It has been quiet around here for a while as I was travelling for a few days in Europe. Then, as soon as I got home, I contracted a nasty cold. It knocked me out for a good 10 days or so, and I’m only just getting back to normal. Not fun.

One of the things I enjoy as an independent consultant is that I get to work on some new and interesting projects. Sometimes, those projects are a little outside of my core competencies, but that’s what makes them fun. I’ve recently finished a market research/opportunity study for a small client in the textile industry. The business is struggling a little and hasn’t embarked on any modernisation since it was founded a couple of generations ago. It has been ticking along successfully up until now. Times are changing and it is evident that businesses that don’t modernise are going to find the going more and more difficult.

Last Thursday evening I was invited to participate in a round table discussion during the annual general meeting. The subject was, of course, artificial intelligence. With three of us, a lawyer, a data scientist, and me, a generalist, the discussion was interesting and, I think, useful to the members of the association concerned. It was a private meeting, so I’m not at liberty to detail anything other than to say that it is clear that small businesses are having a hard time understanding what AI may or may not bring them.

I tried to clarify a little of that, but the time allowed was short, and we weren’t able to get deep into the weeds. Perhaps another session is on the cards.

Reading

I like cross-Atlantic travel as it gives me time to read books. The out journey is difficult, as it is usually overnight, so I can’t disturb too many people in the cabin with a light (I sleep poorly, if at all, on the plane). I tend to listen to a lot of music or podcasts during this time. I should perhaps try audiobooks, but I can’t get on with them in normal circumstances, so I doubt I’d like them on the plane. The return journey, however, is during the day and more conducive to lecture. I finished one book I had just started and then proceeded to finish a second book during the nine-hour flight.

I finished Machine Readable Me by Zara Rahman. A very interesting short book on the impact of our data-obsessed society and where it can lead to serious issues, particularly with those least privileged in society.

The other book was about ADHD. I’ve been diagnosed recently, despite my knowing for the last thirty years or so. This book was a whim purchase and contained some interesting information and articulated reasonably well the difficulties of this condition, despite the overly North American tone, which is a little too much for me. It’s worth a read if you have, or you know, someone who has ADHD.

I’ve been discussing for a number of months the rather egregious deployment of video surveillance for the Olympics in Paris this year, particularly the use of AI to biometrically identify people. Well, it goes further than that, and I’m not comfortable with that. This article (in German—use the translate page feature of your browser) explains what’s happening, and it is not pretty.¹

Meredith Whittaker, CEO of Signal, recently gave a speech at an award acceptance event. Regardless of your position on the use of cryptography, the speech is worth your time.²

Lastly, this article exposes the limitations of current generation genAI systems. It delves (🤭) into the use of words and how the (over) use of some is a telltale sign of genAI.³

That feels better, to have sat down and written some thoughts.

Have a great week.

As you know, I’ve been taking Internet Governance very seriously for a few years now and have accelerated that implication over the last couple of years. One of the highlights of that journey recently was attending ARIN 52 in San Diego and remotely attending ARIN 53 in Barbados.

As an organisation responsible for the management and distribution of Internet number resources in the North American region, including much of the Caribbean, ARIN is an important cog in the system of good governance and community-developed policies. It’s crucial to acknowledge that the success of ARIN’s initiatives and policies is largely attributed to you, the users of these resources. Active community involvement in promoting good governance drives progress. ARIN not only helps enforce policies but also gives back to the community in various ways. It is present at a large number of Internet governance conferences, provides support for organisations working in that area, and hosts its open-to-anyone conference twice a year (I’ve attended a couple virtually and one in person. See above).

However, ARIN runs a little-known assistance program that is currently looking for participants. The ARIN Community Grant Program offers up to 20,000 USD for a project. Smaller grants are also issued for smaller projects.¹

I would encourage you to apply, even if your project idea is not fully baked yet. ARIN will absolutely help get the project going if it aligns with its mission. Many of the people who work for ARIN directly or who are on the various councils would be only too happy to help out where possible.

I recently had a proposal with Stanford University rejected due to an extremely high level of interest, so I am looking at finding a way to redesign that project so that it can be considered by ARIN. I’ll let you know and update my Research page as and when.²

Please take a look at the ARIN Grant Program page for more information: https://www.arin.net/about/community_grants/program/

The 2024 application period runs from 22 April to 7 June, so you should start the application process as soon as possible. Learn more about how to apply in this post on the ARIN Blog.³

P.S. You may find you’ve benefitted from the program without knowing it. If you have attended the Virtual School of Internet Governance, they were a recipient in 2021.

Let me know if I can help in any way.

As I noted last week, I’ll link to articles through footnotes rather than inline https links to make things more readable, especially if you’re reading this using Dark Mode. I should look into updating the theme, but I’m not that disturbed, and to be fair, I don’t really have the expertise to mess around with Hugo. Perhaps I’ll take a look in the future, but for now, footnotes it is.

I’ve been working with a couple of clients, both fairly small in size, but as I have been saying for many years, requiring expertise and tools like any other corporation. The fact that they are small is an issue of scale, not an issue of the types of tools they require. A business process for dealing with billing for a 10-person company is similar, if not the same, as for a 100 or 1000-person company. Sure, there’ll be some differences in hierarchy, approvals, etc, but the basics are very much alike. This is what I help my clients with. Looking at business processes and finding ways to help make them more efficient. This doesn’t automatically mean software. At times, it is organisation or management rather than an app for that.

For my business, I’m seriously considering reorganising my data into a “proper” database with metadata, versioning, and all that good stuff. OS Filesystems just don’t cut it anymore. Having structured data, even if it contains files (Word, Excel, PDF, etc.), is a bonus and helps in many areas: search, collaboration, sharing, and versioning (as previously mentioned). I’ll try to document what I decide to do, as it may help you.

Reading

There’s a lot of text out there discussing LLMs. There’s even text out there discussing LLMs created entirely by LLMs. If you’re like most people, you can tell much of the generated text reasonably easily. There’s just something odd about it. An article from Baldur Bjarnason, which I forgot to link to a week or so back, goes into why.¹ Unlike a lot of articles discussing the subject, it is a lot more nuanced as well as being very well researched.

You may have noticed that I’m pretty against Internet advertising that is egregious, privacy-violating, and downright nasty. You may also have understood that I fall into the group of people who always use ad-blocking techniques as much as possible through software, scripts, or even DNS redirects to 127.0.0.1, where they deserve to be. Some companies, like FB and Google, are unhappy with this and are trying to bust these techniques. It won’t work. It never does.²

Talking about advertising —and I’ve written a lot about its lack of effectiveness—well, here’s an article from Arstechnica that discusses how Facebook’s AI advertising system, which controls all sides of the rigged game, is blowing through budgets in a few hours and charging them more than they have assigned. I’m pretty sure this is fraudulent and not “Computer says no”.³

And it would be remiss of me not to mention that Spain, as well as other European and African countries, have shut down Sam Altman’s pyramid privacy nightmare shitcoin scam, Worldcoin.⁴

I’m reading a lot about Internet Governance, and I’ll share as much as I can here. This article, for example, is about Human Rights in the Digital World. It is worth your time.⁵

On the same topic, there is this article about Digital Rights in the Caribbean. It discusses the integration of Human Rights and Digital Rights and the fact that they cannot be separated now.⁶

You may have heard about a GDPR challenge to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. There have been plenty of poor articles discussing the case. I suggest reading the release from the source.⁷

I thought I’d leave on a positive note, and it will neatly lead into some of the new reading and research I have been doing. Molly White, in her newsletter Citation Needed, writes about the Internet we could have. I highly recommend it.⁸

Thank you for reading, and I’m glad you got some value out of this. I’m compelled to write; I don’t know why; it just is. I’m sitting here finishing this off on a Sunday night before posting tomorrow morning with a lovely glass of old Rhum. It is quiet, apart from the insects, and the temperature is finally coming down to a comfortable level.

Wishing you an excellent week ahead.

I’ll be busy, so I’m not sure how much I’ll post for the next couple of weeks. Please bear with me.

Have a great week.

I had a very busy week with a lot of things coming to a head art the same time. Teaching, training, a corporate speaking gig and a couple of ongoing consulting projects. It took a lot of effort and concentration to get all the ducks in line to produce the work that was required, but I managed to keep it together and I feel quite happy with the things I achieved during the week.

That gave me an excuse to have a lazy Saturday doing absolutely nothing but relaxing, reading and having a little tipple of the excellent Rhum that is found in the part of the work where I live.

Update: I made a change to this article and future articles. I noticed inline links didn’t stand out in dark mode, so I’ve changed them to footnotes. This should help readability and further reading, for those inclined.

Reading

I don’t know how many of you have either used or heard of the Commodore Amiga. It was the first proper computer I owned after having a Sinclair ZX81 when I was much younger. The Amiga is the computer that changed my life, literally. I sold my car to buy one and despite losing a lot of cash on the car resale, I’m still benefitting from that sale over thirty years later. I read a comment article in The Guardian newspaper about just that computer. It’s a fun dip into the past.¹

I know I’ve been going on a lot about advertising and how it is ruining the Internet as we know it. I stumbled across a video someone uploaded about a little application that made the computer buzz every time a tracker called back home. The video is astonishing! It sounds like a 56k modem.²

On the other end of the fight on the Internet for open and interoperability, there is some good news, with modern platforms starting to federate and support decentralised and federated protocols like ActivityPub. Ghost has just joined that list.³ The venerable newsletter platform has started to embrace a better Internet. With a bit of luck the inertia might lead to meaningful changes by the rest of the Internet. And no I’m not talking about Threads federating with Mastodon. I remain very sceptical of their motivations and I suspect they are trying to find a way to advertise on this new Internet. I hope they fail. But they are very motivated by money and a have lots of it to throw around.

There is no doubt that many nations in the Global North are having a moment whereby they are swinging to right politically. Sometimes to the extreme right wing. This is very worrying and will only lead to conflict, possibly of a scale we’ve never witnessed on the planet. It needs to be stamped out as quickly as possible. Tolerating the intolerant is a very bad idea. Anyway, much of the finance and force behind this is found in Big Tech, specifically in Silicon Valley. They have done a good job thus far in hiding their true motivations and have successfully created a cult of sycophants around the world who champion the success of Silicon Valley without really understanding where it came from, why and what it is aiming. To put it bluntly, many (possibly a majority) want to setup segregation, selective procreation, the eternal human, eugenics systems and much much more. They don’t think you deserve to live unless you are a billionaire and are extreme in your world views. They are a fucking disgrace and can’t wait to celebrate the day they fail or otherwise disappear of the face of the earth. Enough of my rant, read these two articles to get a sense of just how dangerous and bad these people are:

The violent disdain of the ordinary man from Marc Andreesson is sickening.⁴

Balaji Srinivasan is even worse. He said the quiet bit out loud, and he wants to “ethnically cleanse” San Francisco.⁵

JFC! What is wrong with these people?

Have a great week.

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

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

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

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

See you in the next newsletter.

Blog post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With gratitude to Glenn McKnight and Alfredo Calderon.

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

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

/committedtodisk