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

Thanks for being a supporter, have a great day.

Visit the website to read all the archives.

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…

Read more

3 years ago · 1 like · Matthew Cowen

After my recent hiatus from writing, I’m feeling good about writing a few essays this year on some of the emerging topics that have captured the imagination of the technorati. I’ll also be diving into some other issues that, whilst not specifically about tech, have such a tech element to them they can be considered tech subjects.

If there is one overriding theme, it is that tech, or digital if you prefer, is sticking its nose into almost everything. As tech enthusiasts, we’ve been used to being sidelined or kept in the corner where we could express our undying love for our tech and not affect anything around us by accident. That is no longer the case.

Too many articles discuss how tech’s disruption has caused more unintended ill than benefits.

Does this mean that all tech is terrible? No, no. Of course not. But what it does mean is that we as tech people need to educate ourselves on nearly everything else to comprehend the world around us we are affecting, and perhaps have some insight into bringing on board those that can help us in their specialist subjects. I’ll get into that some other time, but suffice to say that the future will be equally tricky and fascinating.

Upcoming Podcast

On several occasions, I’ve been a guest on Michele Marius’s podcast, the ICT Pulse Podcast. We recently started recording what we hope will be an interesting conversation around a topic that feels far off for many of us in the Caribbean but is perhaps closer than we realise.

I’ll let Michele announce and release these before giving the game away.

I wanted to say how much I enjoy this format —an open discussion on a specific subject in approximately one hour.

Look out for it on your podcast app of choice soon, and do give us some feedback or pointers into things we may have missed or poorly explained. I’d love you to contribute.

Web 3.0

There has been a lot of interest of late over this thing called Web 3.0. It is hard to accurately describe what it is precisely because no one definition exists. Web 3.0 is whatever you want to suit your world view of the tech environment. I wanted to jot some initial thoughts I’ve had and submit them for discussion. I don’t pretend to be an expert in all of this. I’m trying to figure this out too. I’m just doing it out in the open here, from the perspective of a longtime tech expect.

Of course, there are some common elements in all definitions, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Most people agree that Web 3.0 is a collection of new technologies that will provide a fundamentally different experience on the internet from the world of Web 2.0. Some of those technologies you’ll have heard of or even have dabbled in, like Cryptocurrencies, NFTs and VR/AR.

“But Juanita never comes to The Black Sun anymore. Partly, she's pissed at Da5id and the other hackers who never appreciated her work. But she has also decided that the whole thing is bogus. That no matter how good it is, the Metaverse is distorting the way people talk to each other, and she wants no such distortion in her relationships.” — Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

I’ve avoided the early 90’s noun coined by Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash, Metaverse, purposefully because I have a feeling that, for the moment, it is just one massive land grab on the internet to get it “out there” that you are the most critical player in this field. Again, I’m not judging it as a concept. Even I declared having seen a part of the future when Marshmallow performed in Fortnite to 27 million fans in my essay The New Reality. Still, it is a little cynical in my view for companies to pretend that is it the next big coming purely for the benefit of themselves solely.

I’ll leave you with one last thought. I wrote about Fortnite hosting a live mega-concert for Marshmellow, with something like 10.7 million concert-goers — not counting the countless Twitch streamers (estimated at a total of 27 million people all told). I wondered then, as I do now, how could this technology be used for more “serious business” purposes. I was a regular attendee of Microsoft Conferences over the last 13/14 years, conferences that attract up-to 25 000 attendees in one place I have a badge and a letter to prove it 🏅. So how could Microsoft replace these conferences with an entirely digital experience? One thought that comes to mind is precisely that blueprint trialled by Fornite.

However, let’s start with the technology.

Web 3.0 is based on three technologies slowly gaining ground in capability and notoriety. Blockchain (and hence cryptocurrencies and NFTs), Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality. I am starting with the former in this essay.

Despite different use cases and outcomes, I tend to group Cryptocurrencies and NFTs in essentially the same basket. I know they’re not the same but bear with me. These technologies are based on Blockchain tech, and honestly, I genuinely think that Blockchain is interesting tech with some compelling use cases:

the underlying technology of these currencies is actually quite interesting and has place for use in Digital Transformation, hence why I’d like to talk about it in this week’s issue. That technology is, of course, Blockchain, or as it was originally known as, Block Chain. — Blockchain ≭ Cryptocurrency

Blockchain’s current problem is that it is both slow and energetically inefficient. Scaling Blockchain to applications that require hundreds of thousands of transactions per minute (banking anyone?) is currently a pipe-dream, despite advances being made regularly. But a little like Linux Desktop, it’s always ‘coming soon’. From an energy standpoint, it seems a little immoral to me that extraordinarily greedy systems, from an electrical perspective, operate without the slightest regard for the environment.

Take a look at what happened in Kosovo and in China,1 2 where the governments have banned crypto mining because of the strain on the electrical grid and illegal electrical supply diversions being employed by the less scrupulous. There are attempts at cleaning the face of this technology. For example, an initiative to carbon offset NFTs is a thing3 but is unlikely to have broad appeal or affect the energy requirements of Blockchains materially.

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.

We should additionally consider the two central tenants of the “reason” for Blockchain. Decentralisation and Immutability.

Starting with the latter, immutability is the unique property of an entry in the distributed ledger (we’ll get to that in a minute) that, once written, is permanent. That is, it can’t be altered. Let’s look at that a little closer.

The most popular Blockchain of the moment is Ethereum. Countless projects have been built on Ethereum to mint and distribute stable coins, CBDCs, NFTs and unbacked cryptocurrencies. Late last year, a bug was discovered in Polygon, a scaling project of Ethereum. It was such a severe bug as to allow all assets to be put at risk of being taken away. Stolen is the technical term. Twenty-four billion dollars were at stake.4 And, Polygon paid bug bounties that amounted to nearly $3.5 million5, but not before 2 million dollars were lost. This is not a one-off either. Several “hard fork” instances have had to be enacted to save the Blockchain from total pillage, thus resetting the original assets to $0.

And good luck in getting redress if it’s your asset that was stolen.

This brings us to the second tenant, decentralisation.

The growing backlash against “Big Tech” has fuelled a view that stripping any one entity of absolute power is the answer to abusive centralisation. Meta (who are you kidding Facebook?), Alphabet (née Google), Apple and Microsoft, amongst others, are all accused of abusing their power and essentially rent-seeking6 their users.

The idea behind decentralising the Blockchain is to prevent it from being domiciled on any one platform or property. The apparent advantages are resilience and allegiance. By definition, a distributed system is more resilient as failures in any single node are unlikely to disrupt the whole. Similarly, by decentralising the system, if one participating actor becomes abusive or otherwise falls out of favour, it’s easy to turn off the tap and squeeze them out of the system.

But what most people don’t realise is that this distributed nature of Blockchain is mostly a myth, and at best, being grossly overstated.

The issue lies in using the APIs necessary to build Blockchains such as the aforementioned Ethereum. There is only a tiny amount of APIs used currently, with prevalent ones like Alchemy being used by many. These APIs oversee the read/writes to the ledger. Other APIs used to pull information from the Blockchain are developed and run by a minuscule population. That is, a lot of trust is being placed on a tiny group for pretty much all Blockchain interaction.

Additionally, if you want to buy or sell assets, like NFTs, again, only a handful of platforms exist currently. You may have heard of OpenSea, for example. They account for around 95% of the NFT market.

Then ask yourself the question about where all this stuff runs? On the cloud, of course. But who’s cloud? Amazon’s and Microsoft’s, for the most part.

There are instances of whole markets becoming inoperable —i.e., no trading, no consuming— during AWS cloud outages.7 Thankfully they are not that often, but when they do occur, the inconvenience is enormous.

Then remember where the actual data for the NFT is stored. Generally on someone’s shared drive on a cloud drive service (at best) or a home-built server somewhere, god forbid.

This doesn’t sound as decentralised as perhaps you first thought.

To be clear, I’m playing Devil’s Advocate here deliberately to inform you and to provoke discussion. I’m crypto-neutral for the time being. I can see huge benefits, particularly to the unbanked or the vulnerable that are slowly being excluded from taking part in society. I can see the “value” of digital assets in the same way a 16th Century oil painting by some obscure bloke can be worth millions. Why not?

But without proper oversight, redress in the case of fraud/theft and backing from governments, I can only see risk and potential for propping up devastating illegal activity with my blessing. It’s no surprise drug dealers are turning to crypto. I can’t morally take that position and refuse to prop up Ponzi schemes.

In the following essay, I’ll get into the other aspects of Web 3.0, namely AR, VR and a few additional thoughts. Let me know if you have anything to contribute. It would be my pleasure.

The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in digital tech and its effects. Feel free to contribute. A little share from time to time would also be most appreciated.

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Visit the website to read all the archives. Have a great day.

Good day from Martinique.

I’ve been on a hiatus for a few weeks as I wind down a multi-month project researching and investigating the state of ICT in the Eastern Caribbean, I hope you don’t mind. Rather than the 2,000-ish words I write here, I’ve written and re-written over 50,000 words in the last month or so. Looking at the statistics for Grammarly —yes, I use it happily— I have written over half a million words over the previous year, despite being on a reduced schedule. I’m back malgret tout(1), and I’m hoping to share some of the insights and information I’ve been researching.

In addressing COVID-19, the good news here in Martinique, infection rates are stable, and there is much hope to look forward to with the start of vaccination campaigns soon throughout our region. If I have a bad word to say, it’s about France’s strategy, which frankly was woefully inadequate and too reserved for dealing with a national and global tragedy like we’re seeing. Things are picking up now, so hopefully, we’ll have more good news in a few months. If I have any explanation for the French government’s attitude, it is rooted in technology, as almost everything is these days.

This is a discussion for another day, but France is one of the most vaccine skeptical nations globally, so much so, the government was forced to introduce legislation that barred school children from attending schools if they didn’t have their vaccinations up to date. Social Media, particularly Facebook, had played a significant role in the amplification of misinformation. As a result, more and more parents had chosen not to vaccinate their children, making herd immunity less effective as the absolute numbers of vaccinated people dropped. I’d like to dig into regulation and control of “Internet Power” in the future, and I’m gathering my thoughts and researching, to bring you an informed point of view, hopefully.

Back to COVID-19, around the Caribbean, the story is a mixed bag, but on the whole, the Caribbean has suffered far less from the virus in terms of infections and death, but paradoxically suffered far worse than others from the economic effects as the effects of substantially reduced tourism is affecting our region.

I thought I’d start the 2021 season with a quick outline of some of the trends I see in the global market and how they may or may not affect us here. Let’s get started.

Some of the trends I’m seeing

Cloud Computing

Despite the best efforts of various despots and nationalists worldwide, we are living in an increasingly global marketplace where local trends are being driven from outside sources, having profound effects on how a business operates locally. The increasing use of Cloud Computing, for example, is a trend that started outside the region and has now shoehorned itself into local politics and business strategy. COVID-19 has accelerated that push, but it has also exposed many weaknesses in our digital infrastructure that will profoundly affect our countries over the coming years. Subjects like Digital Health and Digital Healthcare are now starting to be taken more seriously than at any time in the past and looming regulations of “Big Tech” are also on the list of topic discussions for governments and businesses throughout the Caribbean.

Cloud Computing is a catch-all term used to describe the tools and services offered by companies managed and controlled by remote data centers dotted around the globe. For example, in the region, Digicel has built a data center network in Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago to host Infrastructure and Software services throughout the region to its customers. The two most prominent players in the market are Amazon with AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft with its Azure offerings.

Cloud computing, as an opportunity, is still massive for the region, with IDC predicting more than 2T US$ of global cloud sales by 2023 with a reasonably even split over the types of service offerings (IaaS 9%, Managed Services 20%, Consulting 16%, SaaS 19%, and Support 17%) for the Microsoft Partners surveyed. (Source: IDC Software Partner Survey, January 2020). The Caribbean will be no exception in the coming years.

Digital Transformation and Work from Home

You know I’m not a fan of this overused and abused term, but it still resonates for many businesses just starting to open their eyes to the prospect of integrating at a deep level, digital technologies in their businesses. But it is precisely because it has become ubiquitous that there is now a serious drive around the world for companies to embark upon their transformative projects. COVID-19 has probably done more for the cause than any big-budget marketing campaign from the likes of Microsoft and Google.

Lockdowns and new working practices are now beyond the point of being stop-gap solutions to stem a hemorrhage of income. Companies have been forced to experiment with new ways of working together, initially entirely remotely —which didn’t go down well for some— and now in a more hybrid mode. Indicators are starting to appear to suggest that we are in the midst of a sea change of working practices that legislation will likely adapt to. Vacant office space is at an all-time high in some cities, and immigration/emigration figures between different states in the USA show that a recalibration of resource distribution is taking place.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced a significant shift in working remotely, collaboration and the need to be in a single-space to produce. For many years, we have talked about this possibility, but very few organisations have been able or willing to make the human and financial investments necessary to enable this new way of working. COVID-19 has come along and wholly blown all previous notions out of the water, making all but the most resistant organisation think deeply about how they can change their working practices to take advantage of a situation. That is not likely to be resolved in the next few months.

Digital Transformation will be the backbone, or the operating system if you will, of this adoption. Companies that adopt digital throughout the value chain will be those that adapt to the new.

Security

Security is becoming a defining differentiator for solutions that are becoming increasingly complex as the old-world security perimeters are broken down as we move more services to the cloud. Security is no longer limited to firewalls, passwords, and antivirus. Technologies like two-factor authentication (2FA), Virtual Private Networks (VPN), encryption, and Single Sign-On (SSO) services are increasingly in demand and an example where expertise is not readily available in the region. These services cannot be isolated from the implications to business, marketing, and operations as sophisticated attacks are no longer driven by teenagers driven by pride and disruptive cyber-graffiti exploits. In 2018, the island of Sint Maarten (Dutch side) suffered an incident that took offline government services for the 40000 or so population, and according to the Caribbean Council, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines was the target for ISIS originated hacks on Government websites, although details are scarce on the impact. Therefore, knowledge of the whole security stack and its integration with the business value chain is imperative to develop valued services and advice, such as risk management, BI, and Data Analytics.

COVID-19 has provided an almost unlimited opportunity for individual, organised, and state actors to target users over COVID-19 fears. Just days after the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHPRA) approved Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, a sophisticated hack and phishing campaign was mounted to attempt to steal information concerning the logistics process.

Regulation

Besides the global pandemic of COVID-19, if 2020 has taught us anything, it is that regulation of a largely unregulated sector of the economy is about to start in earnest. Initially, it is likely to affect the multinationals such as Google, Facebook, etc., mostly. However, make no mistake, much of the legislation that will be implemented on national and local levels will affect businesses down to the small suppliers of technology. The GDPR of 2016, implemented in 2018, ostensibly protected European citizens from personal data transfers and data mining abuses. It affected every company on the planet that needed to collect and store personal data of European citizens. Online marketplaces and social media sites were the legislation’s apparent targets, but any business that dealt internationally was required to hire, train, and implement a Data Controller and Data Protection Officer responsible for ensuring compliance. Liabilities and penalties were harsh for non-compliance, the most mediatised being either a €20 million or 4% of annual worldwide turnover fine for a serious breach.

GDPR is but one example, with others becoming hot topics in the coming years, such as COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act), Do Not Track Legislation, ePrivacy Regulations, the Digital Markets Act, and the Digital Services Act, for example. In this climate, businesses will be required to update current and upcoming legislation continually and implement training, auditing, and compliance adjustments continually through training and consulting services from specialists.

Many industries are subject to specific, technical regulation, such as Pharma, Oil & Gas, Finance, Utilities, and Cars. Tech and ICT are about to join that list with specific regulations affecting specific issues. It is essential to understand that rules are not usually implemented as wide-brush solutions, and that regulation is highly targeted to treat a particular problem as defined by the various regulatory authorities. “Banks” have never been regulated, only specific products and services in the banking industry are regulated, Deposits, Credit Cards, Pensions, Trading, Mortgages, Futures and Options, by way of example.

Regulation may also lead to an increase in digital sovereignty, with the above example of GDPR showing how this may come to be. The Great Firewall of China is another extreme example, and the fact that China and India now count for more internet users than the rest of the world in total is showing us how the balance of power over the Internet is moving from being US-centric to something more international. One thing to bear in mind is that regulation is designed to protect a specific point of view. The US-centric perspective is more about keeping prices lower —which explains why the free-to-use products have mainly been let off until now— whereas the European-centric position is about healthy competition and consumer protection. This divergence will play out over the coming years and influence every stratum of business.

Digital Health

In an era of ubiquitous access to internet-connected devices from almost anywhere, one of the pre-pandemic concerns was an issue that has been questioned by humanity for centuries; Is the next-generation spending too much time with technology? Much debate had been made over the amount of time people were spending with technologies connected to the Internet. Screen time was such a hot topic that many software providers stepped up with solutions to monitor and control the time people, particularly children, could spend on these devices.

It is in this direction that new insights about screen time will evolve, and it will be a debate about quality, not quantity. It will be about how we can implement “good” screen time and then monitor and control it. It will be about preventing “bad” screen time with quantifiable justification and suggested preventative solutions. This will likely affect the education sector hugely by providing tools better adapted to this new paradigm. We are only just at the end of the beginning of a change in digital health.

Disinformation

Disinformation and conspiracy theories have been part of human nature for millennia. However, recent technical advances like social networking and recommendation algorithms have fuelled to an extent never witnessed, the spread and belief of such disinformation that has consequences for society and possibly even democracy. Today, businesses focusing their marketing and revenue-making activities online should be aware that they could be subject to organic and organised campaigns to discredit their work, profession, or any other attribute that is the current target for attack. An example of this extreme took place in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy when nurses suddenly went from national heroes to national conspirators over misinformation about Coronavirus vaccines.

Disinformation is no longer the “graffiti of the Internet”; it is being used politically and weaponised in cyber-attacks throughout the world—one to watch for.

Automation and Artificial Intelligence

Over the last few years, we have seen an explosion in the number and prevalence of automated systems, from website chatbots that provide first-line support services to deeply integrated automation-development platforms such as Zapier and Microsoft Power Automate. Many predict an increase in spending on automation over the next three years, with services companies well-placed to take advantage of this opportunity by providing help in implementing these systems.

Two main types of automation are emerging as the development targets: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Business Process Automation (BPA). RPA can be applied to many general and industry-specific tasks such as Procurement, Marketing, HR, Retail, Telecommunications and Banking, to name a few. BPA is best suited to the processing of unstructured data sets such as voice, images, and natural language systems, and often rely on Artificial Intelligence to accomplish line of business help, for example, real-time translations over video conferencing. GPT-3 is one such language model that has produced human-like text for human interactions through chatbots etc. Currently, only developed markets such as the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific are investing heavily in these capabilities, but the Latin American market is predicted to grow five-fold by 2025, according to learnbonds.com.

I don’t know what the future will hold, of course, but looking at trends in the wider world can at least give us a heads-up that can help us better understand and adapt. Here’s to a better 2021.

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1 Despite everything

My apologies for the long lapse between writing essays. If I’m honest, the world has been just too much to afford me the mental space to think, write, edit and record these essays. I’ve taken on more responsibilities and simultaneously fell down the rabbit hole with the US presidential elections. And, despite not being directly affected by the ousting of the “Great Orange Liar”, I can’t help but be touched on a personal level. Seeing the once-great nation disintegrating in front of my eyes bothers me much. That’s all I’ll say for the moment.

On a more positive note, as we draw ever-closer to deploying what might be a solution to our number one problem of the novel coronavirus, I thought I’d take a look at what the pandemic has exposed and what digital transformation means today.

One last note on housekeeping, the keen-eyed will notice that I have moved this newsletter to my companies’ domain (dgtlfutures.com). Everything else stays the same and all the existing links still work. It is now easier to find, as it is at newsletter.dgtlfutures.com

The state of Digital Transformation in 2020

When the pandemic appeared to be a real threat to the countries in which it took hold, many including myself estimated that this might be the impetus required to get companies to start, deploy and finish their digital transformations. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth, and it comes back to some difficulties I’ve been discussing for years.

Let’s take a look at where we are in digital transformation today. I’ll go on to show what is missing, what is needed and how we get there.

The first wave - The implementation of computerised back-end systems

The likes of IBM with their AS/400 and DEC with their VAX minis and mainframes were the masters of this. Not because it was hard, but because it was easy and it was a licence to print money. Ever since the first VisiCalc spreadsheet showed the CEO that he or she didn’t need to manually calculate the columns and rows themselves (or have one of the minions to do it), it was inevitable that computerised system would penetrate deeper and deeper in businesses. Those that afforded the outrageous costs of the time, were given an advantage that had not been seen since the invention of the wheel (the innovation that disrupted the movement of atoms from one place to another).

Quickly, IBM and their competitors spun up massive sales teams that crisscrossed the globe demonstrating and selling stock control systems, basic accounting ledgers and simple statistical reporting programs. On the back of this, software-focused companies ramped up work producing ever more complex designs that piggy-backed on the already-deployed hardware. Being that the business model of the IBMs and DECs of the era was to sell high-margin hardware and lucrative support contracts for that hardware, they were pleased to let the software houses integrate their software as it made the hardware even more desirable.

This symbiotic relationship even gave rise to the “Killer App” moniker we use today.

The businesses that needed to make ever-quicker decisions wrote practically open cheques to the manufacturers, as they were confident that the returns on the investments would outdo the spend. And they were right to believe this, as the entire industry structured itself to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A long time ago, I interviewed for a support role in one of the world’s largest banks, in their London office. I was applying for a position as a support engineer that would be dispatched to the trading floor. I was genuinely intrigued by the floor and asked if it would be possible to see the environment in which I would be working. After a short pause, the IT manager agreed to the unusual request and led me down the stairs to the big oak doors that displayed an ominous sign on a big brass plate. “Do Not Feed The Animals” it read. I chuckled and braced myself for the spectacle that was a Trading Floor in the early 90s. I’ll tell that story another day. But what I most remember was that each trader had two complete AS/400 systems under their desks. This, a room with perhaps 60 to 100 people in it.

That would be a multi-million pound budget by today's rates. But this was standard issue, as the opportunity cost was so high for traders that were just that slightly slower than their competition during trading hours. Their killer app was the trading platform that operated on super-slim timing to augment the trader’s abilities.

The second wave - The paperless office

After the fury of this first wave of digital transformation, it was clear to businesses that they needed to go further, and hunting season was declared on paper—a hunting season that has not, by any stretch of the imagination, finished yet even in 2020.

But that is beside the point.

End-user facing documents and reports were the next low-hanging fruit, and businesses proceeded to digitise these objects as and when they could based on the technologies at their disposal. Very few companies bought software with the sole intention of moving paper reports to digital versions of themselves. It was just the icing on the cake for most. So now, timesheets, TP reports (see Office Space) and countless other document types were converted.

Operators would export data from the ERP systems like SAP, import them into Excel and produce the charts that ended up in Word and PowerPoint documents. But even at this stage, paper wasn’t entirely eliminated, as often these reports (and I see this still today) were printed out in colour and distributed manually or by mail (the physical internal and external postal systems) for analysis and treatment. At some point, people realised that this could be made more efficient. With the advent of internal email systems gaining popularity, sending the PPT over email was the method of choice that enabled faster and better “collaboration”.

I used the quotes, as, by today’s standards, this could be nothing but further from the truth of what collaboration is. The back-and-forth of individually saved and edited documents on the network led to an exponential growth in data storage needs for both the email systems and the personal data storage systems.

When working on sophisticated archiving systems, I discovered that it was not that uncommon to have approximately 100 copies of the same documents on the network. That email sent to 20 colleagues, saved on their “personal space” produces in one step 41 copies!

The third wave - The age of collaboration

When the apparent limitations of this model became apparent, and the software had caught up, we started to build-out specific collaboration software to address these limitations.

As a side note, it must be said that IBM was (not for the first time) way ahead of this curve. Whilst the likes of Novell and Microsoft were supplying the pipes to connect businesses with unstable and simplistic networking hardware, IBM bought and extended a company that built a virtually limitless collaboration system that was too much too early. Lotus Domino was the first “proper” collaboration tool that let business easily deploy just-what-was-needed software to decision-makers. It included storage, sharing, app-building and elementary database capabilities that were far ahead of the curve at the time. Its complexity and frankly, the hostile user interface was part of its downfall, but it was an essential step in the computing-business interface building world.

Fast-forward to pre-pandemic, and the state of collaboration today. We see that companies that had implemented the new generation of basic collaboration systems could provide some semblance of business continuity. Whilst those who hadn’t yet taken the steps, scrambled to implement tools, shoehorning them into day-to-day operations. With varying degrees of success, it should be noted. The pandemic has forced many companies to evaluate if the tools work. They work that is for sure, and work surprisingly well, as they are developed from years of research and experience testing. Forcing them on to unprepared staff will only expose the frailty of your operations if you don’t do the hard work of real digital transformation.

But back to the pandemic. Businesses that have been forced to close their doors to receiving public in their offices and shops have turned to their most pressing problem of managing the customer relationship. How do I sell to someone who would previously wander around my shop for 15 minutes before picking an item and purchasing it?

Facebook and WhatsApp, for example, have provided a means to interact with the client, and possibly vehicle some sales. I’d argue that those sales were probably not lost in the first place, but let’s not split hairs. However, they don’t address the fundamental problems of a wholesale shift in the customer journey fro discovery to purchase and beyond. Plasters on broken leg might make you feel a little better, but they don’t repair the break! So, as we progress in the pandemic, most are preoccupied with the customer-facing elements, ignoring the opportunity to implement real change that would set them up for the afterworld.

In trying to schematise the idea, I’ve settled on three blocks; the back-end, the operations and the customer-facing parts.

Source: Matthew Cowen

The back-end has been deployed for many years and is efficient at what it does. What is doesn’t do is the problem we have today, however. Legacy AS/400 and DEC systems are still prevalent all around the world. Those legacy systems are notoriously difficult to interface with, notoriously poor at real-time and notoriously poor at providing reusable data for business intelligence, or BI.

But the customer-facing elements are the new centre of focus. It doesn’t take much work to find hundreds and hundreds of businesses that increase your visibility online and help to market and promote your wares, and that’s just in our region. If you think about Internet assumptions, each one of these businesses competes with the millions around the world that are providing the same thing. It’s the reality of the Internet. But let’s not get hung up on that, and focus on the value-added service they’re providing in a world where it increasingly more challenging to be found. This value-add is only limited in that it doesn’t interface well with the real issue for businesses tackling digital transformation, the operations and the back-end. You can sell online, great, but how does that affect the whole value-chain and all the interlacing parts in your business?

The fourth wave (we’re not here yet) - Reimagining the value chain

The elephant in the room is that big block in the middle; Operations. Real digital transformation comes from looking at the whole can of worms that make up your daily operations. The simple tasks, right up to the complex multi-layer, multi-purpose and multi-approval workflows.

I’m not diminishing the value of the fire-fighting going on today in any way — it is a case of survival in many instances—, but the real work should start now. Businesses need to evaluate in detail every single process that makes up their very existence. In assessing, they need to determine three things; 1) the reason a process exists: is it there simply because that’s the way it has always been done? 2) the worth of the process, or to put it another way: what value does that process bring to the business? And 3) the justification for the process: which is not the reason, nor the individual value, but more of an evaluation about how it fits into the whole. Is the sum of its parts greater than the whole? 

Redesigning and redeploying those processes is necessary and the only path to digital transformation that will bear its fruits in the future. It will undoubtedly put in question your back-end and will almost certainly change your front-end. And as hard as it will be, it will likely be the difference between your businesses prosperity or ultimate demise.

Intel’s Disruption Followup

I’ve been studying and writing about the disruption taking place on Intel’s x86 line for several years. I’ve written substantially about it here (here and here) in this newsletter and in unpublished form. I explained why it is hard to spot disruption, even if it is happening in front of us. It becomes doubly hard when we are focused on our businesses staying alive, as so many of us are in this current pandemic:

From Intel’s Pohoiki Beach and Disruption Theory:

The problem with theories like these is that it is pretty much the same problem we have when we discuss human or animal evolution. We find it hard to understand the future direction of the evolutive process in real-time, mostly because it happens so slowly and over many generations. From a retrospective position, we can see what happened, and we can often even, have an informed guess as to why it happened. Reliable prediction, it seems, is just unreachable. With modern digital technologies and the pace with which they evolve, we might be able to see enough into the future to discern and predict outcomes for companies in this new world.

I described the history behind Intel’s disruption:

Intel is a well-run long-established microprocessor design and fabrication company, with a phenomenal marketing arm and deep links to the most important companies in the computing industry. Founded in 1968, a year before AMD, it has run head to head with AMD and in nearly every battle beaten AMD on just about every level that means anything; marketing, price, availability, design, availability, to name a few. 

The new entrant in the microprocessor market is known as ARM, or as it was previously known, Advanced RISC Machine and before that Acorn RISC Machine — giving you an idea to its origins, powering Acorn Archimedes personal computers. Founded in Cambridge, UK, in 1990 (22 years after Intel), the processor design was a complete revolution and rethink of classic processor design, with the clue in the companies’ original name; RISC.

RISC means Reduced Instruction Set Computer. The Instruction Set of a processor is a fundamental element to how the processor behaves but more importantly, how it is directed to do things, what is more commonly known as programmed. Modern terms, such as coding are basically the same things. Different microprocessors can have the same instruction set, allowing programmers to write the same code, or for the compilers — software designed to turn more human-readable code into native machine language, that is virtually impossible to understand as a human — to translate into the same instructions.

Compared to ARM, Intel microprocessors are CISC, Complex Instruction Set Computers. Without going in to microprocessor design, an instruction is a type of command run by the processor to achieve a desired outcome, like a multiplication, division, comparison, etc. Complex instructions can be of variable length, take more than one processor cycle to execute (processor cycles govern how fast the microprocessor can operate), but are more efficient in memory (RAM) usage. RISC instructions are more simplified and standardised, and critically, take only one processor cycle to execute. They have trade-offs, managing memory (RAM) less efficiently and require the compilers to do more work when translating the code into machine language, i.e., potentially slower development times whilst waiting for the compilation to finish.

The memory issue was only an issue until recently, when memory has become effectively abundant and cheap, allowing hardware designs to incorporate huge amounts of RAM in their designs.

At the begginingg of my writing, I’d tried to frame it in terms of Clayton Christensen’s Disruption Theory, an observation that was, at that time, not frequently put forward. A recent blog post on Medium by one of Christensen’s students vindicated what I’d been writing about for a long time. Have a read if you’re interested in the theory. He does a great job of articulating it.

But it got me thinking about how one could spot disruption or more importantly, one could use the framework to try to provoke disruption. In this essay, I’m delving into that first point.

How do you spot disruption?

Going back to the basics, and ignoring all the incorrect uses of the word —no, disruption is not just doing the same thing but cheaper— I thought I’d try to give you the tools to see disruption happening in your markets.

The big red flag to look for is a product or service that does some of what your existing product or service does, but does it better on a couple of metrics simple metrics; price, efficiency and friction. 

Cheaper is not disruption

A less-expensive product alone is not a sign of disruption. What is, however, is a product that evolves steadily providing more and more features and competing on more and more parts of your product or service all whilst its price is significantly lower than yours. Again, it might just be a cheaper product to produce and sell. You have to ask from the customer’s point of view. Is it fulfilling the job to be done? Is it good enough that it makes your buyers question the need to pay your prices? Can your customers successfully integrate and use the competing product despite its shortcomings over your product and still find value?

Efficiency is key

If the competing product is more efficient, be that in the sales cycle, the use-cycle or the complete lifecycle of the product, buyers will, of course, investigate and evaluate that product. Can the product do essentially the same job as the existing product on the market? Does it do this faster, better with more predictable outcomes? Efficiency might afford you competitor lower costs too.

Friction is proportional to sales

Friction is often overlooked as an important force that influences buying habits. The more you reduce friction in the purchase operation and reception of the product, the more chance the buyer tends to have in choosing your product over a competing one. If the new entrant has substantially reduced this friction compared to the friction required to purchase your product, this should be another indicator that things might be difficult from this point forward for you.

Loyal customers may soften the impact at first, but even the most faithful will switch if the product fulfils several of the criteria I have highlighted above.

But that alone is not enough, you need to have historical data, or you need to develop a way to project into the future and make assumptions about where you think the product and service are going or where it could go. Just look at the image that explains disruptive innovation below. Looking at the “Entrant’s disruptive trajectory” line as compared to the “Mainstream” line shows how, eventually, disruptive innovation will surpass the mainstream product or service when “performance” is evaluated based on the metrics I’ve highlighted above (to name a few).

Source: HBR

If you are the incumbent and you wish to stay profitable and dominant, you have but two choices. Embark on a “sustaining trajectory” or innovate your own disruptive innovation. Just be aware, a sustaining trajectory has its upper limits!

The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in Digital Technologies and how it affects their business. I’d really appreciate it if you would share it to those in your network.

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