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