful attacks on business and government have gone unnoticed by the population, exacerbated by a culture of silence. No high-profile witnesses have spoken up about their experience dealing with the initial phases, legal process, and clean up after an incident. Fear of damaging customer confidence is partly responsible for this; however, this only leads to less information on how cybercrime affects the region. It would be safe to say that what is reported is only the tip of the iceberg and that cybercrime is much more prevalent than is generally known.

Recently, governments and institutions have made more effort to address the issues, including public awareness campaigns and working with international NGOs to develop a better cybersecurity posture for people and businesses alike. One example is Get Safe Online. Get Safe Online operates through a network of Ambassadors that organise in-the-community training using the tools and training materials developed by the organisation.

Legislation and cybersecurity strategy

When it comes to cybersecurity law, the picture is not much better. Saint Lucia, for example, has an “in development” National Cybersecurity Strategy, and despite taking the lead compared to its neighbours in the OECS, it somewhat lags behind the international community. Barbados is another country with the ongoing development of cybersecurity legislation. The most significant barriers to establishing and implementing legislation are government capacity and political willingness. A government like Saint Lucia’s faces challenges on many fronts, stretching resources beyond capacity. A general lack of world-class expertise is also apparent in the region, coupled with a general feeling that cybersecurity is only an ICT responsibility, making cross-government and cross-sector priorities challenging to place at the top of the list.

In the wider OECS region, only Saint Vincent and the Grenadines has specific cybercrime legislation with the Cybercrime Act of 2016. In other countries, cybercrime is regulated under Computer Misuse Acts or Electronic Crime Acts. They are primarily focused on how technology is used to commit crimes without explicitly addressing cybersecurity and how to deal with attacks on information systems. Questions remain on the capacity of countries to adequately prosecute this type of crime which relies on having sufficient infrastructure, personnel and accompanying judicial systems. Many lack the right equipment, software, and training to identify cybercrimes correctly.

Regionally, CARICOM IMPACS has sought to establish harmonised standards of practice, expertise and systematic treatment of cybercrime. It has additionally targeted infrastructure capacity-building to increase crime detection, law enforcement investigation and prosecution. RSS, or Regional Security System, is another organisation with a mandate to prevent and defend against cybercrime that has limited scope for responding to cyberattacks, somewhat because of a lack of harmonisation of policies regionally. Like many regional organisations, they, unfortunately, lack funding and capacity to respond adequately to the modern threat landscape.

What about CSIRTS?

Similarly, the state of Cyber Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) development in the Caribbean lags behind the South American continent and the broader region. Only Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago have implemented funded and functioning CSIRTS. Suriname has restarted a program after having abandoned it a few years ago.

The impact

Small and micro-sized businesses are the backbone of the private economic structure of the Caribbean, and it is precisely these businesses that are the most vulnerable and the least resourced to deal with the complexities of digital security requirements of today. This has been substantially exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, in which new expectations by employees on how, when, and where to work are becoming normalised. Working from home and the expected turn towards a flexible hybrid model for workers have widened the security exposure for companies. In other words, attacks do not need to target one specific network to gain entry to a company; many distributed networks are potential threats. This makes it difficult for understaffed, undertrained and crucially under-financed IT departments to manage such distributed networks in physical and technological terms.

Whilst cloud computing is still in the early development stages in the Caribbean, not all businesses and administrations are advancing simultaneously. Some are more advanced than others, having moved not only low-hanging fruit applications like email and accounting to the cloud but have embraced the possibilities that cloud computing offers, shifting line-of-business applications and identity services and other business-critical services off the on-premises systems. Moving to the cloud changes the security exposure for the entity in question, requiring specialised knowledge to best protect and monitor for breaches and unplanned downtime.

The COVID-19 pandemic has left MSMEs with budgets for investment at historic low levels. MSMEs are typically small businesses with more pressing day-to-day issues, such as immediate revenue generation to pay the bills. With existing relationships with telecom providers, the telecom companies will likely provide cybersecurity offings soon, given the network-based nature of the threat.

The threat landscape (non-exhaustive)

Understanding global threats and their provenance will also play a prominent role in understanding the landscape and developing solutions to minimise those risks. The most common threats to small businesses and administrations in the Caribbean are estimated as follows:

1. Ransomware

Immediately after a successful penetration of defences, a small application sits in background tasks on the infected computer or computers, slowly encrypting data using a virtually impossible-to-decipher encryption key. Once the data has been fully encrypted, the user is alerted that the data is now inaccessible. A ransom of a significant amount is required to decrypt the data and allow access once again.

2. Social Engineering or Phishing

Social Engineering or Phishing is a psychological technic to garner an employee's confidence in a company or government office and then exploit that confidence to extract information or gain access to restricted data. It is often the method used to deploy ransomware and is the weakest link in the armour of cybersecurity.

3. Internal malicious intent

Although relatively rare by most counts, the risk of a disgruntled employee with access to confidential and vital data is manifest. This can be highly disruptive to a business or administration. For example, employees on social media displaying discontent can be the target for exploiting weaknesses to enter a network.

4. Poorly configured and patched systems

Even the best firewall is only as good as its configuration and patch level. Poorly configured or outdated firmware in IT equipment is a regularly exploited vector for entry into the target network.

5. Poor credential hygiene

Easy-to-guess passwords, not regularly changed passwords, and sensitive data with poor access controls are easy targets. Sparse use of two-factor authentication also plays a role in allowing those that should not be permitted.

Mitigation Strategies and Policy Guidance

The following is just a small sample of the opportunity to improve the threat landscape in the region. If you’d like more detailed advice, please let me know.

Invest in the expansion and capacity-building of CSIRTs and regional cybersecurity organisations

Only with adequate and ongoing funding will the diverse region be able to fully appreciate its desire to develop world-class cybersecurity services protecting the public of the Caribbean. We would recommend regional, local government, NGO and private sector funding be increased substantially and rapidly. Events in Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago and more recently in Martinique show the threat is here and the consequences substantial.

Development of affordable managed services for the region

Security software of the past that required an initial purchase, installation and configuration to become fully operative and successfully manage that threat cannot deal with today’s ever-changing security threat landscape. Capital purchase of security software is no longer adapted, and the business model has changed.

We recommend that a managed service provider (MSP) starts with a small but highly specialised team incentivised and remunerated on contract signups and renewals. As the business grows, so can the team and the incentive structure.

Develop and deliver targeted education for users, managers and decision-makers

As with much in life, better education is the key to fundamentally understanding and acting on the current context. There is, sadly, not enough specialised education in the region for the general public to fully understand the implications of good cybersecurity practices. Although organisations such as Get Safe Online have been doing some of this over the last few years, we recommend that governments and NGOs invest in developing local training and awareness on specific cyber security issues, such as protecting smartphone use on the internet.

Develop targeted and highly focused services designed for MSMEs

Customers need to quickly see the value of the offering and be onboarded rapidly and without difficulty. Time spent designing simplified services and automating the onboarding process for the customer will allow the customer to take advantage with less apprehension. Particular attention should be given to building modular services, allowing flexibility in the offering tailored to the customer and not the supplier.

Understand where existing services lack and fill those gaps

Conducting a gap analysis of the state of cyber defences in the Caribbean, looking at the state of government or law enforcement’s resources and role in cybersecurity, including participation from the private sector. This will likely identify complementary areas of interest, encouraging the broadest and most efficient development possibilities.

Develop Security-as-a-Service offerings sold as insurance policies

Just as we have cyberattack software as a service, we should have Cybersecurity as a Service. Software as a Service (SaaS) has been a great enabler for small businesses to use enterprise-grade software that was previously out of reach financially and technically. So it should be for cybersecurity. Providing a service offering akin to an insurance contract (leaving the details of the included/excluded services outside the scope of this report) would allow MSMEs to strengthen their defences in the most cost-effective way.

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¹ https://ttcsirt.gov.tt/threat-alert-2022/

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Writing a paper for an International journal resulted in a better understanding and stopped me in my tracks.

Excuse the rambling. This is written in the true sense of blogging, and it started life as a short blog post idea, transforming into this, for what it’s worth. So I decided to cross-post it here first. I’ll publish it verbatim on my blog soon. That blog is another outlet for my brain, and not exclusively about matters digital.

I wrote a paper proposal for an international hotel industry journal sometime last year. My proposal was accepted, and I started writing in earnest. The paper had a deadline, and I was on track to finish on time, which is extremely rare for me. Sadly, that went south as I progressed and began to formulate a more complete picture of the technology I was writing about and its origins.

The title was:

Is Web 3.0 the next great opportunity in tourism?

The introduction goes like this:

Since the advent of the commercial internet, businesses in the travel and tourism industry have harnessed technology to promote their destinations. Some early tourism websites tried, in vain, to replicate the marketing materials traditionally used to promote destinations, mainly hotels.

This “copy and paste” methodology was seriously limited due to the underlying factors that meant that media-rich websites were near unusable for those with dial-up internet at 56kb/s and invisible for the majority who had not yet become connected to the internet. These simplistic lists of hotels and tourist attractions displaying available amenities neither incited nor informed potential visitors.

Broadband’s wide deployment and adoption enabled a new generation of technologies that would later be named Web 2.0. These technologies allowed media-rich websites to be developed. Many hotel websites today not only market properties in attractive ways but also allow potential visitors to reserve rooms, pay for their stay, and in some cases, simplify check-in and check-out, all achieved automatically without any interaction with reception staff. Today, many of the technologies of Web 2.0 allow hotels to generate first-party data for use elsewhere in their business. For example, for marketing, demand generation or even stock control. It allows benchmarking against other hotels within the same group or in comparison to similar competition. The distinction is important, and it separates these businesses from others that operate through travel agencies, typically providing little or no valuable data for such purposes.

Today, we are at an inflexion point where technology is evolving rapidly, and the adoption is accelerating and becoming more democratised. Technologies like Blockchain, Augmented/Virtual Reality, digital money (through tokens and CDBCs), and the metaverse can allow businesses in the travel and tourism industry to take advantage of this shift. It enables better value and faster client discovery. For example, several key performance indicators, such as the technology acceptance model (TAM), perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived enjoyment (ENJ), showed how virtual reality helped maintain potential visitor interest in destinations cut off by the pandemic and how that technology affected the tendency to visit the actual site (TenAS) (El-Said and Aziz, 2021).

This paper will discuss these technologies and how they may be harnessed so that visitors and non-visitors alike can be incited to visit destinations around the globe, thus generating value for the tourism industry.

Do the new technologies of the Metaverse and web3 provide opportunities for the tourism industry?

Specifically, the following research questions will be addressed:

1. What are the new technologies, and how are they used?

2. What are the opportunities and risks associated with this technology?

3. How can the tourism industry best utilise this technology to its advantage?

The paper’s structure was pretty classic in that there is an introduction (see above), a discussion on what web3 is, a literature review, and a discussion ending with conclusions. All sections are researched and backed up with examples and references.

A lot of it has already been written. Sadly, I started this at possibly the worst possible time for the technology, as it coincided with when web3 began to be exposed for the smoke and mirrors it turned out to be.

I couldn’t faithfully finish the paper as I was becoming increasingly sceptical about the fundamentals of web3, its purported merits and far-right origins. How could I write such a paper and stand by it when I didn’t believe or support most of it?

I have always been crypto sceptical, but I have kept an open mind on blockchain tech and have publicly said so on several occasions here and as a guest on various podcasts. No longer. I’m no longer much of an enthusiast about it.

How did I get here?

Writing a paper is nothing like writing a blog post or firing off a simple observation on social media. For one, papers are generally peer-reviewed before publication. That process starts at the proposal phase, and my proposal didn’t pass on initial inspection, requiring some changes to be considered for publication. Peer review is brutal. If someone doesn’t like or agree with you, they’ll tell you straight and point out why with facts, observations and references as to where you are wrong. When diving deep into a subject, you can quickly build a cognitive bias and eventually see things that aren’t necessarily there or see something that you wish was there (wish casting). During peer review, this is spotted and called out almost immediately.

Secondly, as I researched deeper into the world of web3, I found more things that I couldn’t agree with. It made me uncomfortable and left me dealing with cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonances never end well. One example of the things I was struggling with was the criminal amounts of energy wasted by one of the most useless technologies ever conceived. Blockchain. Without getting into the technical details, some blockchains use what is termed Proof of Work. Linked is the Wikipedia article on what that is. Take the time to read it. Reread it if you have already. I refer to it as Proof of Waste, as I have concluded that it is a more accurate term. Blockchains waste disgraceful amounts of energy on slow validations that could easily be done with existing database technology for a fraction of the cost and an order of magnitude faster.

Yes, I know that the new shiny kid on the block is Proof of Stake, and its energy consumption is vastly reduced. But it also goes directly against a central tenet of web3, decentralisation. Proof of stake puts power into the hands of the most invested (as in money). That sounds very distributed and democratic to me. The EU has recommended that Proof of Stake be used instead of Proof of Waste, threatening an outright ban on it. Only one high-profile cryptocurrency has completed the move to Proof of Stake, taking over eight years in the process.

But here’s another aspect that many seem to have misunderstood. Blockchain is directly against the law in the EU, as outlined in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Of the advertised “advantages” of blockchain is immutability. Blocks are Immutable, i.e., permanent. This is illegal in the EU because the GDPR mandates that people have the right to correct errors and rectify false information through due process. Blockchain doesn’t (can’t) do that. Data on the chain is not erasable. Likewise, illegal. Blockchain prevents ledger data from being deleted. That data is part of the chain. Break the chain, and you break the system.

Then there’s the whole thing of NFTs or Non-Fungable Tokens. What a scam! Personified recently by a certain DT, camply cosplayed up as various imaginary Superheros, and a grift so big it could probably be seen from space.

For the paper —getting back to the subject— I’d thought about how destinations and hotels could mint tokens and sell them as souvenirs. I still quite like the idea and think it has some merit, but the ecosystem is not yet there. Regulation is missing. How do you display them? Can you resell them? What governs gains, losses, and value? Do people really want to virtue signal they’ve been to Bali in this way? How do you prevent grifters and scammers?

For the moment, NFTs are essentially simple pump-and-dump scams that prey on the unsuspecting, the vulnerable, and the plain stupid. I don’t think that is a morally acceptable way to run a business. But then again, I’m not a thief.

On the energy aspect, with energy costs rising and no near-term solution to the impending climate crisis, any project that adds to the planet’s burden should be considered illegal. Yes, you can say that my words here are useless and use energy wastefully in their production, distribution (email) and reading. That’s true. But wake me up when this uses the amount of energy of a small European country, and I’ll gladly stop. Wake me up when the sum total of all the WordPress blogs on the internet reaches the same energy levels as that wasted by Bitcoin to “prove” your magic bean is worth something. And don’t forget that there are literally hundreds of thousands of other magic beans out there too!

They presented some of the systems they’d built and yep, we were impressed. Then, with the startup CTO in the room, one of my fellow engineers asked the key question: “All these systems, are there any that wouldn’t work without blockchain?” The guy didn’t even hesitate: “No, not really.”

The above is taken from a blog post by Tim Bray (AWS). Pro blockchain or not, you should read it as it nicely sums up blockchain’s uselessness.

Even more sinister…

Back to the paper. During my research, I happened upon the following book:

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism

Here’s an extract:

By far the majority of interest in Bitcoin came from technologists and those who follow and admire the work of technologists. To those of us who were watching Bitcoin with an eye toward politics and economics, though, something far more striking than Bitcoin’s explosive rise in value became apparent: in the name of this new technology, extremist ideas were gaining far more traction than they previously had outside of the extremist literature to which they had largely been confined. Dogma propagated almost exclusively by far-right groups like the Liberty League, the John Birch Society, the militia movement, and the Tea Party, conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and David Icke, and to a lesser extent rightist outlets like the Fox media group and some right-wing politicians, was now being repeated by many who seemed not to know the origin of the ideas, or the functions of those ideas in contemporary politics. These ideas are not simply heterodox or contrarian: they are pieces of a holistic worldview that has been deliberately developed and promulgated by right-wing ideologues. To anyone aware of the history of right-wing thought in the United States and Europe, they are shockingly familiar: that central banking such as that practiced by the U.S. Federal Reserve is a deliberate plot to “steal value” from the people to whom it actually belongs; that the world monetary system is on the verge of imminent collapse due to central banking policies, especially fractional reserve banking; that “hard” currencies such as gold provide meaningful protection against that purported collapse; that inflation is a plot to steal money from the masses and hand it over to a shadowy cabal of “elites” who operate behind the scenes; and more generally that the governmental and corporate leaders and wealthy individuals we all know are “controlled” by those same “elites.”

David Golumbia continues to outline how Bitcoin embodies extremist ideologies through Cyberlibertarianism and Internet Exceptionalism frameworks. Simply put, governments should not regulate the internet, and the internet is different and can’t be governed by mere mortals that don’t ‘get it’. This is in line with the extreme right’s ideology, which has brought us to world war, mass ethnic killings, and, more recently, the genuine possibility of a wholesale destabilisation of society. Linking these ideas to the Tea Party, the John Birch Society and conspiracists like David Icke and Alex Jones, the book does an excellent job of showing how the definition of “freedom” is less clear when you question it more robustly. Presciently, he mentions how some public figures do not necessarily outwardly declare their adherence to these ideologies but have demonstrated just that. Elon Musk is one such specimen. There are others, but take note of the ongoing (December 2022) train wreck at Twitter for context. Another article cited in the book is that of Langdon Winner (1997). A must-read, in my view, in which is discussed a personality not talked about much outside Silicon Valley. Ayn Rand. She’s a darling of Silicon Valley but was almost certainly a sociopath. If you have access to the BBC, watch “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” to better understand her and her effect on the Silicon Valley mindset and culture.

To these people, freedom always seems to mean the freedom to do “what I want”, without regard for others.

The Politics of Bitcoin is short —70-odd pages— but I highly recommend it. If you are from a technical background, like me, this will provoke thoughts and perhaps challenge some of your preconceived ideas about tech in the 21st Century. You don’t have to agree, but disagreeing through knowledge is infinitely better than a position to the contrary through ignorance.

Final thoughts

The tourist industry is already under scrutiny for its environmental effects, from ecosystem-damaging hotel developments to carbon waste (mostly travel). I didn’t want to be the author of a paper that promotes or encourages damaging consequences through needless and scam-enabling technologies like crypto and NFTs. Especially not just because it is “cool stuff”. I didn’t want to be part of a group that ignorantly legitimises innovation to extinction.

There may be a future for NFT-type spin-offs once regulation and other parts of the ecosystem are ready, and blockchain might evolve to become genuinely useful. But I suspect that evolution to look remarkably similar to database technology we’ve had for decades.

This experience was enlightening, and I wouldn’t change it for the world because it helped me come to a better, more nuanced understanding. In the near future, I may propose a different paper, although I suspect it might not be accepted. We’ll see.

Share The Future is Digital

Have a great holidays, and I’ll probably write some thoughts in the new year.

Take a peek here...

Rather than whine about how I’ve been busy and haven’t had the time or resources to write too much for this newsletter, I thought I’d share a few of the things I’ve been doing so you can get up to speed. Forgive me for the shameless self-promotion.

I’m currently writing an article on tech regulation. I’m looking at it from a different angle that I think will be interesting. I’ll share it here as soon it is in a decent state.

Reports

Firstly, I co-authored a report for USAID Eastern and Southern Caribbean Mission, entitled “DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM COUNTRY ASSESSMENT (DECA) Eastern and Southern Caribbean”

It can be found here and is publicly available to anyone.

I’m immensely proud of the report I co-wrote with a wonderful team. We were 100% online and have still never met in person. Despite this challenge, I think we were all able to put together out some great work within the limitations of the context, but also the limitations a report like this naturally imposes.

We were able to pair it down to 121 pages (don’t be put off, it’s straightforward to read). In reality, we could have all produced around 120 pages each!

From the report, the main findings:

PILLAR 1: INFRASTRUCTURE AND ADOPTION

The broadband and mobile infrastructure for the region is generally good. While networks have appeared to stand up to increased utilization during the shift to online work and school, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed gaps in access to and affordability of the internet. Leveraging universal service funds, testing last-mile technologies, and exploring innovative policy approaches to increase competition could help make mobile data and internet access more inclusive and affordable. Coordinated action across the region may reduce vulnerability among excluded communities and foster online education, training, and work opportunities.

PILLAR 2: DIGITAL SOCIETY, RIGHTS, AND GOVERNMENT

With emerging activities rolling out under CARICOM’s Single ICT Space initiative and digital transformation projects across the region, development actors including USAID can support and coordinate complementary activities. For example, the cybersecurity action plan developed by the CARICOM Implementation Agency for Crime and Security (IMPACS) can strengthen the institutions and systems needed to support digital transformation efforts. With digital identity initiatives, data privacy concerns and misinformation starting to arise in the region, civil society and media play an increasingly important role in fostering institutional accountability. Supporting civil society and media to engage on emerging issues could foster robust and safe engagement for citizens, as digital transformation progresses.

PILLAR 3: DIGITAL ECONOMY

The region boasts some of the first adopters of central bank digital currencies and efforts to utilize new digital financial service technologies. While there have been recent set-backs, particularly with the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) DCash pilot, efforts to responsibly pilot new FinTech solutions will inform the global community working to strengthen financial inclusion and resilience. The tech startup environment is steadily expanding. Startups are emerging in myriad sectors, yet entrepreneurs struggle to find investors comfortable with investing in technology solutions. Youth interested in tech have limited options in the formal education system to develop digital workforce skills. E-commerce offers a promising avenue for the region to connect to larger markets and foster innovation. Although the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated e-commerce uptake across the ESC, it continues to be hindered by suboptimal digital payment systems, and the absence of a region-wide strategy and supporting legislation.

I’d like to publicly thank Chelceé, Amy, Ariel, Samantha, Mansfield, and the teams at DAI and USAID that contributed.

I have continued work on the Trade Enhancement for the Eastern Caribbean (TEECA) project. I recently wrote a report on the state of Cybersecurity in the Caribbean and the opportunities in that field. The report is private, but I intend to write something here in the coming weeks.

For the same project, a couple of other reports providing guidance on the tools and services MSMEs can use to leverage cloud and automation have also been provided. Again, these are private, and I cannot share them. As these are pretty focused on the companies involved, I’m not sure I can add much value here in this format. However, if you would like to have some thoughts about those tools and how they can be leveraged, let me know in the comments, and I’ll see if there is enough demand.

I was asked to peer review an upcoming report, and I can say that it is an excellent start and something to look out for when it is out. I’ll let you know, but I can’t say more than that now.

The other big project I’ve been working on is taking shape, and I’d love to share more details about it in the coming weeks.

I’ve been working with a partner, and I think we’ve solved some problems with these reports. This information is so valuable to business that we’d like it to be available to anyone who needs it. That’s the first clue. Don’t ask for others. 😉

I nearly finished a paper on the travel and tourism industries’ potential use of web3 technologies but didn’t finish in time. As I was writing it, the space became very fluid, and the bottom dropped out of many of the (obvious) Ponzi schemes, making my analysis very difficult in such a fast-moving (and not in a good direction) environment.

I’m thinking of picking this up again and re-thinking through, now things have largely settled - or at least the big issues have calmed a little unless some billionaire shitposts something that stirs it all up again!

Podcasts

Since I last published, I have spoken on several episodes of the ICT Pulse Podcast. And today, the latest one is out, where I discuss the USAID report. Please go check it out.

For your convenience, here are all the episodes I’ve featured (latest on top):

ICTP 227: Are we there yet? Understanding the Caribbean region’s digital ecosystem and how developed it is

ICTP 187: Artificial Intelligence, key emerging issues and opportunities, with Matthew Cowen

ICTP 181: Internet Exchange Points and the data scarcity challenge in the Caribbean region

ICTP 160: Understanding how technology perpetuates bias, with Matthew Cowen, of dgtlfutures.com

ICTP 133: Confusing smart with digital, and the challenges of achieving innovative disruption in business

ICTP 080: Discovering Martinique, with Matthew Cowen of dgtlfutures

ICTP 054: Community Chat on ride-hailing services. Can they complement the public transport system in the Caribbean, and what might be their social impact?

I also spoke on the excellent Innovation, Agilité & Excellence podcast with Jean-François Nantel and Éric L’Heureux. This is recorded in French along with my silly accent 🤗. Links here (latest on top):

Épisode 66: Échanges croisés sur la transformation numérique avec Matthew Cowen

Épisode 47: Web 3.0, IA et Blockchain avec Matthew Cowen

Épisode 13: La transformation numérique avec Matthew Cowen

Presentations

A while back, I had a chance to meet with Amazon Web Services in Martinique. We chatted, and I was asked to do a quick presentation on the context of the Caribbean and how it is essential for MSMEs that wish to undertake moves towards Cloud Computing.

I’m waiting to see if the video is available. As soon as I know of a link I’ll share it here.

In the meantime, if you’d like to get a copy of the presentation slides, I’d be happy to post them here with the main talking points annotated. I think the information is useful and quickly gives you an overview of the salient points.

The next presentation share is an older video of a presentation I made for the aforementioned TEECA project. I share the results of an Opportunity Study I wrote back in 2020/2021. Again, I think this is a good summary, and although some data has changed since then (mostly improved), it gives you a good idea of the market in the Eastern Caribbean.

YouTube link here. (French)

Other stuff

I teach Informatique and English (1st year) at Vatel Business School in Martinique. Vatel is an international hospitality management school, and it is a privilege to share some of my experience and knowledge with the bachelor’s students.

Despite its best efforts to make you hate it.

In a departure from some of the writing I’ve done here, I thought it would be interesting and perhaps helpful to mention how I use Twitter and how that keeps me a little more protected from the dreadful content and commentary that is so readily forced onto your retinas.

It starts with using the right tools and then unfollowing everyone. (Well, not “everyone”, but most accounts). Then with judicious use of the largely misunderstood and unused tool on Twitter, the experience is much better and more productive for people like me who primarily use it as a research tool.

How to use Twitter

Let’s face it; Twitter is a hell-hole. You don’t need to be on it too long to discover this. I could (maybe I will one day) get into an extensive discussion on moderation vs privacy vs free speech, a veritable minefield if there ever was one. Despite my urges, I’ll resist.

It is also worth noting that I don’t use it for, let’s charitably call it, performative art. Virtue signalling (or empty boasting), attention-seeking and other forms of engineering to be the centre of attention are anathemas to my personality.

So armed with this, many years ago, I decided I would use Twitter for my research and resist use for entertainment and Doomscrolling. I needed to implement a mechanism that would help achieve these goals. I’m on the inattentive spectrum of ADHD, and Twitter is pretty much Kryptonite for people like me… and me. It contributes hugely to procrastination and losing focus, or, better put, moving the focus from the things that need to be done to the interesting things in the moment, inevitably leading to falling down the rabbit hole.

I’ve been on the platform since 2009. I could see its possibilities for community and exchange of ideas back then, which I would hope, is its future post-Elon Musk. I think the future of social networks is more akin to distributed autonomous organisations or DAOs than the monolithic model of social networks today. As humans, we’re just cabled to interact with thousands or millions of people in a day. We didn’t evolve that way. At best, we had immediate family and a few friends. For most of us, the maximum amount of people we’ve been in close contact with is at school, a large business or a conference. That’s why when you go to a big conference (I was a regular at one that had over 20000 people each year), it’s overwhelming at first until you get your bearings and you start to filter out the stuff you don’t need to see and concentrate on the things you do. I’ll try to write up a little more on that idea in the future, but one name springs to mind, Dunbar.

Back to Twitter, I ignored the potential downsides because the user base was almost exclusively tech at the time, and it intrigued me where it could go. Rose-tinted glasses. The reality turned out quite different.

One thing I did do from the beginning was use a third-party Twitter client. In those days, Twitter was web-only, which didn’t appeal to me. For some reason, I’ve never liked web apps. I can’t articulate why, but something feels “off” for me when I use them. I still use a third-party client, Tweetbot, on both iOS and macOS. But I have used Twitterrific and Tweetie —the first third-party iOS app for Twitter and invented the pull-to-refresh UI element that is so pervasive today— and was subsequently purchased by Twitter in 2010 and ruined.

The advantages of using a third-party app are two-fold. No adverts and a chronological timeline. Twitter has consistently tried to make advertising work for it over the years. Despite having some 86% of its revenue in 2020 from advertising, the financials don’t seem to make Twitter an ad powerhouse or act as a profit centre for them. When I’ve strayed into the official app, the ads have been useless and other forms of online media inform me better.

Similarly, Twitter has flip-flopped from a chronological timeline to an algorithmic one. In 2016 they made it the default, causing consternation and a bunch of articles on how to disable it. This was only temporary, as Twitter reverted to the useless algorithm shortly after disabling it. Then it was possible to make that change permanent, then more recently, it has become vital for Twitter to go back to an algorithm - god knows why? (Heads up: Ads)

I’m not against ads per se; I’m against crass, overly intrusive ads. With no ads, I’m not subjected to the barrage of trite that I see when I open the official web app. The chronological timeline allows me to run down a few pages and quickly get up to speed on a topic without wasting hours and being spoon-fed conspiracies and other distasteful junk.

But the most effective way to tame Twitter is a two-pronged approach and can be done with or without the official client. And, even if you’re happy with the tracking and the ads and a completely useless “promoted” timeline, this configuration will still help a little.

Firstly, I “follow” only a few accounts; as a principle, the term “follow” is nauseating for me, but that’s where we are. 🤷‍♂️

These are hand-picked, and it is not an endorsement if I follow you. I just want to temporarily see your thoughts or retweets, etc., in my timeline. This changes now and again as I audit, adding and removing follows as I see fit.

Note: If I’ve unfollowed you recently, don’t take it personally. I’m probably keeping up-to-date with you still but not in my timeline. You’ll see why in a minute.

So my timeline is a pretty quiet place, and it helps me avoid too much time-wasting. This brings me to the other tool. I think this is Twitter’s under-estimated superpower.

It’s called Lists.

Use them prodigiously.

When I thought about this shift in the use of Twitter, one thing that was evident to me was that the soup of random nonsense on the timeline was because we have to switch contexts cognitively as we scroll through constantly. One tweet grotesquely shows videos of deaths in Ukraine (complete with burning corpses), the next, a funny dog video, then a serious political news story from a reputable source, followed by a shitpost from Elon Musk or Kanye West, then the inevitable conspiracy theory skid mark.

It’s cerebrally fatiguing and draining. Not to mention the sheer effort required to understand the truth of what you’ve just seen.

I wanted to devise a way where I could be in a particular context and stay in it for the duration of the session on Twitter. This is where Lists come in. Lists allow you to add Twitter accounts without having to follow them. That way, you can keep up-to-date on a subject, research project, or any context you want without being derailed by the algorithm and other deranging information. I’ve been doing this for a few years, which has helped me a lot.

I recommend you look at this feature and put it to use yourself. The rewards are evident with a bit of effort and a little pruning.

My current lists are; Analysts, Antilles, Apple Related, Apps, Caribbean, Culture, News, Research, Researchers, Tech, and Tropical Weather.

In each of these lists is one or more Twitter accounts that are, in the majority, primarily tweeting on the topic (i.e., the list name) I’d like to read. They don’t need any explanation; I’m sure you can work out each context.

You don’t have to drink from the firehose; you can drink more sensibly.

Here’s some more information on them and how to set them up: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-lists

Thanks for reading.

Visit the website to read all the archives.

I recently appeared on a podcast with my friend and tutor for my Master’s, Jean-François Nantel, where we talked at some length about web3 and the aspects to take notice of. I really enjoy the format, and I hope you will too. It’s in French, with my ‘Allo ‘Allo accent, but it’s full of interesting tidbits. If you understand French, you should check it out here.

In this essay, I wanted to follow up on some of the things I wrote in Part 1, give a little context, and highlight some of the changes that have happened since. If you’re vigilant, you’ll notice that the world has standardised on Web3 and no longer tends to use Web 3.0. I have complied! I could make a joke about centralisation here, but I’ll resist.

I also wanted to discuss the “other side” of the technology and its use for good. I’m sure this is a more considerable discussion. I might dive into that another time.

I hope you enjoy this essay, tell me if you do or don’t. It’s easy, reply or ping me on Twitter (@virek), or you can find me on LinkedIn.

Web3 Part 1 Follow Up

I wrote in Web 3.0 or Web 1.0 in sheep’s clothing? at a time when I was thinking about all of the different aspects of the web and how they had changed over the years, and what I thought it might become. There’s a lot going on in my brain, and I thought that essay would help me clarify a few things. I’m not sure it did, but even little progress is progress. I guess what it did achieve, though, is that I have a clearer view of the various composite parts of web3.

However, one thing that came out of that reflection is a sceptical view of the unregulated crypto world. I (sort of) didn’t mean for it to sound as negative as it did, but to be fair, If you’ve been following what’s going on in that Wild West corner of the internet, you’ll have noticed that scams, frauds and downright theft are becoming a severe problem, as well as the new trend of crypto-romance scams1.

Another aspect you’ll have no doubt noted is that governments are starting to get serious in their thinking on how to regulate transactions and how to kerb the more significant and larger amounts of energy required to conduct transactions at a fraction of the efficiency of traditional systems. I know that the algorithm is slated to change to reduce the energy requirements substantially, but I doubt that it will have any meaningful effect for a long time yet. Take Ethereum, their planned move to ‘proof of stake’2 from the ‘proof of work’ algorithm started over seven years ago and still hasn’t been completed. Kudos for the foresight from the Ethereum founders, but that particular problem seems to be extremely difficult to solve.

Also, look at this article from the BBC, where they went onsite to see one of the mining farms in Kazakhstan. You might be surprised to learn what is needed and what cost to the environment this trend is. Here’s a link to the full documentary, Our World - Kazakhstan’s Crypto-Boom?

The other aspect that I left hanging without really taking sides on is the state of the current NFT market.

The image above represents what the current NFT market looks like today. And again, you may shrug and tell me that isn’t that what all commerce of art, collectables and the like is? And to some extent, that’s correct. The real value of something is what someone is willing to pay for it. The difference in the current NFT setup is the gambling and Ponzi-scheme structure, as discussed in the last essay:

The other elephant in the room over cryptocurrencies are the obvious parallels to pyramid or Ponzi schemes. Several articles in various reputable media outlets like the FT etc., show how much of the “value” of cryptocurrencies and NFTs is speculation. Speculation that requires new entrants into the market to prop up the value higher up the chain. With the clear Achilles heel, if the supply of those at the bottom of the stack —i.e., those who lose their investments— stop pumping money to the higher level of the stack, the whole thing will most likely come crashing down.

And again, for all the bluster and hype, there is no getting away from the fact that the system is lossy on the whole and has been single-handedly responsible for an increase in efficiency to run anonymous ransomware operations that have been responsible for closing down hospitals, disrupting critical infrastructure, and extorting banks, to the tune of over $5B a year. I urge you to read this lecture from David Rosenthal at Stanford University. This site is an invaluable resource to keep up with some of this.

Suffice to say; I’m sceptical of the solution looking for a problem, aka Blockchain, as it is in its current guise for many reasons; decentralisation (it’s not), energy efficiency (dangerously inefficient), anonymity (not quite), speed (ZX81 rapidity), security (at the whim of someone else currently, as well as contributing to a security nightmare for business and public services).

Following on from the discussion —and criticism— on cryptocurrencies, it would be remiss of me not to talk about Central Bank Digital Currencies or CDBCs. These are digital currencies that have some similarities with cryptocurrencies but are fundamentally different from a technical, regulatory and implementation point of view.

One thing that may have escaped your attention is that the Caribbean has and is at the forefront of this technology. Rather than following the word, we find ourselves leading the world. That in and of itself is, in my mind, proof of the possibilities and opportunities that exists here, despite what you may think. Homegrown digital currency companies like Bitt Inc. are leading the world and are developing projects outside the region to Africa and beyond. We are also the home to the world’s first economic union CDBC. In this context, the question becomes “What can Europe learn from us?” rather than the other at round!

Let’s look at a couple of examples in the Caribbean and what they might mean for people living in the Caribbean.

The Caribbean has traditionally suffered from economic underdevelopment, leading to a wholesale stalling of digitisation for the last ten or so years. Where some countries had started their digital transformation that then got a kick in the butt by COVID-19, accelerating those efforts, here, COVID-19 started the process from scratch in most instances. There are several consequences of that economic underdevelopment that I won’t go into here. I’m not an economist, and I’m not sure it’s worth going over old and stale ground. We all know what we’re capable of here and why it hasn’t happened yet too!

However, a couple of things are of interest when talking about the technology of money. According to a CIGI-Ipsos survey in 20173, around 65% of the eligible population (children and adults) were unbanked. A large cash economy has difficulties, notwithstanding a sizeable informal economy that provides no receipts for government or public services, let alone access to ICT-based products and services.

CDBCs promise to resolve some of these structural problems, with access to payments systems and pseudo-banks for people that have traditionally or intentionally avoided the banking system. They also provide security for cash payments, withdrawals, and transfers. That last service is more important in the Caribbean than in other regions due to the distribution of populations around the different territories in the region and beyond.

Additionally, I note that remittances to Latin America and the Caribbean are estimated to be around USD 103 billion4, with Jamaica alone counting for over USD 3 billion. Remittances that are sent need to be transformed into cash, often by relying on convenient but expensive services such as MoneyGram or Western Union. The middleman always gets his cut.

One such CDBC currently in public beta (to use a tech expression) is DCash. DCash is the official CDBC of the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU). Having partnered with several of the local banks and businesses in the OECS, the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB) has launched its pilot program in Antigua and Barbuda, The Commonwealth of Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines with Anguilla to join the list after the initial test period.

From a technical point of view, DCash uses an open-source blockchain co-developed by IBM, called Hyperledger Fabric, a “permissioned” blockchain, ensuring only known parties are participants, thereby contributing to the immutability and the reduced risk of fraud and theft of assets on the blockchain. It does remain to be seen if it can scale to multiple thousands of transactions per second that traditional financial systems have been doing for decades. That is just a matter of technological maturity rather than anything else, in my view. No one believed the limited capability of the original iPhone would be the cornerstone of practically all that is digital today, either.

On a regulatory note, CDBCs are regulated and controlled by their issuing central banks by their very nature. In the case of the Sand Dollar —another CDBC that was the world’s first— the Central Bank of The Bahamas (CBB) is the regulating authority. The CBB authorise financial institutions and retailers to accept the Sand Dollar and handle the valuation and volatility of the currency. This should, in theory, provide a basis for trust in the use of the technology.

However, implementing these CDBCs is not easy, as the recent problems with DCash have been highlighted. For context, DCash transactions have been suspended for over a month5, seemingly due to a digital certificate issue. At this point, it would be easy to point out these difficulties and say, “See, it won’t work!”. But to do so is to ignore the substantial potential for a project of this scale and importance. I do not doubt that the currency will be back online soon and that the teething implementation problems will largely be resolved. I am also confident that other issues will be found and will be corrected. I am also a firm believer that the broader adoption by larger countries and currency unions will be streamlined as a direct result of the in-situ PoCs happening in the Caribbean.

If these projects are successful, as it seems they will be, the transformational changes to the Caribbean economy could be profound and in a good way. For example, cross-border trade in digital and physical goods could be unlocked from current restrictions, complexity and costs, not to mention other applications (remember Blockchain Hurricane Protection from CREAD)6. Don’t just take my word for it either, How blockchain accelerates small business growth and development.7

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6

I wrote about it here:

The Future is Digital

Digital Commerce. Blockchain (again)

Listen now | If you listened to the podcast version, you’d note I added some music. I broke out my skills in Garageband to make a quick accompanying jingle to spice up the podcast. Let me know what you think. 🎵 On to this week’s topics. I’m astonished I didn’t get roasted for completely dissing Blockchain as a useless technology a couple of weeks ago. I thought I’d t…

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3 years ago · 1 like · Matthew Cowen