If you know me well, you know that this is one of my least favourite times of the year. It’s complicated, so I’ll spare you the details. But It does seem to be tradition for blogs and newsletters to do a retrospective of the, soon to be over, year. It’s possibly something inherited from the traditional media industry. And whilst I’m not really a fan of this tradition —you can call me a miserable git for detesting the Spotify-like “wrapped” emails that have been invading and polluting my inbox and general use of apps. Please stop!— I thought it might be useful for me to have a look over some of the stuff I’ve been doing here this year. You don’t have to read this; please just click Mark as Read if it’s not your thing. I won’t judge.

I might take a break next week, so if you don’t see a new email next week, you’ll know why.

In the meantime, have a good holiday.

I started the new year with a new site (this one) with the intention of bringing all my writing and online presence into one place. The Substack “Nazi Bar” problem precipitated the move, and I needed to move off the bigger platforms onto something more independent and open that also had values around the open web.

I landed on micro.blog, a small company providing a simplified and highly customisable platform for blogging. It included newsletter capabilities (albeit rudimentary) and embraced federated technologies for authors to publish on other platforms. It has its own community and provides a social-like experience on a smaller and more manageable scale compared to standard social media (the Facebook’s and so on.)

Since then, I have posted exactly 60 articles, averaging one article a week in newsletter form and a couple of other posts about specific topics. I have been able to keep up a stable rhythm of writing and posting. I generally write starting on Sunday evening and finishing the article on Monday. Editing and proofreading are done on Monday evening so that I can post in the evening or early morning. I have been pretty consistent all year, although lately, I’ve been posting on Tuesday morning.

This post will be the 61st of the year, pushing the total number of words to over 50,000. Depending on who you ask, that is about the length of a book. It is on the lower end of the word count but book-length nonetheless.

In July, I started working with a small IT company on a part-time basis, and personally, I was worried that it would make it difficult for me to keep writing these articles. In the end, it worked out rather well, as it gave me a certain structure conducive to reading, researching, and writing a lot. I’m grateful to them for my employment. I’ve been continuing small contracts with other businesses, too, so the variety has been interesting and helped me keep my feet on the ground regarding what small businesses are living rather than the lofty ideals the media and tech companies often project. I can tell you they have literally no idea what is happening or what to do and are just happy to keep the money flowing through subscriptions, up-selling and cross-selling. The day a big firm really understands SMEs and does something for them, they’ll clean up.

This has been, loosely, the theme of this year’s writing: the disconnect and the disconnection of tech and society. A new word entered the dictionary, enshittification, to describe how businesses like Meta, Google, and plenty of others I have written about here have all turned a corner and are now actively making our online lives as hostile an environment as possible to maximise their profits.

I won’t re-litigate that here again; you can read a few of the posts I wrote here:

https://matthewcowen.org/archive/

I think the most significant topic I have concentrated on this year is Internet Governance.

I was in the ARIN Advisory Council election, and despite not getting elected, I didn’t disgrace myself. I look forward to being on the next list and continuing my involvement with ARIN. I hope we can do something with the French West Indies this year. I’d had initial talks, but time ran out. I’ll keep you posted.

I will continue to concentrate on this topic, and I’ll be looking to see if there are any employment opportunities in this space for someone like me who has many years of experience with the Internet and associated technologies and likes researching and writing about it. Please reach out if you know of anything.

I wrote a little about LLMs and had to admit defeat on the terminology. To re-iterate, LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT and the like are not Artificial Intelligence. Statistical next-word predictors are all they are. Impressive sometimes, yes, but absolutely useless most of the time. Unfortunately, that’s the conclusion that many are coming to now, as the rubber has hit the road. I’ll remind you of my experience in the Microsoft Copilot training, where the trainer used Copilot with a prompt that didn’t produce what was expected and then took a bunch of time to coax it into working, arguably spending more time than just doing the damn thing manually!

This year, I’ve tried to take a more pragmatic approach to discussion tech, Digital Transformation and the topics that seem to attract more smoke and mirrors discussion than real-world and practical analysis. I don’t think I’ve done an amazing job at that yet, but I think I’m definitely better at it than I was and probably better than a number of prominent tech journalists. To clarify, I’m not suggesting I’m a better journalist. I’m suggesting that I’m perhaps a little better at critical thinking about tech.

I hope to continue writing like this. I enjoy it, even if it is painful and cringe-inducing at times. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it.

My ambitions for 2025 are to be more structured in my approach to articles. Next year, I plan to explore a topic in more detail, so maybe I should write a series of articles. Let me have a few glasses of Rhum over the holidays, and I’ll come back refreshed and ready to continue.

Thank you for reading, and I’ll be back in the new year.

Reading

My reading has only increased this year. I suspect next year will be no different. I have a ton on the backlog to read, and more is coming out daily.

Artificial Intelligence Isn’t Actually That Amazing - The reality can’t match the hype.

I think the title says it all. I’ll leave you to discover the short article. Just bear in mind that this is from an economist.

Dark Patterns in Cookie Banners: CNIL issues formal notice to website publishers

You may or may not like the cookie consent forms (which, by the way, exist because of the perverse interpretations from the ad tech industries of the requirements of EU regulation). Still, they try to move some control to you, the reader, rather than the ad tech industry. Well, they’re unhappy and not content enough with the already vast sums of minutiae about you and your life. They’re also sneaky bastards trying to trick you into clicking where you don’t want.

The “Sovereign Democratic Infrastructure” Hyperscalers Trick. Why We Shouldn’t Fall for It, and What We Should Do Instead

This is a very considered discussion of technology, sovereignty, data centres, and control. I’m not sure I agree with every point made, but I’m glad I read it.

European Union Member States Speak Up for Encryption

Noticeably absent… France, Spain, Belgium, Italy and others that should know better.

Enjoy your break if you have one, and have a great week.

It’s a reasonably short one today. I’m progressing on what I promised to write up but haven’t been able to finish as yet. Soon come.

As I write this (Monday afternoon), the first official day of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has wrapped up. I say this as I am neither attending in-person nor following live virtually. This might seem a little odd for someone who is building more connections and work related to the field of Internet Governance. It is very easy to explain why. The place where the forum is being held this year is a significant factor in my conscientious objection to attendance. The forum is currently running in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

As someone who supports and defends human rights (admittedly at my small level of impact), I cannot condone or approve of a forum of this stature and importance being held in a country that has time and time again shown its disdain for respecting the fundamental human rights of people and has gone as far as extra-judicial murdering of a high profile dissenter and journalist.

So what am I saying? Should any regime that violates human rights (and, by extension, many digital rights) should be completely shunned, ignored and not negotiated with? Not at all. I’m all for working with and collaborating with regimes where the common good of the world and people are at the centre of that work. What I do think we should be doing is not fawning over the opulent surroundings and preferential treatment we get compared to its citizens, and we should demand human rights concessions before any discussion to host such an important conference.

After a cursory glance at the conference schedule, I found this event:

Source: IGF website

At first, I thought it was a joke. It is not.

I will take my time to look at many sessions once the conference is over, and I can pick and choose the rhythm to digest some of the information.

I was not the only one to register and not attend. Hopefully, a message may have been sent as intended. Many groups of people cannot travel to Riyadh because of the danger it would put them in as a result of their sexual orientation, religion, political and journalistic positions. This is undoubtedly not the way to hold what is ostensibly an “open” forum that “welcomes all”.

AccessNow went further and held a round table discussion entitled “Internet Governance Forum (IGF) 2024: when digital rights collide with digital oppression.” I attended and very much enjoyed the conversation. You can watch the recording at this YouTube link. I politely ask you to take the time to watch it if you have the time.

What Saudi Arabia is doing fits into my previous discussion about Internet fragmentation. States are starting to try to overstep their current self-imposed limits on Internet meddling.

I said in that article:

I think we’re heading into a critical phase of governance and the overall battle for control of the Internet.

…

The Internet has too big of an influence on populations for governments and ultra-rich private firms with diminishing scruples to ignore. The “Splinternet” is already here, albeit limited in application. The worry is that states that elect authoritarians and increasingly extreme right-wing governments will default to control of the Internet, just as they controlled media in the past.

Saudi Arabia has complete control of the media and is extending that control to the Internet, imposing its oppressive will on its citizens. And whilst I think that governments should get involved in governing the Internet in their countries, some lines shouldn’t be crossed. Unfortunately, these lines are being redrawn and re-redrawn in many countries, including those that traditionally wouldn’t do such a thing (see the UK, USA, and many others).

We can talk all we like about “the Internet we want,” but it will not materialise unless we fight for it.

As I have previously discussed, federated systems, such as social, document storage and sharing, and other organisational systems, are part of the solution. See ActivityPub and other decentralised protocols.

As I wrote that article, I realised that I should give a little bit of an explanation of what a federated system is. And yes, it is not that easy to explain to a layperson, but we all use at least one service that runs in a federated manner. It is robust, decentralised and open for anyone to use. It is email. The basic email protocol, SMTP, is an example of a federated system that allows all parties worldwide to communicate quickly using agreed standards whilst having local control on some aspects of the delivery. It is simple to spin up a mail host and participate in mail delivery and reception (not that easy, but certainly possible). I’m simplifying a little, but you understand the principle.

That’s all I’ll say on the topic for the moment.

Reading

Last week, I promised some reading links:

What people in the global majority need from networks

Wreckage/salvage provides a breakdown of research on the Internet, society, federation, and humanity in the digital world. This article discusses the uses of Big Tech platforms and why populations that are being exploited continue to use them. It is a sobering read that helped me understand my privilege when choosing the tools I use every day.

Domain Trends Signal Shifting Tides in 2024

This article in Circle ID discusses findings from a significant domain name provider in the registration and use of domain names in 2024. I’ve seen significant growth for a Caribbean ccTLD, .gy (Guyana). This was from an analysis of BlueSky domain handles. It turns out that .gy is the second-most used ccTLD on the site. After some research, I discovered it was due to a bridging system called Brid.gy that allows BlueSky and Mastodon to interact. I hope Guyana are getting paid enough for its use.😉

French Piracy Blocking Order Goes Global, DNS Service Quad9 Vows to Fight

France just can’t keep its hands off the Internet at the moment. Whether or not you think piracy is good or bad, DNS manipulation is a dangerous path to follow. When you sanction it as a state, you’re sanctioning authoritarianism and if it is used in anger, as it was here, what is to say that it can’t be used for more nefarious means? You should not use your ISP’s DNS servers at a minimum and should consider using open DNS servers such as Quad9 or others.

Documentary: Hypernormalisation

For a change, I’m recommending a 2016 video documentary. Broadcast on the BBC, it is one of many excellent documentaries from Adam Curtis. I’ll let you discover it and its relevance to today’s times. (Click the title link to open the YouTube video).

Bonus: An interview in 2018 about capitalism. It is not what you think.

All of Adam Curtis’ documentaries are available on YouTube (sanctioned by Adam Curtis and the BBC, so you don’t need to feel guilty watching them).

Back to the grind. Have a great week.

There are times when I start writing these articles, and I suddenly think to myself, oh shit. I think I have bitten off more than I can chew. This is one of those moments, and against my better judgment, I have decided to try to get through it. Bear with me.

I have so many thoughts floating around that empty space balanced above my neck. And I have so many fleeting side conversations, some more in-depth and others that come to me during the day. Their existence is only in that moment and they are forever lost if not captured. So, I have been trying to write down many of these thoughts and ideas in any way I can, even if they turn into nothing. I’m sure I could be more diligent, but I have to work with what I’ve got, and that ain’t much.

Feel free to skip this one. If you do read it through, I’d be interested in your thoughts. You know how to contact me.

I have a whiteboard in my home office on the wall behind my monitor. I have a fairly large monitor on the desk with its height adjusted for comfort, but it slightly obscures the bottom of the Whiteboard. But there is enough for me to keep a note of a couple of thoughts visible throughout my day or whenever I come into and out of the room (the board is close to the door).

Why am I telling you this?

Well, I have been meaning to think deeper and eventually write about a couple of things I wrote on that board that are still there. I’m not there yet, and I think it will take a lot more time to flesh them out fully, but I thought it would be useful to start that process despite its unfinished state.

Let’s start with what is written on the board. Despite my fear of embarrassment, I’ll write exactly as it is:

Dehumanising tech

Takes away the barrier that humans have to temper their reactions

Violent reactions against tech will increase because it harms no one

To progress, I think the next step is to break down those three phrases, explain what I mean, and perhaps define some terms.

Dehumanising Tech

What do I mean by this title or statement?

In essence, I’m thinking about how we are being divided into data points, automated scripts, and other digital assets that can be used, abused, monetised, and ultimately dehumanised.

Source: wallpapers.com

Typically controlled by a fraction of the world’s population, they give you a few crumbs to make you believe you have control over that digital expression of your self when, in fact, you don’t. You are no longer the owner of you.

And what about Artificial Intelligence, the topic of the moment? Is AI going to change the world (for good)? I’ve long argued against using the term AI to talk about LLMs, so I won’t do that here. But I thought it would be interesting to discuss one story about the beginnings of AI.

Around the advent of powerful computers, several scientists set out to replicate the human brain by using complex calculating machines that they believed would become equal to the human brain at some point (when the technology got powerful enough). This failed spectacularly then, and it is still failing to this day.

To parody these hopeless attempts at building computers that think like humans, a computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum built what he claimed was a computer psychotherapist. The patient would “talk” to the machine by tying in their problems. The machine was named ELIZA, and it replaced the works of a real practising psychotherapist called Carl Rogers, who simply repeated back to the patient what they had just said in what became known as the Rogerian Rhetorical Approach:

The Rogerian method of argument involves each side restating the other’s position to the satisfaction of the other, among other principles.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Rogers

This created an illusion of something intelligent in front of the patient and would fool most people who interacted with the machine then. This reaction was not what Joseph Weizenbaum had bargained for, and he went on to write about this in greater detail after this somewhat serendipitous experiment concluded.

What he didn’t realise is that in doing this trick, he’d created a building block for others to use to dehumanise computer-human interaction and develop a state of illusion that the user ultimately preferred (compared to interactions with other humans). The building blocks went on to be exploited on a massive scale with rage-baiting, ad tech, nudge theory, genocide and the potential to destabilise nation-states. Breaking down the human into a series of numbers, bits and bites, and database entries rendered the product ripe for control, subjugation, and manipulation.

Your sleep-tracking data is just part of this. The data is useless even though you think it isn’t. Unless you are well-educated in sleep science, objectively speaking, you can do nothing useful with the data. Or, to put it differently, with or without that data, you can make best guesses about what may or may not be affecting your sleep. The same goes for exercise. As with diet-tracking and any number of areas you can use to deconstruct yourself into two-dimensional data. But, on a mass scale, that data can be extremely valuable to others without considering your interests.

Removing Barriers

If there is one story of humans that remains consistent, it is that we believe we are superior to other species. Our cars, computers, and democracies “prove” that humans have evolved past what other species have and that we are, therefore, at the top of the pecking order.

Source: unknown

It allows us to tell stories to ourselves that justify any action we take toward another species. This trickles down into our understanding of difference, specifically race. We tell ourselves stories of how one race is superior to another, not because we believe humans are all equal, but quite the opposite. We believe that some are more equal than others, and the way to achieve this is to remove pieces of the others’ humanity, making them not quite as human as us. When we remove fundamental human rights from others, we’re systematically stating that they don’t deserve the same rights because they are not as human as us. Often with catastrophic consequences:

The Belgians were influenced by anthropometry, then a fashionable science, and obsessed with the classification and differentiation of ‘races’. They decided that the Tutsis’ facial traits showed they were of Hamitic or Nilotic origin, and were descended from a cattle-herding people who had come to central Africa in search of pasture and imposed themselves on the local Hutus (Bantu farmers) and Twa (a pygmy people who were the original occupants of the land)

Source: https://mondediplo.com/2021/06/11rwanda

This dehumanisation of the other justifies actions taken against the “other” because, without it, we are essentially doing it to ourselves. This is a removal of barriers because the dehumanisation effect justifies the actions.

Technology’s reduction of the human and its constituent parts into data points in a database does the same. It eventually reduces the barriers to an extent that justifies any and all actions we take towards the other on the opposite side of the monitor. For many, the perceived anonymity behind the screen removes enough of that barrier.

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog (1993, The New Yorker).

And, as I have noted above, the mass simultaneous hallucination of the world creates siloed realities that bear little resemblance to the real world and provide potentialities for misuse and abuse.

Violence and Technology

As tech dehumanises us, the inevitable consequence is a reaction against it. We’re seeing this; its seeds have been growing slowly for decades.

Source: Office Space (Film)

The Luddites recognised this, too.¹ TLDR: they were not against technology. They were against technology dehumanising them and reducing them to irrelevant pieces in the cogs of society, thus devaluing them.

Last week, we saw a stark and brutal consequence of dehumanising tech with the cold-blooded execution of UnitedHealthcare CEO in NYC. More importantly, from a societal point of view, we saw the Internet’s reaction to it, with thousands and thousands of people actively celebrating the murder. Hundreds of jokes and memes were pointing to the same thing: the dehumanisation of his insured justified the dehumanisation of him and ultimately justified the retaliation. What they said is (paraphrasing), “If it is OK for the CEO to hind behind a screen using data to decide the fate of another human being, justifying it through the use of Machine Learning and Bayesian predictions, then it is OK for that life to be ended because like all of our lives, we both are no longer human. We are all just binary representations of humans.”

This is a perilous path to pursue and is likely just the start of a cycle of digital violence becoming real-world violence.

No reading list this time

I’ve been rambling enough already, so I’ve moved a list of articles I wanted to recommend to next week.

I feel very vulnerable discussing like this in the open, but I wanted to get something down that I can work from. Don’t shout at your screen if you feel I’ve got something wrong. Contact me. Let’s chat. I am, after all, human. Have a great week.

In this week’s discussion, I’m returning to the subject of Internet Governance and how the Internet is starting to become a weapon in International games of control and manipulation.

Last week, I changed how I link to articles I’ve read to make them more obvious and provide a better link for you to read them. As a bonus, I think it looks better. I hope you do, too.

If you’ve been reading my writing for a while, you know that I have become evermore involved in Internet Governance, and I have even put myself out there to be part of the process that, in a small way, provides the guidance, structure and tools to run the Internet as an open, transparent and fair tool for all to use. This isn’t perfect, and those who are involved in Internet Governance would likely acknowledge that, but it is, at least, the best option we have currently. I was on the election list for the ARIN Advisory Council, and the results were announced while I was away. Unfortunately, I didn’t get elected, but I’ll definitely put my name in the hat again in the next cycle. Honestly, I didn’t think I’d do as well as I did, so that was a pleasant surprise.

The importance of good Internet Governance has become more critical, just as the rise of tech and the almost total inclusion of tech in every sphere of life takes hold. The more it is involved in our lives, the more important it becomes as a tool and, hence, the more important it is for it to be governed well.

This has not escaped government scrutiny and interest from around the world, with seemingly open states starting to try to wrestle control over this public infrastructure to impose their own will, with both good and bad intentions. We’ve seen the United Nations finally getting involved after years of leaving it to the ITU to deal with through the Global Digital Compact. The ITU mandate was woefully inadequate for what the Internet has become, with it no longer being a telecommunications network over which ISPs and telcos route data packets for a fee. The Internet is a place in the world —albeit virtual— where, without it, you can no longer adequately function in many societies in the world. Two-thirds of the world is connected to the Internet in one way or another, and although the growth rate seems to be slowing, it is projected that the rest of the world will be online at some point in the near future. It won’t be 100%; that is impossible, as there will always be a section of the population that will reject the technology, arguably wisely. I doubt that Internet adoption will reach above 80% in total, and I think that it will take at least a decade to get there.

_Source: https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2024-deep-dive-the-state-of-internet-adoption

I think we’re heading into a critical phase of governance and the overall battle for control of the Internet. I’m deeply worried about organisations like Meta (see below) building infrastructure that they will inevitably use for their own purposes (be damned with the consequences) and the risk that brings for the world as governments become more entrenched in authoritarian ways. Mark Zuckerberg’s turn to the right and the sycophant-ing to the new Trump administration is the first sign of this. The Internet has too big of an influence on populations for governments and ultra-rich private firms with diminishing scruples to ignore. The “Splinternet” is already here, albeit limited in application. The worry is that states that elect authoritarians and increasingly extreme right-wing governments will default to control of the Internet, just as they controlled media in the past.

This is why we need to fight back, and fighting back is by seriously limiting your use and engagement on big tech platforms that don’t have your interests at heart. Building your own tools for publishing, discussion, and diversion on the Internet will be key to online freedom in the coming years. The recent case with Open AI, which was accused of stealing social media posts and discussions to train its models, shows how the creator and originator of the posts made on platforms like Twitter, Threads, and Instagram are owned by the platform and not the individual. Go out there and start a little blog. Spin up a small social web instance. Keep it small and manageable, and then federate so you can participate in other discussions. It is not even expensive or technically challenging anymore.

I was thinking about this after ICANN published a blog post entitled Who Runs the Internet? Misconceptions About ICANN. The post responded to an article on a Russian site that seemed to criticise ICANN, suggesting that it ran the Internet and, hence, that the Internet was under American control. The article clearly signalled renewed interest worldwide in wresting control of the infrastructure. This is not the only incident, and it won’t be the last, ensuring Internet Governance will be at the forefront of stability, democracy, and freedom in the near future.

What the Russian article did, however, highlight is that many, if not most, people have no idea how the Internet actually works and how it is run. This ignorance of the systems we rely on daily contributes to the decline in their openness as those with the finances, political power and a nefarious mindset start to position themselves in the debate, taking advantage of the general apathy and ignorance of the public. This may even contribute to the collapse of the Internet as we know it today, although that is a little way off for the moment. And despite me sounding overly dramatic, it doesn’t take long or much.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

From The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemmingway

I would add that we in the Caribbean are particularly at risk of the consequences of digital colonialism driven by rogue nation-states imposing their will on small territories without the resources or the organisation to defend the interests of an open Internet. There are even cases where governments in the region are toying with the idea of implementing restrictions on the Internet and freedom of expression through legislation. It’s a tricky one, and I don’t pretend to be a lawyer, but the slippery slope effect is often the case in situations like this, where initial legislation is the entry point for a much broader implementation in the future. That’s something we all need to look out for.

Upcoming topics and discussion

I haven’t forgotten about the topics I mentioned last week. I’m working on them, but I don’t have anything in a form that I can write about as yet. Soon come.

I’ve also been working on documenting and writing out the margin notes I’d made on two papers about tech and AI. These things take time, and I hope you can excuse me. If you’re interested, they are:

Hype, Sustainability, and the Price of the Bigger-is-Better Paradigm in AI

Analog Privilege

(I lead an exciting life 🤣)

Lastly, I still haven’t written my thoughts on Caribbean federated instances. It’s coming, I promise.

Reading

Meet the underpaid workers in Nairobi, Kenya, who power OpenAI

I’ve written about this here in the past, calling attention to the practice of exploitation that seems part and parcel of big tech these days. Now, the US investigative show 60 Minutes has done a program about the issue. Pivot to AI has a write-up about it.

Tether Has Become a Massive Money Laundering Tool for Mexican Drug Traffickers, Feds Say

This is another topic that I have been a long-term sceptic of. Rather than being a solution looking for a problem —which is exactly how I still feel about Blockchain— cryptocurrencies have found their problem and product-market fit. Crime. That and, er, destroying the planet.

Meta’s $10 Billion Plan to Build the World’s Largest Subsea Cable Network

I can’t think of another company that I would least like to build critical Internet infrastructure (Google?). They have shown us time and time again that they are not good Internet citizens and that their motivations are so misaligned to a peaceful world that we should take a serious look at whether or not we should allow them to do this. Poorly behaved citizens are generally excluded (generally temporarily) from society, so should Meta in the case of its flagrant poor behaviour. Should they be allowed to invest? Of course, but not allowed to own and control wholly.

OpenAI explores advertising as it steps up revenue drive (Paywalled)

ChatGPT is about to peddle shitty ads next to its statistically-generated falsehoods, misinterpretations, and the occasional decent paragraph if the FT is to be believed. What a time to be alive. 🤦‍♂️

Meet Emma: The German AI Travel Influencer Stirring Controversy

“How can a fake person in a fake place ‘inspire’ anyone to travel to a real place?” - Precisely. Please, I beg you, Caribbean tourism decision-makers, steer away from this, or at least put your personal wealth and reputation on the line if you truly believe this will produce any good for your destination.

This is POSSE post, federated to Mastodon. Have a great week.

I’m back after a much-needed short break where I travelled across the Atlantic Ocean approximately two and a half times. Did anything happen in the world while I was gone? 🤪

I was, however, dismayed and pretty offended by the recent comments from Emmanuel Macron (France’s President), who recently said that Haiti’s problems were the fault of Haitians. While any country is responsible for a number of its troubles —and believe me, France has its shit to deal with that it seems incapable of addressing adequately— the case of Haiti is an altogether different one. Macron’s comments were offensive because we know the real systemic causes of Haiti’s difficulties since its independence in 1804, only recognised in 1825. France imposed a “Freedom Reparations bill” that crippled the country financially and has only recently been fully paid off, to the tune of around 20 to 30 billion USD. The duplicitous and dishonest assessment of a country badly in need of help, not scorn, is just revolting. France owes Haiti an apology to start with; then, it needs to do something about the money it stole from the people it broke.

Today, I wanted to continue discussing the Social Web, federation and decentralisation. Let me know if you have any comments.

In tech news, there was a mass exodus from Twitter to Bluesky that hasn’t finished, as far as I can tell. For the uninitiated, Bluesky is a supposedly decentralised social media website born out of a project at Twitter a number of years ago to build a new protocol to supplant that of the existing Twitter eventually. That didn’t happen, and the project was spun off as its own entity, where it continued its development of the ATProto protocol and eventually provided its services to the general public. I opened an account a while back as it was still an invite-only project and didn’t think much of it. Now Bluesky has something in the order of 20 million users and is growing. It is on track to overtake Twitter itself. Bluesky is a faithful copy of Twitter, so If you used Twitter of old, you’d be right at home with Bluesky. For the moment, the site is fun, and there are a lot of interesting conversations being had, particularly since the journalists and other social commentators moved over since Twitter’s owner has finally revealed his true colours. I doubt this will last personally, as I’ve lived through this cycle a multitude of times. It first happened when I saw a large growth in the number of people frequenting one of the Usenet groups I was part of in the 90s. The sudden rise in population and the sudden rise in popularity of the group eventually destroyed it. The dynamic was never the same, and the sheer scale of the discussion outweighed any attempts at moderation and gentle cajoling to stay on track. It eventually became hostile and filled with insults and threats of violence and was never the same. I believe this is the fate that awaits Bluesky and any social network that is structured in the way it is. Which leads me to thoughts I have about its structure and why I think the above is the natural conclusion for social media as we know it.

I’ve talked about the “Social Web” and decentralisation at length in these articles and, more importantly, why I think they are the best hope we have yet for a more humane social experience on the Internet. Their very nature of being distributed, decentralised and hence not run by any one person, company or organisation makes them inherently resistant to shock and control by interests other than the users themselves. And it’s not just a lack of monetisation through the tokenisation and sale of your interactions, ultimately dehumanising you and your social groups, or is it the objectively stupid, racist and sexist moderation policies of a madman that would, under normal circumstances, be sectioned and sedated in a padded cell. No, it’s the fact that users who own and run the individual services —called instances— can de-federate other instances that are noxious or otherwise undesirable. There have been several examples of ultra-right-wing nazis starting decentralised systems on Mastodon, only to be choked off (figuratively speaking), making their particular brand of “daddy didn’t give me enough hugs” attention-seeking utterly neutralised. They were not shut down nor “cancelled” from the Internet, not at all. They were just shunned into shouting into the void, the same way the utter cranks shout into a void of onlookers (usually one or two) at Speaker’s Corner in London. Say what you want there; you have the right to do it. What you don’t have the right to is the mass reach of your inane or discriminatory drivel. (That, and a possible kicking from a member of the public offended at your crap). And that’s part of the point: consequences.

Anyway, Bluesky is not this. Bluesky is a sort of halfway house between a singularly controlled walled garden and a truly distributed and federated system like Mastodon. It goes some way toward solving the issue of centralisation without actually being a decentralised system. You can spin up your own hardware and relay connection to the system, but the hardware and bandwidth required are prohibitive for the vast majority of the population of the Internet. Their documentation acknowledges this:

The federation architecture allows anyone to host a Relay, though it’s a fairly resource-demanding service.

Quoting a quote from this very detailed blog about Bluesky:

When you build architecture that in theory anyone can participate in, but the barrier to entry is so high so that only those with the highest number of resources can participate, then you’ve still built a walled garden. – Morgan Lemmer-Webber

I’ve seen discussion of disk space requirements in the terabytes to multiples of terabytes, with that requirement increasing as more users join the site.

So, no, Bluesky is not decentralised nor a truly federated system, but it faithfully reproduces the Twitter-when-Twitter-was-good system, and for most people, that is good enough.

I’d like to see more feedback from the Caribbean about the use of these systems, particularly when it comes to political and socio-economic organisation. Who’s using them? Are they gaining traction? Do they provide a truly collaborative space to exchange ideas without fear of trolls, racists and other undesirables? I’d love to know. Any and all discussions will be strictly confidential unless you decide otherwise. Please reach out.

Upcoming discussions

I wanted to put a couple of bookmarks in here at this point as I don’t have the time to write much more today, but I want to expand on a couple of topics I’ve been looking into lately.

One is about foreign direct investment in the Caribbean and how we need to be vigilant and more demanding of real-world and useful outcomes. The angle of the piece is telling the story of a tragic, and in my mind, criminal outcome. When we’re talking about Blockchain, Defi, and other so-called Web3 investments, there is much to discuss and critique.

I’d also asked about federated instances in the Caribbean and if anyone had examples of such in the region. A guy in Guadeloupe reached out to me, and we chatted about it. I’m hoping to write a couple of words about that soon, too.

Reading

Six years of the GDPR: we won’t pay for our right to data protection

You know my feelings on invasive surveillance adtech, so I’m not going to beat that drum too much. Suffice it to point you to another very accessible article from Access Now. Please become more aware of what these companies are doing with data and the dangers that lie ahead that we have only started seeing.

LLMs don’t do formal reasoning - and that is a HUGE problem

LLMs are still the talk of the town, but mass deployment and inclusion in decision-making roles are still very risky prospects. They don’t reason, and they mathematically place words after each other. That’s it. No magic. This article explains it all.

 The Fediverse has empowered me to take back control from Big Tech. Now I want to help others do the same.

The article title says it all.

Escape from Twitter. The future of social media is decentralized

More on my topic in this newsletter. Heads up: You’ll need to use a translation tool unless you read Polish.

Watchdog finds AI tools can be used unlawfully to filter candidates by race, gender

Shocked, I tell you. I’m really shocked. FFS, why do we keep doing these things?

Written by hand, over several days of thinking, typing, editing, and then panicking to get the last paragraphs written at the last minute. Have a great week.