From ba5e741c599136571e100365eefdcf56c5e8cd70 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kevin Nguyen Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2019 11:56:22 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 01/65] Add Stewardship notes --- .../4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md | 352 ++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 352 insertions(+) create mode 100644 notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md diff --git a/notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md b/notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9b5929a --- /dev/null +++ b/notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md @@ -0,0 +1,352 @@ +# Data. Together. Let's read about it + +[About the Data Together Reading Group](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether) + +## Stewardship (August 6, 2019) + +[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbJUSvO_Xvc) + +### Intro +Our selections this month begin with traditional notions and practices of stewardship. We then look briefly at present-day theory and principles around data preservation. We continue with 2 different studies of modern day institutions: an ecological research science network & an university library, and look at the continuing challenges they face and how they deal with data stewardship. Finally, we finish with a selection on the problems facing open-source software and how to sustain digital infrastructure. + +### Readings: + +PDFs: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1K2C3AEf4tdZfMJoyC11RwjX0XwO-Ejtt + +1. Pastor Henry Wright (2019). **The Stewardship of Time** + - Minutes 2:50-6:17 + - Available at: https://youtu.be/RWCbK8qRkuo?t=170 + - Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l8tfRlAAL6y4JDRpeK4s--NTRcdBitMHpjsVfAzbPtU/edit +2. Nora Marks Dauenhauer (1990). **Haa Tuwunáagu Yis** + - pp. 263-267, 277-281, Elders Speak to the Future +3. Kat Anderson (2005). **Tending the wild** + - pp. xv-xviii, Preface + - pp. 2-6, Introduction + - pp. 358-364, Coda - Indigenous Wisdom in the Modern World + - Available at: https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520280434 +4. Trevor Owens (2017). **Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation** + - pp. 6-9, Sixteen Guiding Digital Preservation Axioms + - pp. 122-130, Conclusion: Tools for Looking Forward + - Available at: https://osf.io/preprints/lissa/5cpjt +5. Karasti, Helena & Baker, Karen & Halkola, Eija. (2006). **Enriching the Notion of Data Curation in E-Science: Data Managing and Information Infrastructuring in the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network.** Computer Supported Cooperative Work. 15. 321-358. 10.1007/s10606-006-9023-2 + - pp. 6-11, Challenges of Data Sharing + - pp. 14-16, Intensive Data Description + - pp. 23-27, Discussion + - pp. 30-33, Conclusions + - Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220169111_Enriching_the_Notion_of_Data_Curation_in_E-Science_Data_Managing_and_Information_Infrastructuring_in_the_Long_Term_Ecological_Research_LTER_Network +6. Definititon of [post-custodial theory of archives](https://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/p/postcustodial-theory-of-archives) +7. Hannah Alpert-Abrams, David A Bliss, Itza Carbajal (2019). **Post-Custodial Archiving for the Collective Good.** + - pp. 5-12 + - Part 1: Post-custodial, Anti-Colonial, Neoliberal + - Part 2: Labor + - pp. 18-21, Part 4: From Common Good to a Collective Good + - Available at: https://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/87 +8. Nadia Eghbal. **Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure** + - pp. 8-10, Executive Summary + - pp. 40-45, Digital Infrastructure Changes Frequently + - pp. 53-58, Why do people keep contributing when they’re not getting paid? + - pp. 60-65, starting with “Structurally...” re decentralization, money, and project stewardship + - Quote on page 75 + - pp. 125-130, How to sustain + - Available at: https://www.fordfoundation.org/media/2976/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure.pdf + +*Optional*: + +- Andrew Russel & Lee Vinsel (2016). **Hail the maintainers** + - Available at: https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more +- LTER (1990): **Long-Term Ecological Research and the Invisible Present, and Long-Term Ecological Research and the Invisible Place** + - Available at: https://lternet.edu/wp-content/themes/ndic/library/pdf/reports/Number%209.pdf + + +### **Check-in: What is the oldest memory, story, lesson, heirloom, etc. that you hold or have received from your family, parents, ancestors?** + +## Questions/Themes + +### 1) Define & Redefine. How do we define Stewards/Stewardship? What are the qualities we start from and agree with? What can we learn from other traditions of stewardship? How did others pick up on the idea? How have your ideas changed or evolved over time? +> Stewardship is the management of various assets +> That don't belong to you +> ... +> Authority, Responsibility, Accountability +> ... +> Faithfulness is the minimum requirement +> For the steward - Wright + + + +* The antidote of 'Dominion'. Proper use & care vs. using something up. To serve rather than to control + +> ...one gains respect for nature by *using* it judiciously. By using a plant or an animal, interacting with it, where it lives, and tying your well-being to its existence, you can be intimate with it and understand it. (xvi) - Anderson + +> ...our human forbears everywhere did not just passively gather food and basketry materials but actively tended the plant and animal populations on which they relied. **There was no clear-cut distinction between hunter-gatherers** – the category into which most California Indians had been tossed – **and the more "advanced" agricultural peoples of the ancient world.** (xvii, emphasis added) - Anderson + +### 2) Proper Use. With the drive towards digitalization and it's assumed reduced cost and ease-of-use, what are we losing by not interacting with data on a more visceral level? In what ways can we encourage the use of data so that people can have that sense of stewardship over their/our data? +> Developers like to point to _usefulness_ as an indicator of whether a new project gets adopted or not. - (45) Eghbal + +* Proper use/care is a quality for stewardship + * Ties back to Liz's sense of citizenship shared to those "we share dreams with" or to a sense of shared purpose + * Question for group: is there something in your life that became much closer to your heart when you began to interact with it more directly (rather than revering it)? + +* Knowledge commons: without continuous use, the commons shrivels and dies (network effects), the tragedy of the anti-commons + +> The traditional hand written field notebook or group station log of activities creates flexibility in practice with the possibility of in-the-field category modifications or inserted margin notes. These unexpected reorganizations and notations represent science-in-the-making yet create challenges for structured data flows and present challenges to update while data collection continues (329) - LTER + +> manual data taking is inherently a question of data collector and their understanding and relationship with the instrument and the ecological site in which data is collected...the "sense" for data, that ecologists acquire as collectors of their own data in the field or laboratory, plays the most important role also in their use of data collected by someone else because it helps them to understand and to assess the data (344) - LTER + +> Pushing forward with automated approaches presents a potential danger of marginalizing other approaches (345) - LTER + +### 3) Continuity & Severance. The need for institutions & a long-term perspective. If we assume continuity, as another quality of stewardship, where have we seen that continuity been severed in data stewardship? + +> The concept of California...as wilderness---erased the indigenous cultures and their histories from the land and dispossessed them of their enduring legacy of tremendous biological wealth. - (2-3) Anderson + +> ...it is tremendously important for California Indians' connection to a place to have the depth of time, for them to be able to point to a particular harvesting patch, shrub, tree, living site, or sacred spot and know that many generations before them used the same plants, walked the same paths, tended the same land. - (363) Anderson + +> The craft of digital preservation is anchored in the past. It builds off of the records, files, and works of those who came before us. (122) - Owens + +> There is no end for digital preservation. The best one can hope for is to be one link in an unbroken chain of memory...those links to our past, those connections to facts, and the decisions we make about who's stories matter enough to constitute our collective social memory, are now more important than ever. - (130) Owens + +* How do we reconcile the frequent change of digital infrastructure with need of institutions and long-term continuity for effective stewardship? + +> Digital infrastructure changes frequently...Digital infrastructure not only requires frequent maintenance and upkeep to be compatible with other software components, but its usage and adoption changes frequently as well. - (40) Eghbal + + +### 4) Curation. We can't preserve everything, so what do we choose to steward and preserve? What should be forgotten? How do we identify areas in need of repair and maintenance? + +> Hoarding is not preservation. - (7) Owens + +> Accept and embrace the archival sliver. We've never saved everything. We've never saved most things. - (9) Owens + +> ...one of the biggest challenges to its sustainability, is that there is no organizing body to determine what gets built or used in digital infrastructure. - (42) Eghbal + +* I have hesitency about things like Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB), that have no way to edit posts. I want my art to be what remains, not my growing pains. I don't want my shame and mistakes to be entertainment or reason for capital punishment (cancel culture). + +* How does maintenance and repair figure into the conversation as we focus on technological innovation and new tools? + +### 5) Stewarding the Stewards. Preservation is a neverending process and so requires continuous care of not just what is preserved, but the people, practices, and culture doing the preserving. What problems can we identify with how we care for the stewards? How do we approach and resolve those problems? + +> Instead of finding pathways for people to make their way into well-paid careers in libraries, archives, and museums, our society has established pathways from communities to prisons that provide cheap labor and further undermines the future of a professional cultural heritage workforce. - (127) Owens + +> cost-cutting practices leads to increased dependence on lower-cost labor, including volunteers, interns, and outsourced workers..."This puts the long-term survival of archives at risk, which challenges the archival paradigm of long-term preservation and historical importance" - (10) Abrams, et. al + +> Positions are temporary...lead to frequent staff turnover; these conditions also lead archival workers to focus on short-term goals and objectives that can be completed within the terms of their contracts. As a result, we operate without the deep knowledge that comes with long-term practice, and without the institutional memory that would enable us to sustain the many relationships on which post-custodial projects depend. - (11) Abrams, et. al + +> Most of us take opening a software application for granted, the way we take turning on the lights for granted. We don't think about the human capital necessary to make that happen. - (9) Eghbal + +* Issues with labor practices - EDGI has relied on the same volunteer labor and short-term contracts. If we see ourselves as helping to steward environmental data and governance, how do we reconcile those short-term labor practices vs. long-term visions & goals? + +* Reputation-based motivations - developers contribute to popular projects and do so until they get hired at some company/corporation + +* Open-source projects that are large enough to require funding and maintenance, but not popular enough to get the support they need. + +### 6) Continuing, Repetition. Instead of how does this conversation end today; How do we continue these conversations, how do we continue preserving, how do we continue being good stewards? + +> Through daily, firsthand observation, become intimately familiar with the needs, chararcteristics, growth, and reproduction of plants and animals being used. - (360) Anderson + +> ...caring...is not solely a matter of following nuts-and-bolts prescriptions...it comes from human motivations. Motivation is fostered within the culture itself––through art, legend, kinship systems, ceremonies, and its overarching worldview. - (361) Anderson + +> Money alone will not fix a struggling infrastructure project, because open source thrives on human rather than financial resources...An effective support strategy must include multiple ways to generate time and resources besides directly financing development. It must start from the principle that the open source approach is not inherently flawed, but rather under-resourced. - (125) Eghbal + + +## Notes +- KN: Stewardship is a big topic. Started the readings by looking at traditional notions of stewardship. My religious background was my first exposure to stewardship. Which is why I started with this pastor. It's a good listen. He's a great speaker. Then we moved to prayers from Kelsey's tribe, from the book she shared last time. Then went into land stewardship, Tending the Wild, about native California tribes + - **Before we talk about data stewardship, how do others define stewardship and where did they get their ideas and how did it evolve?** +- EN: Stewardship involves taking care of something so others can benefit from it. Can take notes +- B5: Steward the notes! +- KN: Because the group is small and notes take lots of brainspace, we can take notes after, using the recording. We can just talk +- B5: The word stewardship was not part of my life before data rescue. For me, steward is a librarian, archivist, knowledge of library science. + - Was introduced to stewardship through library science. People who had serious views on metadata, taxonomies, filing systems. To me, steward is someone...it's a profession, a professional steward + - If it's not apparent, I really want this to fall apart fast. But want to be honest, conceive steward as someone who has intimate knowledge of library science, can steward this, notion of availability. Can keep accessible and available for a long time. That relationship is tightly coupled. Stewarding is a very serious committment. Real responsible to be a steward of an artifact +- KN: For the readings that didn't have anything to do with library science or data, how did you respond? +- B5: Have to admit, been running a company and did not do the readings. Though I love you to bits! <3 +- RB: For you B5, 2 readings are applicable to your work. LTER article and Post-custodial archives paper +- B5: Have read stuff in past +- KN: No worries, glad you're here +- Mauve: Only glanced over notes myself, only had a week, also didn't have time. Next time will have more preparation +- KN: No worries, question still stands +- Mauve: Stewardship is pretty new concept. Don't have any cultural knowledge of stewardship or personal experiences. One interesting use is by Fleki(?) from Dat, putting together network like communes where nomads come and do something with a given focus and then go somewhere else. A stream of nomads coming and going. But there are people living there, stewards of the land that keep it maintained. Nomads help less. Stewards are taking care of it so others can use it and helping coordinate people. That concept as a role is interesting and cool +- KB: Is that a novel or real? +- Mauve: It's real. A community they're building. Bought land and making like a "circus" commune. Making it a network for these hubs +- KB: Cool, is there a link? +- Mauve: Will ask. Not sure if it's public yet. Will ask and post in Slack +- KB: Thanks +- KN: Kelsey, anything to add? +- KB: Heard of stewardship term in 2 contexts + - Montessori: stewarding a space. Elementary classrooms where everybody has a chore everyday, time at the end of the day for dusting computer monitors or rolling things up, put away. Space stewardship which is cool interaction and ownership over space. No cleaners are coming. This is your space and need to take care of it. + - Land stewardship: My dad spent career in timber sales. Dual part - they are clear cutting Alaskan forests but also works for tribal entities. Job a decade ago was stewardship of island with monoculture of spruce. Spruce takes a 100 years to mature. A lot of trees you can harvest in 10 years. But not spruce. Had to create plans accounting for livelihood but also economic, spirtual, recreational pursuits of tribal owners or shareholders. How Alaska native claims settled out, in perpetuity. Had to create plans out 100 years + - Think about stewardship, looking at climate change, **the importance of place.** Stewarding land as opposed to nomads, which is how I've land but still attached to place. That's why circus commune is interesting. **The importance of intergenerational persistance, passing of knowledge as you lose a place** +- EN: Really appreciated Kelsey's observations and reflections. Also land stewardship is how I think of it, my partner's family runs a farm for a long time. Kelsey raised issue of ownership + - So interesting, the steward is not an owner, taking care of someone else's stuff. Reflect on the reading, pastor's comments, felt shockingly insightful. Not expecting something so straight-forward for a sermon, but helped defined stewardship in terms of ownership, responsibility, accountability, all these things that go into taking care of somebody else's stuff for them in relation to others who are potentially using it. Lots going on, great selection +- RB: Would echo lot of that. To answer original question. The section we listened to was how I traditionally conceptualized it. Taking care of somebody else's stuff. Also, something intergenerational, going back to memory thing + - On dad's side, lots of passing things down and understanding family history when it's special. Not like that on mom's side, contrasts + - Thinking of things my parents have that I grew up with, or have been given me. Especially last year, grandma passed, my dad and his siblings splitting that stuff. **What needs continued custodianship? Who can provide that?** Interesting perspective on it. + - Sense of even though the person it was meaningful for is not around, not stewarding for society, but still sense of importance. This table is important, or this chest, or whatever. Think about that a lot. Intergenerational +- KN: I liked that people touched on ownership. Talked to neighbor who is a pastor. They had a great term, it's the "antidote to dominion", instead of lording over or controlling something. Instead, taking care of, the proper care and use of things. Theme I wanted to touch on next + - Within the Tending the Wild reading + - > ...one gains respect for nature by *using* it judiciously. By using a plant or an animal, interacting with it, where it lives, and tying your well-being to its existence, you can be intimate with it and understand it. (xvi) - Anderson + - that's how you take care of it. Similaring the LTER paper they talked about how scientists in the field taking notes on paper, changing things in the margins, it's more visceral and by doing so they have a better sense of the data as opposed to just numbers in a spreadsheet + - Going along with that idea, I'm curious + - How do we interact with data on a more visceral level? + - **More importantly, how do we get the public, the people we're trying to reach with our technology to use data in a way that they will want to steward it?** + - Right now, you hear about Cambridge Analytica, "they did something with my data, what is my data, I don't know what it is, I don't care, how do I make money off that data?" + - How do we make people want to steward data? + +- Mauve: One cool thing is if they are stewarding it without thinking about it + - SSB is amazing because everyone acts as a steward for their data and their friends + - You don't have to think about it, it's more "I use it". It's my digital social life. Like the behind-the-scenes, making it part. More transactional phases. I am the owner. Companies gain access through stewardship + - SSB people create and share directly data. Think that's powerful. Think it's a way forward. How to get there is a whole other thing + - Large groups of data are bad for this sort of thing. One ginormous dataset is so harder to care for. Logistics. It's not person-to-person, families. Need higher level orgs. The data from Large Hadron Collider. Won't have people stewarding it, but it's not "people" data, so probably ok? Large data hard to steward and people steward data as function of using it +- B5: That's elegant. To build upon it, from Post-custodial + - continuous custodianship of material objects can no longer be the focus of archival practice. Becomes necessary to shift traditionally archival labor to record creators + - For thinking post-custodial archiving, SSB has that. To push that labor down into protocol by automating disseminating data. By virtue of viewing, you are seeding. Lovely mechanism + - Comes with complications. Direct follow-on conversation is scale. Lot of these patterns work if we're not taking up all of users hard drives. Not violating user's expectations. Somebody's participation, becoming seeder is great but wait this thing I downloaded is putting all this data I don't care about on my computer. Shoot! + - Think that's part of sociological relationship to data. Hardest aspect to remedy. Requires us to stop everybody, Hey! You were upset by CA (Cambridge Analytica) and somebody aggregating your information in ways you disagree with + - Many remedies will involve convos we didn't want to have before. How do we negotiate that? + - Shifting labor is real, moving work onto people who weren't doing work before. When thinking about stewardship of information. That's really what we're talking about, when decentralizing - pushing the burden of keeping thing available and online, turning thin clients into stewards. + - Paul Frazee's pick think or thin client. New responsibility, hard to change rules of game now. When internet still works this way, everyone's freeloading. Treating data people are creating as labor that can be monetized + - Feels like central pain of decentralization and feels like one of stewardship. + - Became a steward overnight and they didn't realize it. How do we have that convo in meaningful way, seeing value in taking SSB road +- RB: Couple thoughts in line and counter + - First immediate reaction, pushing concept of stewardship into protocol. Good from perspective of: it makes it easy to do. Worry about ways it could hide it from conscious consideration + - Counterpoint in here is part of what's important, in equitable society, something we should be thinking about. A new point of consideration in these new technologies. Big part of what's different in distributed web stuff. Where things live is something you should be thinking about now, it only exists if it's well stewarded by multiple people. Bears real thinking about + - To some degree, think it's critical in systems we want to work well that gets surfaced somehow + - Can't criticize SSB, keep meaning to read up on protocol. To degree of declaring peer/friend, you're stewarding their data. Good thing, makes it a conscious decision. But if you're doing it also for the people you're around maybe it's less good + - Counterpoint - I think concerning issue isn't so much scale, as it is scope. Part about scale is more about measurate(?) scale. Mauve's point - can't expect people to also be stewards of LHC, but institutions have same sort of needs of co-work and co-stewardship. The instituions that support that also have to support scale + - The concerning part to pay attention to is scope. Intentional communities where we can consciously think about what we're stewarding and who we're communicating with. + - The problem is Google storing 5 billion users data instead of community of 1000 or 10, but maybe it's lots of data. It's fine because it's a scope we can make meaningful + +- KN: Looking at this quote right on the screen +> Pushing forward with automated approaches presents a potential danger of marginalizing other approaches - LTER + +- The idea of making it invisible... I just joined SSB and the first question I asked is, "How much data is this taking up on my hard drive?"" Asked an SSB developer, how much do I add on average when I follow someone? He couldn't answer that. That's a good question + - What I've seen is that I started at 200MB, now follow about 30 people and it's up to 1.5GB. How did I get here??? + - He showed me other clients like Patchfoo, a light-weight client. Also Manyverse, a mobile app, and I'm unsure how much it downloads. I've had to struggle with wrangling gigs on my phone, so the invisibleness scares me + +- RB: Reminds me of torrenting. Tracking seeding vs downloading. Tracking ratio +- EN: Basic idea of developing systems where actual use is stewarding data. Great to hear that idea. Tending the wild reading, one of the things that struck me - stewardship is often taking care implies don't touch it, don't use it. + - Point is, actual stewarding for future, has to be used. Particularly environments, ecosystems. California's example requires use to persist over time, to look as it did. Question of use is so important. Maybe differs from other things like grandma's table where stewardship does not involve use + - Maybe a lot of data we can tie those things. Or some data, those two things are separate. + - What we're wrestling around. Incentives. How do we get people invested in decentralized stewardship? Back around to quote, "tying one's well-being to resource your stewarding". Really resonated. Incentives aren't necessarily monetary. **How to incentivize to particpate in stewardship? How their well-being is involved with care of data** + - Another point from Tending the Wild, though there are problems of transferring land stewardship to data, but in Coda author says there's the technical rules "how do you manage resource, when do you start a fire", but affecting values, beliefs, behaviors. So much comes back to cultural rules + - In this case, different kinds of events illustrated importance of stewardship and resource in question, social structures + - So much more to say around incentives and role of values, developing value and belief-system around data stewardship. Framing themselves as stewards + +- KB: Lots of thoughts, writing them down. Want to address incentivation + - [Inkandswitch - You own your data](https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html) + - Value of offline-first apps to the user. Hint to how we make this transistion to something people feel like doing + - For example, programmers have been resistant of IDEs in cloud app environment. Prefer offile. + - Why? You want it local. Want ability to work offline. Want to understand whole file structure. it's faster. + - Not unique to programmers. **Why is everyone ok with cloud native? Why not building offline-first on the whole?** + - Inkandswitch looking at CRDTs. Recommend the post + +- Mauve: Inkandswitch is awesome. "Local-first" is revolutionary. "P2P", "decentralization", "distributed" is techy. "Local-first" has more emotion in it. + - Work locally first, but also spread out. Not fully offline. Really like that + - InkandSwitch - They're using Dat under-the-hood + - But this is not enough for a lot of people, specifically the well-off. If you have great devices and connection, local-first isn't helpful. They don't benefit as much + - Having access to internet wasn't something I had. Programming somewhere not home, had to print docs to reference them or download whole websites for offline use. Partially because I was poor teenager with no data plan + - With wealth disparity, people on the bottom will have most use for local-first. They have least say. In the same vicinity you can still communicate with friends. There is no cloud service to pay. Not useful to those who have everything + - We have 2 class system: producers of tech and consumers of tech. Producers are most informed. Rich tech people working on social media don't give their children phones. They know the peril because they're building it + - Educating people why they should care or even empowering them is very hard + - Big point of decentralization is getting rid of servers, lowering barriers to entry. Because now having to pay $5/month for tiny VM already too much because assumes: credit card, monthly income, and tech skills to muck around in server + - Higher level building blocks that are just your device and sharing to people reduces places where need of tech expertise. Tech expertise becomes more working with your data and sharing it + +- B5: Reading group that has resonated is Civics. Civic republicanism was challenging and earns a place in this convo. Rewind to Eric's comment about incentives + - Mind goes to block chain, economics, one interpretation of incentives + - But other side is let's do stewardship through dependency. I rely on data therefore will store + - Third space that has emerged - civic angle. Articulating a moral duty to participate in preservation of information. Something we should call out and talk about, 3 buckets: + - Economic + - Interdependence - open source + - Classic steward - church figure taking care of text, archivist maintaining a collection. They don't depend on it, but carry a lot of weight. + - That's harder to talk about. In efforts for post-archival universe, we're wholly in blockchain, everything on chain and life is more boring. Or completely open-source, zealously trading - straw hats for source code. Still have middle space - agree to preserve purely because it's my job, a duty to participate somehow. We need to talk about more + - I think about IA, when Trump's tweets get pulled out. No one thought to archive until it was deleted. All these things that aren't valued today but are much valuable for somebody later. + - This role doesn't fit in other 2 buckets. We should challenge ourselves to ask: + - **In trying to articulate why people should change their behavior along the way are we talking about digital citizenship? Should we be thinking more broadly about the convo? Is that too much?** + - Food for thought! But I got nothing + +- RB: Yes, great point! Slide into post-custodial piece -> common good into collective good. + - Want the follow on about what they mean by collective goods + - There is a whole point about what our responsibilities are there. Common goods in current economic and cultural environment are broken and unable to fulfill that. Turning to idea of collective good. **Focus on how do you choose what those things you are responsible for? What is cultural system you're in and thinking when you're making that choice? Who is or isn't actively saying this is important, who are we saving for, how do we make those decisions in equitable and just way?** + - Common good is just in your context. If you have the ability to do that you're probably coming from a white, colonial context. So how do you determine what goes into collective area? It's a huge deal + - Eric had me thinking about, idea of how much space with SSB, stuff is taking up on my machine. That custodialism is pushed to edges. Producers of records are also custodians. In sense of doing for community and not just for yourself. + - Local-first is just for yourself, then go to concept in what way can that support a community? + - Torrent trackers, shooting for 1:1 ratio. Seeding and downloading. **Thinking about the numbers, in a community context your responsibility to store others stuff is a lot more than your own.** Which is kind of a thing, right? + - **How to provide structures to make that easy? Cultural signifiers to make that desirable? Where do local institutions fit in in offloading burden?** It's probably not feasible for everybody. Some sort of community institution that could do that + - Like IPFS pinning service, not paid for but agreed on, pinning data so not everything is on my machine, so I can still use my computer. So light clients can exist. Supporting a community service that does do that + - If this is important, have to support idea the more capable or affluent you are the more you have to store of others. What kind of community things can or should exist to offload burden? + +- KB: Rob's articulating what I've been calling "weight of heritage"? Also need to disambiguate 2 types of stewardship + - In the present, care in the present of a thing. What SSB does. The way it is initially disseminated to a community + - Other, more difficult, is long-term care of a thing. Which involves either aggregating infinite greater knowledge or pruning it. You have to. Things will get lost. At that point, questions of justice, "Who draws the line, why, for whom?" + - Interesting, like Facebook. We don't like how they handle our privacy or monetize. OTOH, you weren't planning to keep what they've kept. They do a good job showing it to you and feeling the same things + - They've created an incentive structure for themselves to be good stewards in the long sense. But bad stewards by not doing it in the way people want. + - How do manage carry all this weight? Acquaintances, families, past places. How do we make those choices? How do we make it so that people can make those choices for themselves within the platforms and protocols we design? + +- Mauve: An important part is getting rid of the choice. Should I store it or not? We have scarcity of storage. If we don't have scarcity, it's not a big decision whether to keep or not. Decision is what do I want to purge. + - Storage is expensive, but not that expensive. A lot of it is artificial. Phones with 32GB in 2019. By 2019 standards, that sucks. Who does that benefit? Cloud providers. There are SD cards that TBs. How much do users need? How hard is it to have external drive? In terms technology, getting rid of the choice of what do I store or not store. It's possible to make it easier + - A lot of push for thin clients is to push cloud forward. But if you make it a little thicker, suddenly some things are a big as deal. Storage, data + +- KN: Storage is cheap enough to keep everything, but I do want a choice. Back to SSB, I'm sure there was a lot of thought that went into it, once things are posted its uneditable, immutable. It stays in the record + - When I think about any social media, I don't want everything to exist forever. Right to be forgotten + - What do we want to steward, maintain? Don't want me 20s to be other people's entertainment. I don't wnat my mistakes to haunt me forever. I grow + - What do we choose to keep? What do we choose to let go of? + +- Mauve: Regarding deletion, big question, not talked about enough. Tried to bring up in Dat for last couple years. Not hard to do if people behave well + - **when publishing and it replicates across the world, that's scary** + - But if we have "unpublish", and have people who respect that + - Tombstone - Mark something as deleted, and can't undelete + - You don't have to replicate everything in a distributed system. Also, not everything has to be public and replicated to everybody. Facebook posts that are public are weird. Also, adding new contact and they see your entire life is weird. Encryption is something we can use that's underutilized + - Moving to decentralization, distributed systems–only privacy now is encryption. Scary, but a question we have to think about + - When creating data, who can see it? As app devs, we have to inform users. Available forever, for friends. Avoid people keeping copies because they're a jerk + +- KN: Is it possible for self-destruct messages? +- Mauve: Cryptographically, can't make self-destruct messages. Maybe new sci-fi tech, it's a trust thing. Snapchat - people can still screenshot or take a pic. Information theory makes this a pain. Once something is out there, it's OUT THERE! + +- KB: Trust changes over time too. Marriage and divorce. The person you trusted with life and things, is no longer trusted. Our system needs to account for that +- Mauve: Side channels is hard problem. Make software that behaves well. This is where centralization wins. Default mode of arbiter. +- RB: A bunch of this is software design, a lot is about trust. None of these systems remove trust. + - Concern in dweb, blockchain people talk about not needing trust. This discussion shows how critical it is. More pieces and people because we're removing arbiter like Facebook. As long as you trust arbiter, then they can lock other person out +- B5: Important to not ask our technology to do things it can't do. I can't unsay things, no takebacks in experiential world. When you send an email, it's public. Someone can disseminate it on forward + - We try to build protocols to automate away worst aspects of society + - Back to stewardship - how stewardship is dynamic and part of the awesome responsiblility is the discretion of the author, authorial intent, the desire to have a commonly agreed system where rules are understood before stewardship begins + - Embedded in this convo, is we should have a delete button, a way to transmit desire to delete. Right now, it's not in the protocol. Not a slight, it's hard to make and there's lots of other things to make and prioritize + - As we're trying to get around how stewardship funcitons and how we move across these categories, it comes with new problems and challenges that may not come until the future and Kelsey's aspect of temporal + - You don't want a delete button, until the minute you really need one. And you don't want a bi-directional, encrypted protocol until you do + - Don't ask things that aren't possible. It's not possible for protocol designers to think of all edge cases. There's the whole history of law and governments, tyring to plan for stuff you can't plan for + - Humbling and pressing need for us to break down barriers between producers and consumers, rely on accurate effort to translate into useful metaphors. That effor belongs on people who author protocols + +- Mauve: Tech in distributed space don't talk about law. People ask - What if I publish copyrighted stuff on Dat? You get sued! If you're doing something illegal, you should be sued + - Some tech people think exclusively about what's cryptographically possible or not possible, but miss the social aspect. The tech should have good defaults that reduce onboarding(?), but societal pressures should push forward + - How do we as a society decide what's good and bad? What to do about it? How can tech not get in the way and provide good guarantees + - Focusing on just the tech is not enough. It's the least interesting part. Though most to me because it's my speciality + - On a bigger scale - cultural values, morals, stewardship we focus on. Filecoin - stewardship is in the protocol. Just publish and free market provides, no human involvement. It's one approach, but alternative is people agree on what to do and that's important + - A partner has data that's confidential, there should be social repurcussions, but tech should try to protect. But then, ditch math and go for the club! + +- KB: Loved where we started with personal artifacts moving forward. Loved moved through also: what we're keeping, why we're keeping, who we're keeping it for + - Close with quote from short story, talks about disappearance of data over time - The Witness +> But something or an infinite number of things dies in every death unless the universe is possessed of a memory as the Theosophists(?) have supposed. In the course of time, there was a day that closed the last eyes to see Christ, the bottle of jounin(?), and the love of Helen each died with the death of some one man. What will die with me when I die? What pitiful or perishable form will the world lose? The voice of Macedonia Fernandez? The image of a roan horse upon the vacant lot of Cerrano and sharkas(?)? A bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk + +- Stewardship and remembering tech can not solve every problem. There will be losses: experiential, deeply personal, the way the data affected you or made you feel. Cool to hear everybody talking about different ways data is impacting them. Ways in which we think about what goes forward or deleted. Maybe nothing is deleted? Finding value and remembering that not everything gets saved, so the work of trying to save what we can is all that we can do in some sense + +- KN: Thanks Kelsey, great way to not end the conversation but leave us thinking more about how to continue this? Hope people think about how do we continue this conversation? How to be good stewards? Preserving what should be preserved, what we want to preserve or letting people choose? Thanks for an awesome conversation. + +- B5: Will create issue for decentralization. Especially local-first as foil for challenging decentralization + +### Transcript + +### Chat Log +* 00:22:30 Brendan O'Brien: thx! +* 00:22:36 Environmental Data Governance Initiative: https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw?view +* 00:24:01 Brendan O'Brien: then b5 on stack! +* 00:43:55 Rob Brackett: Me next! +* 00:46:04 Environmental Data Governance Initiative: Kev next +* 00:49:54 Eric Nost: i’ll jump in next +* 00:51:09 Mauve: I'm like 3 GB for SSB data +* 00:53:29 Brendan O'Brien: I’ll jump on stack +* 00:53:55 Mauve: I'll jump in after if Kel doesn't have something :P +* 00:55:13 Rob Brackett: Then me +* 00:57:46 Eric Nost: https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html +* 01:14:30 Rob Brackett: Credit Union for your Data +* 01:15:01 Eric Nost: Data trusts? https://www.cigionline.org/articles/what-data-trust +* 01:16:32 Brendan O'Brien: totally. feels like the *continued* push for thin client must have something to do with the cloud +* 01:17:52 Brendan O'Brien: this data trust stuff is very interesting +* 01:31:23 Brendan O'Brien: I think you’re very much in the right place :) +* 01:31:35 Rob Brackett: ^^^^^^^^^ +* 01:35:40 Eric Nost: thank you for hosting! From bc792f57fc8ac79c5da6b2a727122660f6674899 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kevin Nguyen Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2019 13:40:55 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 02/65] Update name of Dat member Co-Authored-By: RangerMauve --- notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md b/notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md index 9b5929a..9185bda 100644 --- a/notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md +++ b/notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md @@ -162,7 +162,7 @@ PDFs: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1K2C3AEf4tdZfMJoyC11RwjX0XwO-Ej - KN: No worries, glad you're here - Mauve: Only glanced over notes myself, only had a week, also didn't have time. Next time will have more preparation - KN: No worries, question still stands -- Mauve: Stewardship is pretty new concept. Don't have any cultural knowledge of stewardship or personal experiences. One interesting use is by Fleki(?) from Dat, putting together network like communes where nomads come and do something with a given focus and then go somewhere else. A stream of nomads coming and going. But there are people living there, stewards of the land that keep it maintained. Nomads help less. Stewards are taking care of it so others can use it and helping coordinate people. That concept as a role is interesting and cool +- Mauve: Stewardship is pretty new concept. Don't have any cultural knowledge of stewardship or personal experiences. One interesting use is by Fleeky(?) from Dat community, putting together network like communes where nomads come and do something with a given focus and then go somewhere else. A stream of nomads coming and going. But there are people living there, stewards of the land that keep it maintained. Nomads help less. Stewards are taking care of it so others can use it and helping coordinate people. That concept as a role is interesting and cool - KB: Is that a novel or real? - Mauve: It's real. A community they're building. Bought land and making like a "circus" commune. Making it a network for these hubs - KB: Cool, is there a link? From c85e2d99acb726d2ee151745642b7cfa25ec71e2 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kevin Nguyen Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2019 13:51:44 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 03/65] Fix Mauve's comment Co-Authored-By: RangerMauve --- notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md b/notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md index 9185bda..0a29486 100644 --- a/notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md +++ b/notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md @@ -313,7 +313,7 @@ PDFs: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1K2C3AEf4tdZfMJoyC11RwjX0XwO-Ej - Humbling and pressing need for us to break down barriers between producers and consumers, rely on accurate effort to translate into useful metaphors. That effor belongs on people who author protocols - Mauve: Tech in distributed space don't talk about law. People ask - What if I publish copyrighted stuff on Dat? You get sued! If you're doing something illegal, you should be sued - - Some tech people think exclusively about what's cryptographically possible or not possible, but miss the social aspect. The tech should have good defaults that reduce onboarding(?), but societal pressures should push forward + - Some tech people think exclusively about what's cryptographically possible or not possible, but miss the social aspect. The tech should have good defaults that reduce onboarding pain, but societal pressures should push forward - How do we as a society decide what's good and bad? What to do about it? How can tech not get in the way and provide good guarantees - Focusing on just the tech is not enough. It's the least interesting part. Though most to me because it's my speciality - On a bigger scale - cultural values, morals, stewardship we focus on. Filecoin - stewardship is in the protocol. Just publish and free market provides, no human involvement. It's one approach, but alternative is people agree on what to do and that's important From 567f9df006cb8083443c9e86e3ca40ecb0e40e17 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2019 11:47:05 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 04/65] adds google group join link to readme, finishes sentence about blog posts --- README.md | 4 ++-- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 05df254..7ecbcec 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ Data. Together. Let's read about it Data Together's reading group is a set of conversations on themes relevant to information and ethics. Curated reading selections are distributed once a month; we meet to discuss on video call. -This year, we are creating **blog posts** of +This year, we are creating **blog posts** of each of the conversations, which you can see at [datatogether.org](//datatogether.org) # Spring - Summer 2019 Data Together Reading Group @@ -12,7 +12,7 @@ This year, we are creating **blog posts** of 🎯 Participation link (recorded): [https://edgi-video-call-landing-page.herokuapp.com/https://zoom.us/j/847315566](https://edgi-video-call-landing-page.herokuapp.com/https://zoom.us/j/847315566) ▶️ [**Data Together Call Playlist**](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtsP3g9LafVul1gCctMYGm9sz5FUWr5bu) -Once a month, we'll host a 1.5 hour discussion of one of our [themes](#themes). Everyone should try hard to read the *core* reading (~30 pages), and once or twice sign up to [facilitate discussion](#facilitation). +Once a month, we'll host a 1.5 hour discussion of one of our [themes](#themes). Everyone should try hard to read the *core* reading (~30 pages), and once or twice sign up to [facilitate discussion](#facilitation). [**Join the Google Group**](https://groups.google.com/forum/embed/?place=forum/datatogether/join) to be notified of upcoming meetings and readings. Our hope is that: first, we learn together!; second, through documenting discussion we can articulate Data Together principles. From bda75e88c84a2a2dff5863e53a8d40426a1b0b74 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2019 12:05:18 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 05/65] Updates blog post links to datatogether.org, adds one --- README.md | 6 +++--- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 05df254..e5a59e0 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -24,10 +24,10 @@ Our hope is that: first, we learn together!; second, through documenting discuss ## Themes - [Knowledge Commons](#knowledge-commons) (April 9) -[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/bW8BYVwVbuo)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/1-knowledge-commons-2019-04-09.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.github.io/website/posts/01_knowledge_commons/) +[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/bW8BYVwVbuo)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/1-knowledge-commons-2019-04-09.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/01_knowledge_commons/) - [Civics](#civics) (May 7) -[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/YUt2PxRZCYs)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/2-civics-2019-05-07.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.github.io/website/posts/02_civics/) -- [Alternatives to Capitalist Structures](#alternatives-to-capitalist-structures) (June 4)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/VWBiq1K7N4k)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/3-alternatives-to-capitalist-structures-2019-06-04.md) +[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/YUt2PxRZCYs)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/2-civics-2019-05-07.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/02_civics/) +- [Alternatives to Capitalist Structures](#alternatives-to-capitalist-structures) (June 4)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/VWBiq1K7N4k)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/3-alternatives-to-capitalist-structures-2019-06-04.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/03_alternatives_capitalist/) - [Stewardship](#stewardship) (August 6) - [What is Decentralization?](#what-is-decentralization) (September TBD) From ad00ef2edf8eb88f6fafb529dae1741bce0bf318 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Breseman Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2019 16:25:07 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 06/65] adds period to end of sentence --- README.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 7ecbcec..67c6409 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ Data. Together. Let's read about it Data Together's reading group is a set of conversations on themes relevant to information and ethics. Curated reading selections are distributed once a month; we meet to discuss on video call. -This year, we are creating **blog posts** of each of the conversations, which you can see at [datatogether.org](//datatogether.org) +This year, we are creating **blog posts** of each of the conversations, which you can see at [datatogether.org](//datatogether.org). # Spring - Summer 2019 Data Together Reading Group From bf9dc16d2ef7aa54a08a93900e26216aef0ced3c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kevin Nguyen Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2019 16:21:34 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 07/65] Apply suggestions from code review Co-Authored-By: Kelsey Co-Authored-By: Rob Brackett --- .../4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md | 49 ++++++++++--------- 1 file changed, 25 insertions(+), 24 deletions(-) diff --git a/notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md b/notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md index 0a29486..d0add88 100644 --- a/notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md +++ b/notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md @@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbJUSvO_Xvc) ### Intro -Our selections this month begin with traditional notions and practices of stewardship. We then look briefly at present-day theory and principles around data preservation. We continue with 2 different studies of modern day institutions: an ecological research science network & an university library, and look at the continuing challenges they face and how they deal with data stewardship. Finally, we finish with a selection on the problems facing open-source software and how to sustain digital infrastructure. +Our selections this month begin with traditional notions and practices of stewardship. We then look briefly at present-day theory and principles around data preservation. We continue with two different studies of modern day institutions: an ecological research science network & an university library, and look at the continuing challenges they face and how they deal with data stewardship. Finally, we finish with a selection on the problems facing open-source software and how to sustain digital infrastructure. ### Readings: @@ -17,9 +17,9 @@ PDFs: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1K2C3AEf4tdZfMJoyC11RwjX0XwO-Ej - Minutes 2:50-6:17 - Available at: https://youtu.be/RWCbK8qRkuo?t=170 - Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l8tfRlAAL6y4JDRpeK4s--NTRcdBitMHpjsVfAzbPtU/edit -2. Nora Marks Dauenhauer (1990). **Haa Tuwunáagu Yis** +2. Nora Marks Dauenhauer (1990). **Haa Tuwunáagu Yís** - pp. 263-267, 277-281, Elders Speak to the Future -3. Kat Anderson (2005). **Tending the wild** +3. Kat Anderson (2005). **Tending the Wild** - pp. xv-xviii, Preface - pp. 2-6, Introduction - pp. 358-364, Coda - Indigenous Wisdom in the Modern World @@ -37,7 +37,7 @@ PDFs: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1K2C3AEf4tdZfMJoyC11RwjX0XwO-Ej 6. Definititon of [post-custodial theory of archives](https://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/p/postcustodial-theory-of-archives) 7. Hannah Alpert-Abrams, David A Bliss, Itza Carbajal (2019). **Post-Custodial Archiving for the Collective Good.** - pp. 5-12 - - Part 1: Post-custodial, Anti-Colonial, Neoliberal + - Part 1: Post-Custodial, Anti-Colonial, Neoliberal - Part 2: Labor - pp. 18-21, Part 4: From Common Good to a Collective Good - Available at: https://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/87 @@ -62,7 +62,7 @@ PDFs: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1K2C3AEf4tdZfMJoyC11RwjX0XwO-Ej ## Questions/Themes -### 1) Define & Redefine. How do we define Stewards/Stewardship? What are the qualities we start from and agree with? What can we learn from other traditions of stewardship? How did others pick up on the idea? How have your ideas changed or evolved over time? +### 1) Define & Redefine. How do we define stewards/stewardship? What are the qualities we start from and agree with? What can we learn from other traditions of stewardship? How did others pick up on the idea? How have your ideas changed or evolved over time? > Stewardship is the management of various assets > That don't belong to you > ... @@ -90,7 +90,7 @@ PDFs: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1K2C3AEf4tdZfMJoyC11RwjX0XwO-Ej > The traditional hand written field notebook or group station log of activities creates flexibility in practice with the possibility of in-the-field category modifications or inserted margin notes. These unexpected reorganizations and notations represent science-in-the-making yet create challenges for structured data flows and present challenges to update while data collection continues (329) - LTER -> manual data taking is inherently a question of data collector and their understanding and relationship with the instrument and the ecological site in which data is collected...the "sense" for data, that ecologists acquire as collectors of their own data in the field or laboratory, plays the most important role also in their use of data collected by someone else because it helps them to understand and to assess the data (344) - LTER +> Manual data taking is inherently a question of data collector and their understanding and relationship with the instrument and the ecological site in which data is collected...the "sense" for data, that ecologists acquire as collectors of their own data in the field or laboratory, plays the most important role also in their use of data collected by someone else because it helps them to understand and to assess the data (344) - LTER > Pushing forward with automated approaches presents a potential danger of marginalizing other approaches (345) - LTER @@ -117,7 +117,7 @@ PDFs: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1K2C3AEf4tdZfMJoyC11RwjX0XwO-Ej > ...one of the biggest challenges to its sustainability, is that there is no organizing body to determine what gets built or used in digital infrastructure. - (42) Eghbal -* I have hesitency about things like Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB), that have no way to edit posts. I want my art to be what remains, not my growing pains. I don't want my shame and mistakes to be entertainment or reason for capital punishment (cancel culture). +* I have hesitancy about things like Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB), that have no way to edit posts. I want my art to be what remains, not my growing pains. I don't want my shame and mistakes to be entertainment or reason for capital punishment (cancel culture). * How does maintenance and repair figure into the conversation as we focus on technological innovation and new tools? @@ -125,9 +125,9 @@ PDFs: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1K2C3AEf4tdZfMJoyC11RwjX0XwO-Ej > Instead of finding pathways for people to make their way into well-paid careers in libraries, archives, and museums, our society has established pathways from communities to prisons that provide cheap labor and further undermines the future of a professional cultural heritage workforce. - (127) Owens -> cost-cutting practices leads to increased dependence on lower-cost labor, including volunteers, interns, and outsourced workers..."This puts the long-term survival of archives at risk, which challenges the archival paradigm of long-term preservation and historical importance" - (10) Abrams, et. al +> Cost-cutting practices leads to increased dependence on lower-cost labor, including volunteers, interns, and outsourced workers..."This puts the long-term survival of archives at risk, which challenges the archival paradigm of long-term preservation and historical importance" - (10) Abrams, et al. -> Positions are temporary...lead to frequent staff turnover; these conditions also lead archival workers to focus on short-term goals and objectives that can be completed within the terms of their contracts. As a result, we operate without the deep knowledge that comes with long-term practice, and without the institutional memory that would enable us to sustain the many relationships on which post-custodial projects depend. - (11) Abrams, et. al +> Positions are temporary...lead to frequent staff turnover; these conditions also lead archival workers to focus on short-term goals and objectives that can be completed within the terms of their contracts. As a result, we operate without the deep knowledge that comes with long-term practice, and without the institutional memory that would enable us to sustain the many relationships on which post-custodial projects depend. - (11) Abrams, et al. > Most of us take opening a software application for granted, the way we take turning on the lights for granted. We don't think about the human capital necessary to make that happen. - (9) Eghbal @@ -170,8 +170,8 @@ PDFs: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1K2C3AEf4tdZfMJoyC11RwjX0XwO-Ej - KB: Thanks - KN: Kelsey, anything to add? - KB: Heard of stewardship term in 2 contexts - - Montessori: stewarding a space. Elementary classrooms where everybody has a chore everyday, time at the end of the day for dusting computer monitors or rolling things up, put away. Space stewardship which is cool interaction and ownership over space. No cleaners are coming. This is your space and need to take care of it. - - Land stewardship: My dad spent career in timber sales. Dual part - they are clear cutting Alaskan forests but also works for tribal entities. Job a decade ago was stewardship of island with monoculture of spruce. Spruce takes a 100 years to mature. A lot of trees you can harvest in 10 years. But not spruce. Had to create plans accounting for livelihood but also economic, spirtual, recreational pursuits of tribal owners or shareholders. How Alaska native claims settled out, in perpetuity. Had to create plans out 100 years + - Montessori: stewarding a space. Elementary classrooms where everybody has a chore every day, time at the end of the day for dusting computer monitors or rolling things up, put away. Space stewardship which is cool interaction and ownership over space. No cleaners are coming. This is your space and need to take care of it. + - Land stewardship: My dad spent career in timber sales. Dual part - they are clear cutting Alaskan forests but also works for tribal entities. Job a decade ago was stewardship of island with monoculture of spruce. Spruce takes 100 years to mature. A lot of trees you can harvest in 10 years. But not spruce. Had to create plans accounting for livelihood but also economic, spiritual, recreational pursuits of tribal members/shareholders. How Alaska Native claims settled out, in perpetuity. Had to create plans out 100 years - Think about stewardship, looking at climate change, **the importance of place.** Stewarding land as opposed to nomads, which is how I've land but still attached to place. That's why circus commune is interesting. **The importance of intergenerational persistance, passing of knowledge as you lose a place** - EN: Really appreciated Kelsey's observations and reflections. Also land stewardship is how I think of it, my partner's family runs a farm for a long time. Kelsey raised issue of ownership - So interesting, the steward is not an owner, taking care of someone else's stuff. Reflect on the reading, pastor's comments, felt shockingly insightful. Not expecting something so straight-forward for a sermon, but helped defined stewardship in terms of ownership, responsibility, accountability, all these things that go into taking care of somebody else's stuff for them in relation to others who are potentially using it. Lots going on, great selection @@ -182,7 +182,7 @@ PDFs: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1K2C3AEf4tdZfMJoyC11RwjX0XwO-Ej - KN: I liked that people touched on ownership. Talked to neighbor who is a pastor. They had a great term, it's the "antidote to dominion", instead of lording over or controlling something. Instead, taking care of, the proper care and use of things. Theme I wanted to touch on next - Within the Tending the Wild reading - > ...one gains respect for nature by *using* it judiciously. By using a plant or an animal, interacting with it, where it lives, and tying your well-being to its existence, you can be intimate with it and understand it. (xvi) - Anderson - - that's how you take care of it. Similaring the LTER paper they talked about how scientists in the field taking notes on paper, changing things in the margins, it's more visceral and by doing so they have a better sense of the data as opposed to just numbers in a spreadsheet + - that's how you take care of it. Similar, in the LTER paper they talked about how scientists in the field taking notes on paper, changing things in the margins, it's more visceral and by doing so they have a better sense of the data as opposed to just numbers in a spreadsheet - Going along with that idea, I'm curious - How do we interact with data on a more visceral level? - **More importantly, how do we get the public, the people we're trying to reach with our technology to use data in a way that they will want to steward it?** @@ -201,7 +201,7 @@ PDFs: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1K2C3AEf4tdZfMJoyC11RwjX0XwO-Ej - Think that's part of sociological relationship to data. Hardest aspect to remedy. Requires us to stop everybody, Hey! You were upset by CA (Cambridge Analytica) and somebody aggregating your information in ways you disagree with - Many remedies will involve convos we didn't want to have before. How do we negotiate that? - Shifting labor is real, moving work onto people who weren't doing work before. When thinking about stewardship of information. That's really what we're talking about, when decentralizing - pushing the burden of keeping thing available and online, turning thin clients into stewards. - - Paul Frazee's pick think or thin client. New responsibility, hard to change rules of game now. When internet still works this way, everyone's freeloading. Treating data people are creating as labor that can be monetized + - Paul Frazee's piece re thick or thin client. New responsibility, hard to change rules of game now. When internet still works this way, everyone's freeloading. Treating data people are creating as labor that can be monetized - Feels like central pain of decentralization and feels like one of stewardship. - Became a steward overnight and they didn't realize it. How do we have that convo in meaningful way, seeing value in taking SSB road - RB: Couple thoughts in line and counter @@ -209,18 +209,18 @@ PDFs: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1K2C3AEf4tdZfMJoyC11RwjX0XwO-Ej - Counterpoint in here is part of what's important, in equitable society, something we should be thinking about. A new point of consideration in these new technologies. Big part of what's different in distributed web stuff. Where things live is something you should be thinking about now, it only exists if it's well stewarded by multiple people. Bears real thinking about - To some degree, think it's critical in systems we want to work well that gets surfaced somehow - Can't criticize SSB, keep meaning to read up on protocol. To degree of declaring peer/friend, you're stewarding their data. Good thing, makes it a conscious decision. But if you're doing it also for the people you're around maybe it's less good - - Counterpoint - I think concerning issue isn't so much scale, as it is scope. Part about scale is more about measurate(?) scale. Mauve's point - can't expect people to also be stewards of LHC, but institutions have same sort of needs of co-work and co-stewardship. The instituions that support that also have to support scale + - Counterpoint - I think concerning issue isn't so much scale, as it is scope. Part about scale is more about commensurate scale. Mauve's point - can't expect people to also be stewards of LHC, but institutions have same sort of needs of co-work and co-stewardship. The instituions that support that also have to support scale - The concerning part to pay attention to is scope. Intentional communities where we can consciously think about what we're stewarding and who we're communicating with. - - The problem is Google storing 5 billion users data instead of community of 1000 or 10, but maybe it's lots of data. It's fine because it's a scope we can make meaningful + - The problem is Google storing 5 billion users' data instead of community of 1000 or 10, which could still be lots of data. It's fine because it's a scope we can make meaningful - KN: Looking at this quote right on the screen > Pushing forward with automated approaches presents a potential danger of marginalizing other approaches - LTER -- The idea of making it invisible... I just joined SSB and the first question I asked is, "How much data is this taking up on my hard drive?"" Asked an SSB developer, how much do I add on average when I follow someone? He couldn't answer that. That's a good question +- The idea of making it invisible... I just joined SSB and the first question I asked is, "How much data is this taking up on my hard drive?" Asked an SSB developer, how much do I add on average when I follow someone? He couldn't answer that. That's a good question - What I've seen is that I started at 200MB, now follow about 30 people and it's up to 1.5GB. How did I get here??? - He showed me other clients like Patchfoo, a light-weight client. Also Manyverse, a mobile app, and I'm unsure how much it downloads. I've had to struggle with wrangling gigs on my phone, so the invisibleness scares me -- RB: Reminds me of torrenting. Tracking seeding vs downloading. Tracking ratio +- RB: Reminds me of torrenting. Tracking seeding vs downloading. It was always important to keep your ratio in check - EN: Basic idea of developing systems where actual use is stewarding data. Great to hear that idea. Tending the wild reading, one of the things that struck me - stewardship is often taking care implies don't touch it, don't use it. - Point is, actual stewarding for future, has to be used. Particularly environments, ecosystems. California's example requires use to persist over time, to look as it did. Question of use is so important. Maybe differs from other things like grandma's table where stewardship does not involve use - Maybe a lot of data we can tie those things. Or some data, those two things are separate. @@ -230,9 +230,9 @@ PDFs: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1K2C3AEf4tdZfMJoyC11RwjX0XwO-Ej - So much more to say around incentives and role of values, developing value and belief-system around data stewardship. Framing themselves as stewards - KB: Lots of thoughts, writing them down. Want to address incentivation - - [Inkandswitch - You own your data](https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html) + - [Inkandswitch - You own your data, in spite of the cloud](https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html) - Value of offline-first apps to the user. Hint to how we make this transistion to something people feel like doing - - For example, programmers have been resistant of IDEs in cloud app environment. Prefer offile. + - For example, programmers have been resistant of IDEs in cloud app environment. Prefer offline. - Why? You want it local. Want ability to work offline. Want to understand whole file structure. it's faster. - Not unique to programmers. **Why is everyone ok with cloud native? Why not building offline-first on the whole?** - Inkandswitch looking at CRDTs. Recommend the post @@ -248,7 +248,7 @@ PDFs: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1K2C3AEf4tdZfMJoyC11RwjX0XwO-Ej - Big point of decentralization is getting rid of servers, lowering barriers to entry. Because now having to pay $5/month for tiny VM already too much because assumes: credit card, monthly income, and tech skills to muck around in server - Higher level building blocks that are just your device and sharing to people reduces places where need of tech expertise. Tech expertise becomes more working with your data and sharing it -- B5: Reading group that has resonated is Civics. Civic republicanism was challenging and earns a place in this convo. Rewind to Eric's comment about incentives +- B5: Reading group that has resonated is [Civics](https://datatogether.org/posts/02_civics/). Civic republicanism was challenging and earns a place in this convo. Rewind to Eric's comment about incentives - Mind goes to block chain, economics, one interpretation of incentives - But other side is let's do stewardship through dependency. I rely on data therefore will store - Third space that has emerged - civic angle. Articulating a moral duty to participate in preservation of information. Something we should call out and talk about, 3 buckets: @@ -256,7 +256,7 @@ PDFs: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1K2C3AEf4tdZfMJoyC11RwjX0XwO-Ej - Interdependence - open source - Classic steward - church figure taking care of text, archivist maintaining a collection. They don't depend on it, but carry a lot of weight. - That's harder to talk about. In efforts for post-archival universe, we're wholly in blockchain, everything on chain and life is more boring. Or completely open-source, zealously trading - straw hats for source code. Still have middle space - agree to preserve purely because it's my job, a duty to participate somehow. We need to talk about more - - I think about IA, when Trump's tweets get pulled out. No one thought to archive until it was deleted. All these things that aren't valued today but are much valuable for somebody later. + - I think about the Internet Archive (IA), when Trump's tweets get pulled out. No one thought to archive until it was deleted. All these things that aren't valued today but are much valuable for somebody later. - This role doesn't fit in other 2 buckets. We should challenge ourselves to ask: - **In trying to articulate why people should change their behavior along the way are we talking about digital citizenship? Should we be thinking more broadly about the convo? Is that too much?** - Food for thought! But I got nothing @@ -272,7 +272,7 @@ PDFs: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1K2C3AEf4tdZfMJoyC11RwjX0XwO-Ej - Like IPFS pinning service, not paid for but agreed on, pinning data so not everything is on my machine, so I can still use my computer. So light clients can exist. Supporting a community service that does do that - If this is important, have to support idea the more capable or affluent you are the more you have to store of others. What kind of community things can or should exist to offload burden? -- KB: Rob's articulating what I've been calling "weight of heritage"? Also need to disambiguate 2 types of stewardship +- KB: Rob's articulating what I've been calling "the weight of heritage"– obligation to steward an ever-growing inheritance of data/knowledge/information/wisdom. Also need to disambiguate 2 types of stewardship - In the present, care in the present of a thing. What SSB does. The way it is initially disseminated to a community - Other, more difficult, is long-term care of a thing. Which involves either aggregating infinite greater knowledge or pruning it. You have to. Things will get lost. At that point, questions of justice, "Who draws the line, why, for whom?" - Interesting, like Facebook. We don't like how they handle our privacy or monetize. OTOH, you weren't planning to keep what they've kept. They do a good job showing it to you and feeling the same things @@ -320,8 +320,9 @@ PDFs: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1K2C3AEf4tdZfMJoyC11RwjX0XwO-Ej - A partner has data that's confidential, there should be social repurcussions, but tech should try to protect. But then, ditch math and go for the club! - KB: Loved where we started with personal artifacts moving forward. Loved moved through also: what we're keeping, why we're keeping, who we're keeping it for - - Close with quote from short story, talks about disappearance of data over time - The Witness -> But something or an infinite number of things dies in every death unless the universe is possessed of a memory as the Theosophists(?) have supposed. In the course of time, there was a day that closed the last eyes to see Christ, the bottle of jounin(?), and the love of Helen each died with the death of some one man. What will die with me when I die? What pitiful or perishable form will the world lose? The voice of Macedonia Fernandez? The image of a roan horse upon the vacant lot of Cerrano and sharkas(?)? A bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk + - Close with quote from short story, talks about disappearance of data over time - [The Witness](https://thefloatinglibrary.com/2008/09/14/the-witness/) by Jorge Luis Borges +> But something, or an infinite number of things, dies in every death, unless the universe is possessed of a memory, as the theosophists have supposed. +> In the course of time, there was a day that closed the last eyes to see Christ. The bottle of Junin, and the love of Helen each died with the death of some one man. What will die with me when I die, what pitiful or perishable form will the world lose? The voice of Macedonio Fernandez? The image of a roan horse on the vacant lot at Serrano and Charcas? A bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk? - Stewardship and remembering tech can not solve every problem. There will be losses: experiential, deeply personal, the way the data affected you or made you feel. Cool to hear everybody talking about different ways data is impacting them. Ways in which we think about what goes forward or deleted. Maybe nothing is deleted? Finding value and remembering that not everything gets saved, so the work of trying to save what we can is all that we can do in some sense From e91c03a1108f5331f797be75eac371a33431ea9e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kevin Nguyen Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2019 16:29:25 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 08/65] Remove link to PDFs --- notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md | 2 -- 1 file changed, 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md b/notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md index d0add88..d50e263 100644 --- a/notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md +++ b/notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md @@ -11,8 +11,6 @@ Our selections this month begin with traditional notions and practices of stewar ### Readings: -PDFs: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1K2C3AEf4tdZfMJoyC11RwjX0XwO-Ejtt - 1. Pastor Henry Wright (2019). **The Stewardship of Time** - Minutes 2:50-6:17 - Available at: https://youtu.be/RWCbK8qRkuo?t=170 From 7aa4df0039d21daa3f0f1948536930ecdb331318 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kevin Nguyen Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2019 16:38:08 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 09/65] Update README with stewardship notes links --- README.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 05df254..7d63fed 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ Our hope is that: first, we learn together!; second, through documenting discuss - [Civics](#civics) (May 7) [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/YUt2PxRZCYs)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/2-civics-2019-05-07.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.github.io/website/posts/02_civics/) - [Alternatives to Capitalist Structures](#alternatives-to-capitalist-structures) (June 4)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/VWBiq1K7N4k)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/3-alternatives-to-capitalist-structures-2019-06-04.md) -- [Stewardship](#stewardship) (August 6) +- [Stewardship](#stewardship) (August 6)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/fbJUSvO_Xvc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md) - [What is Decentralization?](#what-is-decentralization) (September TBD) ## Sessions From f3edca12fae9d72734c087cb8cd440aa61f817f1 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kevin Nguyen Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2019 16:46:21 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 10/65] Fix README --- README.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index e473605..509e058 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -26,7 +26,7 @@ Our hope is that: first, we learn together!; second, through documenting discuss - [Knowledge Commons](#knowledge-commons) (April 9) [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/bW8BYVwVbuo)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/1-knowledge-commons-2019-04-09.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/01_knowledge_commons/) - [Civics](#civics) (May 7) -[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/YUt2PxRZCYs)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/2-civics-2019-05-07.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.github.io/website/posts/02_civics/) +[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/YUt2PxRZCYs)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/2-civics-2019-05-07.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/02_civics/) - [Alternatives to Capitalist Structures](#alternatives-to-capitalist-structures) (June 4)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/VWBiq1K7N4k)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/3-alternatives-to-capitalist-structures-2019-06-04.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/03_alternatives_capitalist/) - [Stewardship](#stewardship) (August 6)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/fbJUSvO_Xvc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md) - [What is Decentralization?](#what-is-decentralization) (September TBD) From 98bf845e87c4773d206e3f0405c68cdbc280202d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kevin Nguyen Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2019 08:40:02 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 11/65] Add link to repo in notes template --- notes/template.md | 1 + 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+) diff --git a/notes/template.md b/notes/template.md index b184df2..a481475 100644 --- a/notes/template.md +++ b/notes/template.md @@ -1,4 +1,5 @@ # Data. Together. Let's read about it +[About the Data Together Reading Group](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether) ## Topic (Date of discussion) From 5edd2f47d1b8888d8303c31ce091f6cee10cbb37 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kevin Nguyen Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2019 17:39:15 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 12/65] Add Decentralization readings --- README.md | 45 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--- 1 file changed, 42 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 509e058..222f807 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -145,13 +145,52 @@ Topic description coming soon! - Available at: https://lternet.edu/wp-content/themes/ndic/library/pdf/reports/Number%209.pdf ### What is Decentralization? -**September TBD** +**November 12, 2019** -Topic description coming soon! +True to form, we gathered readings in a decentralized way. Themes that emerged were: looking critically at how "decentralization" is defined, how it could/should be measured, and the sticky problems that aren't automatically solved (and sometimes are actually caused) by technology. **Readings:** -Coming soon! Readings should appear at least 1 month before the date of discussion. +1. Sarah Friend. **Decentralization and its Discontents** + - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mRhvltGs8A + - Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vRS9OW2IXhD3uboF7fDb8aBegEA7MzeqyJpGvoYxithpLYu__cwSyfZhmQj08mJvm1RPtPA6Du3bEeI/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000&slide=id.p +2. Angela Walch. (2019) **Deconstructing 'Decentralization': Exploring the Core Claim of Crypto Systems** + - pp. 11-24 + - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3326244 +3. Kleppmann, Martin & Wiggins, Adam & Hardenberg, Peter van & McGranaghan, Mark. **Local-first Software** + - Read the seven ideals for local-first software + - https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html#seven-ideals + +--- + +4. Brancati, D. (2006). **Decentralization: Fueling the Fire or Dampening the Flames of Ethnic Conflict and Secessionism?** + - pp. 651-660, 681 + - https://sci-hub.tw/10.1017/s002081830606019x +5. Elinor Ostrom. **Green from the Grassroots** + - https://www.commondreams.org/views/2012/06/12/green-grassroots +6. Rachel-Rose O’Leary. **This North Syrian School Is a Baby Step Toward a Blockchain Society** + - https://www.coindesk.com/this-north-syrian-school-is-a-baby-step-toward-a-blockchain-society + +--- + +7. James C. Scott. (1998) **Seeing Like a State** + - pp. 309-311 (beginning of chapter 9), + - pp. 323-328 "Practical Knowledge Versus Scientific Explanation" + - pp. 333-339 "The Social Context of Metis and Its Destruction" + - https://libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-%20James%20C.%20Scott.pdf +8. Jessica J. Prentice. **The Most Dangerous Notion in Reinventing Organizations** + - https://medium.com/@jessicajprentice/the-most-dangerous-notion-in-reinventing-organizations-9032930295e2 + +--- + +**OPTIONAL** + +9. Adi Robertson. **How the Biggest Decentralized Social Network is Dealing With its Nazi Problem** + - https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentralized-social-network-gab-migration-fediverse-app-blocking +10. Darius Kazemi. **Run Your Own Social** + - https://runyourown.social/ +11. Longer talk of Sarah Friend. **Decentralization and its Discontents** + - https://youtu.be/Km6EYsBYAlY?t=64 ## Facilitation From 783efe39dfd235af9d3f8dbe7595c4d1ab167de8 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kevin Nguyen Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2019 17:42:39 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 13/65] Add more info to readings description --- README.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 222f807..323d200 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -147,7 +147,7 @@ Topic description coming soon! ### What is Decentralization? **November 12, 2019** -True to form, we gathered readings in a decentralized way. Themes that emerged were: looking critically at how "decentralization" is defined, how it could/should be measured, and the sticky problems that aren't automatically solved (and sometimes are actually caused) by technology. +True to form, we gathered readings in a decentralized way. Themes that emerged were: looking critically at how "decentralization" is defined, how it could/should be measured, and the sticky problems that aren't automatically solved (and sometimes are actually caused) by technology. The readings are chunked to break them up a bit. The first 3 focus on decentralized tech and apps, the next 3 on political decentralization, and the last 2 on decentralized knowledge creation and stewardship. **Readings:** From f55aa1de4406ff28910a308e14bf421a810d37a6 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 11:43:10 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 14/65] Adds date to November meeting --- README.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 323d200..313c78a 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -29,7 +29,7 @@ Our hope is that: first, we learn together!; second, through documenting discuss [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/YUt2PxRZCYs)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/2-civics-2019-05-07.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/02_civics/) - [Alternatives to Capitalist Structures](#alternatives-to-capitalist-structures) (June 4)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/VWBiq1K7N4k)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/3-alternatives-to-capitalist-structures-2019-06-04.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/03_alternatives_capitalist/) - [Stewardship](#stewardship) (August 6)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/fbJUSvO_Xvc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md) -- [What is Decentralization?](#what-is-decentralization) (September TBD) +- [What is Decentralization?](#what-is-decentralization) (November 12) ## Sessions From a3c2ec7a1365830c0e55aeaca3adeb2ea9e9e2b5 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Breseman Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2019 14:38:28 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 15/65] updates with notes and readme directing to next semester --- README.md | 6 +- .../5-decentralization-2019-11-12.md | 418 ++++++++++++++++++ 2 files changed, 423 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) create mode 100644 notes/semester_02_2019/5-decentralization-2019-11-12.md diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 313c78a..ca480b7 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -6,6 +6,10 @@ Curated reading selections are distributed once a month; we meet to discuss on v This year, we are creating **blog posts** of each of the conversations, which you can see at [datatogether.org](//datatogether.org). +# 2020 Data Together Reading Group + +Coming soon! See: https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/71 + # Spring - Summer 2019 Data Together Reading Group 📅 17:30-19:00 ET Tuesdays [**Data Together Calendar**](https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=u75o4fbnv59006peo07nv67vsg%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America%2FToronto) @@ -29,7 +33,7 @@ Our hope is that: first, we learn together!; second, through documenting discuss [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/YUt2PxRZCYs)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/2-civics-2019-05-07.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/02_civics/) - [Alternatives to Capitalist Structures](#alternatives-to-capitalist-structures) (June 4)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/VWBiq1K7N4k)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/3-alternatives-to-capitalist-structures-2019-06-04.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/03_alternatives_capitalist/) - [Stewardship](#stewardship) (August 6)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/fbJUSvO_Xvc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md) -- [What is Decentralization?](#what-is-decentralization) (November 12) +- [What is Decentralization?](#what-is-decentralization) (November 12)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/74jsTUzdOZc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/5-decentralization-2019-11-12.md) ## Sessions diff --git a/notes/semester_02_2019/5-decentralization-2019-11-12.md b/notes/semester_02_2019/5-decentralization-2019-11-12.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e5221c1 --- /dev/null +++ b/notes/semester_02_2019/5-decentralization-2019-11-12.md @@ -0,0 +1,418 @@ +# Data. Together. Let's read about it + +[About the Data Together Reading Group](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether) + +## Decentralization (November 12, 2019) + +[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/74jsTUzdOZc) + +### Intro +True to form, we gathered readings in a decentralized way. Themes that emerged were: looking critically at how "decentralization" is defined, how it could/should be measured, and the sticky problems that aren't automatically solved (and sometimes are actually caused) by technology. The readings are chunked to break them up a bit. The first 3 focus on decentralized tech and apps, the next 3 on political decentralization, and the last 2 on decentralized knowledge creation and stewardship. + +### Readings: + +1. Sarah Friend. **Decentralization and its Discontents** + - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mRhvltGs8A + - Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vRS9OW2IXhD3uboF7fDb8aBegEA7MzeqyJpGvoYxithpLYu__cwSyfZhmQj08mJvm1RPtPA6Du3bEeI/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000&slide=id.p +2. Angela Walch. (2019) **Deconstructing 'Decentralization': Exploring the Core Claim of Crypto Systems** + - pp. 11-24 + - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3326244 +3. Kleppmann, Martin & Wiggins, Adam & Hardenberg, Peter van & McGranaghan, Mark. **Local-first Software** + - Read the seven ideals for local-first software + - https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html#seven-ideals + +--- + +4. Brancati, D. (2006). **Decentralization: Fueling the Fire or Dampening the Flames of Ethnic Conflict and Secessionism?** + - pp. 651-660, 681 + - https://sci-hub.tw/10.1017/s002081830606019x +5. Elinor Ostrom. **Green from the Grassroots** + - https://www.commondreams.org/views/2012/06/12/green-grassroots +6. Rachel-Rose O’Leary. **This North Syrian School Is a Baby Step Toward a Blockchain Society** + - https://www.coindesk.com/this-north-syrian-school-is-a-baby-step-toward-a-blockchain-society + +--- + +7. James C. Scott. (1998) **Seeing Like a State** + - pp. 309-311 (beginning of chapter 9), + - pp. 323-328 "Practical Knowledge Versus Scientific Explanation" + - pp. 333-339 "The Social Context of Metis and Its Destruction" + - https://libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-%20James%20C.%20Scott.pdf +8. Jessica J. Prentice. **The Most Dangerous Notion in Reinventing Organizations** + - https://medium.com/@jessicajprentice/the-most-dangerous-notion-in-reinventing-organizations-9032930295e2 + +--- + +**OPTIONAL** + +9. Adi Robertson. **How the Biggest Decentralized Social Network is Dealing With its Nazi Problem** + - https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentralized-social-network-gab-migration-fediverse-app-blocking +10. Darius Kazemi. **Run Your Own Social** + - https://runyourown.social/ +11. Longer talk of Sarah Friend. **Decentralization and its Discontents** + - https://youtu.be/Km6EYsBYAlY?t=64 + +### Notes from readings +1. Sarah Friend. **Decentralization and its Discontents** + * 3 guiding q's + * What is decentralization? + * Do we want decentralization? + * Are there limits to decentralization? + * Defining decentralization: draws from political and then organizational contexts. So what is our context and how is it defined there? + * We may bring several contexts and several definitions– technical on a protocol basis? Organizational? Archival? + * Broad range of claimaints to "decentralization" + * Characterization of a free market as by-nature decentralized– rational actors operating without centralizing system + * Mao for decentralized socialism: "locally self-completed industrial system" + * Lorentz curve & Gini coefficient used to measure decentralization of wealth + * Applied to cryptocurrencies shows intense disparities + * Why not centralization + * "Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion." + * Governance & censorship: "Is there anything such that you would stop participating in the network?" + * Nazis, child porn, etc. + * Motives– broad umbrella! So many reasons to be interested + * "Networks centralize for efficiency and decentralize for resilience" + * Scalability trilemma + * Decentralization (can run in small compute env at each user node) + * Scalability (ability to process transactions efficiently) + * Security (resources needed by a hacker) + * "Decentralization is a stat we could lower to improve the other two" + * Decentralization of manufacturing + * 3 major RAM producers + * Tech sensitive to localized natural disasters + * Connection between centralization and specialization (bus factor!) + * Process of the developers is not decebtralized, shown by Lorentz curve on open source projects commits per dev [starting here](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vRS9OW2IXhD3uboF7fDb8aBegEA7MzeqyJpGvoYxithpLYu__cwSyfZhmQj08mJvm1RPtPA6Du3bEeI/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000&slide=id.g451e42b6e3_0_41) + * "Who and what are we serving with our particular decentralization?" +2. Angela Walch. (2019) **Deconstructing 'Decentralization': Exploring the Core Claim of Crypto Systems** + * Points of centralization in a mostly-decentralized system + * Not really decentralized unless all the subsystems are decentralized, e.g. software dev process centralized to small group of developers + * Concentration of wealth + * Power of an exchange to include/disinclude + * Decentralization conceptualized as a tool for disruption & revolution, break up existing power structures + * Disambiguating "distributed" vs "decentralized": "decentralized" = nodes controlled by different parties, not necessarily true for distributed + * Insights into decentralization + * Decentralization is non-binary; it is multifaceted and each facet is on a spectrum + * Decentralization changes over time + * Decentralization can be used to hide power + * Example of Bitcoin centralized decision making: 11 developers knew about a major bug and made a patch & decision to deliberately keep some info about that bug hidden *(Does this show centralization of power? Or could it show decentralization of initiative?)* + * "..if some things have to be kept secret from others, the system is not decentralized." (19) + * "moments of crisis uncover where actual power lies in a system" + * *curious if there's a conflation of coordination with "centralization"* + +3. Kleppmann, Martin & Wiggins, Adam & Hardenberg, Peter van & McGranaghan, Mark. **Local-first Software** + * *These principles articulate an ideal more than they do an existing software practice* + * Local-first means that though info can be on the cloud, your local copy is primary & it's a backup (vs: cloud is primary and yours is a cache) + * Faster work b/c no need to bounce to remote server + * Work is not trapped on one device, there's data sync + * Network is optional to function + * Collaboration seamless and supportive of varied workflows (e.g. suggest vs direct edit), Google Docs a key example + * Should be archivable to be legible even if a service is no longer running + * Privacy and security through end to end encryption: cloud service cannot decrypt + * You own the data: can access, modify, copy + + > With data ownership comes responsibility: maintaining backups or other preventative measures against data loss, protecting against ransomware, and general organizing and managing of file archives. For many professional and creative users, as introduced in the introduction, we believe that the trade-off of more responsibility in exchange for more ownership is desirable. Consider a significant personal creation, such as a PhD thesis or the raw footage of a film. For these you might be willing to take responsibility for storage and backups in order to be certain that your data is safe and fully under your control. + +--- + +4. Brancati, D. (2006). **Decentralization: Fueling the Fire or Dampening the Flames of Ethnic Conflict and Secessionism?** + + * Decentralization to localized gvt a *win* where it increases local participation but *bad* where it highlights differences between regions + * Win more elections, greater influence on policy + * Reinforce local identity, produce legislation that favors one group over another + * Regional vs ethnic parties an important distinction + +5. Elinor Ostrom. **Green from the Grassroots** + +* Importance of enacting climate change policy at several layers of locality (city/state/federal/international) + * We need to be able to evolve & adapt bc of high uncertainty + * Research shows overlapping policies are more effective than a single overarching policy +* 30+ states and over 900 US cities have created plans despite lack of federal plan + +6. Rachel-Rose O’Leary. **This North Syrian School Is a Baby Step Toward a Blockchain Society** + +> ...North Syria’s governance structure, which consists of communes where people come together to take decisions at a local level. It’s here, Maxmud says, where blockchain can play a unique role. Using a distributed ledger for public accounting, communes can make their spending transparent and better manage collective resources +--- + +7. James C. Scott. (1998) **Seeing Like a State** + + > Any large social process or event will inevitably be far more complex than the schemata we can devise, prospectively or retrospectively, to map it. (309) + + * Importance of "improvisations, missteps, and strokes of luck" for success even in systems where rigid heirarchy is emphasized + + > ...the schemes that did not collapse altogether managed to survive thanks largely to desperate measures either not envisaged or else expressly prohibited by the plan." (310) + + > Formal order ... is always and to some considerable degree parasitic on informal processes, which the formal scheme does not recognize, without which it could not exist, and which it alone cannot create or maintain. + + * Work-to-rule strike: workers perform their tasks exactly according to rules (no improvisations or creativity) and thus productive work ceases + * This is a reason why authoritarian control is dangerous & unproductive + * *If we interact primarily in digitally mediated & built-environment spaces, what impact does that have on the availability of creativity? What important improvisations are not possible, given that code **is** a set of rules?* + + * Different measurement & classification types: imposed (central) & standard vs. local & useful. e.g. classifying plants by utility rather than genus + * Practical knowledge derived through experimental solutions to a problem at hand + * Connection to stewardship: (on derivation of practical knowledge) "these cultivators have a direct, vital stake..." (324) + * Cases of practice preceding science b/c cause & effect of a local practice can be perceived by a motivated observer even if mechanism is unknown (325) + + > Metis ... is the mode of reasoning most appropriate to complex material and uncertain tasks where the uncertainties are so daunting that we must trust our (experienced) intuition and feel our way. (327) + + > Where the interactions involve not just the material environment but social interaction as well– building and peopling new villages or cities, organizing a revolutionary seizure of power, or collectivizing agriculture– the mind boggles at the multitude of interactions and uncertainties (as distinct from calculable risks). (327) + + * Advocates a "strategic retreat" from comprehensive planning. More about learning how to learn to build and doing it incrementally + * Veillees in France: gatherings to swap local knowledge + * Metis not evenly distributed, intersectional issues where concentrated into guilds, fraternities, etc. + * Metis disappears as easier, cheaper solutions (e.g. pesticides) become available. This leads to centralized control– e.g. pharmaceuticals that can only be made in a lab via secret formula displace knowledge of natural, distributed, and freely available functional natural remedies + * Capitalist profit requires efficiency + control (336) (not sure I followed this argument) + +8. Jessica J. Prentice. **The Most Dangerous Notion in Reinventing Organizations** + + > contemporary conventional farming as derived from European history can be seen as the predict-and-control approach to food production, whereas permaculture is absolutely about sense-and-respond + + > Holacratic domains function in an analogous way [to usufruct]: *they flow from use, familiarity, need, and negotiation*. Ownership, in this sense, is less an *exclusive possession* than an *explicit and privileged stewardship*. + + > In these small communities, where the network of family relationships was so dense and complex, public opinion so important, and social values so deeply ingrained, a strong and visible government was superfluous. (Margolin, "The Ohlone Way") + + > ...I believe that the headman received his leadership in the first place through the natural tendency of the members of the tribe to go to the most able member for advice. (Mayfield) + + > Another feature of the hunter-gatherer way of life is a deep respect for individual decisions. There are experts rather than leaders, men or women whose skills are revered; but decisions about whether to follow their lead or take their advice are matters of individual choice. (Brody) + +## Questions/Themes + +## Discussion +- B5: Decent draws many people in and is adjacent to terms like disrupt + - 3 buckets: tech, group, state + - If you haven't already, what does decentralization mean to you? And review at end of session +- Intros round! U of T, tech consulting & cooperatives, EDGI, Dat, artist, culture and technology, etc! (Not evenly represented in this list) +- Readings in 3 major groups. Sarah Friend a great framing with 3 questions right away: + - What is decentralization? + - Do we want decentralization? + - Are there limits to decentralization? + +- Mauve: Power is bottom up. Individuals have autonomy. Consensus with each other rather than top-down. Having power spread up and organizing up +- Dawn: Lean on textbook definition: delegating decision-making and activity from a central org. Has a political context + - Glad readings were both tech and political side of coin + - Way back when first session - lineage of term. Where has 'decentralization' been used? +- KB: Defining is harder than we think because it's defined in opposition. There's a tendency to centralization. Easy to have one source of truth. Harder for several points of input + - Richard Bartlett - decent cooperative in Enspiral. They have to actively work to decentralize. If you don't name people, you have people secretly in charge + +- Heather: Distributed network where power is not top-down. Struggled after saying 'distributed'. 'Decentralized' is already a negation. Knowledge, power structures are emergent. Decision-making, in charge, responsibility are emergent properties. + - One place to look is pedagogy like Montesorri, Waldorf. Inquiry based learning. Did not have this type of learning growing up, maybe now there is better language + +- SM: Couldn't define it. But then hearing others, wanted to add a layer: X/Y axis with decentralization and representation. + - Centralization - representation and media + - Decentralization - more facilitation + - A lot of examples of decent are people governing themselves: facilitation, communication. Centralization is less 2-way communicating, more broadcast + +- B5: Interesting that a lot comes from political. Hearing power a lot + - If we can think decentralization exists on a spectrum, do we have to consider whole spectrum to examine this properly + - Decentralization from tech, Butavik definition + - Does network scale? + - Control - no 51% + - ?? + - We want to have an effect on a method of organizing +- KB: Like the specifity of definition because it defines power. Code is made of rules + - Social structures - increase trust, + - Technical - removing need of trust + - Cognitive dissonance, none of the metaphors work +- MP: One way to begin, what qualities or associations does decent have moral, is good + - Technial - robustness of network + - Politcal - liberatarian, anarachist - where does good reside? Shared language + - I am guilty of slippage between tech and political + - attributing moral to tech structures, no need for those structures to decentralziae power + - decent tech can still centralize power +- Mauve: Bitcoin, blockchain are excellent example of decent tech that are centralized underneath. + - Inside money. How do I make, keep money. If you have money, then you have power and can make more money. Even if distributed, the power dynamics aren't decentralized + - Decentralized is one thing, but is it distributed, p2p. Technical qualifiers +- EN: I'm not a technical person, not where I come at it. More from the political end. First word that came to mine was 'distributed'. + - There is a technical difference between centralized, decentralized, distributed. + - Don't fully understand differences but probably have political implications + - At what scale is a network decentralized? How far are you looking at the network? What extent? + - If things can be hidden underneath, then to examine 'decent' what scale or extent are we looking at? + - Ostrom reading - cities are a different scale than nation +- Heather: Related to trust issue - historically politicals is value-laden and science should be science-free. How about flipping that? + - Bruno Latour - value-laden science + - When we try to remove trust - looking for value-free tech + - Politics - we're looking to build trust, value-laden + - What happens if we look at the ?? + - Related to Mauve and money problem - hoarding. Centralized power and networks of data/knowledge - hoarding of power and knowledge + - Even when people are interested in DIY, they still like to hoard knowledge. We're circling around - what people go *into* it wanting, vs what we are *capable* of/how it plays out, what do we want? + +- DW: Might be a failure of analysis of power. Not a sincere act when people don't know how to let go of their knowledge. + - Cool thought experiment of flipping science as value-laden and politics value-free + - Liberal Western democracies are believed to be ascendent. How do we think ??? +- SM: Don't want completely value-free politics, just the flipping is a good thought experiment + - The problem of hoarding is funny to get around, seems gendered. In the tech space especially, or any field of expertise, algorithmic thought. Tech vs political + - Difference between algorithmic and heuristic thought + - Code is centralized - drafted, coded by experts like legal code. Once they exist they have effects, but power is baked into it + - Heuristic - squishy feelings that humans feel, ideas and values, how we come to agreement + - These conversations keep leading me to dichotomies. Not sure what's going on +- B5: Yes, cognitive dissonnce. + - Think there is a misnomer around trust-less. Cogito of trust-less is cryptography. Orientated in math and feels like universal law. Founded on math proofs that provide a rock, that trust... + - Cartesian framing has... +- MP: Where is the ground/foundation of argument to be found? The certainly of crypto becomes ideological. That wins arguments that it maybe doesn't deserve to win. You can find concentrations of power and watch them in systems that... systems aren't purely tech, also social +- B5: ... +- Mauve: Wish less logic around trust. Crypto proofs so we don't need to trust people. If I want to trust someone with my data, I should trust them in meatspace (in real life). +- KB: Problem of scale of trust in social societies. 20 people in a room - we'll be nice to each other, doesn't work on a country, city, internet-scale + - What about if we don't use crypto for trustlessness. In the decent web... to get root hash, you have to trust somebody. There's no version where you don't have to trust anyone at all. Not to get rid of trust, but reduce entities you have to trust to managable size of social level +- EN: Time-scale, Ostrom +- Mauve: Like reducing trust, but groups of techbros or investors/banks... +- Dawn: crypto proof as kernal. These are always sociotechinical systems. Hard to think of language for both, we veer into one or the other. How do we recognize that? + - Trustlessness rendered as technical rather than... Only using trust is only locating in the individual. In collectives it might be expressed differently. Where does it break down? Implicitly individualism. SSB - peer broadcast +- B5: Trust - common for tech to co-opt or adopt language. We pull them forward to technical centers. Trust - moved into provable thing +- KB: when qualitative to quantitative like IQ test, worry about anything that turns non-math into math. That probably looks right because it came out of a computer +- Mauve: Seeing as a state - quantifying stuff, then erased context +- Heather: Corporeality. Promises of tech: immortal, continues to posterity + - "Agency" - language as the first technology? does text have agency? + - representation, avatar + - Cartesian - rooted in doubt, requires continual doubt. Continual doubt and displace. Logic is the beginning of wisdom +- Dawn: Agency beyond humans + - reattach to broader understandings of technology +- Matt: The unit/entity that participates in decentralization is important + - If you have collective of collectives, with hub that folks make decisions +- B5: Maybe there are methods of organizing that have been happening for a long time +- Heather: +- Stefan: + + +## Chat log +14:39:10 From Dawn . : sorry for being late! +14:39:26 From Matt Price : 15cm +14:39:37 From Matt Price : it's like a real snow +14:40:10 From Matt Price : I was WW kayaking sunday morning. and then a snow storm yesterday +14:40:48 From Kevin : I can help with notes +14:41:06 From Matt Price : oh me too, I'll help +14:41:14 From Kevin : thanks Matt +14:41:18 From Kelsey : Semester 3: https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/71 +14:42:33 From Kelsey : Shared notes: https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw?both +14:44:06 From Kelsey : that’s harder than expected +14:49:55 From Kelsey : Welcome, Heather! +14:51:55 From Dawn . : add me on stack b5! +14:52:45 From Brendan O'Brien : Go it +14:52:50 From Brendan O'Brien : *got it +14:52:52 From Kelsey : Etiquette note: if you want to speak, raise your hand or request to be put on stack in the chat here, and the facilitator will pay attention and call on you +14:54:00 From Brendan O'Brien : I have Kelsey next +14:55:06 From Brendan O'Brien : Reminds me of “counterdisintermediation” +14:55:24 From Dawn . : autonomous? self-determining? +14:56:13 From Stefan Morales : I have a thought next! +14:56:26 From Brendan O'Brien : then Stefan! +14:57:39 From Brendan O'Brien : My fav is “rhizomes” +14:59:18 From Kelsey : Love that– strong tie btw the pedagogy thought & the self-determination thought. I’m a montessori kid! V much about “intrinsic motivation" +14:59:21 From Eric : “direction, agency, and intention” - I like those three parameters for thinking about de/centralization +15:00:35 From Kelsey : or as I like to think of it “treating people like adults" +15:02:32 From Mauve : I actually started from technical and got more political as I learned more about it +15:03:48 From Dawn . : I think that vitalik article is a super interesting study in the hidden assumptions that emerge when translating/operationalizing concepts into technical ~things~ +15:03:57 From Brendan O'Brien : stack: +15:04:06 From Brendan O'Brien : Kelsey, Matt, Eric +15:04:45 From Brendan O'Brien : I’ll jump on stack after eric +15:06:54 From Dawn . : me too, I was so into that article. Want to re-read it immediately :)) +15:07:05 From Mauve : Could I comment on that? +15:07:27 From Stefan Morales : bummer about the promise of tech not being met=understatement of the decade! lol +15:08:12 From Kelsey : oh man just like capitalism! +15:08:43 From Matt Price : Somehow the view of Catan behind Mo during a discussion about money, currency and centralization is giving me a whole new understnading. +15:10:16 From Kelsey : From Walch/Crypto reading: Disambiguating "distributed" vs "decentralized": "decentralized" = nodes controlled by different parties, not necessarily true for distributed +15:11:56 From Brendan O'Brien : Oh we’re big fans of those +15:13:17 From Brendan O'Brien : I’ll jump on stack next +15:14:06 From Matt Price : (re: Eric, citis, ostrom) I thought of Ostrom's article as part of a kind of Jane Jacobs axis that goes Jacobs - Scott - Ostrom, and strongly valorizes the spontaneous relationships and orderings that arise esp in urban spaces; so there seemed to me a bit of a romanicization of the power of those relationships/decisions to effect change at larger scales. +15:14:06 From Dawn . : Is value free politics ~= fukuyama and the end of history ?! +15:14:39 From Matt Price : @dawn I'm not sure -- I am not sure I want a value free politics! +15:14:51 From Kelsey : curious how value-free vs. value-laden plays into our intertwined conceptions of what is legal & what is moral +15:15:05 From Matt Price : can't remember who I heard say, a rational society would be a horror beyond all horrors. +15:15:15 From Kelsey : it’s also so caught up in the notion of corporations & whether they have any obligation to responsibility +15:15:19 From Mauve : @matt Nice. 🔥🔥 +15:15:26 From Matt Price : maybe Iain Banks. +15:15:27 From Dawn . : me either matt! I guess I felt an echo with that style of fukuyama's arguments +15:17:18 From Eric : @matt - ooh interesting point about Jacobs/Ostrom +15:17:57 From Matt Price : neat. +15:19:45 From Brendan O'Brien : I’ll jump on stack next +15:21:04 From Kelsey : a la racist algorithms in machine learning +15:21:17 From Kelsey : the algorithms aren’t racist, the training datasets are +15:21:30 From Heather : Decentered knowledge, baked in codes=headless corpse (Bataille’s) +15:22:00 From Kelsey : searching for frameworks +15:23:45 From Matt Price : adding myself to stack +15:23:47 From Eric : @b5 for a quick second I thought you said cartography, oriented in maps, and I was like, wow geography is so important. but nope, that’s just me. +15:23:52 From Kelsey : so, “trustless” networks reduces the number of entities we need to trust to a socially plausible number? +15:24:17 From Kelsey : attacking the scale problem through cryptographic approaches +15:24:48 From Dawn . : I feel like there is a dissertation in the gap between theory / reference implementations and applied cryptography 😬 +15:24:54 From Heather : a wrench we can throw in Descartes’ cogito ego sum is that some say a more accurate translation is: I think therefore I doubt +15:25:42 From Kelsey : ^ I love that and have not heard it before +15:26:33 From Brendan O'Brien : I think we’ve got mauve on stack next? +15:26:45 From Mauve : 👍 +15:27:08 From Heather : OH no I made a dumb typo! I meant to say: +15:27:15 From Heather : "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am") +15:28:39 From Matt Price : nice @heather +15:30:13 From Dawn . : Can I be on stack after Mauve? But weight me lower I think I've been a little too much on the talking side +15:30:51 From Brendan O'Brien : SO MUCH THIS +15:31:06 From Brendan O'Brien : Dawn on stack next +15:31:12 From Kelsey : “meatspace” = irl +15:31:43 From Kelsey : can I go on stack too? +15:31:49 From Matt Price : how similar are promises and contracts, really? aren't they pretty different? +15:31:49 From Brendan O'Brien : yaya +15:32:00 From Dawn . : kelsey before me pls! +15:33:30 From Eric : it’s trust all the way down +15:33:43 From Brendan O'Brien : Just like you need to trust someone before you visit http://shadyurl.com +15:34:01 From Kelsey : oh jeez I really want to click that +15:34:06 From Brendan O'Brien : DO NOT CLICK +15:34:10 From Brendan O'Brien : I have no idea what it is +15:34:19 From Brendan O'Brien : (Don’t trust me) +15:34:41 From Brendan O'Brien : Then dawn! +15:35:34 From Kevin : Vibez only +15:35:52 From Kelsey : @mauve sounds like a need for the post-custodial archiving approaches we read about in Stewardship +15:37:46 From Kelsey : trust as inherently drawing from our existing biases (personal or social) on “trustworthy” +15:38:49 From Mauve : Scuttlebutt is my favorite cult. 💜 +15:39:27 From Kelsey : https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ for anyone on the call not already initiated into what that is +15:40:03 From Heather : @dawn we can and should ask about the motivations of the algorithm, (I’m not a coder or anything so maybe algorithm is not the right aspect of decentralized knowledge networks to refer to?) +15:41:01 From Heather : This whole discussion is bringing me back to another important philosophical dichotomy (from post-structuralism and also psychoanalysis): presence/absence +15:41:13 From Mauve : ✋ +15:41:17 From Dawn . : @heather fair, I wouldn't disagree with that being a fruitful approach. I guess I'm not sure that would be sufficient (i.e., to only analyse the motivations) to understand the impacts and context they operate in +15:41:21 From Brendan O'Brien : Mauve next! +15:42:42 From Brendan O'Brien : data collection as a destructive, extractive process +15:44:29 From Brendan O'Brien : kevin, was that a hand? +15:44:38 From Kevin : +1 tech is 1st tech +15:44:41 From Kevin : No hand +15:45:35 From Kelsey : love that bc it leads to extending sapir-whorf (sp?) hypothesis to all technologies +15:46:33 From Brendan O'Brien : Or you’re just flipping the framing :) +15:46:39 From Kelsey : think of revolutions in mathematics like the existence of geometries other than Euclidian +15:46:56 From Kelsey : there’s rarely one correct logic +15:47:02 From Kelsey : (never?) +15:48:13 From Matt Price : long hting I've bene typing +15:48:15 From Matt Price : Several of these points are sort of swirling around together for me. +- Crypto tries to take the social out of social interaction. And trust is maybe just one part of what's being removed. +- This is related to the sort of creeping individualism that Dawn described. The thing that's called "provable trust" in crypto is related, not to the actual trust we have in actual people, but to the mechanisms that enable or guarantee good-faith interaction in anonymous contexts -- legal frameworks, criminal sanctions, with the idea that we can turn the law into a pure mechanism and thereby exorcise its tyrannical aspects. But (a) its unclear that this can be done, or that it would remove inequities; and (b) this has little to do with the value we place in trusting people. +- Coming back, again to Dawn, individualism, collectives, I have bee nwondering a little bit about the *scale of decentralizations*; what scale are the individual entities that participate in a "decentralized" system; are they persons, collectives, cor +15:48:16 From Heather : @kelsey yes exactly, we are in the fractal (and other?) realm with these quandaries +15:49:35 From Kelsey : it depends, is the central council advisory? ') +15:50:09 From Dawn . : yeah non-euclidean geometery is super interesting! I really like Poincaré mathematian/philosophy badass +15:51:14 From Mauve : Anarchy Works was a great book about alternative ways people have organized +15:51:48 From Dawn . : one force among many? +15:51:48 From Kelsey : Stefan had a hand +15:51:56 From Brendan O'Brien : then stefan! +15:51:58 From Brendan O'Brien : sorry! +15:53:23 From Heather : @Brendan “data-colonized” did you say? Was that from someone/somewhere or are you coining that? I want to borrow that term! +15:53:33 From Brendan O'Brien : … made it up on the spot? +15:53:52 From Brendan O'Brien : feels like a term this crowd came up with together :) +15:56:31 From Heather : purity is inefficient +15:56:49 From Heather : Scratch that, purity is vulnerable and unresilient +15:59:41 From Brendan O'Brien : Land as centering, but not centralizing +16:00:21 From Heather : does blockchain technology create the same sense of commitment to not “fouling the nest” that land-based decentralized knowledge networks do? +16:01:25 From Brendan O'Brien : I think blockchain enthusiasts would argue yes, that they’re entirely oriented as systems that incentivize “good behaviour" +16:01:28 From Mauve : @Heather, the commitment is through economic incentives +16:01:35 From Brendan O'Brien : ^^ what mauve said +16:01:39 From Kelsey : 4pm! +16:01:45 From Kelsey : or whatever time it is for you +16:02:03 From Eric : thank you for organizing! +16:02:11 From Matt Price : thanks so much @b5! +16:02:13 From Heather : To answer my own question… it does in the sense of creating scarcity, doesn’t it? But also if we talk about the “commons” in relation to land-based, we are talking about a common (ubiquitous resource) that is not scarce (necessarily) +16:02:19 From Dawn . : thanks for facilitating b5! +16:02:28 From Matt Price : if it had been coherent, it would have changed :-) +16:02:38 From Dawn . : So nice to see all your faces :)) +16:02:45 From Mauve : 💜💜💜 +16:03:10 From Kevin : Great to see everyone! And thanks Stefan and Heather for joining +16:03:25 From Stefan Morales : Thank you for welcoming! +16:03:30 From Brendan O'Brien : github.com/datatogether +16:03:43 From Stefan Morales : Really enjoyable discussion everyone! +16:03:50 From Dawn . : (when does it start up again?!) +16:03:53 From Matt Price : this is my important find of hte day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73A0iMus8so +16:04:08 From Mauve : It was wonderful talking to y'all! Thank you for facilitating this! 💜💜 +16:04:12 From Kelsey : and please co-facilitate next semester! https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/71 +16:04:33 From Dawn . : @matt amazing! +16:04:34 From Heather : Thank you for letting us join in! I feel very bolstered by this discussion! +16:04:35 From Kelsey : *reading list suggestions have been started but do need more suggestion & curation +16:04:48 From Dawn . : my find: refused is making the tracks for cyberpunk 2077 +16:05:34 From Kelsey : oops now we stopped recording From 23f74f626097a6fcb0bcdf168548ecff008a87c3 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2019 10:11:25 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 16/65] adds stewardship blog post --- README.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index ca480b7..c2be9e5 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ Our hope is that: first, we learn together!; second, through documenting discuss - [Civics](#civics) (May 7) [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/YUt2PxRZCYs)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/2-civics-2019-05-07.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/02_civics/) - [Alternatives to Capitalist Structures](#alternatives-to-capitalist-structures) (June 4)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/VWBiq1K7N4k)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/3-alternatives-to-capitalist-structures-2019-06-04.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/03_alternatives_capitalist/) -- [Stewardship](#stewardship) (August 6)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/fbJUSvO_Xvc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md) +- [Stewardship](#stewardship) (August 6)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/fbJUSvO_Xvc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/04_stewardship/) - [What is Decentralization?](#what-is-decentralization) (November 12)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/74jsTUzdOZc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/5-decentralization-2019-11-12.md) ## Sessions From 615d5b8535a0a77d765617c4c0f30bb6f13da84c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2019 20:59:11 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 17/65] Reformats chat log and replaces notes with transcript --- .../5-decentralization-2019-11-12.md | 782 ++++++++++++------ 1 file changed, 548 insertions(+), 234 deletions(-) diff --git a/notes/semester_02_2019/5-decentralization-2019-11-12.md b/notes/semester_02_2019/5-decentralization-2019-11-12.md index e5221c1..2a7fd8b 100644 --- a/notes/semester_02_2019/5-decentralization-2019-11-12.md +++ b/notes/semester_02_2019/5-decentralization-2019-11-12.md @@ -176,243 +176,557 @@ True to form, we gathered readings in a decentralized way. Themes that emerged w ## Questions/Themes ## Discussion -- B5: Decent draws many people in and is adjacent to terms like disrupt - - 3 buckets: tech, group, state - - If you haven't already, what does decentralization mean to you? And review at end of session -- Intros round! U of T, tech consulting & cooperatives, EDGI, Dat, artist, culture and technology, etc! (Not evenly represented in this list) -- Readings in 3 major groups. Sarah Friend a great framing with 3 questions right away: - - What is decentralization? - - Do we want decentralization? - - Are there limits to decentralization? - -- Mauve: Power is bottom up. Individuals have autonomy. Consensus with each other rather than top-down. Having power spread up and organizing up -- Dawn: Lean on textbook definition: delegating decision-making and activity from a central org. Has a political context - - Glad readings were both tech and political side of coin - - Way back when first session - lineage of term. Where has 'decentralization' been used? -- KB: Defining is harder than we think because it's defined in opposition. There's a tendency to centralization. Easy to have one source of truth. Harder for several points of input - - Richard Bartlett - decent cooperative in Enspiral. They have to actively work to decentralize. If you don't name people, you have people secretly in charge - -- Heather: Distributed network where power is not top-down. Struggled after saying 'distributed'. 'Decentralized' is already a negation. Knowledge, power structures are emergent. Decision-making, in charge, responsibility are emergent properties. - - One place to look is pedagogy like Montesorri, Waldorf. Inquiry based learning. Did not have this type of learning growing up, maybe now there is better language - -- SM: Couldn't define it. But then hearing others, wanted to add a layer: X/Y axis with decentralization and representation. - - Centralization - representation and media - - Decentralization - more facilitation - - A lot of examples of decent are people governing themselves: facilitation, communication. Centralization is less 2-way communicating, more broadcast - -- B5: Interesting that a lot comes from political. Hearing power a lot - - If we can think decentralization exists on a spectrum, do we have to consider whole spectrum to examine this properly - - Decentralization from tech, Butavik definition - - Does network scale? - - Control - no 51% - - ?? - - We want to have an effect on a method of organizing -- KB: Like the specifity of definition because it defines power. Code is made of rules - - Social structures - increase trust, - - Technical - removing need of trust - - Cognitive dissonance, none of the metaphors work -- MP: One way to begin, what qualities or associations does decent have moral, is good - - Technial - robustness of network - - Politcal - liberatarian, anarachist - where does good reside? Shared language - - I am guilty of slippage between tech and political - - attributing moral to tech structures, no need for those structures to decentralziae power - - decent tech can still centralize power -- Mauve: Bitcoin, blockchain are excellent example of decent tech that are centralized underneath. - - Inside money. How do I make, keep money. If you have money, then you have power and can make more money. Even if distributed, the power dynamics aren't decentralized - - Decentralized is one thing, but is it distributed, p2p. Technical qualifiers -- EN: I'm not a technical person, not where I come at it. More from the political end. First word that came to mine was 'distributed'. - - There is a technical difference between centralized, decentralized, distributed. - - Don't fully understand differences but probably have political implications - - At what scale is a network decentralized? How far are you looking at the network? What extent? - - If things can be hidden underneath, then to examine 'decent' what scale or extent are we looking at? - - Ostrom reading - cities are a different scale than nation -- Heather: Related to trust issue - historically politicals is value-laden and science should be science-free. How about flipping that? - - Bruno Latour - value-laden science - - When we try to remove trust - looking for value-free tech - - Politics - we're looking to build trust, value-laden - - What happens if we look at the ?? - - Related to Mauve and money problem - hoarding. Centralized power and networks of data/knowledge - hoarding of power and knowledge - - Even when people are interested in DIY, they still like to hoard knowledge. We're circling around - what people go *into* it wanting, vs what we are *capable* of/how it plays out, what do we want? - -- DW: Might be a failure of analysis of power. Not a sincere act when people don't know how to let go of their knowledge. - - Cool thought experiment of flipping science as value-laden and politics value-free - - Liberal Western democracies are believed to be ascendent. How do we think ??? -- SM: Don't want completely value-free politics, just the flipping is a good thought experiment - - The problem of hoarding is funny to get around, seems gendered. In the tech space especially, or any field of expertise, algorithmic thought. Tech vs political - - Difference between algorithmic and heuristic thought - - Code is centralized - drafted, coded by experts like legal code. Once they exist they have effects, but power is baked into it - - Heuristic - squishy feelings that humans feel, ideas and values, how we come to agreement - - These conversations keep leading me to dichotomies. Not sure what's going on -- B5: Yes, cognitive dissonnce. - - Think there is a misnomer around trust-less. Cogito of trust-less is cryptography. Orientated in math and feels like universal law. Founded on math proofs that provide a rock, that trust... - - Cartesian framing has... -- MP: Where is the ground/foundation of argument to be found? The certainly of crypto becomes ideological. That wins arguments that it maybe doesn't deserve to win. You can find concentrations of power and watch them in systems that... systems aren't purely tech, also social -- B5: ... -- Mauve: Wish less logic around trust. Crypto proofs so we don't need to trust people. If I want to trust someone with my data, I should trust them in meatspace (in real life). -- KB: Problem of scale of trust in social societies. 20 people in a room - we'll be nice to each other, doesn't work on a country, city, internet-scale - - What about if we don't use crypto for trustlessness. In the decent web... to get root hash, you have to trust somebody. There's no version where you don't have to trust anyone at all. Not to get rid of trust, but reduce entities you have to trust to managable size of social level -- EN: Time-scale, Ostrom -- Mauve: Like reducing trust, but groups of techbros or investors/banks... -- Dawn: crypto proof as kernal. These are always sociotechinical systems. Hard to think of language for both, we veer into one or the other. How do we recognize that? - - Trustlessness rendered as technical rather than... Only using trust is only locating in the individual. In collectives it might be expressed differently. Where does it break down? Implicitly individualism. SSB - peer broadcast -- B5: Trust - common for tech to co-opt or adopt language. We pull them forward to technical centers. Trust - moved into provable thing -- KB: when qualitative to quantitative like IQ test, worry about anything that turns non-math into math. That probably looks right because it came out of a computer -- Mauve: Seeing as a state - quantifying stuff, then erased context -- Heather: Corporeality. Promises of tech: immortal, continues to posterity - - "Agency" - language as the first technology? does text have agency? - - representation, avatar - - Cartesian - rooted in doubt, requires continual doubt. Continual doubt and displace. Logic is the beginning of wisdom -- Dawn: Agency beyond humans - - reattach to broader understandings of technology -- Matt: The unit/entity that participates in decentralization is important - - If you have collective of collectives, with hub that folks make decisions -- B5: Maybe there are methods of organizing that have been happening for a long time -- Heather: -- Stefan: +**BRENDAN**: Hello, everybody, and welcome. Welcome to the final course in our semester to have our data together reading group. I'm very much looking forward to today's topic, decentralization. +Just a little signposting: we have planned our semester three, we have not set dates for it. But we are now starting to field and collect readings for our next semester, which we'll figure out the dates for it at some point in the future. + +The subject for semester three is going to be polity: what does it mean, to be participating in a government? + +My name is B5, I'm going to be helping to facilitate a discussion that hopefully I will be stepping forward, giving a little preamble and then stepping back. + +The topic of tonight's conversation is decentralization. This is a conversation about a word, a word that has pulled a number of us together over the years, months, minutes. + +I think decentralization is very interesting, as far as words go. Decentralization, to me is an angsty teenager. It's this super cool word that refuses to pick a lane. It hangs out with other really cool words like "disrupt", "design", and "open". And clearly, it doesn't fully identify with any of those words it's just adjacent to those words. + +Decentralization is this wonderful concept that draws a number of people in. + +Tonight we're going to look at decentralization in three major contexts. If we look at our readings, I sort of thought it would be nice to bucket these in the context of technology, groups of people, and the state; and feel free to challenge those. + +We've done a number of readings that help frame and set each of those contexts. And because we're here to think critically, I think one of the more interesting things we can do is play those contexts off of each other, looking for insights. + +One thing I did want to do as an exercise is, now that you've done some reading on the topic, write down your own quick interpretation or definition of what the word decentralization means for you. We're not going to go around and share it. I don't think we should. I think it'd be more interesting to just write a note to yourself that we'll hopefully review at the end of this. + +I'm going to leave a minute, not too long. And I don't want you to think too hard about it, because you've already done the work. So now let's take one minute and just do a definition for decentralization. + +How's everybody feeling? more time? Awesome. Kevin. + +**KEVIN**: Should we do like a quick round of introductions too? + +**BRENDAN**: That sounds like a good idea. Do you want to start, Kevin? And then I can call on them. + +**KEVIN**: I'm Kevin, I'm a part of EDGI, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. We're one of the partners of the Data Together network. I've been a long term volunteer there for the past two years; and for the past year, the part-time community coordinator. I've been on the email list and sending out messages and stuff like that. + +Popcorn style, I pick Matt. + +**MATT**: I'm Matt Price. I was involved in EDGI from the very beginning until not that long ago, and I teach at the University of Toronto, and I'm here to talk to people. Oh, I get to pick. How about Kelsey? + +**KELSEY**: Hi, I'm Kelsey. I am at EDGI and have been taking the lead on this Data Together initiative for the last year-ish. + +But I also think about the decentralized web a lot and I have a meetup going on here in Seattle on the decentralized web. I feel like I've introduced myself to all of you before. So let's move on to Eric. + +**ERIC**: Everybody, Eric Nost. I'm involved with EDGI and have been for the past few years, especially on the web monitoring side of things. And I teach at the University of Guelph. I'm going to point at Dawn. + +**DAWN**: I'm probably the same intro as Matt's, with a slight variation. I feel like I'm like an emeritus member of EDGI and Data Together. I was around for a long time, but less so lately. I'm a PhD student, that's the difference, at University of Toronto, but I guess I also think about decentralization stuff more broadly than my previous involvement in EDGI and Data Together. It's always been an interesting space where worlds collide. + +And I guess I see Mauve. + +**MAUVE**: Hello, I'm Mauve. I work at the Dat project. And I'm just interested, I guess, in decentralization in general. Lately, I've been a lot more into community organizing and figuring out how to better facilitate discussions and have more open ways of people collaborating in tech in my community at Dat. And also just figuring out how to get more artists to be using this decentralization tech rather than business types. + +I don't know who hasn't spoken. Has Kevin gone?. + +**KEVIN**: I'll pick the Stefans. Whoever, whichever Stefan wants to go + +**STEFAN**: Is it my turn? + +Okay. I'm Stefan. I do a lot of different things in the consulting space right now. I used to work in government for a few years; I used to be in the academic world for a few years too; and now I'm doing a lot of cooperativism with some other consulting colleagues to try and form a cooperative together. So learning a little bit about that, which is pretty exciting. + +**BRENDAN**: Fantastic. + +**HEATHER**: I'm Heather. Stefan, my partner, had told me about this reading group. And when he described it to me, I got very, very excited because a very, very, very long time ago, I did an MA on culture science and technology. + +Also I'm an artist. I have a BFA, and then I got really interested in a lot of different stuff to do with a critical theory of interactive media and philosophy of science and sociological feminist critique of things like reproductive technologies, and then proceeded to go a different way and haven't been thinking about those things for a very long time. + +That was over 10 years ago. So now I'm really excited to start thinking about the issues that affect this time in this moment, and this seems like a really great place to do it. So I'm very excited to participate. + +**BRENDAN**: Fantastic, thank you so much. This is great. + +Thank you, everybody, for joining. For those of you who haven't met me, I'm B5 or Brendan O'Brien. I'm calling from Brooklyn and I'm I work in a project called Qri and we do decentralized open data, built partially on the IPFS, ideally with more decentralized things in the future. + +With that, we've all jotted down a quick definition. I really loved the way that the readings were truncated into three major groups. I definitely found that having Sarah Friend's introduction, her ten-minute quick jump in was a great framing for a lot of this conversation, given that she had three questions right out the gates, that help tee off this discussion. + +I thought we'd just put that to the group as a starting point: to hear what others' definitions of decentralization is, and if you feel the need to pull in a different reading or pull the discussion in a different direction, feel free. + +So for anyone: What does decentralization mean to them? + +yeah. Kelsey, then Mauve. + +**KELSEY**: I can pull up Sarah's questions: + +* What is decentralization? +* Do we want decentralization? +* Are there limits to decentralization? + +Brendan, I totally agree that these are the right questions. I feel like we end up asking the first one and not the other two a lot. So I wanted to go into especially critiques of what decentralization is. I don't have a direct answer to "what is decentralization". + +**MAUVE**: To me, decentralization is almost like a practice or a look at how power structures end up looking. + +One thing that's been on my mind a lot is like, to me, a decentralized group is one where power is bottom up. Individuals ultimately have autonomy. And then they collaborate with others so that they can form consensus and work together, rather than centralization, where you have someone up top, and it's a top-down hierarchy where they have some sort of needs and then they have the others fulfill those needs. + +For me, **decentralization is really having power spread up and organizing bottom-up rather than having power concentrated and organizing top down**. + +**STEFAN**: Awesome. Dawn. + +**DAWN**: I have a textbook definition I lean on: "delegating decision making and authority away from delegating decision making and activities away from a central authority", which is, I think, the abstract way it gets framed in a political context. + +I don't know if it is totally right. Or, I don't know if you want to leave it abstract like that when you move it into a technical space. + +I really thought these were a cool collision of readings that tried to represent both technical and political sort of sides of the coin. + +I remember way back last year when we did "what is decentralization", I think Matt was flagging the genealogy of the term. + +That's something that I've been thinking about lately: **Where has decentralization been used?** I think these readings support asking that. + +**KELSEY**: One thing I want to highlight about the word decentralization is that **it's defined in opposition**. I think that's really interesting, because I don't think that we have a non-antagonistic word for what we're talking about. + +Basically, what it suggests is that there's a tendency to centralize. We're probably familiar with: in power structures, it's really easy to have there be one source of truth, and much harder to have there be several sources of input– and also decision. + +It reminds me a lot of some of Rich Bartlett– I think we've read him before in this– has written about decentralized power structures and patterns as it relates to the Enspiral cooperative. He talks about how **they have to actively work to continuously decentralize**. If you're in a decentralized organization, and what that means is that you just don't name someone as a leader, then you end up with people secretly in charge, rather than transparently in charge. + +If you want actual decentralization, you need people to say, "Hey, I noticed that I've been accidentally becoming a central node. How do we deconstruct that?" + +**HEATHER**: My definition is not different than what other people said. I basically said distributed network whereby power is not top down. + +I, like Kelsey, struggled after writing distributed network. And then I tried to think of how to say the next part without negating something else. And that was really hard. And I didn't want to, but it's in the word; decentralized is already a negation. + +One of the qualities to me that's interesting about decentralized networks or decentralized knowledge, or decentralized power structures, is that what we have is emergent. Direction, intention and all the things you just described, Kelsey, **who's in charge of something or taking responsibility is an emergent property of a group.** + +I think it's ripe for coming up with other words; I think people have probably already worked on this about coming up with a word that's not a negation. + +One place that might be really useful to look is pedagogy. I'm an early childhood educator. And also I've taught at university level, but right now, I've been a preschool teacher for a long time. And my interest is in alternative pedagogies, such as Montessori, original, Reggio Emelia, and Waldorf as well. They're very much about emergent learning or inquiry-based learning. + +I'm 44. So any of you that are much younger might have already gotten to do this when you were in school, when you were little, but I didn't. And I wish that I had, I think now it's quite common. Maybe there's a lot of language within alternative pedagogies that would be useful for thinking about decentralizing our sense of direction and agency and intention setting. + +**BRENDAN**: Stefan, do you want to do a follow-up? + +**STEFAN**: My thought when I was trying to define decentralization, I couldn't. I was sitting there not being able to. And but then hearing everybody else talk about it. I thought maybe I would add another layer to thinking about how to define decentralization: an X-Y axis where you have decentralization versus representation. + +It seems like with centralization you have the need for more representation, and more opportunities for mediation and media slotting in. And **With decentralization, there's there's more of a need for facilitation, as opposed to representation.** + +When I was reading those readings, I was thinking about how a lot of these examples that are upheld as examples of decentralization, in a lot of ways, **it's people governing themselves**. + +What that involves and entails is a lot of conversation, a lot of facilitation, a lot of communication. When you see centralization, it's kind of the opposite. There isn't a two-way street between communicators. What's communicated out is broadcast. + +Maybe narrowcast is also an interesting dichotomy; to broadcast and narrowcast. We're still in a centralized paradigm, but it's decentralized. So the conversation isn't two-way. + +**BRENDAN**: It's very interesting to hear that almost all the initial reactions seem to originate from this political side of things. I'm hearing a lot of like dancing around the phrases power and power distribution + +To that end, I think to support something where you were saying Stefan, Sarah has asked us to consider this question of the intersection of intersectional thinking and decentralization in her very quick talk, and this question of how those two things play against each other. + +I think that some of what you were saying gets at that questioning of if we can think of decentralization as existing on a spectrum. Can we consider the spectrum? I'm misphrasing her a little bit here, but the general vibe is, do we have to get some of the whole of the spectrum to be able to be able to pull this into our heads properly? + +I think it's worth it to try and pull the conversation back towards the technical folks for a little while and put the technical pinning on it. I think a lot of us come to the word decentralization from a political trajectory. + +I think when we think about decentralization from a technical side of things, it was really interesting to see Vitalik Buterin say decentralization is three key concepts. It's pretty simple: **compute power, distributed relatively evenly**. + +* Does the whole network compute faster? +* Is the whole network able to process more transactions than the sum of its parts effectively? +* And can we make sure that control of the network isn't concentrated in 51% of the people on the network? + +That's a very cut and dried definition of decentralization. + +I feel like there's a tension that often exists when we introduce the technology framing to the politics framing where the technologists really want us to interpret the phrase "decentralization" quite specifically. We have decentralization meaning a specific suite of characteristics of a of a network and and the way that it behaves. But the thing that draws a lot of us to this, in my mind, is this political framing: **we're here because we want to have an effect on a method of organizing.** + +**KELSEY**: I like the specificity of that technical definition because it's also clearly about power. It's just that the **power is really specifically defined in this network. Because it's code, it's made of rules.** + +What's really fascinated me that I cannot resolve in my head: **when we talk about decentralization in terms of social structures, it is almost entirely about increasing individual trust. And when we talk about it in a technical context, it is almost entirely about removing the need for trust through technology**. + +There's so much cognitive dissonance in using the same language and thinking about both things in the same conversation. None of the metaphors work. + +**MATT**: That's confusing to me, too. It seems to me that one way to, to begin the conversation is: **from what qualities or associations does decentralization acquire a kind of moral authority for people like us?** Why do we think, oh, decentralization good? + +It seems to me there's one set of technical arguments about robustness of a network, but then there's a set of political arguments that we've just been describing. They're not all necessarily compatible with each other. There are libertarian and anarchist decentralizers who may have pretty different views about where the good resides. But they share this word. + +I doing some of the readings today, I felt guilty of a kind of slippage between the technical and moral/political senses of the term: attributing to the technical features, the moral characteristics of shared power. This, when there's no reason to believe, or at least this was my sense from Deconstructing Decentralization, that there's no need for those technical structures to deconcentrate power. + +You can have technically decentralized infrastructure that still concentrates power in a small number of hands. That seemed like a bummer that we should pay attention to. + +**MAUVE**: I think Bitcoin and blockchain and The FinTech side of decentralization is an excellent example of decentralization that's super centralized, just like projects end up having centralization hidden underneath. + +In the FinTech case, it's actually super obvious where the centralization is, and it's inside money. Since the whole system is geared around, how do I make and how do I keep my money? If you have it, you get more money, and it's a barrier to entry to everyone else. **Even if it's distributed, the power dynamics aren't necessarily decentralized.** + +Decentralized is one thing, but then there's also, **is it a distributed system? Is it peer to peer? And then, is there a single implementation?** These are other technical qualifiers that drastically change the way it works. + +**ERIC**: I'm not a technical person; that's not where I come at this from, at least at first glance. I'm more on the political end of things. And so when I was asked, What is decentralization? That was a really tough question. + +The first word that came to my mind was "distributed". Heather, that term was in your definition as well. + +Between centralized, decentralized, and distributed, there's actually some technical differences that I don't fully understand, but that are probably really important and have political implications. + +Maybe part of it has to do with with scale. As a geographer, I come to a lot of questions through the lens of scale, but especially questions around decentralization. It may not seem particularly practical but the question for me would be, **at what scale is a network decentralized?** It can depend on how far you're looking into the network or what extent of the network you're looking at. + +Mauve, when you mentioned things like, part of the network can be centralized underneath, that raises a lot of questions. To really call something decentralized, it depends on what scale we're looking at. + +This came up for me in Elinor Ostrom's article that we read: great, cities are doing all this work to combat climate change. And it's a sort of decentralized approach to climate change. But cities are just one level of analysis. Yes, it's more decentralized than nation states are international agreements. + +Cities also have their own structures that are very uneven and unequal, that we may not call distributed or decentralized. + +**BRENDAN**: did I miss any hands? Does anybody feel like they have a burning thought right now they want to jump in on? Heather, go ahead. + +**HEATHER**: I have two different things to throw into the mix that are not fully formed thoughts. They're more like just things I thought about while other people were talking. + +One of them is actually me poaching an idea that I've heard Stefan bring up many times. This is in response to what Kelsey was saying about the trust issue, about this weird inversion of trust and our expectations of trust in the world of tech and and data versus the world of decentralized power in terms of political decision making and power. + +Historically, or at least in our current moment, we think of politics as being a space that's value-laden, whereas science has meant to be value-free. It hasn't always been that way, but that's how it is now. + +Stefan wrote a piece where he advocated for possibly flipping that on its head and **searching for value-free politics, and value-laden science**. + +Now, that's not original. There's plenty of work out there by Bruno Latour and others about value-laden science. But then thinking of politics as something that could somehow be value-free– I can't speak to that, but I thought it played with this idea of trust. + +**When we try to remove trust, in in the case of decentralizing knowledge networks, it's a way of us looking for a value-free tech.** + +In the other definition of decentralization, which was about politics– as Kelsey pointed out, what we're looking for is building trust, which is value-laden politics. + +What happens if we stop trying to do away with the responsibility of trust in our tech, and data decentralization, and then stopped worrying about it quite so much in our decision-making networks? + +I don't know if it would be good or bad, but if we change those definitions, do we have that gestalt shift, does it suddenly make everything else legible? + +The other thing was in relation to what Mauve said, which was about the money problem. One way I think about the money problem is in relation to hoarding. Our problem with money right now is that there's people hoarding money. And our problem with centralized power networks are power, centralized power on the one hand and centralized networks of data. **Knowledge is again, there's a hoarding of capital. There's a hoarding of knowledge.** + +Stefan and I used to organize something called the Wayward School that was skill and knowledge sharing workshops. We're both really interested in permaculture and do a lot of community building work. And we continually butt into this problem of, even when people are kind of interested in the idea of doing these things and becoming decentralized, becoming really DIY, they still like to hoard their knowledge. They like to be the one that knows how to brew something from scratch. Or they don't want other people know where you can gather nettle. + +I know that's a really tangible, concrete example. And I'm not doing a great job of applying it to data and tech. But I think part of the thing we're all circling around is, what people go into it wanting, and then what it's capable of doing. And then what's gumming it all up. + +**BRENDAN**: that's fantastic. I'm going to pick on either Dawn or Matt, who have been lighting up the chat, to come forth and share some views. Matt's pointing at Dawn, Dawn's pointing at Matt + +**DAWN**: As a slight aside, I resonate super hard with what you just said, Heather about that hoarding of knowledge in some of those DIY spaces, having been active in them myself. + +Lately, I'm on a reading group because of the recent election. In politics, **I think sometimes there's been a failure in those spaces to actually have an accurate analysis of power**. Maybe that's why they don't see what that does as a form of holding on to power. Because I think it's not always a sincere act, when people don't know how to let go of their knowledge. + +What I was saying in the chat, I was trying to think of this thought experiment. It's a really cool inversion. If we want to figure out how to speak about science as value-laden, **what does it mean to think about politics as value-free?** I'm not sure if I would want such a thing + +It felt a little bit like Fukuyama's argument about the "end of history", which is this, Oh, we tend towards Democracy, written in the 90s, like liberal Western democracies are this ascendant form. We did it, we cracked that nut. We've solved politics. And then it was like, Oh, actually, we haven't. + +So I wonder if trying to think about how something gets rendered value-free helps you understand the assumptions and the things that are already like are currently treated as value-free that aren't around you. Maybe that's a powerful lens. + +**BRENDAN**: Stefan. + +**STEFAN**: I feel like I should clarify a bit. In no way would I be suggesting that it's possible to have a value-free politics, but it was rather just the flipping of the lens to help you see the the thing a little differently. + +This is about seven or eight years ago now that I wrote all that stuff up, but I think I was turning to Manuel De Landa's work quite a bit at the time. He wrote a lot of stuff in his book, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, about how social and political forms are just these materialistic creations and you could study them in that very neutral way. I thought that was an interesting book. + +Jumping on what Heather was saying about the knowledge network, some of the aspects that were in the Seeing Like a State reading, I think that that problem of hoarding is very, very funny to get around. And I think it's gendered. In the tech space, especially I see that is happening, I see that in any space where there's a lot of expertise and insight around having to really think through what you would call algorithmic thought. + +This is another bridge to another conversation we're all having, which is this difference between the tech and the political and and how to think through them differently. + +I would say that the distinction between algorithmic and heuristic thinking is really helpful on this front, because if you're looking at it algorithmically, you could see the code beneath the decentralized networks themselves as a form of centralization, in the sense that they had to be drafted and composed and written and agreed upon by a group of experts, similar to the way that laws within a legal code are also developed in that way. And so in a way law and legal code, although they exist within a centralized entity, are themselves decentered process; once they exist, they produce effects without too much human input, but the power gets baked into it. And the power gets baked into the decentralized technical network as well in this algorithmic way. + +And then the heuristic element of decentralization is more around the squishy feelings that humans feel and the ideas and the values that they have and how they come together and reach agreement or work through disagreement around all of that. And in that way, heuristics and rules of thumb and principles and values and all of these phrases that we have to try to capture where I'm coming from on this issue, or whatever it might be, then come into play and then need to be conversed through in this non-representational way or at least like as as unmediated as possible way, synchronous communication, whatever you want to call it. + +This whole conversation, I keep going back to all these dualisms and dichotomies, and I don't know what's going on. It's very strange. + +**BRENDAN**: I want to try and pull some of that algorithmic and the sort of heuristics framing because I think that sort of echoes what Kelsey was saying a little bit about this cognitive dissonance of the word trust. And I want to again provide some anchoring on the technical side, just totally step into the technical side of this. + +I think that there's a bit of a misnomer around the phrase "trustless environments", and so I'm gonna start from the technical framing, or the algorithm framing. + +I think that if you really try to break it down and take as subjective a view as possible that a lot of the there is sort of a *cogito* in the modern decentralization movement. By *cogito* I mean like the the Cartesian sense of *ergo sum*: I think, therefore I am. + +I think the *cogito* of trustless environments is cryptography. And I think that we believe and understand that, even in technical circles, when you talk about cryptography, it is oriented in math. And it feels like a universal law, right? it feels like when you encrypt something, its foundations are in mathematical proofs. And those mathematical proofs form a kind of rock upon which you can layer other techniques out of a sort of hell of trustlessness towards something that resembles trust. And I think that's the sort of framing that is positioned when we talk about decentralized technologies. + +Personally, I intentionally want to invoke this Cartesian framing, because I think that it has a lot to say about a sort of gendered method of believing that you are capable of beginning at zero and moving to a completely cohesive system in a single line of thought. And I have to draw my hands on this, because what I think is scary about this framing is that along the way, you cannot do that without at some point layering on the technology that intertwines that heuristic framing, this set of values. + +We can we have cryptography, cryptography, cryptography, if you look at any single thing, if you layer it up and you've turned it into bitcoin, you're now talking you've layered on a sort of capital, capital, capital market heuristic onto onto your technology. Or if you turn it into IPFS or debt you've now layered on a communication protocol, HTTP-type replica free information sharing slants to the way that you're thinking. + +So I think there's a question about, what do we do with these things? And at what point do they stop? I think it's really interesting that both data and IPFS stop much sooner than a blockchain. + + +As someone who has struggled with this a little bit on the tech side, I think there is a place where the heuristic enters, and it's very difficult to know what that is because you feel so confident because of the math. + +**MATT**: This really makes you want to think about Walch and have the conversation about her piece on Deconstructing Decentralization. It seems to me that that what is at issue in that piece is where the ground is to be found laying the foundation of the argument. There's a repetition, maybe a different scale of the exact same kind of Cartesian error that you described: "I found certainty". Now we can start solving problems because certainty is here, right? And of course, what happens with Descartes is then you get Kant Fichte and Hegel and it gets more complicated, more difficult. + +And in the same way, **the certainty of the cryptographic solution becomes an ideological condition, which which wins arguments that maybe it shouldn't win.** + +In Walch's argument is that you can find concentrations of power, and watch them being applied to these systems that you believe are immune to the application of power. What's useful about that is that it shows that the systems are not purely technical, but are also social. And when we pretend that they're purely technical, we misrepresent them to ourselves. And we also maybe participate a little bit in a con job, right? Bitcoin could be also interpreted as a huge con that's being run on the world economy. + +I'd like to hear where you felt like she went wrong in that argument, because I was so friendly to it. + +**BRENDAN**: I just felt like her argument was too weak. I think she attacked the wrong things. + +I think if you're like, hey, a bunch of folks stepped into action and change and patched Bitcoin to prevent a centralization, or they behaved in a centralized way, and that should be cited as evidence that this is a an impurity in the system. + +I agree that we should absolutely be using this other running. I just think it could be applied better. + +It is proof that you could one day have a situation where someone could use that same set of 11 people in the Bitcoin security disclosure, could behave in a sort of odd, in a way that is a power grab. But I think that the design of the network itself invites much more interesting questions about about centralization, decentralization, and its central tenets or claims. + +I think that there's a double click that happens when we call it a decentralized thing that we've all experienced firsthand. **We were sucked in for political reasons. And then the cryptography keeps us connected, because it seems to make good on some of those promises.** But that double click has already happened in my mind. That's why I like my version of it better. The idea that you think that you've got some incredibly decentralized space in cryptography, it's like, yeah, but like as soon as we hit some layer like this, this stops being the kind of decentralization that we showed up for. + +The meaning of the phrase flips when we get to the technology. The thing that brought us there is not the thing that is keeping us here. And I think that that's more interesting to me personally. + +To Mauve's point, you can write another implementation. I think that it's sad that we don't look at the fact that there are like, 25 bajillion currencies out there. That is in itself a kind of decentralization, and should be seen as points in the column of, well, Bitcoin isn't the only game in town. That's a form of decentralization. And it's not a fun one to look at. But I think there are better ways to do a takedown [than Walch uses]. + +**MAUVE**: I actually wish we had less of the logic around trust and less of the cryptographic proofs that we don't need to trust. **I think we should put trust on the people.** If I want to trust someone to have my data, I should trust them in meatspace. + +Capturing every meaning of trust in a smart contract, it just doesn't make sense to me. Especially looking at real contracts and real promises you make to people– they're a lot more loose, and there's so much more ambiguity. In a machine, it's much harder to express that ambiguity and the fluid nature of trust and of agreements + +Personally, I love crypto for making sure that data can't be intercepted or changed as it's being transported between people. But I'm not a fan of crypto automating decisions and stuff that humans could actually be doing in a way that makes more sense for their specific context rather than this imagined idea of what trust is for all of humanity or for the whole network. + +**KELSEY**: We talked before about the problem of scale in trust in social societies, right? Where if it's 20 people, you can look around the room and be like, okay, we're all going to be nice to each other; there isn't gonna be one of us who comes in and just screws everything up. And if there is they'll leave, because that's how social cohesion works, in a way that it doesn't work on, say, a country scale, a city scale, a an internet scale. + +So what about the idea that we use cryptography in networks to create not trustlessness– In the decentralized web, you have a lot of elements that you don't have to have trust about that you don't have to think about, right? Because there's all this hashed data. But ultimately, if you're trying to come back to a single root hash in order to ask for that root hash, or public key in the Dat case, you have to trust somebody. And **there is no version of a decentralized web framework where you don't have to trust anyone at all.** + +**I feel like maybe what "trustless" systems are trying to do is not to get rid of trust, but to reduce the number of entities you actually have to trust to a size that is manageable on a social level.** + +**ERIC**: There's scale in the sense of number of people, but also geography, but then also temporal scale. + +The Ostrom article talks about the need for more rapid decision-making around climate change, so I wonder if there's something here about time, too. + +**MAUVE**: I like the idea of reducing the number of people you need to trust for stuff to work, I actually really like that it makes trust a little bit more manageable. + +The problem I have with the state of things is that the [specific] smaller amount of people you trust are either tech bros, who I find it very hard to trust, or investors of tech companies, or just like regular business people or people with money, which are all people that I don't want to trust as my building block. + +**I'd rather trust a person I'm interacting with.** So I like when we can use tech for that and ignore some of the tech folks somehow or maybe find some tech folks that are more hippy dippy. + +I think trusting fewer people is nice when those are people you *can* trust rather than those are people that you *have to* trust and can't really opt out of. + +**DAWN**: I can connect to what you've just said, but also reeling it back a little bit going into what you said. + +The cryptographic proof is this kernel or this small building block. I agree with Matt's response about the fact that these are always already socio-technical systems. The thing is that we've not figured out good ways of thinking those two things together, or a language that like reflects that, so we veer into one side or the other. That's what I'm interested in, is how to be aware of that and how to recognize that, doing that careful recognition around some of these decentralizing projects. + +To think about this idea of trust rendered technical and its reliance on cryptography, as opposed to actual models of trust at scale: there's a concern I have with only using the concept of trust, because it's a form of methodological individualism. It's locating in an individual or at the scale of one person and their motivation, a way to think about phenomena that in collectives might be expressed differently. + +I was thinking okay, what is trust? Like that I have one on one or like the trust that I would have with a group of 20 people, be they tech bros or not. And if whether or not what I don't want that to be like the kind of trust I have. + +Maybe there is a way that some imperfect representation of that exists in like public key cryptography, say Coinbase or something. We have all these chains of proofs and ways that we say we know each other to each other and, publish that places. But that isn't the same way that trust– and trust isn't, there, the right word. + +I'm comfortable being in a group of friends of friends, or if I'm in a circle where I know five people really close, but there's like 20 people there, but I would feel more comfortable saying something in that group than I would in another group. + +**I was trying to think about where trust breaks down or if there's this implicit individualism that is being surfaced there.** And maybe there's other ways to think about it. And how are those being implemented technically? + +I was actually thinking about on Scuttlebutt, that way of peer broadcasts or something about the way that you end up actually transmitting or just thinking about how that log functions is maybe a way that also doesn't rely on individual relationship. + +**BRENDAN**: I think it's interesting, the centricity of the trust words. And I'm wondering if we just take a framing for a second– + +It is a very common trick for tech when we're developing technologies to co-opt or adopt language. As the the second movers, we've pulled these meanings towards technical centers. + +I feel like this conversation has centered around the phrase "trust", because of the way that the word trust is used to describe the environments that are on the technical side + +It also feels like we have a similar double click phenomenon happening, where Mauve, you're talking about trust as a relationship between people, not as a provable thing, but we have this word trust that has been moved into this "provable thing" territory. + +I want to know how others feel about the idea that in technology, we tend to lift these terms to describe technical concepts. + +It seems to me to be part of this– if we just called it "snarfark" and said, it's the snarfark protocol, and then all it does is sort of some method of making sure that all of your data moves correctly. + +**KELSEY**: Whenever we make qualitative things quantitative, we're usually wrong and trust things too much. + +I'm trying to think of a good example. I know I've come across several recently, but I guess a canonical one would be the IQ test, where, to some extent it does measure intelligence and to another extent, it measures how well you match a training set. And to a third extent, that training set is based on your existing class and race. But because it's a number, and it was a way of turning things that were not originally quantifiable into something that looks a lot like math, we think it's right. + +I worry a lot about when we start to move into quantifiable genetics spaces, where there are some data sets to draw on that are much larger than other data sets that we draw on. For example, my Native Alaskan ancestry means that a lot of the genetic testing that you can do is less valid in my case than in other cases, but there are no confidence intervals shown at the point of interpretation. + +**I worry about anything that that turns something not math-y into something that looks math-y enough that people who don't understand how it came to be will just look at it and say, "well, that's probably right, it came out of a computer".** + +**MAUVE**: To bring that towards the reading, I think Seeing Like a State, that was like the whole point of the book to me, because it was all people coming in and saying, we need to quantify stuff. And as part of the quantification, they introduced biases and erased a whole bunch of stuff that was actually super relevant to the context. + +At the top you have a number. And that number is useful for a bureaucrat, but it's just completely destroying the actual context it's being applied on, which absolutely sucks. So I agree. + +**BRENDAN**: Heather, you've got some great stuff going in chat. Do you want to jump in with any of that here? + +**HEATHER**: +I decided that maybe instead of taking notes, I should put my notes there, so they can be discursive. I realized just now, as you were talking that I accidentally wrote something as a statement, which I meant as a question, which was: we can and should ask about the motivations of the algorithm. I was asking that more like, shouldn't we? should we? Who are we questioning? + +That was bringing me into these other places about corporate reality is what we're talking about right? That's the promise of these technologies, is that they're immortal, in some ways infallible, that they continue on into posterity. + +So that's where my head is going with this discussion, but it keeps going back to straight up philosophical questions and you want to maybe pull it away from there back into these more specific questions about the technology itself. + +I personally always have a hard time doing that because one of the motivating questions that I have, whenever I think about technology, media, electronic communications, and data networks, has to do with agency and whether or not text itself could be said to have agency. And thinking if languages are truly our first technology, because it's something that's outside of our body that extends our capabilities and can exist without us– it expands what we can do with our bodies, it's a tool, etc. Now, I don't think that sounds that crazy to all of you. But when I would posit that to my advisors when I was in dissertation mode, that was a real, "I don't know if I agree with that" kind of thing. And so therefore, I always come back to it as whether or not we can think of languages the first technology, and then also whether or not text can be said to have agency. + +To me those questions are really alive in any discussion about blockchain, about decentralization, and all of the things we're bringing up here about trust and representation, which again, avatar representation, that means something stands in for something else. Again, that kind of extension of our self into a non-corporeal realm. + +And then back to the Descartes that you brought up: I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. I'm bringing that up in relation to what you had pointed out about. Math, mathematical proofs, and certainty. If we think of Cartesian as also being certainty, but it's actually rooted in doubt, and it also requires continual doubt, we find the truth, but we don't stay there. + +Or as Spock would say, logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end. So we have to continually doubt and displace and or else we stagnate; we become anaerobic, basically. + +**DAWN**: I'll just plus one the whole thread that you brought up, Heather. I think there's a lot, and you referenced here at the beginning but I think in as well as other sides of technologies, scholars have talked a lot about agency beyond non-humans or agency of non-human, so beyond humans, and trying to study and understand that in context, and I think that's super fruitful. + +I was reading this book lately by Mitcham, called Thinking through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy. About these early conceptualizations around technology and the distinction ignore some of its roots. + +I think it can be helpful to connect the narrow way that sometimes we mean "digital technology" when we say "technology", but to reattach it to a much broader understanding of "technology" because I think that opens up a way of thinking about relationships to it. + +**MATT**: The unit of the entity that participates in a decentralized system is important. If you have a collective of collectives with a rigid hub at the center where representatives of those collectives make decisions, is it nonetheless the case that we could describe that in some ways as a decentralized organizational structure? + +**BRENDAN**: +I think now's a great time to try and bring back one article that hasn't come up a ton, but I think might be fun to try and sew in as a theme here, see if we can connect some dots. + +The Most Dangerous Notion in Reinventing Organizations. To me, one of the central thoughts brought forth there might be a fun thought to start to draw to a close with. + +We started the conversation with this notion that decentralization is defined in opposition. I think, if we riff on the The Most Dangerous Notion in Reinventing Organizations article, it gets access to say, hey, this stuff has been around for a while. And maybe there are methods that of organizing that have existed for a long time that when we came in and sort of data colonized them, swept over some very subtle ways of moving and conducting ourselves, as was cited in this piece on the way that different indigenous Californian tribes are operating. + +Are there other things that have existed outside of the technical framing, outside of the like political framing, or maybe inside of framing depending on how you want to think about it, that we trust over because of the direction the discussion has gone. + +If we just thought about it as maybe there is a sort of original state or different state or a version of the world in which decentralization isn't the counter-hegemonic force. + +**HEATHER**: You could argue that it always was, because in relation to chaos and order, order is constantly trying to deal with all of the stuff that it sees as too noisy and and not producing the right information. So they rely on each other. But depending on your perspective, you could absolutely see that it already always was and is predominant, and that everything else is just like a desperate attempt to try to get on top of that. + +So I don't have an example of for your actual question, what are some ways that we see that becoming predominant, I would argue maybe it is. It's just our fear of it. Because we see it as messier. And that we don't just let it be. + +**STEFAN**: I think that that Reinventing Organizations piece was very interesting to me in part because a lot of the work that we're doing in our coop now is modeled off of some of the agreements and the organizational DNA that's inside of the Enspiral Handbook. And I know that they're very influenced by Reinventing Organizations, amongst other ideas and whatnot. + +I thought that what that article was getting at was also basically tying in with some of the other readings and some other readings that aren't in the reading list: Elinor Ostrom's work Governing the Commons. + +A fascinating series of case studies in there that are all non-Western and all outside of the canon, about how people on the land base contextually responded to all of these different questions that we're dealing with here around power, around decision making, around all of that. + +A lot of the ideas that she was pointing out in that piece where we're looking at examples from First Nations communities within the United States and how they've managed themselves on the land base. + +When we are looking at things like what James C. Scott was talking about, in Seeing Like a State, where he's talking about *metis* knowledge and these ideas around work to rule, this idea that workers within industrialized factories would buck the trend and strike while working by working to the rulebook. So working according to the algorithm as set out by management, then everything would be totally inefficient and ineffective and slow down. A way for them to resist was to completely follow the rule book. Because **what they were experiencing contextually in these spaces was a kind of heuristic algorithmic blend between the human and the machine** to try to understand how to make this thing operate the best way. + +I think the same can be said about the blockchain space, which then to further on Brendan's critique of that one article. You could then say, that article does miss the point because **it's holding that entire ecosystem to this really difficult high standard that it's impossible to be held up to, because there will be a need to jump in and tweak the technicalities of the things to help it work better, because that's just how we relate with technology. That's how it has always been.** + +Coming back to the land-based piece, I think that in terms of land base and in terms of the algorithmic and technical side of that, I think things like Internet of Things, all of these different technical networks that come into play with the land base in different ways, and measure it or monitor it or whatever, are very interesting sites to begin thinking about how we can take some of these older practices that have more to do with stewardship and sustainability and caring for the earth and caring for people and their relationship with the earth these permaculture principles, taking that and like plugging it into some of this new technology to see if there's a way that we can leverage that to to better deepen, to better democratize *metis* knowledge– because this is another thing that James C. Scott talked about was how *metis* knowledge was kind of undemocratic and coming back to what we were talking about earlier around people hoarding their knowledge. So maybe this is the way forward. + +**MATT**: It's worth reflecting on the fact that the the idea of an algorithmic solution is related to the idea of a rigid, legal structure which guarantees equality before the law and was the kind of ideology that promotes those systems, those modernist systems that James Scott is deeply opposed to, has very important critiques of, was developed to address important kinds of injustice. + +One interesting question is: **what is it about some systems that seem to promote or to dampen injustice without the rigid formality and weaknesses of algorithmic thinking?** + +One thing about systems that are based in the land somehow is that **there's a shared commitment, which is very dependable to preserving the land; you can't get away with with abusing that commitment, partly because of social pressures, but also because the land is not forgiving of your destruction of it. The question is, where is that commitment in these other endeavors, or these other technologies? How do you guarantee that commitment?** Or how do you how do you promote or create that commitment? At least that was the question that that Stefan's thoughts raised for me. Is there some analogy that you can build into the system or promote at least in the system? + +**DAWN**: To think about what some of those models of stewardship where say that maybe Ostrom profiles are the sort of history of Commons, forms of stewardship, or more conditional knowledge and traditional land practices practice by communities worldwide. + +I also think: what were the other forms that they were in relation to? We read an article last semester from Peter Linebaugh about commons. He does this really intense way of talking about how a large percentage of UK was held in commons, but a lot of it wasn't. + +I think a lot about, what were those practices operating alongside? And then I wonder, how do you attach that same level of commitment? And maybe these digital practices we're talking about, and how do we understand them and their relationship to the broader digital practices? + +**BRENDAN**: This brings us to a close on our time. Thank you so much, everybody for joining. This was a delightful discussion. I do invite you to take a quick second. Think about that definition you wrote down an hour and a half ago and see if it shifted at all. ## Chat log -14:39:10 From Dawn . : sorry for being late! -14:39:26 From Matt Price : 15cm -14:39:37 From Matt Price : it's like a real snow -14:40:10 From Matt Price : I was WW kayaking sunday morning. and then a snow storm yesterday -14:40:48 From Kevin : I can help with notes -14:41:06 From Matt Price : oh me too, I'll help -14:41:14 From Kevin : thanks Matt -14:41:18 From Kelsey : Semester 3: https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/71 -14:42:33 From Kelsey : Shared notes: https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw?both -14:44:06 From Kelsey : that’s harder than expected -14:49:55 From Kelsey : Welcome, Heather! -14:51:55 From Dawn . : add me on stack b5! -14:52:45 From Brendan O'Brien : Go it -14:52:50 From Brendan O'Brien : *got it -14:52:52 From Kelsey : Etiquette note: if you want to speak, raise your hand or request to be put on stack in the chat here, and the facilitator will pay attention and call on you -14:54:00 From Brendan O'Brien : I have Kelsey next -14:55:06 From Brendan O'Brien : Reminds me of “counterdisintermediation” -14:55:24 From Dawn . : autonomous? self-determining? -14:56:13 From Stefan Morales : I have a thought next! -14:56:26 From Brendan O'Brien : then Stefan! -14:57:39 From Brendan O'Brien : My fav is “rhizomes” -14:59:18 From Kelsey : Love that– strong tie btw the pedagogy thought & the self-determination thought. I’m a montessori kid! V much about “intrinsic motivation" -14:59:21 From Eric : “direction, agency, and intention” - I like those three parameters for thinking about de/centralization -15:00:35 From Kelsey : or as I like to think of it “treating people like adults" -15:02:32 From Mauve : I actually started from technical and got more political as I learned more about it -15:03:48 From Dawn . : I think that vitalik article is a super interesting study in the hidden assumptions that emerge when translating/operationalizing concepts into technical ~things~ -15:03:57 From Brendan O'Brien : stack: -15:04:06 From Brendan O'Brien : Kelsey, Matt, Eric -15:04:45 From Brendan O'Brien : I’ll jump on stack after eric -15:06:54 From Dawn . : me too, I was so into that article. Want to re-read it immediately :)) -15:07:05 From Mauve : Could I comment on that? -15:07:27 From Stefan Morales : bummer about the promise of tech not being met=understatement of the decade! lol -15:08:12 From Kelsey : oh man just like capitalism! -15:08:43 From Matt Price : Somehow the view of Catan behind Mo during a discussion about money, currency and centralization is giving me a whole new understnading. -15:10:16 From Kelsey : From Walch/Crypto reading: Disambiguating "distributed" vs "decentralized": "decentralized" = nodes controlled by different parties, not necessarily true for distributed -15:11:56 From Brendan O'Brien : Oh we’re big fans of those -15:13:17 From Brendan O'Brien : I’ll jump on stack next -15:14:06 From Matt Price : (re: Eric, citis, ostrom) I thought of Ostrom's article as part of a kind of Jane Jacobs axis that goes Jacobs - Scott - Ostrom, and strongly valorizes the spontaneous relationships and orderings that arise esp in urban spaces; so there seemed to me a bit of a romanicization of the power of those relationships/decisions to effect change at larger scales. -15:14:06 From Dawn . : Is value free politics ~= fukuyama and the end of history ?! -15:14:39 From Matt Price : @dawn I'm not sure -- I am not sure I want a value free politics! -15:14:51 From Kelsey : curious how value-free vs. value-laden plays into our intertwined conceptions of what is legal & what is moral -15:15:05 From Matt Price : can't remember who I heard say, a rational society would be a horror beyond all horrors. -15:15:15 From Kelsey : it’s also so caught up in the notion of corporations & whether they have any obligation to responsibility -15:15:19 From Mauve : @matt Nice. 🔥🔥 -15:15:26 From Matt Price : maybe Iain Banks. -15:15:27 From Dawn . : me either matt! I guess I felt an echo with that style of fukuyama's arguments -15:17:18 From Eric : @matt - ooh interesting point about Jacobs/Ostrom -15:17:57 From Matt Price : neat. -15:19:45 From Brendan O'Brien : I’ll jump on stack next -15:21:04 From Kelsey : a la racist algorithms in machine learning -15:21:17 From Kelsey : the algorithms aren’t racist, the training datasets are -15:21:30 From Heather : Decentered knowledge, baked in codes=headless corpse (Bataille’s) -15:22:00 From Kelsey : searching for frameworks -15:23:45 From Matt Price : adding myself to stack -15:23:47 From Eric : @b5 for a quick second I thought you said cartography, oriented in maps, and I was like, wow geography is so important. but nope, that’s just me. -15:23:52 From Kelsey : so, “trustless” networks reduces the number of entities we need to trust to a socially plausible number? -15:24:17 From Kelsey : attacking the scale problem through cryptographic approaches -15:24:48 From Dawn . : I feel like there is a dissertation in the gap between theory / reference implementations and applied cryptography 😬 -15:24:54 From Heather : a wrench we can throw in Descartes’ cogito ego sum is that some say a more accurate translation is: I think therefore I doubt -15:25:42 From Kelsey : ^ I love that and have not heard it before -15:26:33 From Brendan O'Brien : I think we’ve got mauve on stack next? -15:26:45 From Mauve : 👍 -15:27:08 From Heather : OH no I made a dumb typo! I meant to say: -15:27:15 From Heather : "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am") -15:28:39 From Matt Price : nice @heather -15:30:13 From Dawn . : Can I be on stack after Mauve? But weight me lower I think I've been a little too much on the talking side -15:30:51 From Brendan O'Brien : SO MUCH THIS -15:31:06 From Brendan O'Brien : Dawn on stack next -15:31:12 From Kelsey : “meatspace” = irl -15:31:43 From Kelsey : can I go on stack too? -15:31:49 From Matt Price : how similar are promises and contracts, really? aren't they pretty different? -15:31:49 From Brendan O'Brien : yaya -15:32:00 From Dawn . : kelsey before me pls! -15:33:30 From Eric : it’s trust all the way down -15:33:43 From Brendan O'Brien : Just like you need to trust someone before you visit http://shadyurl.com -15:34:01 From Kelsey : oh jeez I really want to click that -15:34:06 From Brendan O'Brien : DO NOT CLICK -15:34:10 From Brendan O'Brien : I have no idea what it is -15:34:19 From Brendan O'Brien : (Don’t trust me) -15:34:41 From Brendan O'Brien : Then dawn! -15:35:34 From Kevin : Vibez only -15:35:52 From Kelsey : @mauve sounds like a need for the post-custodial archiving approaches we read about in Stewardship -15:37:46 From Kelsey : trust as inherently drawing from our existing biases (personal or social) on “trustworthy” -15:38:49 From Mauve : Scuttlebutt is my favorite cult. 💜 -15:39:27 From Kelsey : https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ for anyone on the call not already initiated into what that is -15:40:03 From Heather : @dawn we can and should ask about the motivations of the algorithm, (I’m not a coder or anything so maybe algorithm is not the right aspect of decentralized knowledge networks to refer to?) -15:41:01 From Heather : This whole discussion is bringing me back to another important philosophical dichotomy (from post-structuralism and also psychoanalysis): presence/absence -15:41:13 From Mauve : ✋ -15:41:17 From Dawn . : @heather fair, I wouldn't disagree with that being a fruitful approach. I guess I'm not sure that would be sufficient (i.e., to only analyse the motivations) to understand the impacts and context they operate in -15:41:21 From Brendan O'Brien : Mauve next! -15:42:42 From Brendan O'Brien : data collection as a destructive, extractive process -15:44:29 From Brendan O'Brien : kevin, was that a hand? -15:44:38 From Kevin : +1 tech is 1st tech -15:44:41 From Kevin : No hand -15:45:35 From Kelsey : love that bc it leads to extending sapir-whorf (sp?) hypothesis to all technologies -15:46:33 From Brendan O'Brien : Or you’re just flipping the framing :) -15:46:39 From Kelsey : think of revolutions in mathematics like the existence of geometries other than Euclidian -15:46:56 From Kelsey : there’s rarely one correct logic -15:47:02 From Kelsey : (never?) -15:48:13 From Matt Price : long hting I've bene typing -15:48:15 From Matt Price : Several of these points are sort of swirling around together for me. +- 14:39:10 From Dawn . : sorry for being late! +- 14:39:26 From Matt Price : 15cm +- 14:39:37 From Matt Price : it's like a real snow +- 14:40:10 From Matt Price : I was WW kayaking sunday morning. and then a snow storm yesterday +- 14:40:48 From Kevin : I can help with notes +- 14:41:06 From Matt Price : oh me too, I'll help +- 14:41:14 From Kevin : thanks Matt +- 14:41:18 From Kelsey : Semester 3: https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/71 +- 14:42:33 From Kelsey : Shared notes: https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw?both +- 14:44:06 From Kelsey : that’s harder than expected +- 14:49:55 From Kelsey : Welcome, Heather! +- 14:51:55 From Dawn . : add me on stack b5! +- 14:52:45 From Brendan O'Brien : Go it +- 14:52:50 From Brendan O'Brien : *got it +- 14:52:52 From Kelsey : Etiquette note: if you want to speak, raise your hand or request to be put on stack in the chat here, and the facilitator will pay attention and call on you +- 14:54:00 From Brendan O'Brien : I have Kelsey next +- 14:55:06 From Brendan O'Brien : Reminds me of “counterdisintermediation” +- 14:55:24 From Dawn . : autonomous? self-determining? +- 14:56:13 From Stefan Morales : I have a thought next! +- 14:56:26 From Brendan O'Brien : then Stefan! +- 14:57:39 From Brendan O'Brien : My fav is “rhizomes” +- 14:59:18 From Kelsey : Love that– strong tie btw the pedagogy thought & the self-determination thought. I’m a montessori kid! V much about “intrinsic motivation" +- 14:59:21 From Eric : “direction, agency, and intention” - I like those three parameters for thinking about de/centralization +- 15:00:35 From Kelsey : or as I like to think of it “treating people like adults" +- 15:02:32 From Mauve : I actually started from technical and got more political as I learned more about it +- 15:03:48 From Dawn . : I think that vitalik article is a super interesting study in the hidden assumptions that emerge when translating/operationalizing concepts into technical ~things~ +- 15:03:57 From Brendan O'Brien : stack: +- 15:04:06 From Brendan O'Brien : Kelsey, Matt, Eric +- 15:04:45 From Brendan O'Brien : I’ll jump on stack after eric +- 15:06:54 From Dawn . : me too, I was so into that article. Want to re-read it immediately :)) +- 15:07:05 From Mauve : Could I comment on that? +- 15:07:27 From Stefan Morales : bummer about the promise of tech not being met=understatement of the decade! lol +- 15:08:12 From Kelsey : oh man just like capitalism! +- 15:08:43 From Matt Price : Somehow the view of Catan behind Mo during a discussion about money, currency and centralization is giving me a whole new understnading. +- 15:10:16 From Kelsey : From Walch/Crypto reading: Disambiguating "distributed" vs "decentralized": "decentralized" = nodes controlled by different parties, not necessarily true for distributed +- 15:11:56 From Brendan O'Brien : Oh we’re big fans of those +- 15:13:17 From Brendan O'Brien : I’ll jump on stack next +- 15:14:06 From Matt Price : (re: Eric, citis, ostrom) I thought of Ostrom's article as part of a kind of Jane Jacobs axis that goes Jacobs - Scott - Ostrom, and strongly valorizes the spontaneous relationships and orderings that arise esp in urban spaces; so there seemed to me a bit of a romanicization of the power of those relationships/decisions to effect change at larger scales. +- 15:14:06 From Dawn . : Is value free politics ~= fukuyama and the end of history ?! +- 15:14:39 From Matt Price : @dawn I'm not sure -- I am not sure I want a value free politics! +- 15:14:51 From Kelsey : curious how value-free vs. value-laden plays into our intertwined conceptions of what is legal & what is moral +- 15:15:05 From Matt Price : can't remember who I heard say, a rational society would be a horror beyond all horrors. +- 15:15:15 From Kelsey : it’s also so caught up in the notion of corporations & whether they have any obligation to responsibility +- 15:15:19 From Mauve : @matt Nice. 🔥🔥 +- 15:15:26 From Matt Price : maybe Iain Banks. +- 15:15:27 From Dawn . : me either matt! I guess I felt an echo with that style of fukuyama's arguments +- 15:17:18 From Eric : @matt - ooh interesting point about Jacobs/Ostrom +- 15:17:57 From Matt Price : neat. +- 15:19:45 From Brendan O'Brien : I’ll jump on stack next +- 15:21:04 From Kelsey : a la racist algorithms in machine learning +- 15:21:17 From Kelsey : the algorithms aren’t racist, the training datasets are +- 15:21:30 From Heather : Decentered knowledge, baked in codes=headless corpse (Bataille’s) +- 15:22:00 From Kelsey : searching for frameworks +- 15:23:45 From Matt Price : adding myself to stack +- 15:23:47 From Eric : @b5 for a quick second I thought you said cartography, oriented in maps, and I was like, wow geography is so important. but nope, that’s just me. +- 15:23:52 From Kelsey : so, “trustless” networks reduces the number of entities we need to trust to a socially plausible number? +- 15:24:17 From Kelsey : attacking the scale problem through cryptographic approaches +- 15:24:48 From Dawn . : I feel like there is a dissertation in the gap between theory / reference implementations and applied cryptography 😬 +- 15:24:54 From Heather : a wrench we can throw in Descartes’ cogito ego sum is that some say a more accurate translation is: I think therefore I doubt +- 15:25:42 From Kelsey : ^ I love that and have not heard it before +- 15:26:33 From Brendan O'Brien : I think we’ve got mauve on stack next? +- 15:26:45 From Mauve : 👍 +- 15:27:08 From Heather : OH no I made a dumb typo! I meant to say: +- 15:27:15 From Heather : "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am") +- 15:28:39 From Matt Price : nice @heather +- 15:30:13 From Dawn . : Can I be on stack after Mauve? But weight me lower I think I've been a little too much on the talking side +- 15:30:51 From Brendan O'Brien : SO MUCH THIS +- 15:31:06 From Brendan O'Brien : Dawn on stack next +- 15:31:12 From Kelsey : “meatspace” = irl +- 15:31:43 From Kelsey : can I go on stack too? +- 15:31:49 From Matt Price : how similar are promises and contracts, really? aren't they pretty different? +- 15:31:49 From Brendan O'Brien : yaya +- 15:32:00 From Dawn . : kelsey before me pls! +- 15:33:30 From Eric : it’s trust all the way down +- 15:33:43 From Brendan O'Brien : Just like you need to trust someone before you visit http://shadyurl.com +- 15:34:01 From Kelsey : oh jeez I really want to click that +- 15:34:06 From Brendan O'Brien : DO NOT CLICK +- 15:34:10 From Brendan O'Brien : I have no idea what it is +- 15:34:19 From Brendan O'Brien : (Don’t trust me) +- 15:34:41 From Brendan O'Brien : Then dawn! +- 15:35:34 From Kevin : Vibez only +- 15:35:52 From Kelsey : @mauve sounds like a need for the post-custodial archiving approaches we read about in Stewardship +- 15:37:46 From Kelsey : trust as inherently drawing from our existing biases (personal or social) on “trustworthy” +- 15:38:49 From Mauve : Scuttlebutt is my favorite cult. 💜 +- 15:39:27 From Kelsey : https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ for anyone on the call not already initiated into what that is +- 15:40:03 From Heather : @dawn we can and should ask about the motivations of the algorithm, (I’m not a coder or anything so maybe algorithm is not the right aspect of decentralized knowledge networks to refer to?) +- 15:41:01 From Heather : This whole discussion is bringing me back to another important philosophical dichotomy (from post-structuralism and also psychoanalysis): presence/absence +- 15:41:13 From Mauve : ✋ +- 15:41:17 From Dawn . : @heather fair, I wouldn't disagree with that being a fruitful approach. I guess I'm not sure that would be sufficient (i.e., to only analyse the motivations) to understand the impacts and context they operate in +- 15:41:21 From Brendan O'Brien : Mauve next! +- 15:42:42 From Brendan O'Brien : data collection as a destructive, extractive process +- 15:44:29 From Brendan O'Brien : kevin, was that a hand? +- 15:44:38 From Kevin : +1 tech is 1st tech +- 15:44:41 From Kevin : No hand +- 15:45:35 From Kelsey : love that bc it leads to extending sapir-whorf (sp?) hypothesis to all technologies +- 15:46:33 From Brendan O'Brien : Or you’re just flipping the framing :) +- 15:46:39 From Kelsey : think of revolutions in mathematics like the existence of geometries other than Euclidian +- 15:46:56 From Kelsey : there’s rarely one correct logic +- 15:47:02 From Kelsey : (never?) +- 15:48:13 From Matt Price : long hting I've bene typing +- 15:48:15 From Matt Price : Several of these points are sort of swirling around together for me. - Crypto tries to take the social out of social interaction. And trust is maybe just one part of what's being removed. - This is related to the sort of creeping individualism that Dawn described. The thing that's called "provable trust" in crypto is related, not to the actual trust we have in actual people, but to the mechanisms that enable or guarantee good-faith interaction in anonymous contexts -- legal frameworks, criminal sanctions, with the idea that we can turn the law into a pure mechanism and thereby exorcise its tyrannical aspects. But (a) its unclear that this can be done, or that it would remove inequities; and (b) this has little to do with the value we place in trusting people. - Coming back, again to Dawn, individualism, collectives, I have bee nwondering a little bit about the *scale of decentralizations*; what scale are the individual entities that participate in a "decentralized" system; are they persons, collectives, cor -15:48:16 From Heather : @kelsey yes exactly, we are in the fractal (and other?) realm with these quandaries -15:49:35 From Kelsey : it depends, is the central council advisory? ') -15:50:09 From Dawn . : yeah non-euclidean geometery is super interesting! I really like Poincaré mathematian/philosophy badass -15:51:14 From Mauve : Anarchy Works was a great book about alternative ways people have organized -15:51:48 From Dawn . : one force among many? -15:51:48 From Kelsey : Stefan had a hand -15:51:56 From Brendan O'Brien : then stefan! -15:51:58 From Brendan O'Brien : sorry! -15:53:23 From Heather : @Brendan “data-colonized” did you say? Was that from someone/somewhere or are you coining that? I want to borrow that term! -15:53:33 From Brendan O'Brien : … made it up on the spot? -15:53:52 From Brendan O'Brien : feels like a term this crowd came up with together :) -15:56:31 From Heather : purity is inefficient -15:56:49 From Heather : Scratch that, purity is vulnerable and unresilient -15:59:41 From Brendan O'Brien : Land as centering, but not centralizing -16:00:21 From Heather : does blockchain technology create the same sense of commitment to not “fouling the nest” that land-based decentralized knowledge networks do? -16:01:25 From Brendan O'Brien : I think blockchain enthusiasts would argue yes, that they’re entirely oriented as systems that incentivize “good behaviour" -16:01:28 From Mauve : @Heather, the commitment is through economic incentives -16:01:35 From Brendan O'Brien : ^^ what mauve said -16:01:39 From Kelsey : 4pm! -16:01:45 From Kelsey : or whatever time it is for you -16:02:03 From Eric : thank you for organizing! -16:02:11 From Matt Price : thanks so much @b5! -16:02:13 From Heather : To answer my own question… it does in the sense of creating scarcity, doesn’t it? But also if we talk about the “commons” in relation to land-based, we are talking about a common (ubiquitous resource) that is not scarce (necessarily) -16:02:19 From Dawn . : thanks for facilitating b5! -16:02:28 From Matt Price : if it had been coherent, it would have changed :-) -16:02:38 From Dawn . : So nice to see all your faces :)) -16:02:45 From Mauve : 💜💜💜 -16:03:10 From Kevin : Great to see everyone! And thanks Stefan and Heather for joining -16:03:25 From Stefan Morales : Thank you for welcoming! -16:03:30 From Brendan O'Brien : github.com/datatogether -16:03:43 From Stefan Morales : Really enjoyable discussion everyone! -16:03:50 From Dawn . : (when does it start up again?!) -16:03:53 From Matt Price : this is my important find of hte day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73A0iMus8so -16:04:08 From Mauve : It was wonderful talking to y'all! Thank you for facilitating this! 💜💜 -16:04:12 From Kelsey : and please co-facilitate next semester! https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/71 -16:04:33 From Dawn . : @matt amazing! -16:04:34 From Heather : Thank you for letting us join in! I feel very bolstered by this discussion! -16:04:35 From Kelsey : *reading list suggestions have been started but do need more suggestion & curation -16:04:48 From Dawn . : my find: refused is making the tracks for cyberpunk 2077 -16:05:34 From Kelsey : oops now we stopped recording +- 15:48:16 From Heather : @kelsey yes exactly, we are in the fractal (and other?) realm with these quandaries +- 15:49:35 From Kelsey : it depends, is the central council advisory? ') +- 15:50:09 From Dawn . : yeah non-euclidean geometery is super interesting! I really like Poincaré mathematian/philosophy badass +- 15:51:14 From Mauve : Anarchy Works was a great book about alternative ways people have organized +- 15:51:48 From Dawn . : one force among many? +- 15:51:48 From Kelsey : Stefan had a hand +- 15:51:56 From Brendan O'Brien : then stefan! +- 15:51:58 From Brendan O'Brien : sorry! +- 15:53:23 From Heather : @Brendan “data-colonized” did you say? Was that from someone/somewhere or are you coining that? I want to borrow that term! +- 15:53:33 From Brendan O'Brien : … made it up on the spot? +- 15:53:52 From Brendan O'Brien : feels like a term this crowd came up with together :) +- 15:56:31 From Heather : purity is inefficient +- 15:56:49 From Heather : Scratch that, purity is vulnerable and unresilient +- 15:59:41 From Brendan O'Brien : Land as centering, but not centralizing +- 16:00:21 From Heather : does blockchain technology create the same sense of commitment to not “fouling the nest” that land-based decentralized knowledge networks do? +- 16:01:25 From Brendan O'Brien : I think blockchain enthusiasts would argue yes, that they’re entirely oriented as systems that incentivize “good behaviour" +- 16:01:28 From Mauve : @Heather, the commitment is through economic incentives +- 16:01:35 From Brendan O'Brien : ^^ what mauve said +- 16:01:39 From Kelsey : 4pm! +- 16:01:45 From Kelsey : or whatever time it is for you +- 16:02:03 From Eric : thank you for organizing! +- 16:02:11 From Matt Price : thanks so much @b5! +- 16:02:13 From Heather : To answer my own question… it does in the sense of creating scarcity, doesn’t it? But also if we talk about the “commons” in relation to land-based, we are talking about a common (ubiquitous resource) that is not scarce (necessarily) +- 16:02:19 From Dawn . : thanks for facilitating b5! +- 16:02:28 From Matt Price : if it had been coherent, it would have changed :-) +- 16:02:38 From Dawn . : So nice to see all your faces :)) +- 16:02:45 From Mauve : 💜💜💜 +- 16:03:10 From Kevin : Great to see everyone! And thanks Stefan and Heather for joining +- 16:03:25 From Stefan Morales : Thank you for welcoming! +- 16:03:30 From Brendan O'Brien : github.com/datatogether +- 16:03:43 From Stefan Morales : Really enjoyable discussion everyone! +- 16:03:50 From Dawn . : (when does it start up again?!) +- 16:03:53 From Matt Price : this is my important find of hte day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73A0iMus8so +- 16:04:08 From Mauve : It was wonderful talking to y'all! Thank you for facilitating this! 💜💜 +- 16:04:12 From Kelsey : and please co-facilitate next semester! https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/71 +- 16:04:33 From Dawn . : @matt amazing! +- 16:04:34 From Heather : Thank you for letting us join in! I feel very bolstered by this discussion! +- 16:04:35 From Kelsey : *reading list suggestions have been started but do need more suggestion & curation +- 16:04:48 From Dawn . : my find: refused is making the tracks for cyberpunk 2077 +- 16:05:34 From Kelsey : oops now we stopped recording From bb308cf39dfcd9dace2ee0d735be4eddcaef27d1 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Breseman Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2019 10:13:48 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 18/65] adds decentralization blog post link to readme --- README.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index c2be9e5..c59950f 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -33,7 +33,7 @@ Our hope is that: first, we learn together!; second, through documenting discuss [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/YUt2PxRZCYs)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/2-civics-2019-05-07.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/02_civics/) - [Alternatives to Capitalist Structures](#alternatives-to-capitalist-structures) (June 4)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/VWBiq1K7N4k)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/3-alternatives-to-capitalist-structures-2019-06-04.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/03_alternatives_capitalist/) - [Stewardship](#stewardship) (August 6)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/fbJUSvO_Xvc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/04_stewardship/) -- [What is Decentralization?](#what-is-decentralization) (November 12)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/74jsTUzdOZc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/5-decentralization-2019-11-12.md) +- [What is Decentralization?](#what-is-decentralization) (November 12)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/74jsTUzdOZc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/5-decentralization-2019-11-12.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/06_decentralization/) ## Sessions From 67b084dd011de6d90f74c1fee9a6a028c0567085 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Breseman Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2019 10:25:40 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 19/65] adds final 2019 readme to notes folder --- notes/semester_02_2019/0-overview.md | 226 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 226 insertions(+) create mode 100644 notes/semester_02_2019/0-overview.md diff --git a/notes/semester_02_2019/0-overview.md b/notes/semester_02_2019/0-overview.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c59950f --- /dev/null +++ b/notes/semester_02_2019/0-overview.md @@ -0,0 +1,226 @@ +Data. Together. Let's read about it +==== + +Data Together's reading group is a set of conversations on themes relevant to information and ethics. +Curated reading selections are distributed once a month; we meet to discuss on video call. + +This year, we are creating **blog posts** of each of the conversations, which you can see at [datatogether.org](//datatogether.org). + +# 2020 Data Together Reading Group + +Coming soon! See: https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/71 + +# Spring - Summer 2019 Data Together Reading Group + +📅 17:30-19:00 ET Tuesdays [**Data Together Calendar**](https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=u75o4fbnv59006peo07nv67vsg%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America%2FToronto) +🎯 Participation link (recorded): [https://edgi-video-call-landing-page.herokuapp.com/https://zoom.us/j/847315566](https://edgi-video-call-landing-page.herokuapp.com/https://zoom.us/j/847315566) +▶️ [**Data Together Call Playlist**](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtsP3g9LafVul1gCctMYGm9sz5FUWr5bu) + +Once a month, we'll host a 1.5 hour discussion of one of our [themes](#themes). Everyone should try hard to read the *core* reading (~30 pages), and once or twice sign up to [facilitate discussion](#facilitation). [**Join the Google Group**](https://groups.google.com/forum/embed/?place=forum/datatogether/join) to be notified of upcoming meetings and readings. + +Our hope is that: first, we learn together!; second, through documenting discussion we can articulate Data Together principles. + +- [Themes](#themes) +- [Sessions](#sessions) +- [Facilitation](#facilitation) +- [Potential Readings](#potential-readings) + +## Themes + +- [Knowledge Commons](#knowledge-commons) (April 9) +[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/bW8BYVwVbuo)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/1-knowledge-commons-2019-04-09.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/01_knowledge_commons/) +- [Civics](#civics) (May 7) +[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/YUt2PxRZCYs)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/2-civics-2019-05-07.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/02_civics/) +- [Alternatives to Capitalist Structures](#alternatives-to-capitalist-structures) (June 4)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/VWBiq1K7N4k)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/3-alternatives-to-capitalist-structures-2019-06-04.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/03_alternatives_capitalist/) +- [Stewardship](#stewardship) (August 6)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/fbJUSvO_Xvc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/04_stewardship/) +- [What is Decentralization?](#what-is-decentralization) (November 12)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/74jsTUzdOZc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/5-decentralization-2019-11-12.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/06_decentralization/) + +## Sessions + +### Knowledge Commons +**April 9** + +Let’s revisit last semester’s ideas around governing the commons, but with more emphasis and focus on how knowledge, information, and digital data might be treated and governed as common pool resources. + +**Readings:** + +1. Ostrom and Hess “A Framework for Analyzing the Knowledge Commons” (Chapter 3, pages 41-81 of *Understanding Knowledge as a Commons*) (http://www.wtf.tw/ref/hess_ostrom_2007.pdf) +2. Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, Hervé Le Crosnier. [An Introduction to the Digital Commons: From Common-Pool Resources to Community Governance.](https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00736920/document), 2012. +3. This twitter thread from mmildenberger: https://twitter.com/mmildenberger/status/1102604887223750657 +4. Garrett Hardin’s [“The Tragedy of the Commons”](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243/tab-pdf) + +We’re hoping these readings will spur us toward frameworks for understanding how open resources beyond nature can be sustainably governed. + +If you have any questions or want to dig into other works we considered, feel free to chime in on our planning github issue: https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/40 + + +### Civics +**May 7** + +A major lens through which governance of communities is understood is civics and citizenship. Even our own texts talk about "a civic layer for the web." But it's not clear that we really know what we mean by that! In order to think about communities, and more compellingly, what forms of space and collective action could be built around decentralized forms of governance, let's read about civics! + +**Readings:** + +1. Iseult Honohan, Chapter V "Common goods and public virtue" in *[Civic Republicanism](https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781134616114/chapters/10.4324/9780203460894-10)*. + This is a somewhat academic text, and to some extent refers to concepts that are defined in the first (mostly historical) part of the book. Still, it's really very interesting and helpfully discusses the tension between a liberal and "republican" view of society and the rights and duties it confers. If it feels long and difficult, maybe concentrate on the sections labelled "Introduction", "The Common Good", "Is Civic Virture Oppressive?", "Specifying Civic Virtue", and "Conclusion" -- together these are about half the full chapter, and should (we hope!) be intelligible without the remaining sections. + +2. Paul Frazee [Information Civics](https://infocivics.com/). Available at: [https://infocivics.com/](https://infocivics.com/). This is also a somewhat philosophical text, but focused on the new possibiliies that information technology opens up for civic engagement. Hopefully we can bring (1) and (3) (if you read that optional reading) into conversation with this text. +3. *Optional* Johnson, P., & Robinson, P. (2014). [Civic hackathons: Innovation, procurement, or civic engagement?](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ropr.12074) Review of Policy Research, 31(4), 349-357. Available at: [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ropr.12074](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ropr.12074) -- Read the Intro and Conclusion, Skim the rest . This text is largely a reminder of where many of us come from, and a prompt to think about what we might want to be doing differently or better. +4. *Optional* **Rethinking the Civic and Citizenship** + These optional readings flesh out the problem of citizenship especially through an examination of the [*No one is Illegal*](http://nooneisillegal.org/) anti-racist and migrant movement. We often construct our sense of "civic" around a rights-based and liberal "citizenship regime". By examining places where that construct breaks down -- especially around immigration status -- we can maybe come to grips with the ways that "citizenship" can let us down, and maybe even the limitations of "civic" as a concept. + + - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on [Citizenship](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/citizenship), esp. [citizens and non-citizens](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/citizenship/#CitiNonCitiRigh) and [feminist critique](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/citizenship/#FemiCrit) + - Nyers, P. (2010). [No one is illegal between city and nation](https://journals.library.brocku.ca/index.php/SSJ/article/view/998). Studies in social justice, 4(2), 127. Available at: [https://journals.library.brocku.ca/index.php/SSJ/article/view/998](https://journals.library.brocku.ca/index.php/SSJ/article/view/998) (open access) + *Nyers looks at the relationship between the common claims for non-status individuals by migrants rights organizers (including No one is illegal) and the strategies for "regularization" of status at the city versus national level (e.g., through sanctuary city, immigration law changes). Through this examination Nyers highlights the forms of citizenship beyond rights and legal status.* + - Guardian article ['No human being is illegal'](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/06/illegal-immigrant-label-offensive-wrong-activists-say) (2015) + - Wikipedia article on [History of Citizenship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_citizenship) + + +### Alternatives to Capitalist Structures +**June 4** + +When we explore current centralized data models, many of our fears and challenges are driven by the power of capitalist incentives; the reduction of privacy, disproportionate influence by advertisers, and concentrated ownership of data by a few corporations are all seemingly justified by the capitalist imperative to deliver maximum value to shareholders. + +If the levers of capitalism place it in opposition to just data practices, can we imagine an alternative? What systems are imagined or practiced outside of capitalism, what is their power, and what do they center? + +**Readings:** + +1. Kathi Weeks (2011): **The Problem with Work p5-8, 42-47, 51-57** Available at: [libcom.org](https://libcom.org/files/the-problem-with-work_-feminism-marxism-kathi-weeks.pdf) +1. Hanna Hurr (2016): **Silvia Federici interviewed in Mask Magazine** Available at: [maskmagazine.com/the-control-issue/struggle/interview-silvia-federici](http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-control-issue/struggle/interview-silvia-federici) +1. Cory Doctorow (2017): **Walkaway** (a novel) [Excerpt]. Available at: [tor.com/2017/04/03/excerpts-cory-doctorow-walkaway-chapter-2/](https://www.tor.com/2017/04/03/excerpts-cory-doctorow-walkaway-chapter-2/) +1. Gibson-Graham, J.K. and E. Miller (2015): "**Economy as Ecological Livelihood**" Available at: [communityeconomies.org/publications/chapters/economy-ecological-livelihood](http://www.communityeconomies.org/publications/chapters/economy-ecological-livelihood) +1. Frase, Peter (2011): "**Four Futures**" Available at: [jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/) +1. Michael Johnson (2012): **The Cooperative Principles, the Common Good, and Solidarity** Available at: [geo.coop/story/cooperative-principles-common-good-and-solidarity](http://www.geo.coop/story/cooperative-principles-common-good-and-solidarity) +1. Arturo Escobar (2018): **Designs for the Pluriverse** intro **p7-21** Available at: +[dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-7105-2_601.pdf](https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-7105-2_601.pdf) +1. *Optional* All of Doctorow's novel **[Walkaway](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40604388-walkaway)** +1. *Optional* Adrienne Maree Brown (2017): **Emergent Strategy** Resilience, Creating More Possibilities **p77-98** +1. *Optional* Nora Marks Dauenhauer (1990): **Haa Tuwunáagu Yis** on potlatch (jsoo.éex’) **p75-109** + +### Stewardship +**August 6** + +Topic description coming soon! + +**Readings:** + +1. Pastor Henry Wright (2019). **The Stewardship of Time** + - Minutes 2:50-6:17 + - Available at: https://youtu.be/RWCbK8qRkuo?t=170 + - Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l8tfRlAAL6y4JDRpeK4s--NTRcdBitMHpjsVfAzbPtU/edit +2. Nora Marks Dauenhauer (1990). **Haa Tuwunáagu Yis** + - pp. 263-267, 277-281, Elders Speak to the Future +3. Kat Anderson (2005). **Tending the wild** + - pp. xv-xviii, Preface + - pp. 2-6, Introduction + - pp. 358-364, Coda - Indigenous Wisdom in the Modern World + - Available at: https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520280434 +4. Trevor Owens (2017). **Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation** + - pp. 6-9, Sixteen Guiding Digital Preservation Axioms + - pp. 122-130, Conclusion: Tools for Looking Forward + - Available at: https://osf.io/preprints/lissa/5cpjt +5. Karasti, Helena & Baker, Karen & Halkola, Eija. (2006). **Enriching the Notion of Data Curation in E-Science: Data Managing and Information Infrastructuring in the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network.** Computer Supported Cooperative Work. 15. 321-358. 10.1007/s10606-006-9023-2 + - pp. 6-11, Challenges of Data Sharing + - pp. 14-16, Intensive Data Description + - pp. 23-27, Discussion + - pp. 30-33, Conclusions + - Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220169111_Enriching_the_Notion_of_Data_Curation_in_E-Science_Data_Managing_and_Information_Infrastructuring_in_the_Long_Term_Ecological_Research_LTER_Network +6. Definititon of [post-custodial theory of archives](https://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/p/postcustodial-theory-of-archives) +7. Hannah Alpert-Abrams, David A Bliss, Itza Carbajal (2019). **Post-Custodial Archiving for the Collective Good.** + - pp. 5-12 + - Part 1: Post-custodial, Anti-Colonial, Neoliberal + - Part 2: Labor + - pp. 18-21, Part 4: From Common Good to a Collective Good + - Available at: https://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/87 +8. Nadia Eghbal. **Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure** + - pp. 8-10, Executive Summary + - pp. 40-45, Digital Infrastructure Changes Frequently + - pp. 53-58, Why do people keep contributing when they’re not getting paid? + - pp. 60-65, starting with “Structurally...” re decentralization, money, and project stewardship + - Quote on page 75 + - pp. 125-130, How to sustain + - Available at: https://www.fordfoundation.org/media/2976/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure.pdf + +*Optional*: + +- Andrew Russel & Lee Vinsel (2016). **Hail the maintainers** + - Available at: https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more +- LTER (1990): **Long-Term Ecological Research and the Invisible Present, and Long-Term Ecological Research and the Invisible Place** + - Available at: https://lternet.edu/wp-content/themes/ndic/library/pdf/reports/Number%209.pdf + +### What is Decentralization? +**November 12, 2019** + +True to form, we gathered readings in a decentralized way. Themes that emerged were: looking critically at how "decentralization" is defined, how it could/should be measured, and the sticky problems that aren't automatically solved (and sometimes are actually caused) by technology. The readings are chunked to break them up a bit. The first 3 focus on decentralized tech and apps, the next 3 on political decentralization, and the last 2 on decentralized knowledge creation and stewardship. + +**Readings:** + +1. Sarah Friend. **Decentralization and its Discontents** + - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mRhvltGs8A + - Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vRS9OW2IXhD3uboF7fDb8aBegEA7MzeqyJpGvoYxithpLYu__cwSyfZhmQj08mJvm1RPtPA6Du3bEeI/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000&slide=id.p +2. Angela Walch. (2019) **Deconstructing 'Decentralization': Exploring the Core Claim of Crypto Systems** + - pp. 11-24 + - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3326244 +3. Kleppmann, Martin & Wiggins, Adam & Hardenberg, Peter van & McGranaghan, Mark. **Local-first Software** + - Read the seven ideals for local-first software + - https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html#seven-ideals + +--- + +4. Brancati, D. (2006). **Decentralization: Fueling the Fire or Dampening the Flames of Ethnic Conflict and Secessionism?** + - pp. 651-660, 681 + - https://sci-hub.tw/10.1017/s002081830606019x +5. Elinor Ostrom. **Green from the Grassroots** + - https://www.commondreams.org/views/2012/06/12/green-grassroots +6. Rachel-Rose O’Leary. **This North Syrian School Is a Baby Step Toward a Blockchain Society** + - https://www.coindesk.com/this-north-syrian-school-is-a-baby-step-toward-a-blockchain-society + +--- + +7. James C. Scott. (1998) **Seeing Like a State** + - pp. 309-311 (beginning of chapter 9), + - pp. 323-328 "Practical Knowledge Versus Scientific Explanation" + - pp. 333-339 "The Social Context of Metis and Its Destruction" + - https://libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-%20James%20C.%20Scott.pdf +8. Jessica J. Prentice. **The Most Dangerous Notion in Reinventing Organizations** + - https://medium.com/@jessicajprentice/the-most-dangerous-notion-in-reinventing-organizations-9032930295e2 + +--- + +**OPTIONAL** + +9. Adi Robertson. **How the Biggest Decentralized Social Network is Dealing With its Nazi Problem** + - https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentralized-social-network-gab-migration-fediverse-app-blocking +10. Darius Kazemi. **Run Your Own Social** + - https://runyourown.social/ +11. Longer talk of Sarah Friend. **Decentralization and its Discontents** + - https://youtu.be/Km6EYsBYAlY?t=64 + + +## Facilitation + +Here are some guidelines about preparation in order to facilitate a session: + +- Before the session: + - Have read and thought about the texts + - Identify and write 2-4 "themes" or questions you are interested in from the readings + - We use the same [shared notepad](https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw#): https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw#, which uses [a template for notes](./notes/template.md) +- During the session: + - Arrive on time (call should auto record as the first person enters) + - Ensure the call is recorded (it should auto-record as the first person enters, but always make sure someone presses the record button if not) + - Ask for someone to take notes + - Keep time and gently wrap us up +- After the session: + - Copy the notes and open a pull request in [this repository](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/tree/master/notes) + +## Potential Readings + +We maintain a shared bibliography in the [`datatogether` Zotero group](https://www.zotero.org/groups/2250068/datatogether), which includes potential readings. + +Anyone can request an invite on a call or by [creating a github issue](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/new) in this repository with their Zotero username. + +## License + +Data Together Reading Group Materials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. + +See the [`LICENSE`](./LICENSE) file for details. From 3d926edf30e483aba8e91c3f67056a677911aa04 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Breseman Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2019 10:28:35 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 20/65] fixes links to notes --- notes/semester_02_2019/0-overview.md | 10 +++++----- 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) diff --git a/notes/semester_02_2019/0-overview.md b/notes/semester_02_2019/0-overview.md index c59950f..5f15226 100644 --- a/notes/semester_02_2019/0-overview.md +++ b/notes/semester_02_2019/0-overview.md @@ -28,12 +28,12 @@ Our hope is that: first, we learn together!; second, through documenting discuss ## Themes - [Knowledge Commons](#knowledge-commons) (April 9) -[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/bW8BYVwVbuo)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/1-knowledge-commons-2019-04-09.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/01_knowledge_commons/) +[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/bW8BYVwVbuo)   [🗒 **Notes**](./1-knowledge-commons-2019-04-09.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/01_knowledge_commons/) - [Civics](#civics) (May 7) -[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/YUt2PxRZCYs)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/2-civics-2019-05-07.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/02_civics/) -- [Alternatives to Capitalist Structures](#alternatives-to-capitalist-structures) (June 4)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/VWBiq1K7N4k)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/3-alternatives-to-capitalist-structures-2019-06-04.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/03_alternatives_capitalist/) -- [Stewardship](#stewardship) (August 6)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/fbJUSvO_Xvc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/04_stewardship/) -- [What is Decentralization?](#what-is-decentralization) (November 12)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/74jsTUzdOZc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/5-decentralization-2019-11-12.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/06_decentralization/) +[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/YUt2PxRZCYs)   [🗒 **Notes**](./2-civics-2019-05-07.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/02_civics/) +- [Alternatives to Capitalist Structures](#alternatives-to-capitalist-structures) (June 4)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/VWBiq1K7N4k)   [🗒 **Notes**](./3-alternatives-to-capitalist-structures-2019-06-04.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/03_alternatives_capitalist/) +- [Stewardship](#stewardship) (August 6)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/fbJUSvO_Xvc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/04_stewardship/) +- [What is Decentralization?](#what-is-decentralization) (November 12)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/74jsTUzdOZc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./5-decentralization-2019-11-12.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/06_decentralization/) ## Sessions From 2c312a3076664f30db442513e3ffdf16e388c3eb Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Breseman Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2019 11:08:03 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 21/65] minor formatting fixes --- notes/semester_02_2019/0-overview.md | 6 +++--- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/notes/semester_02_2019/0-overview.md b/notes/semester_02_2019/0-overview.md index 5f15226..0bc5891 100644 --- a/notes/semester_02_2019/0-overview.md +++ b/notes/semester_02_2019/0-overview.md @@ -31,9 +31,9 @@ Our hope is that: first, we learn together!; second, through documenting discuss [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/bW8BYVwVbuo)   [🗒 **Notes**](./1-knowledge-commons-2019-04-09.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/01_knowledge_commons/) - [Civics](#civics) (May 7) [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/YUt2PxRZCYs)   [🗒 **Notes**](./2-civics-2019-05-07.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/02_civics/) -- [Alternatives to Capitalist Structures](#alternatives-to-capitalist-structures) (June 4)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/VWBiq1K7N4k)   [🗒 **Notes**](./3-alternatives-to-capitalist-structures-2019-06-04.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/03_alternatives_capitalist/) -- [Stewardship](#stewardship) (August 6)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/fbJUSvO_Xvc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/04_stewardship/) -- [What is Decentralization?](#what-is-decentralization) (November 12)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/74jsTUzdOZc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./5-decentralization-2019-11-12.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/06_decentralization/) +- [Alternatives to Capitalist Structures](#alternatives-to-capitalist-structures) (June 4)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/VWBiq1K7N4k)   [🗒 **Notes**](./3-alternatives-to-capitalist-structures-2019-06-04.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/03_alternatives_capitalist/) +- [Stewardship](#stewardship) (August 6)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/fbJUSvO_Xvc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/04_stewardship/) +- [What is Decentralization?](#what-is-decentralization) (November 12)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/74jsTUzdOZc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./5-decentralization-2019-11-12.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/06_decentralization/) ## Sessions From fde47053562e73415360eb6b005a268aa279ee9a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Breseman Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2019 14:40:37 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 22/65] updates readme with 2020 topics --- README.md | 198 ++++++++++++------------------------------------------ 1 file changed, 42 insertions(+), 156 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index c2be9e5..730a222 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -2,199 +2,85 @@ Data. Together. Let's read about it ==== Data Together's reading group is a set of conversations on themes relevant to information and ethics. -Curated reading selections are distributed once a month; we meet to discuss on video call. -This year, we are creating **blog posts** of each of the conversations, which you can see at [datatogether.org](//datatogether.org). +*See **blog posts** of previous conversations at [datatogether.org's blog](//datatogether.org/posts/). [Previous semesters' **syllabi**](//datatogether.org/readings/) are also available.* -# 2020 Data Together Reading Group +## Logistics +Once a month, we'll host a 1.5 hour discussion of one of our [themes](#themes). Everyone should try hard to read the *core* reading (~30 pages), and once or twice sign up to [facilitate discussion](#facilitation). -Coming soon! See: https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/71 - -# Spring - Summer 2019 Data Together Reading Group - -📅 17:30-19:00 ET Tuesdays [**Data Together Calendar**](https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=u75o4fbnv59006peo07nv67vsg%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America%2FToronto) +📅 During session, we meet once a month at 17:30-19:00 ET on a Tuesday ([**Data Together Calendar**](https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=u75o4fbnv59006peo07nv67vsg%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America%2FToronto)) 🎯 Participation link (recorded): [https://edgi-video-call-landing-page.herokuapp.com/https://zoom.us/j/847315566](https://edgi-video-call-landing-page.herokuapp.com/https://zoom.us/j/847315566) ▶️ [**Data Together Call Playlist**](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtsP3g9LafVul1gCctMYGm9sz5FUWr5bu) -Once a month, we'll host a 1.5 hour discussion of one of our [themes](#themes). Everyone should try hard to read the *core* reading (~30 pages), and once or twice sign up to [facilitate discussion](#facilitation). [**Join the Google Group**](https://groups.google.com/forum/embed/?place=forum/datatogether/join) to be notified of upcoming meetings and readings. - -Our hope is that: first, we learn together!; second, through documenting discussion we can articulate Data Together principles. - - [Themes](#themes) - [Sessions](#sessions) - [Facilitation](#facilitation) - [Potential Readings](#potential-readings) -## Themes +[**Join the Data Together reading group!**](//datatogether.org/join/) -- [Knowledge Commons](#knowledge-commons) (April 9) -[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/bW8BYVwVbuo)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/1-knowledge-commons-2019-04-09.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/01_knowledge_commons/) -- [Civics](#civics) (May 7) -[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/YUt2PxRZCYs)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/2-civics-2019-05-07.md)   [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/02_civics/) -- [Alternatives to Capitalist Structures](#alternatives-to-capitalist-structures) (June 4)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/VWBiq1K7N4k)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/3-alternatives-to-capitalist-structures-2019-06-04.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/03_alternatives_capitalist/) -- [Stewardship](#stewardship) (August 6)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/fbJUSvO_Xvc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/4-stewardship-2019-08-06.md) [📜 **Blog Post**](https://datatogether.org/posts/04_stewardship/) -- [What is Decentralization?](#what-is-decentralization) (November 12)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/74jsTUzdOZc)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_02_2019/5-decentralization-2019-11-12.md) +# 2020 Data Together Reading Group: "Polity: What is my civic role?" -## Sessions - -### Knowledge Commons -**April 9** +What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in political and in digital contexts? What are the implications of one’s polity not aligning with one’s national or governmental state? -Let’s revisit last semester’s ideas around governing the commons, but with more emphasis and focus on how knowledge, information, and digital data might be treated and governed as common pool resources. +## Themes -**Readings:** +- [Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice](#algorithmic-racism-environmental-data-justice) (Date TBD) +- [Content Moderation and Consent](#content-moderation-and-consent) (Date TBD) +- [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (Date TBD) +- [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human)) (Date TBD) +- [Private Data & Policies](#private-data-policies) (Date TBD) +- [Polity](#polity) (Date TBD) -1. Ostrom and Hess “A Framework for Analyzing the Knowledge Commons” (Chapter 3, pages 41-81 of *Understanding Knowledge as a Commons*) (http://www.wtf.tw/ref/hess_ostrom_2007.pdf) -2. Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, Hervé Le Crosnier. [An Introduction to the Digital Commons: From Common-Pool Resources to Community Governance.](https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00736920/document), 2012. -3. This twitter thread from mmildenberger: https://twitter.com/mmildenberger/status/1102604887223750657 -4. Garrett Hardin’s [“The Tragedy of the Commons”](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243/tab-pdf) +## Sessions -We’re hoping these readings will spur us toward frameworks for understanding how open resources beyond nature can be sustainably governed. +### Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice +**Discussion Date TBD** -If you have any questions or want to dig into other works we considered, feel free to chime in on our planning github issue: https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/40 +Description +**Readings:** +[Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/72) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. -### Civics -**May 7** +### (Content) Moderation and Consent +**Discussion Date TBD** -A major lens through which governance of communities is understood is civics and citizenship. Even our own texts talk about "a civic layer for the web." But it's not clear that we really know what we mean by that! In order to think about communities, and more compellingly, what forms of space and collective action could be built around decentralized forms of governance, let's read about civics! +Description **Readings:** +[Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/73) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. -1. Iseult Honohan, Chapter V "Common goods and public virtue" in *[Civic Republicanism](https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781134616114/chapters/10.4324/9780203460894-10)*. - This is a somewhat academic text, and to some extent refers to concepts that are defined in the first (mostly historical) part of the book. Still, it's really very interesting and helpfully discusses the tension between a liberal and "republican" view of society and the rights and duties it confers. If it feels long and difficult, maybe concentrate on the sections labelled "Introduction", "The Common Good", "Is Civic Virture Oppressive?", "Specifying Civic Virtue", and "Conclusion" -- together these are about half the full chapter, and should (we hope!) be intelligible without the remaining sections. - -2. Paul Frazee [Information Civics](https://infocivics.com/). Available at: [https://infocivics.com/](https://infocivics.com/). This is also a somewhat philosophical text, but focused on the new possibiliies that information technology opens up for civic engagement. Hopefully we can bring (1) and (3) (if you read that optional reading) into conversation with this text. -3. *Optional* Johnson, P., & Robinson, P. (2014). [Civic hackathons: Innovation, procurement, or civic engagement?](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ropr.12074) Review of Policy Research, 31(4), 349-357. Available at: [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ropr.12074](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ropr.12074) -- Read the Intro and Conclusion, Skim the rest . This text is largely a reminder of where many of us come from, and a prompt to think about what we might want to be doing differently or better. -4. *Optional* **Rethinking the Civic and Citizenship** - These optional readings flesh out the problem of citizenship especially through an examination of the [*No one is Illegal*](http://nooneisillegal.org/) anti-racist and migrant movement. We often construct our sense of "civic" around a rights-based and liberal "citizenship regime". By examining places where that construct breaks down -- especially around immigration status -- we can maybe come to grips with the ways that "citizenship" can let us down, and maybe even the limitations of "civic" as a concept. - - - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on [Citizenship](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/citizenship), esp. [citizens and non-citizens](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/citizenship/#CitiNonCitiRigh) and [feminist critique](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/citizenship/#FemiCrit) - - Nyers, P. (2010). [No one is illegal between city and nation](https://journals.library.brocku.ca/index.php/SSJ/article/view/998). Studies in social justice, 4(2), 127. Available at: [https://journals.library.brocku.ca/index.php/SSJ/article/view/998](https://journals.library.brocku.ca/index.php/SSJ/article/view/998) (open access) - *Nyers looks at the relationship between the common claims for non-status individuals by migrants rights organizers (including No one is illegal) and the strategies for "regularization" of status at the city versus national level (e.g., through sanctuary city, immigration law changes). Through this examination Nyers highlights the forms of citizenship beyond rights and legal status.* - - Guardian article ['No human being is illegal'](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/06/illegal-immigrant-label-offensive-wrong-activists-say) (2015) - - Wikipedia article on [History of Citizenship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_citizenship) +### Data Monopolies +**Discussion Date TBD** +Description -### Alternatives to Capitalist Structures -**June 4** +**Readings:** +[Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/75) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. -When we explore current centralized data models, many of our fears and challenges are driven by the power of capitalist incentives; the reduction of privacy, disproportionate influence by advertisers, and concentrated ownership of data by a few corporations are all seemingly justified by the capitalist imperative to deliver maximum value to shareholders. +### Trust (Cryptographic and Human) +**Discussion Date TBD** -If the levers of capitalism place it in opposition to just data practices, can we imagine an alternative? What systems are imagined or practiced outside of capitalism, what is their power, and what do they center? +Description **Readings:** +[Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/74) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. -1. Kathi Weeks (2011): **The Problem with Work p5-8, 42-47, 51-57** Available at: [libcom.org](https://libcom.org/files/the-problem-with-work_-feminism-marxism-kathi-weeks.pdf) -1. Hanna Hurr (2016): **Silvia Federici interviewed in Mask Magazine** Available at: [maskmagazine.com/the-control-issue/struggle/interview-silvia-federici](http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-control-issue/struggle/interview-silvia-federici) -1. Cory Doctorow (2017): **Walkaway** (a novel) [Excerpt]. Available at: [tor.com/2017/04/03/excerpts-cory-doctorow-walkaway-chapter-2/](https://www.tor.com/2017/04/03/excerpts-cory-doctorow-walkaway-chapter-2/) -1. Gibson-Graham, J.K. and E. Miller (2015): "**Economy as Ecological Livelihood**" Available at: [communityeconomies.org/publications/chapters/economy-ecological-livelihood](http://www.communityeconomies.org/publications/chapters/economy-ecological-livelihood) -1. Frase, Peter (2011): "**Four Futures**" Available at: [jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/) -1. Michael Johnson (2012): **The Cooperative Principles, the Common Good, and Solidarity** Available at: [geo.coop/story/cooperative-principles-common-good-and-solidarity](http://www.geo.coop/story/cooperative-principles-common-good-and-solidarity) -1. Arturo Escobar (2018): **Designs for the Pluriverse** intro **p7-21** Available at: -[dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-7105-2_601.pdf](https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-7105-2_601.pdf) -1. *Optional* All of Doctorow's novel **[Walkaway](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40604388-walkaway)** -1. *Optional* Adrienne Maree Brown (2017): **Emergent Strategy** Resilience, Creating More Possibilities **p77-98** -1. *Optional* Nora Marks Dauenhauer (1990): **Haa Tuwunáagu Yis** on potlatch (jsoo.éex’) **p75-109** - -### Stewardship -**August 6** +### Private Data & Policies +**Discussion Date** -Topic description coming soon! +Description **Readings:** +[Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/76) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. -1. Pastor Henry Wright (2019). **The Stewardship of Time** - - Minutes 2:50-6:17 - - Available at: https://youtu.be/RWCbK8qRkuo?t=170 - - Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l8tfRlAAL6y4JDRpeK4s--NTRcdBitMHpjsVfAzbPtU/edit -2. Nora Marks Dauenhauer (1990). **Haa Tuwunáagu Yis** - - pp. 263-267, 277-281, Elders Speak to the Future -3. Kat Anderson (2005). **Tending the wild** - - pp. xv-xviii, Preface - - pp. 2-6, Introduction - - pp. 358-364, Coda - Indigenous Wisdom in the Modern World - - Available at: https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520280434 -4. Trevor Owens (2017). **Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation** - - pp. 6-9, Sixteen Guiding Digital Preservation Axioms - - pp. 122-130, Conclusion: Tools for Looking Forward - - Available at: https://osf.io/preprints/lissa/5cpjt -5. Karasti, Helena & Baker, Karen & Halkola, Eija. (2006). **Enriching the Notion of Data Curation in E-Science: Data Managing and Information Infrastructuring in the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network.** Computer Supported Cooperative Work. 15. 321-358. 10.1007/s10606-006-9023-2 - - pp. 6-11, Challenges of Data Sharing - - pp. 14-16, Intensive Data Description - - pp. 23-27, Discussion - - pp. 30-33, Conclusions - - Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220169111_Enriching_the_Notion_of_Data_Curation_in_E-Science_Data_Managing_and_Information_Infrastructuring_in_the_Long_Term_Ecological_Research_LTER_Network -6. Definititon of [post-custodial theory of archives](https://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/p/postcustodial-theory-of-archives) -7. Hannah Alpert-Abrams, David A Bliss, Itza Carbajal (2019). **Post-Custodial Archiving for the Collective Good.** - - pp. 5-12 - - Part 1: Post-custodial, Anti-Colonial, Neoliberal - - Part 2: Labor - - pp. 18-21, Part 4: From Common Good to a Collective Good - - Available at: https://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/87 -8. Nadia Eghbal. **Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure** - - pp. 8-10, Executive Summary - - pp. 40-45, Digital Infrastructure Changes Frequently - - pp. 53-58, Why do people keep contributing when they’re not getting paid? - - pp. 60-65, starting with “Structurally...” re decentralization, money, and project stewardship - - Quote on page 75 - - pp. 125-130, How to sustain - - Available at: https://www.fordfoundation.org/media/2976/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure.pdf - -*Optional*: - -- Andrew Russel & Lee Vinsel (2016). **Hail the maintainers** - - Available at: https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more -- LTER (1990): **Long-Term Ecological Research and the Invisible Present, and Long-Term Ecological Research and the Invisible Place** - - Available at: https://lternet.edu/wp-content/themes/ndic/library/pdf/reports/Number%209.pdf - -### What is Decentralization? -**November 12, 2019** - -True to form, we gathered readings in a decentralized way. Themes that emerged were: looking critically at how "decentralization" is defined, how it could/should be measured, and the sticky problems that aren't automatically solved (and sometimes are actually caused) by technology. The readings are chunked to break them up a bit. The first 3 focus on decentralized tech and apps, the next 3 on political decentralization, and the last 2 on decentralized knowledge creation and stewardship. +### Polity +**Discussion Date TBD** -**Readings:** +Who are the groups of people to whom we are connected in systems of governance? To whom do we owe allegiance? -1. Sarah Friend. **Decentralization and its Discontents** - - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mRhvltGs8A - - Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vRS9OW2IXhD3uboF7fDb8aBegEA7MzeqyJpGvoYxithpLYu__cwSyfZhmQj08mJvm1RPtPA6Du3bEeI/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000&slide=id.p -2. Angela Walch. (2019) **Deconstructing 'Decentralization': Exploring the Core Claim of Crypto Systems** - - pp. 11-24 - - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3326244 -3. Kleppmann, Martin & Wiggins, Adam & Hardenberg, Peter van & McGranaghan, Mark. **Local-first Software** - - Read the seven ideals for local-first software - - https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html#seven-ideals - ---- - -4. Brancati, D. (2006). **Decentralization: Fueling the Fire or Dampening the Flames of Ethnic Conflict and Secessionism?** - - pp. 651-660, 681 - - https://sci-hub.tw/10.1017/s002081830606019x -5. Elinor Ostrom. **Green from the Grassroots** - - https://www.commondreams.org/views/2012/06/12/green-grassroots -6. Rachel-Rose O’Leary. **This North Syrian School Is a Baby Step Toward a Blockchain Society** - - https://www.coindesk.com/this-north-syrian-school-is-a-baby-step-toward-a-blockchain-society - ---- - -7. James C. Scott. (1998) **Seeing Like a State** - - pp. 309-311 (beginning of chapter 9), - - pp. 323-328 "Practical Knowledge Versus Scientific Explanation" - - pp. 333-339 "The Social Context of Metis and Its Destruction" - - https://libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-%20James%20C.%20Scott.pdf -8. Jessica J. Prentice. **The Most Dangerous Notion in Reinventing Organizations** - - https://medium.com/@jessicajprentice/the-most-dangerous-notion-in-reinventing-organizations-9032930295e2 - ---- - -**OPTIONAL** - -9. Adi Robertson. **How the Biggest Decentralized Social Network is Dealing With its Nazi Problem** - - https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentralized-social-network-gab-migration-fediverse-app-blocking -10. Darius Kazemi. **Run Your Own Social** - - https://runyourown.social/ -11. Longer talk of Sarah Friend. **Decentralization and its Discontents** - - https://youtu.be/Km6EYsBYAlY?t=64 +**Readings:** +[Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/77) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. ## Facilitation From 5e9e27973f4686759933e0b9c50d0c06f93a55a0 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Breseman Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2019 15:24:36 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 23/65] adds descriptions to each topic --- README.md | 10 +++++----- 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 730a222..c981220 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -37,7 +37,7 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in ### Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice **Discussion Date TBD** -Description +How do choices in technology design and implementation reflect and impact broader social structures? Let's explore, starting with readings from environmental data justice and studies of algorithmic racism. **Readings:** [Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/72) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. @@ -45,7 +45,7 @@ Description ### (Content) Moderation and Consent **Discussion Date TBD** -Description +This topic covers factors that impact the content that we see. How do platforms balance freedom of expression versus consent to avoid offensive content, navigate algorithmic versus human moderation and curation, or incentivize different types of interaction? What are downstream effects of these choices? **Readings:** [Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/73) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. @@ -53,7 +53,7 @@ Description ### Data Monopolies **Discussion Date TBD** -Description +Most of our data and information is controlled by a handful of companies. How did this come to be, what are examples of responsible and irresponsible holding of this power, and how do we imagine we might slip the trap of data monopolies? **Readings:** [Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/75) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. @@ -61,7 +61,7 @@ Description ### Trust (Cryptographic and Human) **Discussion Date TBD** -Description +New technologies attempt to free us from (data) monopolized spaces, but does cryptographic trust truly map onto or enable better human-to-human (or human-to-company or human-to-technology) trust? **Readings:** [Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/74) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. @@ -69,7 +69,7 @@ Description ### Private Data & Policies **Discussion Date** -Description +How have particular implementations of data privacy policies impacted humans, economics, and legal systems? What are appropriate expectations around data privacy, and who should inform, create, or enforce policies? **Readings:** [Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/76) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. From b9c83b3b61785404c934787102fc54276d7cc92a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2020 13:02:54 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 24/65] Adds dates to reading sessions --- README.md | 24 ++++++++++++------------ 1 file changed, 12 insertions(+), 12 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index c981220..3d7953b 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -25,17 +25,17 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in ## Themes -- [Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice](#algorithmic-racism-environmental-data-justice) (Date TBD) -- [Content Moderation and Consent](#content-moderation-and-consent) (Date TBD) -- [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (Date TBD) -- [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human)) (Date TBD) -- [Private Data & Policies](#private-data-policies) (Date TBD) -- [Polity](#polity) (Date TBD) +- [Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice](#algorithmic-racism-environmental-data-justice) (March 3) +- [Content Moderation and Consent](#content-moderation-and-consent) (April 7) +- [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (May 5) +- [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human)) (June 2) +- [Private Data & Policies](#private-data-policies) (July 7) +- [Polity](#polity) (August 4) ## Sessions ### Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice -**Discussion Date TBD** +**March 3** How do choices in technology design and implementation reflect and impact broader social structures? Let's explore, starting with readings from environmental data justice and studies of algorithmic racism. @@ -43,7 +43,7 @@ How do choices in technology design and implementation reflect and impact broade [Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/72) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. ### (Content) Moderation and Consent -**Discussion Date TBD** +**April 7** This topic covers factors that impact the content that we see. How do platforms balance freedom of expression versus consent to avoid offensive content, navigate algorithmic versus human moderation and curation, or incentivize different types of interaction? What are downstream effects of these choices? @@ -51,7 +51,7 @@ This topic covers factors that impact the content that we see. How do platforms [Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/73) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. ### Data Monopolies -**Discussion Date TBD** +**May 5** Most of our data and information is controlled by a handful of companies. How did this come to be, what are examples of responsible and irresponsible holding of this power, and how do we imagine we might slip the trap of data monopolies? @@ -59,7 +59,7 @@ Most of our data and information is controlled by a handful of companies. How di [Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/75) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. ### Trust (Cryptographic and Human) -**Discussion Date TBD** +**June 2** New technologies attempt to free us from (data) monopolized spaces, but does cryptographic trust truly map onto or enable better human-to-human (or human-to-company or human-to-technology) trust? @@ -67,7 +67,7 @@ New technologies attempt to free us from (data) monopolized spaces, but does cry [Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/74) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. ### Private Data & Policies -**Discussion Date** +**July 7** How have particular implementations of data privacy policies impacted humans, economics, and legal systems? What are appropriate expectations around data privacy, and who should inform, create, or enforce policies? @@ -75,7 +75,7 @@ How have particular implementations of data privacy policies impacted humans, ec [Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/76) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. ### Polity -**Discussion Date TBD** +**August 4** Who are the groups of people to whom we are connected in systems of governance? To whom do we owe allegiance? From 6a0ca83d1130e6791d275219db8bdd0d76e879c2 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2020 13:06:38 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 25/65] typo fix --- README.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 3d7953b..1b1c7a9 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in - [Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice](#algorithmic-racism-environmental-data-justice) (March 3) - [Content Moderation and Consent](#content-moderation-and-consent) (April 7) - [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (May 5) -- [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human)) (June 2) +- [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human) (June 2) - [Private Data & Policies](#private-data-policies) (July 7) - [Polity](#polity) (August 4) From 2b09c7ddfac2d1e30e50e70bc03eb86abb26b95c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Breseman Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2020 09:42:51 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 26/65] fixes https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/72 --- README.md | 10 ++++++++-- 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 1b1c7a9..309d04d 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -25,7 +25,7 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in ## Themes -- [Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice](#algorithmic-racism-environmental-data-justice) (March 3) +- [Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice](#algorithmic-racism--environmental-data-justice) (March 3) - [Content Moderation and Consent](#content-moderation-and-consent) (April 7) - [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (May 5) - [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human) (June 2) @@ -40,7 +40,13 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in How do choices in technology design and implementation reflect and impact broader social structures? Let's explore, starting with readings from environmental data justice and studies of algorithmic racism. **Readings:** -[Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/72) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. +* EDGI EDJ group, 2019: [EDJ Syllabus](https://envirodatagov.org/announcements-rollout-of-environmental-data-justice-syllabus-and-upcoming-ejxyouth-summit-online-event/) +* Sasha Constanza-Chock, 2018: [Design Justice: Towards an Intersectional Feminist Framework for Design Theory and Practice](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3189696) +* EDJ (Lourdes Vera, Dawn Walker, and many more, EDGI), 2018: [extractive logic paper](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14erRGMYNgc6b2iJNwXGGX0leQigFdAHm/view) +* Mark Wilkinson, Michel Dumontier, and many more authors, 2016: [FAIR principles for scientific data management and stewardship](https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/) +* Research Data Alliance International Indigenous Data Sovereignty Interest Group, 2019, in The Global Indigenous +Data Alliance: [CARE principles for Indigenous Data Governance](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d3799de845604000199cd24/t/5da9f4479ecab221ce848fb2/1571419335217/CARE+Principles_One+Pagers+FINAL_Oct_17_2019.pdf) +* Max Liboiron, 2017: [Pollution is Colonialism](https://discardstudies.com/2017/09/01/pollution-is-colonialism/) ### (Content) Moderation and Consent **April 7** From fa7686f72f417a4ec7287e4d57fe3029f8b11545 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2020 09:47:19 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 27/65] updates date for 1st meeting --- README.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 309d04d..f060f96 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -25,7 +25,7 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in ## Themes -- [Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice](#algorithmic-racism--environmental-data-justice) (March 3) +- [Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice](#algorithmic-racism--environmental-data-justice) (March 10) - [Content Moderation and Consent](#content-moderation-and-consent) (April 7) - [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (May 5) - [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human) (June 2) From 07b6f2c0d719db23b1bce70749c679ea1b67eca8 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2020 10:00:35 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 28/65] fixing date --- README.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index f060f96..4826b45 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -35,7 +35,7 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in ## Sessions ### Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice -**March 3** +**March 10** How do choices in technology design and implementation reflect and impact broader social structures? Let's explore, starting with readings from environmental data justice and studies of algorithmic racism. From 5d8146bba2f42faed5e55568b65e9d4874387035 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2020 14:47:24 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 29/65] Update README.md --- README.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 4826b45..b985eca 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -1,7 +1,7 @@ Data. Together. Let's read about it ==== -Data Together's reading group is a set of conversations on themes relevant to information and ethics. +Data Together's reading group is a set of conversations on themes relevant to information and ethics. Learn more and consider [joining](https://datatogether.org/join/)! *See **blog posts** of previous conversations at [datatogether.org's blog](//datatogether.org/posts/). [Previous semesters' **syllabi**](//datatogether.org/readings/) are also available.* From c9acfe31ea4fc446a3c9644a849cd3a87931a0d4 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2020 10:57:42 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 30/65] resolves https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/73 --- README.md | 23 +++++++++++++++++++++-- 1 file changed, 21 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index b985eca..8e01d04 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -48,13 +48,32 @@ How do choices in technology design and implementation reflect and impact broade Data Alliance: [CARE principles for Indigenous Data Governance](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d3799de845604000199cd24/t/5da9f4479ecab221ce848fb2/1571419335217/CARE+Principles_One+Pagers+FINAL_Oct_17_2019.pdf) * Max Liboiron, 2017: [Pollution is Colonialism](https://discardstudies.com/2017/09/01/pollution-is-colonialism/) -### (Content) Moderation and Consent +### Content Moderation **April 7** This topic covers factors that impact the content that we see. How do platforms balance freedom of expression versus consent to avoid offensive content, navigate algorithmic versus human moderation and curation, or incentivize different types of interaction? What are downstream effects of these choices? **Readings:** -[Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/73) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. +* Bijan Stephen for The Verge: "[Something Awful's Founder Thinks Youtube Sucks at Moderation](https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/26/18744264/something-awful-youtube-moderation-rich-kyanka-lgbtq)" (2019) - strategies for moderation from Something Awful's founder +* Casey Newton for The Verge: "[Bodies in Seats](https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/19/18681845/facebook-moderator-interviews-video-trauma-ptsd-cognizant-tampa)" (2019) - around outsourced content moderation & its impacts on the humans who have to view & judge the content. Would recommend: + * From the beginning to "But for the first time, three former moderators for Facebook in North America agreed to break their nondisclosure agreements and discuss working conditions at the site on the record." + * NOT RECOMMENDED: the middle of the article for this group– it's good reporting but needs a content warning for graphic descriptions (and the intro gets the points across) +* Jussi Passanen: "[Human centred design considered harmful](https://www.jussipasanen.com/human-centred-design-considered-harmful)" – how good design principles applied to business sense can be harmful for humans, especially in the context of a livable planet +* **Choose one of the following** (their lengths vary): + * Mark Scott for Politico EU: "[Why Banning Political Ads on Social Media Misses the Point](https://www.politico.eu/article/facebook-twitter-google-political-ad-ban/)" (2019) - argues that beginning to moderate content for advertising is the beginning of social media companies taking ownership/responsibility over user content generally + * Niam Yaraghi for Brookings: "[Twitter's Ban on Political Advertisements Hurts Our Democracy](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2020/01/08/twitters-ban-on-political-advertisements-hurts-our-democracy/)" (2020) - discusses the unequal impact of the ban on more vs less-well funded political groups and pushes for more detailed transparency measures + * Kate Conger for the New York Times: "[Twitter Will Ban All Political Ads, C.E.O. Jack Dorsey Says](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/technology/twitter-political-ads-ban.html)" (2019) – contrasted with the Facebook hands-off approach and Google's selective approach +* **Choose one of the following** (their lengths vary): + * Clint Pumphrey for HowStuffWorks: "[How Do Advertisers Show Me Custom Ads?](https://computer.howstuffworks.com/advertiser-custom-ads.htm)" (2012) – cookies and retargeting, notice tone + * Cade Metz for the New York Times: "[How Facebook's Ad System Works](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/technology/how-facebook-ads-work.html)" (2017) – targeting factors that Facebook uses for ads, the inception of ads into a content stream, some treatment of the Russia issue + * Cole Nemeth for Sprout Social: "[How the Twitter Algorithm Works in 2020](https://sproutsocial.com/insights/twitter-algorithm/)" (2020) before "How to turn off the Twitter algorithm" – a really short one just highlighting the factors involved + * Will Oremus for Slate: "[Twitter's New Order](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/cover_story/2017/03/twitter_s_timeline_algorithm_and_its_effect_on_us_explained.html)" (2017) – much more in depth (not just how but why and future directions) but pretty long + * Josh Constine for TechCrunch: "[How Facebook News Feed Works](https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/06/ultimate-guide-to-the-news-feed/)" (2016) before "An Updated List Of News Feed Algorithm Changes" + +*Optional bonus readings* +* Naomi Wu's experience with media manipulation & being "content moderated" off of several funding platforms she had used to make a living: [part 1](https://medium.com/@therealsexycyborg/shenzhen-tech-girl-naomi-wu-my-experience-with-sarah-jeong-jason-koebler-and-vice-magazine-3f4a32fda9b5) and [part 2](https://medium.com/@therealsexycyborg/shenzhen-tech-girl-naomi-wu-part-2-over-the-wall-and-into-the-fire-5e8efc5c1509) – this is very interesting and topical but too long to include in the required reading +* [Flame Warriors](https://www.politicsforum.org/flame-warriors/), if you'd like a lighter take, is a tongue-in-cheek characterization of the various types of people moderators encounter +* The end of the Casey Newton "[Bodies in Seats](https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/19/18681845/facebook-moderator-interviews-video-trauma-ptsd-cognizant-tampa)" article, from "Last week, I visited the Tampa site with a photographer." to the end, interesting additional perspective re trying to figure out how this stuff *should* be done ### Data Monopolies **May 5** From 100fefe8566e68474799dcc58e9b74ece69264f7 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2020 11:00:48 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 31/65] Update README.md --- README.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 8e01d04..f08fcf3 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -48,7 +48,7 @@ How do choices in technology design and implementation reflect and impact broade Data Alliance: [CARE principles for Indigenous Data Governance](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d3799de845604000199cd24/t/5da9f4479ecab221ce848fb2/1571419335217/CARE+Principles_One+Pagers+FINAL_Oct_17_2019.pdf) * Max Liboiron, 2017: [Pollution is Colonialism](https://discardstudies.com/2017/09/01/pollution-is-colonialism/) -### Content Moderation +### Content Moderation and Consent **April 7** This topic covers factors that impact the content that we see. How do platforms balance freedom of expression versus consent to avoid offensive content, navigate algorithmic versus human moderation and curation, or incentivize different types of interaction? What are downstream effects of these choices? From ee50bb60cbd966c5b321b73e3fb42c2bd9293c19 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2020 11:17:04 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 32/65] Adds new readings to Algorithmic Racism and Consent session, updates date --- README.md | 5 ++++- 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index f08fcf3..ca1bb43 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -35,7 +35,7 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in ## Sessions ### Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice -**March 10** +**March 17** How do choices in technology design and implementation reflect and impact broader social structures? Let's explore, starting with readings from environmental data justice and studies of algorithmic racism. @@ -47,6 +47,9 @@ How do choices in technology design and implementation reflect and impact broade * Research Data Alliance International Indigenous Data Sovereignty Interest Group, 2019, in The Global Indigenous Data Alliance: [CARE principles for Indigenous Data Governance](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d3799de845604000199cd24/t/5da9f4479ecab221ce848fb2/1571419335217/CARE+Principles_One+Pagers+FINAL_Oct_17_2019.pdf) * Max Liboiron, 2017: [Pollution is Colonialism](https://discardstudies.com/2017/09/01/pollution-is-colonialism/) +* Dan Robitzsky, 2019: [TikTok Secretly Hid Videos by Fat, LGBTQ, Mentally Disabled Users](https://futurism.com/the-byte/tiktok-hid-videos-fat-lgbtq-mentally-disabled) +* Edward Ongweso Jr, 2019: [Racial Bias in AI Isn’t Getting Better and Neither Are Researchers’ Excuses](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xzwgx/racial-bias-in-ai-isnt-getting-better-and-neither-are-researchers-excuses) +* Rebecca Heilweil, 2020: [Why algorithms can be racist and sexist](https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/18/21121286/algorithms-bias-discrimination-facial-recognition-transparency) ### Content Moderation and Consent **April 7** From 86bc5b3c884b3b8d566347c8ab483de5ec78e827 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2020 11:17:41 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 33/65] Update README.md --- README.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index ca1bb43..1819646 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -25,7 +25,7 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in ## Themes -- [Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice](#algorithmic-racism--environmental-data-justice) (March 10) +- [Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice](#algorithmic-racism--environmental-data-justice) (March 17) - [Content Moderation and Consent](#content-moderation-and-consent) (April 7) - [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (May 5) - [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human) (June 2) From 5d92b284e9dc9797ab579144ae793f3509bda4ad Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Breseman Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2020 12:34:59 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 34/65] adds notes for EDJ session, needs transcript and vid link --- .../1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md | 119 ++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 119 insertions(+) create mode 100644 notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md diff --git a/notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md b/notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7a72e9b --- /dev/null +++ b/notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md @@ -0,0 +1,119 @@ +# Data. Together. Let's read about it + +## Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice (March 17) + +[🎬 **Recorded Call**]() + +### Intro +These selections mostly come from the environmental data justice (EDJ) Syllabus, which has been an evolving document of literature and links to organizations that work in the environmental and data justice spheres. Members of EDGI have preliminarily defined EDJ as "public accessibility and continuity of environmental data and research, supported by networked open-source data infrastructure that can be modified, adapted, and supported by local communities" (Dillon et al. 2017). + +A lot of the readings do not necessarily have to do with environmental data, but are the data justice offerings that influenced EDGI's EDJ as working group. The first is Sasha Constanza-Chock's essay on Design Justice, which is now a book! Then, we are reading the FAIR and CARE principles that the Indigenous Sovereignty Networks have developed. Finally, Pollution is Colonialism is a short but eye opening blogpost.These works have influenced the academic article of the bunch, "When data justice and environmental justice meet: formulating a response to extractive logic through environmental data justice." + +**Readings** +* Sasha Constanza-Chock, 2018: Design Justice: Towards an Intersectional Feminist Framework for Design Theory and Practice: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3189696 +* Mark Wilkinson, Michel Dumontier, and many more authors, 2016: FAIR principles for scientific data management and stewardship: https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/ +* Research Data Alliance International Indigenous Data Sovereignty Interest Group, 2019, in The Global Indigenous Data Alliance: CARE principles for Indigenous Data Governance: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d3799de845604000199cd24/t/5da9f4479ecab221ce848fb2/1571419335217/CARE+Principles_One+Pagers+FINAL_Oct_17_2019.pdf +* Max Liboiron, 2017: Pollution is Colonialism: https://discardstudies.com/2017/09/01/pollution-is-colonialism/ + +***(Optional)*** +* EDGI EDJ group, 2019: EDJ Syllabus: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O7ytnzXWFkluiYE4Pulo_mCHs9jdNpPm8hw83aLU2pg/edit#heading=h.p7r8t8xelqcr +* EDJ (Lourdes Vera, Dawn Walker, and many more, EDGI), 2018: extractive logic paper: https://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy.neu.edu/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2019.1596293 +* https://futurism.com/the-byte/tiktok-hid-videos-fat-lgbtq-mentally-disabled +* https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xzwgx/racial-bias-in-ai-isnt-getting-better-and-neither-are-researchers-excuses +* https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/18/21121286/algorithms-bias-discrimination-facial-recognition-transparency + + +### Themes + +#### All of these works surface themes: +* Interlocking powers of oppression as they shape and contain data +* Extractive logic by which we produce and use data +* Community-centered data practices +* Activism for better data + +#### Key Points from Readings + +##### EDJ Syllabus +* Most of these readings are on the EDJ syllabus. I encourage everyone to explore it and if any of the themes in the readings stick out to you, you can find more on them here. There is a more elaborate DJ section. I still have to put up the FAIR and CARE principles. +* We aim to develop the EDJ syllabus as a collaborative and ever-changing document. If you want to add something, please do. + +##### Pollution is Colonialism + +* Land is at the center of colonialism + * Value comes from the extraction of resources and people from land. +* Pollutants are material forms of harm + * Pollutants pose health hazards to land and bodies. +* The state gives permission to pollute + * Industry gets permits to pollute certain amounts of compounds without the consent of people. +* Call to action + * List of relevant activist organizations + +##### CARE Principles + +###### **C**ollective Benefit +Indigenous peoples should benefit from data infrastructure design and functions. This design process should promote the self-determination of communities and meet their needs. Moreover, communities should be engaged in determining data policies. +###### **A**uthority to Control +Data should recognize indigenous peoples’ self-determination and self-governance. Data policies and protocols should recognize both collective and individual rights to free, prior, and informed consent +###### **R**esponsibility +Researchers working with Indigenous data are responsible for showing how it relates to Indigenous Peoples’ self-determination and collective benefit. Relationships between communities and data stewards should encourage transparency, trust, respect, reciprocity, mutual understanding. They should focus on expanding capability and capacity while enhancing data literacy. Resources should generate data that pertain to the languages, worldviews, values, and principles of indigenous peoples. +###### **E**thics +Data collection and practices across the data lifecycle should align with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), and ethical assessments of benefits and harms should be conducted from the perspectives of those relating to the data. These ethical considerations should be geared towards future use and metadata data acknowledging data provenance and study the limits or obligations + +##### FAIR Principles +###### **F**indable +* (Meta)data is rich and contains an identifier that is clearly described. They are registered and indexed. +* Question: what about anonymous data? How much work is it to index (meta)data? +###### **A**ccessible +* (Meta)data are retrievable, and the protocol for this process is open and authenticated. +* Archiving of metadata is important to ensure accessibility +###### **I**nteroperable +* (Meta)data are accessible and use "broadly applicable language" +* "use vocabularies following FAIR principles" +* Reference to other (meta)data (everything is linked!) +###### **R**eusable +* Rich, accurate descriptions and detailed provenance. Community standards are important for (meta)data. + +##### Design Justice +* New book out! https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/design-justice +* The matrix of domination - interlocking structures of oppression including but not limited to racism, ableism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, etc. inform most top-down design practices. +* Alternative design of systems, infrastructure, and information can center marginalized perspectives by involving communities in a bottom-up approach. +* Organizations like Detroit Digital Justice and Allied Media are moving towards this approach towards design for collective liberation and sustainability. + +##### Extractive Logic +* Bridging from Design Justice and Black feminism, we explore how data is tied up in the Matrix of Domination. Environmental data both serves and can be used to challenge the matrix of domination. +* Can justice ever be achieved? Maybe not, but we are working towards it. +* Has an informative overview of EJ vs. DJ. Both deal with extraction and accumulation of capital to the disadvantage of historically marginalized people. +* ‘Extractive logic’ + * the accumulation of resources, like data, for capital gain by those in power. Connects with Pollution is colonialism. +* disconnects data from provenance + * erased the source of data and the people/ power relations that extracted it. +* privileges the matrix of domination + * Certain people can see/create/use/access data over others. +* whitewashes data to generate uncertainty + * ECHO and TRI present themselves as authoritative data sources but are really industry self-reported and not easy to use databases. +* EDGI's public comment +* We struggled to get these ideas across to a policy audience. + +## Discussion + +## Chat log +00:14:25 Kelsey Breseman: https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw# +00:20:27 Kevin: That’s me on phone +00:23:53 Lourdes Vera: I'd like to make an informational video of how racism was historically constructed +00:28:46 Kelsey Breseman: linked in the hackmd +00:28:52 Kevin: https://futurism.com/the-byte/tiktok-hid-videos-fat-lgbtq-mentally-disabled +https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xzwgx/racial-bias-in-ai-isnt-getting-better-and-neither-are-researchers-excuses +https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/18/21121286/algorithms-bias-discrimination-facial-recognition-transparency +00:28:55 Kelsey Breseman: er yah github +00:45:21 Kevin: extracting as much as possible +00:47:42 Kelsey Breseman: or not a person who is focusing on this particular problem +00:53:32 Kelsey Breseman: “white music” is like 80s pop right? +00:59:38 Kelsey Breseman: the gentlest activism +01:14:07 Kelsey Breseman: andis it really ok that one of them is allowed? +01:14:11 Kelsey Breseman: have to run grab my charger +01:16:29 Lourdes Vera: brb +01:26:30 Kelsey Breseman: paying to keep having the dream +01:27:44 Kevin: because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." + +John Steinbeck +01:27:49 Kevin: That’s the quote \ No newline at end of file From b2ddbfe4ca7820bf45c1ac1edae85ea208ef9f86 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Breseman Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2020 15:32:15 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 35/65] adds notes and transcript from algorithmic racism and edj discussion --- README.md | 2 +- .../1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md | 322 +++++++++++++++++- 2 files changed, 308 insertions(+), 16 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 1819646..474f80f 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -25,7 +25,7 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in ## Themes -- [Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice](#algorithmic-racism--environmental-data-justice) (March 17) +- [Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice](#algorithmic-racism--environmental-data-justice) (March 17) [🎬 **Recorded Call**]()   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md)   - [Content Moderation and Consent](#content-moderation-and-consent) (April 7) - [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (May 5) - [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human) (June 2) diff --git a/notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md b/notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md index 7a72e9b..12373d5 100644 --- a/notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md +++ b/notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md @@ -95,25 +95,317 @@ Data collection and practices across the data lifecycle should align with the Un * We struggled to get these ideas across to a policy audience. ## Discussion +**LOURDES**: I'm gonna give my spiel of just my experience wading through these readings because they're sort of like big pillars that are holding up my personal work. And then informing the environmental data justice theoretical framework as a whole. + +Starting with [Design Justice](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3189696), that's the first time where I started to really think about design, and in this case building environmental data infrastructure, in terms of intersectionality. When I went to the data justice conference in Cardiff, Sasha Constanza-Chock gave the keynote address. That's the first time that I learned about their work. And they talked about going through airport security as trans. And the fact that when you go through those big giant detector scanners, they click on whether you're male or female. So then people who are trans always get pulled to the side. And then I'm thinking about that in terms of intersectionality, and thinking, what if you're trans and a person of color as well, you're probably always going to get pulled for extra security measures or something. I noticed that myself: in the summer, when I'm darker, I get pulled, and also when I wear my hair up in a bun, because the whole system is based on white and cisgender people. Hairdos that go outside of that, they just throw off the system. + +In response to these sort of issues, the whole idea of design justice is bottom-up design. Like I said before, I think the term design– maybe to talk about this a little bit more: what does design mean? Is it engineering as well as planning? And then how does that inform or how does that work within environmental data justice and building new tools that are from the lens of community members. + +So then that takes me to the [FAIR](https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/) and [CARE](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d3799de845604000199cd24/t/5da9f4479ecab221ce848fb2/1571419335217/CARE+Principles_One+Pagers+FINAL_Oct_17_2019.pdf) principles. I think those are a really good concrete guideline for data scientists and technologists and scientists for working with communities and vulnerable populations. These principles are really popular with and come out of out of the US Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network. + +Recently, I wrote one of my comprehensive exam papers on how scientists can apply the care principles to genomic research. So, they're in research. There's just a long history of extractive research that's either killed people or perpetuated ideas of racism and sexism and heteropatriarchy and also getting caught up in this cycle of research being co-opted by capitalism and being for-profit instead of for the interests of the people. + +And then then [Pollution is Colonialism](https://discardstudies.com/2017/09/01/pollution-is-colonialism/) I think that really reoriented me towards the connection between environmental hazards and land, and then how that's all tied into and produced by a whole history of the state being built on native land and through the appropriation of this land in order to generate capital. + +Throughout all these readings, systems of power are taking whatever kind of capital and people's information, people's health and livelihood, taking that in order to produce academic papers, produce money, produce whatever feeds their power. And I'm part of this too. + +Rico I don't know if you want to go about and just reflect on the other articles? + +**RICO**: Yes, I can start with my own reason for being interested in this line of study. I think, as someone who has a political background, I've spent plenty of time talking to– I think we've all had this experience of talking to people who believe that – and I'm particularly interested in the racial aspect of this, but – believe that racism exists, and will always acknowledge that, but who localize it to just being an interpersonal phenomenon, that systems don't encode– systems aren't persons. And so systems don't encode those biases. + +Especially in a conversation where you're trying to change someone's mind. It's really hard to walk through how a whole system gets shaped and born and fortified with all these small decisions. + +I'm particularly interested in applications of algorithms for very simple-to-understand life purposes, that carry with them the biases of the data that are used to generate them or the creators of the algorithms themselves. + +One reason I'm interested in it is I think, because it's so hard to say, Hey, listen, Uncle Jim. Listen, man, the system is racist. He's like, Look, I don't doubt that there are politicians and there are DMV workers who are racist, but like the system is not the problem. + +I think this is a really easy to understand story: Black Americans are 12% of the American population 12 to 15%. That means that if you're trying to source black faces and arms and bodies to teach a car to stop when it sees that, if you're doing a good job, 12% of the images you're getting to the algorithm to train on are black arms and legs and blah blah. So that means it's going to be significantly less talented at spotting those things and therefore it's gonna stop just a little bit slower. All these things feed into a real danger that is "not the fault" of the researchers who went and just got as much data as they possibly could or "not the fault" of the researchers who wanted to make sure that the data that they got was representative of the population that is going to be impacted by these cars, right? If they say, this is an algorithm for cars that are driving in America, well, 15% of Americans are black. So we're going to have 15% of the images that we train our algorithm on to be black. And that presents a real problem. + +You can look at this as a summation of a lot of well-meaning decisions at different points in the chain that results in a really horrible outcome where our black neighbors are walking down the street and not sure if an autonomous vehicle is going to stop for them when they're crossing the street. And that is systemic. + +It's not specifically tied to one person saying a bad joke, which we all so easily define as racism. It's part of a system of norms that develop, that have shaped whiteness in America as default. Not necessarily better or worse, but default. When you think of just an average American, most people think of a white family. I shouldn't say most people, most white people do, I'm sure. So the impact of that is that gets encoded in our daily lives. + +**Unless we're consciously working to reverse that, we're on the verge of amping up everything about our society considerably. And all the little little elements of racism that exist in these algorithms, they will be in the car that I drive and the Uber that I pick up and the blank and the blank and the blank. Whatever racism is tied into the system is about to get multiplied.** + +That's a real interest of mine in terms of trying to educate myself and others on how this happens so that we can convince more people that this is a real, clear systemic case, because this seems to be the cleanest version of that; I think there's a lot of people who aren't going to believe that the system is racist unless they see everybody with a federal government, job, say something really terrible about another race. And that's just not how it actually exists. + +That's how I've been drawn to the subject. That's my own little philosophy. So I tried to share some readings of just very light weight. Here's a tech application and here's why it's doing a shitty job perpetuating an encoded norm, and that norm being racially or otherwise tinged. + +**LOURDES**: I think that definitely connects with design justice. Sasha writes about algorithmic bias, but all of our materials are built from these systems of oppression, like this Nalgene bottle and the straw – everything is built from this system. Coming from an environmental perspective, people of color are disproportionately affected by the emissions from making those plastics, and we buy into that whole system. And the wealth that's generated from that. + +There's a really good article by Wendy Leo Moore, that of whiteness, what whiteness is because the ideas of white and black come out of racism, come out of that system. The idea is that whiteness is property is that wealth that generations have inherited from slavery and also that ability to navigate life without that kind of discrimination. + +**KELSEY**: I like where you're going with that, Lourdes. Specifically, one of the things that I think is really important about understanding various forms of bias, including racism, is – I don't know if I should call it a privilege or a right to not worry about it. Because things are just made with you in mind. + +**KEVIN**: That's true. I really liked the design justice piece because they ask the question of who's being introduced at the beginning, who's being involved in the problem solving. I've been going down this design thinking pattern a little bit and Lourdes, you asked earlier, what is design? For me it's problem solving, whatever realm that happens to be. It could be applications, it could be engineering, design can happen in all forms. I was just thinking about those questions at the beginning, how are people involved? And who gets to be involved? Are the communities affected being involved? + +I also like that you shared the CARE principles alongside the FAIR principles. The FAIR principles were really data-centric, but the CARE principles were talking about the communities or what would happen with data. + +Thinking about design justice makes a lot of sense in this realm: how do we make sure that these communities are brought forward at the very beginning of any problem solving exercise, problem solving process? + +**KELSEY**: I went to a Sunrise Movement training last summer that was held in Berkeley. I don't know how familiar each of you is with the Bay Area, but when you drive north from Berkeley, there's a big obvious petrochemical plant refinery in Richmond. There was a woman who came to speak at the Sunrise Movement training. And Sunrise Movement has a lot of good things about it. And it is a very explicitly inclusive movement. But I think a lot of more seasoned activists from different backgrounds see all the energy and all the hope and they worry that it's naivety. So one of the things that the trainers, also youth, did was they made a point of bringing in some outside organizers to kind of coalition build and gave them space to speak. One of the most interesting ones was a woman who lived down the street from that refinery. And she talked about what a visible symbol it is that that's happening in their community, which is a mostly black community, I believe. And there's a lot of reasons why this plant emitting chemicals is this obvious blight, and it's this thing people want to fight. + +And there's a thing that happens on a regular basis, which is protest groups get really upset about it and decide to go make a stand and they march down the street. And she says, I live there, and I'm an organizer, and not even once in like the 20 years, whatever it is, I don't know how many decades, not even once have they come by and said, Hey, we're thinking about doing a strike in your area. Do you want to join? + +It's related to the discussion that I've heard around how "easy" it is to solve problems over in Africa versus here. You can "solve" their system because you can't solve yours at home. It's not that it's easy. It's that you don't understand the complexity. + +**LOURDES**: My friend from my program actually wrote her dissertation on the Chevron refinery. And it's one of the largest refineries in the nation. And she wrote about the community activist groups and how the refinery also greenwashes everything. They're like, oh, we're here, but Chevron will donate this whole garden and all these sustainable things to your neighborhood. So that we can be green. And that goes along with the color blindness or not color blindness, but what I talked about in the extractive logic paper, white washing. It's covering everything up including the fact that they are profiting off of people's health. + +Something else I wanted to bring up was this idea of bias. I feel like data justice people or technology people always say, oh, this algorithm is biased etc. But then coming from a sociology of science perspective, we sort of equate objectivity with talking about colorblindness. **The the word bias implies that there is some sort of objectivity, but we know that objectivity doesn't really exist.** + +**RICO**: As a society, we're beginning to laugh at people that say they don't see color. I think the ones who are closest to not seeing color are the ones who make sure that they see it. This is my way of saying, I worked at a fashion tech startup before Qri. We were training computer vision models on how to extract attribute data from fashion product images. So, this is a gray sweater. It's a medium gray sweater. It's a medium gray men's sweater. From just the picture of a model wearing this, we were trying to teach computer algorithms how to do that. + +You'd think that when you get started on a project like that you need 10,000 images that are classified on a taxonomy. And you feed that data into a neural network, so that when I show the computer it can then learn. + +When I began working there and seeing what we were doing, I was like, almost all of the models that we're using are white. That's probably the most cost-effective way to make sure we get lots of pictures, lots of models, because most of the models are white. And I was curious about how this might do when we're trying to identify a blue bag with someone who's not white. + +We didn't get that far in the company. The company only lasted 11 months. But in order for the algorithm to be colorblind, it needed to see: this is a blue bag and it's being carried by a black person. This is a blue bag and it's being carried by a brown person. This is a blue bag, and it's being carried by a white person. The computers are very dumb until you make them very smart. + +It can be really expensive to source a lot of that training data. You can imagine, we're about to compete for a project where we tag colors of bags, for a giant client. You want to be able to do that quickly and cost efficiently, so you're going to be searching for images of white models carrying blue and brown and yellow bags. + +I think like many tech startups, we weren't doing life or death work, but that's kind of not the point. The foundation of the work that we're doing, and the approach that we're taking, if copied by everybody, encodes the wrong kind of colorblindness, where I can't tell you what color this bag is because a black model is holding it. That's a big problem. And not because it costs more to figure out what the color of that bag is, because then maybe someone has to go in and manually select: the computer's never seen a black person before, this is a blue bag. + +To get to colorblindness, you have to put all of these colors at the front of this person's memory. + +I equated machine learning in the application we were using it to: imagine you have a young child who fell off another planet and didn't speak any language that you spoke. And all you did was show them a picture and said blue, and another picture and said green. Eventually, after thousands and thousands of images, they figure out what green means and what blue means. That's essentially what you're doing with computer vision. But without giving more of the context of, like I said, green purse, a white woman, tall, whatever. It's gonna be blind to all those other aspects. + +**KELSEY**: I come from a startup background too. And one of the things that you really, really feel when you're in a startup is how urgent it is that you spend little and make lots. I wish Brendan was here because I feel like we've talked about this a little bit. But I mean, frankly, it's why I left Silicon Valley. + +One of the things that that Brendan and I have talked about is how different it is when he works at Qri versus when he works at EDGI, because within EDGI one of the things that we do is work very slowly. We take the problems and we take a lot of time and distance and thought and it means that we don't get things done on a product-style speed. For those of us who actually really enjoy making product, it's maddening. You want to be able to produce, otherwise you feel like you're not doing anything useful, which is a whole other thing. + +But there's a huge value in doing things slowly, trying things that you don't complete because you've decided that it wasn't the right thing. + +I don't want to be the person who always goes back to "oh, well, capitalism", but there is something there's something very, very real to that, which is: this is us deciding what matters for ourselves and therefore, for the parts of society we have influence over. + +In my context, it was, can we really afford to try to hire for diversity, which was like, can we afford not to? + +**LOURDES**: These are the nuances of getting caught up in capitalism. + +**KEVIN**: I was just thinking, even EDGI has that problem. Hiring. Hiring is – it's not that you want it to be fast, but you don't want it to be too slow either because then it just drains all the energy out. And then we just use that as the excuse to use shortcuts, like we just don't have time for it. So we'll just hire the easiest thing. And the easiest thing is just to stay within our networks and the people that we know already. Rico's agreeing, like Yes, because it's really easy to get a lot of white people pictures. + +**RICO**: Completely. + +**LOURDES**: This whole fast pace thing– this is our life in this society. We are always going, ch-ch-ch-ch– and that's what neoliberalism is about, is this idea of being extra efficient, maximizing your profits. Getting, and always needing, more money. + +Sometimes you have to take a step back. I think Coronavirus is helping us do that, helping us say, Wow, there are things that are deeply flawed in the systems that we've created for ourselves, but we also need them. + +How do we live outside of them now? + +**KELSEY**: I'm very disturbed this week by– I get that it is difficult for people to work from home while their children are not in school and not in childcare of any kind. On the other hand, I've been talking to a lot of parents who are basically weighing: I don't know I don't know how to entertain them other than putting them in front of a screen. And I'm like, What? Did we forget that you can play music and talk to people and go outside? There's so many ways of being in the world that don't involve screens, and genuinely I think people have forgotten that. And it's really biting people right now. It feels hard to watch because, I can go out there. But in the city, maybe you're just in an apartment complex, and you actually can't go anywhere. So you kind of have to have this virtual world that you actually live in. Which is why algorithms and bias training is so important, because if everything we do is moderated through a screen and especially through the internet– who controls the internet? And how? + +**RICO**: The thing I'm most afraid of is that it's either not a person, or not a good person, or not enough people. + +By controlling the internet, I'm just going to boil that big idea down into something small, my LinkedIn network. Let's say, 25 from my friends get a new job. How do they put the five that I should congratulate in front of me? It's a decision by kind of no person because there's an algorithm behind that based on the last five people I've messaged or the last five people I haven't messaged, and that just encodes whatever behaviors. It's encoding the ways of working that exists today. And like, locking them in unless you proactively change them. + +Whenever I hear a Spotify song that I don't like, I'm worried about disliking it, because then I think I'm never going to hear that artist again. You know, the computer is going to learn too much. + +**RICO**: I don't know the algorithm that recommends from LinkedIn who I should "Say hello" to but if I pass on two women in a row, if it then stops recommending that I "Say hello" to women or congratulations on the new job, that I'm not going to remember that someone now works in organization that could be great for my business. It needs to not encode just your previous behaviors, because a lot of our previous behaviors are based on the networks that we grew up with. And we've all been locked in these segregated worlds, a lot of us have been locked in a lot of these segregated worlds, and the those worlds are not going to change unless those algorithms are cracked into at some some other point. + +**LOURDES**: I was thinking about the same thing with Spotify. I just like too many bands that are all white dudes, and I really need to stop that. But you know, I like the music that I like. But when I like things, then Spotify is like, Oh, she really likes white boy punk bands from the 90s. And so we're gonna like recommend some white boy punk bands from now. I've made a rule for myself that if it's all white cis white dudes from the past five years, I'm not listening to that. + +**KELSEY**: The best part is that your music taste is supposed to be based on music that you've heard before and music that you've liked before. So it might actually work. + +**LOURDES**: I have a really eclectic music taste. But, you know, it's the your daily mix. One will be jazz, one will be hardcore punk, another will be shoegaze or something. + +**KELSEY**: Why is it that– I mean, I would expect that Spotify, LinkedIn, Facebook, all of them probably do specifically call out people and bands and stuff as white, male, female, Latina, whatever. **In most forms of machine learning, we do actually choose what parameters are being looked at.** We pick these ones because they're easy to identify. But they are in many ways the least interesting. + +**LOURDES**: But then we're talking about the fact that they're not chosen. There is no equity in how these algorithms are built. There's no algorithm, I'm assuming, in Spotify that says, Oh, this person's listening to too much white music. We're gonna put some people of color bands. + +**RICO**: This is I think a perfect distillation of your point, Lourdes. I bet most datasets at Spotify are not coded by the race of the author. And instead, it's just the genre because 90s punk bands were mostly white. Those things get correlated tightly and so when you keep listening to that, you keep getting whiter audiences. To your point, in that sense, the algorithm was colorblind, but because it was colorblind, it therefore tied to another correlative thing and therefore became pushing white music. I shouldn't say white music, white punk 90s music. + +If there were somebody on the engineering team who was like, I'm gonna, tag these artists by their predominant race– I'm worried that this black punk band in the East Bay is getting no listens or whatever. There's a there's a black punk band in the in East Bay. And so I'm going to weight things. These algorithms are putting bands in front of you that are a little bit more local to your place. There are other categories that are not race specific, that can get other kinds of music in front of you. + +If I'm in New York and I listen to No Effect, Pennywise, those are my bands. But if Spotify was aware that 90s punk rock music was a white dominated genre, if– I'm a New Yorker– if it pushed up a black punk band from, Queens into my feed, and I was like, this sounds cool. And then oh my god, they're from Queens. I'm much more likely to check them out. Because they're from Queens than because they're black. + +**LOURDES**: Their algorithms incorporate the sound wave and match up not only according to genre but according to the melodies and tones. So that will match to your interest. So that's one way to get people to listen to more people of color music. + +But then, I feel like, at least before all this material and readings came out, and people started writing about this, the act of tagging a band with their race, like how white or how not-white they were would be perceived as racist. And then the question of, who are you, some white dude coder, to determine the race of a band? So then you would have forms when the band puts up their information on Spotify that says, What's your demographic? And then the band will be like, why is this a question here? But I think that should be a thing. + +**KELSEY**: I think that's really interesting. I would love to see recommendation engines– you definitely see a lot of blog posts and especially librarian curations of you know how to read for a specific story that might not be part of existing mainstream. When I was in the Portland library recently, I picked up a couple fliers that were movies and books centering indigenous voices– #ownvoices, where you're specifically reading books that are written by the people that they're about. + +In our modern society, not everybody is interested in reading for diversity, but there's a huge population that is. I think that there's a market available for recommendation engines that specifically give you stuff that's outside of the norm, stuff that's outside of the mainstream. + +**LOURDES**: I just searched on Spotify, "punks of color", and there is one playlist. + +I think it does start with putting together playlists, putting together book lists, curating things. And then fostering those sorts of tastes. + +**KELSEY**: In theory, given that this is Data Together, we're talking about algorithmic bias as an encoded algorithm. But we also have influence over how people think and perceive what normal is, right? Just by creating models of it. + +One of the things that I was doing for a while was going through those book lists for whatever diversity category, some book list of things that were released in the last year, and my local library has a "recommended this book" option to suggest materials for purchase. And so I could put these in the library. I wouldn't even necessarily have to read them. They would just be on the shelves. It felt really powerful because otherwise people didn't even know they existed. + +**RICO**: Switching gears a little bit, I think I also shared an article of TikTok moderators, being alerted when a TikTok-er who has Down syndrome has at least 6000 people watching their video. A moderator is cued to check in and make sure that people aren't making fun of that person. + +I'm fascinated by the unintended consequences of really good policies and practices, and you can make all the reasons why in the world today that's sort of a necessary process. At the same time, imagine being someone with Down syndrome and knowing that if I get a certain level of popularity, I'm going to have moderators in my feed immediately. That's hurtful. I mean, maybe I don't know it. It depends. I guess everybody can interpret that differently. But I'd feel othered by that. + +We're sort of fumbling through a lot of this: best intentions, tech as it is, the world as it is. And the output is really messy. + +**LOURDES**: That is patronizing in a way: that someone has to look out for you. + +**RICO**: Right. + +**LOURDES**: But, I love it when people intervene and are telling people off. + +There's an organization, I don't know if they still exist, of white folks who come in and intervene in threads of racist people being racist, and to take the load off of the person of color in that thread who's like, y'all are being racist? they'll step in and will educate. I think that's cool. That's a good way for white people to engage in solidarity. + +But it's only when they're requested. + +I think that goes back to Design Justice: you ask people if they want to contribute. But, and this goes with EDGI too, you don't want to put the burden of contributing on people; you want to give them the space and facilitate their contribution. And if they want to take a leadership role, it's open but not not pressed. + +**KELSEY**: It could actually be really cool feature if TikTok, when you signed up, said, Hey, are you a member of XYZ vulnerable population? Because if so we can prioritize moderation requests that you submit. + +That would be neat. + +**RICO**: Yeah, I feel I should have really read through the whole case, but I think it's just triggered. + +**KELSEY**: +It read to me less positive than you presented it. + +I guess I'm really curious about how folks think we can get around algorithmic bias given that machine learning is definitely happening. + +**KEVIN**: Just give me a chronological timeline again. And no ads. Don't push anything. Just let me find it through serendipity. + +I do like weird hacks when I'm like using when I do use social media. For Facebook, you can create personal lists. And I only use it through the browser, not through the app, even on my phone. And then in that way, I'm able to see things chronologically without ads. And it's a very different experience because I start to see stuff from people that I normally don't interact with, which is nice. + +I would say, how do we turn off that? Is there a feature where we just turn off the algorithm? **Do we always need an algorithm to push everything?** + +**RICO**: **Transparency sounds like the very first step.** This is the tension because this is the bread and butter. This is the trade secret. If you knew exactly how it worked, you could adjust your behavior accordingly, or maybe ask for changes. I mean, I basically know that my Instagram feed is some combination of things I like and things that they that look like the things that I have liked. + +**LOURDES**: The other thing is, big advertising. But the fact that you can put ads on Facebook for not a lot of money... it really helps. If EDGI wanted to put up an ad, it would only cost a couple bucks. That's really cool about the technology. But then people can also spread misinformation using that and can also target say African American populations with misinformation and do damage that way. + +**KEVIN**: Yeah, it'e really dangerous. Weaponizing being able to specifically target people for things leads me closer to DWeb stuff with federated social networks. Does it make sense for me to be connected to somebody I don't know, in Egypt, like right now, or should I be having social networks with my neighbors? For what's called [Scuttlebutt](scuttlebutt.nz) you can see folks that are on the same network or just around you. Is there a place for smaller social networks? Instead of the ginormous Facebook where we're all on the same thing? That's the question. I wonder, what would that be like? + +**RICO**: That's a sword that cuts both ways. Because the white Kevins of the world who have the same genuine interest in keeping their world a little smaller, if they grew up in white worlds, are then keeping their all-white worlds a little more tightly wound, unless you're proactively braking against that. Yeah. + +**KEVIN**: Yeah. There's this other question. How much of the social networks is our real life? Why are we spending so much time on it? And then, because we're spending so much time on it makes it easier to self-isolate in these bubbles. If we had to step out and deal with the people around us more often, how much would that change things? Depends on where you're living, I guess, too. + +**RICO**: Yeah, I think I've just chosen to like– I mean, I'm already 35 and race has been a problem in my country for 500 years and a problem in the world for far longer than that. I think I've accepted the fact that it will be a big part of the life of many of the people of the country that I live in for the rest of my time here. And so I'm keeping the goal of erasing all of that for another lifetime. Just reducing the worst parts of it. + +Bringing us back, the fact that autonomous car can't as easily identify a black neighbor of mine is a majorly scary problem. And **that seems really both really scary and really fixable**. And so, I personally want to focus efforts on where those two things intersect. Let's get the big dangerous things reduced however we can. There may only be three black punk bands in the United States. And for there to be six might be progress. But that's a longer project. + +**LOURDES**: where you have Bad Brains, which is homophobic, and people are like, oh, Bad Brains. Oh, they're a black band. It's like, Yeah, but they're bigoted. + +**KELSEY**: I was reading an argument, that machine learning. I'm trying to remember where this was from. [Edit: it's from [A Human Algorithm](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45029192-a-human-algorithm) by Flynn Coleman] + +The author was making the argument that this is the only moment in which we can influence whether algorithms have our same biases. Pretty soon, machine learning will work faster than human ability to feed machine learning. + +I don't know if that's a full argument because it's just another one of those things that's huge and out of our control. + +**KEVIN**: Well, there's that question posed by one of the articles where it said, in this vein of like slowing down, why should we even do this at all? The facial recognition software article asked, what is it officially useful for? Unlocking our phones and tracking everybody wherever they're moving. + +**LOURDES**: I mean, there's Instagram, quick changing art things. Fun facial recognition. But yeah, no, I agree. + +**KELSEY**: I feel like I've heard a good argument about: it's a good thing we developed the H bomb because it brought us all these other technologies that we really like. + +**KEVIN**: Oh, yeah. + +**LOURDES**: I mean, technology isn't bad, it isn't good. It's another tool. + +**KELSEY**: The only thing I'm sure about is that it's gonna happen. I, I don't really believe in human abilities to suppress ideas in any kind of permanent way. + +**LOURDES**: Any other thoughts? + +**KEVIN**: Some stuff that I was reading made me think about the [ECHO](https://echo.epa.gov/) project. I heard Kelsey say this, but, basically these permits are permissions to pollute, right? That's what all these permits are, just giving these companies or whatever they happen to be permission to pollute. And I'm curious, this relates to design justice, how are these thresholds determined? How long ago were these determinations made? Were they thought about in aggregate, like, it's okay for one power plant to pollute that much, but what if we had 10 of them next to each other? Is there any thought to the cumulative effect of all of them being allowed to pollute in that area? + +**LOURDES**: Yeah. + +**KEVIN**: Do you know that stuff, Lourdes? I know you've been studying this. + +**LOURDES**: Yeah. That's what I've studied, is just those thresholds being based on being generally based on white male bodies. And the idea that the dose makes the poison. That's totally, not reflective of reality. And the fact that companies prevent certain science from happening, it's what this STS scholar Scott Frankel calls "undone science". There's just loads of science about these chemicals that isn't done. + +**KEVIN**: I really like the design justice article because it calls into those questions: these people that are being affected, why aren't they involved in the determination of these permits and how they work and stuff like that, or how they were set? + +**RICO**: I think there's a new algorithms officer for New York City. I don't know exactly what their job and powers are. But I think one of the big missions of the people who cared about that position being created and shaped it is– all the data that could any algorithm that goes into a city process– the algorithm is made public and the underlying training data if it's machine learning, is made public, so that at least people can take a look at it. This is sort of what I mean about, Kevin, your point: Do I get to tune the algorithm for myself? The first step would be at least understanding how it works as an instrument, right? + +There was a police effort in Chicago, which I think is still alive. It's sort of like predictive policing, if you've seen Minority Report. It's kind of like that, where they crunch all this data and they say, Look, you are likely to commit a crime or be the victim of a crime, based on these factors. We're knocking on your door just to check to make sure that you've got housing, a job, blah, blah, because these are the four things that, if you get those, you're much less likely to be on our list in the future. So like, how's your job, blah, blah. And this is wildly controversial for all the reasons that are probably obvious to us, but a lot of people in communities that had their doors knocked on, some of them are like, why the fuck are cops knocking on my door like this and other people are like, Oh my god, I'm so glad that they're checking in to make sure that my housing is safe and they helped me make a complaint about my landlord blah, blah. Very Brave New World. + +**KEVIN**: Yeah. + +**RICO**: You can see all the obvious reasons this is concerning, right. + +**KELSEY**: That's the best version of predictive policing I could imagine. + +**RICO**: Yeah. + +**KEVIN**: I agree with you, Rico, that the transparency of it helps us determine– a similar thing, where my friend, she works at a school, and they want to use some type of data analysis to find students at risk of failing and reach out to them first. But then there's all this identifying information about the parents' income or whatever and so, yeah, it's just like Brave New World. For sure. + +**RICO**: I don't know how I feel about it. + +**KELSEY**: I was trying to remember– I have a note here from when I read it and I'm trying to decipher it, and maybe this will bring something out for you. But it's just design principles. The design process itself matches product best practices to ensure there's a market, but it becomes potentially extractive at the point of profit balance versus incentive and challenge to design– and the challenge to design and create a useful thing. + +There is something really interesting reading that article about design justice. My education in design is from a school of thought called user oriented collaborative design. And it embodies the same principles that were outlined in the paper to a large degree, which is that you choose who your product is going to serve. And then you go and you meet some of them. And you find out what your product ought to be, by way of interviewing them and then showing them rough prototypes, until you have something that really solves their need. And it's really cool because you're identifying problems– you can't not identify a good problem that way. On the other hand, you've now used the input of these people to create a product that you wish to now sell to them, and everyone like them, for a profit. I'm not anticapitalist enough to say– there is some level of, well, you deserve to make some money for going through this process of design. Design and creation of a product is real work. It's useful work. + +**LOURDES**: Yeah. + +**KELSEY**: But exactly how much and where is really much more a function of, how much can you get for it? + +**LOURDES**: Yeah, and I'm not a fan of top-down models, and I think you know what? Most of these pieces are saying is that we need to shift from top-down to bottom-up. And I personally think that corporations and companies should be owned by the workers, by like everyone who is in it and maybe have shares based on how long you've been with the company. And how much, I don't know, student loans you have and that's, again, like that's sort of what EDGI, even though we do, I mean, we have issues with how much we pay people according to skills. What if we lived in a world where all skills were equal, like someone managing makes as much as someone doing cleaning because they're both working the same amount of hours? And everyone has a stake in the organization that they keep running + +**KEVIN**: Wages for housework as well. + +**LOURDES**: Or maybe also think of economies that are outside of money. + +**KELSEY**: Yes, I'm more concerned with the idea that we have to give people incentives to do things. + +**LOURDES**: yeah. Come on, come on. + +**KEVIN**: Yeah. + +**LOURDES**: To make money. + +**RICO**: I think, as an MBA in a hopefully high-growth tech startup, and a white guy and a capitalist and a Warren supporter, I think it'll be "revolution enough" to have just, Lourdes, to your point, greater worker ownership of the firms that they operate in, whether that's quotas for certain-sized companies like 10 or 20%, or something like that. + +The massive accumulation of wealth among a small number of people– capitalism was evil and terrible 60 years ago, and that system was wildly preferable to the one that exists today. Elizabeth Warren's made this point many times: a lot of people talk about racial harmony coming once black families make closer to the median net income in America. Her point is, do you know how much closer those families' net income was to the median net income in the 1960s and 50s? it was higher. + +Well, wealth has gone like this. And the world has gotten way more stratified, depending on a lot of different things. Racial progress has progressed in a number of areas. So we have to unbuckle those a little bit instead of just hoping that race gets figured out once everybody's middle class again. + +LeBron James will have to work 1200 years at his current salary– 1200 years at LeBron James wages– to amass enough wealth to be Jeff Bezos. And how many people have to work for 1200 years to be LeBron James? It's way out of wack. + +**LOURDES**: He needs to pay my student loans. And they need to, I don't know, they need to give us money, because nobody works hard enough to make that much money. + +**RICO**: Right. Right. + +**LOURDES**: Yeah. + +**RICO**: like 5000 years of work. + +**LOURDES**: Yeah. That's just not fair. And I hate whenever someone gives me that bootstraps thing. Really, you think that someone who works 40 hours a week should make that much more than 40 hours' worth? + +I'm angry now. + +**KEVIN**: I forgot the phrase but I think it's like: Americans, there's a lot of folks that support the billionaires because they believe that they'll be they'll be billionaires soon enough. But that's not what 1% means. + +**RICO**: The estate tax doesn't impact anybody who's trying to give less than $11 million to their children. That's a lot, and everybody's complaining about this "death tax" and not being able to bequeath whatever little wealth we all have to our children. + +**LOURDES**: I mean, but that's another thing, inheritance. People have to cut out the large inheritances. I think it's okay to pass down a few thousand or whatever to help when you die, but more than that, I just don't think it's fair. That's how racism is constructed. + +**KELSEY**: Even if no money is passed down, you have probably an easier education and social support. + +**RICO**: Right. Those things compound. + +**KELSEY**: +Wait, Kevin, do you want to read that quote out? I feel like it'd be a great closer to our video. + +**KEVIN**: "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." By John Steinbeck. + ## Chat log -00:14:25 Kelsey Breseman: https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw# -00:20:27 Kevin: That’s me on phone -00:23:53 Lourdes Vera: I'd like to make an informational video of how racism was historically constructed +* 00:14:25 Kelsey Breseman: https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw# +* 00:20:27 Kevin: That’s me on phone +* 00:23:53 Lourdes Vera: I'd like to make an informational video of how racism was historically constructed 00:28:46 Kelsey Breseman: linked in the hackmd -00:28:52 Kevin: https://futurism.com/the-byte/tiktok-hid-videos-fat-lgbtq-mentally-disabled +* 00:28:52 Kevin: https://futurism.com/the-byte/tiktok-hid-videos-fat-lgbtq-mentally-disabled https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xzwgx/racial-bias-in-ai-isnt-getting-better-and-neither-are-researchers-excuses https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/18/21121286/algorithms-bias-discrimination-facial-recognition-transparency -00:28:55 Kelsey Breseman: er yah github -00:45:21 Kevin: extracting as much as possible -00:47:42 Kelsey Breseman: or not a person who is focusing on this particular problem -00:53:32 Kelsey Breseman: “white music” is like 80s pop right? -00:59:38 Kelsey Breseman: the gentlest activism -01:14:07 Kelsey Breseman: andis it really ok that one of them is allowed? -01:14:11 Kelsey Breseman: have to run grab my charger -01:16:29 Lourdes Vera: brb -01:26:30 Kelsey Breseman: paying to keep having the dream -01:27:44 Kevin: because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." +* 00:28:55 Kelsey Breseman: er yah github +* 00:45:21 Kevin: extracting as much as possible +* 00:47:42 Kelsey Breseman: or not a person who is focusing on this particular problem +* 00:53:32 Kelsey Breseman: “white music” is like 80s pop right? +* 00:59:38 Kelsey Breseman: the gentlest activism +* 01:14:07 Kelsey Breseman: andis it really ok that one of them is allowed? +* 01:14:11 Kelsey Breseman: have to run grab my charger +* 01:16:29 Lourdes Vera: brb +* 01:26:30 Kelsey Breseman: paying to keep having the dream +* 01:27:44 Kevin: because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." John Steinbeck -01:27:49 Kevin: That’s the quote \ No newline at end of file +* 01:27:49 Kevin: That’s the quote \ No newline at end of file From 0ecd0758b8ffb289512db3a6ae02748b63badc19 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Breseman Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2020 15:55:14 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 36/65] adds link to video --- README.md | 2 +- notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md | 2 +- 2 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 474f80f..fe04452 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -25,7 +25,7 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in ## Themes -- [Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice](#algorithmic-racism--environmental-data-justice) (March 17) [🎬 **Recorded Call**]()   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md)   +- [Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice](#algorithmic-racism--environmental-data-justice) (March 17) [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/0Vg-A9eK-14)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md)   - [Content Moderation and Consent](#content-moderation-and-consent) (April 7) - [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (May 5) - [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human) (June 2) diff --git a/notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md b/notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md index 12373d5..da879a9 100644 --- a/notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md +++ b/notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ ## Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice (March 17) -[🎬 **Recorded Call**]() +[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/0Vg-A9eK-14) ### Intro These selections mostly come from the environmental data justice (EDJ) Syllabus, which has been an evolving document of literature and links to organizations that work in the environmental and data justice spheres. Members of EDGI have preliminarily defined EDJ as "public accessibility and continuity of environmental data and research, supported by networked open-source data infrastructure that can be modified, adapted, and supported by local communities" (Dillon et al. 2017). From ae3b434401df79eeaeb3572adde27673324e111a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Breseman Date: Mon, 4 May 2020 13:04:46 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 37/65] adds notes for moderation less discussion notes --- ...2-content-moderation-consent-2020-04-07.md | 54 +++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 54 insertions(+) create mode 100644 notes/semester_03_2020/2-content-moderation-consent-2020-04-07.md diff --git a/notes/semester_03_2020/2-content-moderation-consent-2020-04-07.md b/notes/semester_03_2020/2-content-moderation-consent-2020-04-07.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c38327c --- /dev/null +++ b/notes/semester_03_2020/2-content-moderation-consent-2020-04-07.md @@ -0,0 +1,54 @@ +# Data. Together. Let's read about it + +## Content Moderation & Consent (April 7) + +[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/Sb9pJfypvfg) + +## Intro +This topic covers factors that impact the content that we see. How do platforms balance freedom of expression versus consent to avoid offensive content, navigate algorithmic versus human moderation and curation, or incentivize different types of interaction? What are downstream effects of these choices? + +## Readings +* Bijan Stephen for The Verge: "[Something Awful's Founder Thinks Youtube Sucks at Moderation](https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/26/18744264/something-awful-youtube-moderation-rich-kyanka-lgbtq)" (2019) - strategies for moderation from Something Awful's founder +* Casey Newton for The Verge: "[Bodies in Seats](https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/19/18681845/facebook-moderator-interviews-video-trauma-ptsd-cognizant-tampa)" (2019) - around outsourced content moderation & its impacts on the humans who have to view & judge the content. Would recommend: + * From the beginning to "But for the first time, three former moderators for Facebook in North America agreed to break their nondisclosure agreements and discuss working conditions at the site on the record." + * NOT RECOMMENDED: the middle of the article for this group– it's good reporting but needs a content warning for graphic descriptions (and the intro gets the points across) +* Jussi Passanen: "[Human centred design considered harmful](https://www.jussipasanen.com/human-centred-design-considered-harmful)" – how good design principles applied to business sense can be harmful for humans, especially in the context of a livable planet +* **Choose one of the following** (their lengths vary): + * Mark Scott for Politico EU: "[Why Banning Political Ads on Social Media Misses the Point](https://www.politico.eu/article/facebook-twitter-google-political-ad-ban/)" (2019) - argues that beginning to moderate content for advertising is the beginning of social media companies taking ownership/responsibility over user content generally + * Niam Yaraghi for Brookings: "[Twitter's Ban on Political Advertisements Hurts Our Democracy](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2020/01/08/twitters-ban-on-political-advertisements-hurts-our-democracy/)" (2020) - discusses the unequal impact of the ban on more vs less-well funded political groups and pushes for more detailed transparency measures + * Kate Conger for the New York Times: "[Twitter Will Ban All Political Ads, C.E.O. Jack Dorsey Says](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/technology/twitter-political-ads-ban.html)" (2019) – contrasted with the Facebook hands-off approach and Google's selective approach +* **Choose one of the following** (their lengths vary): + * Clint Pumphrey for HowStuffWorks: "[How Do Advertisers Show Me Custom Ads?](https://computer.howstuffworks.com/advertiser-custom-ads.htm)" (2012) – cookies and retargeting, notice tone + * Cade Metz for the New York Times: "[How Facebook's Ad System Works](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/technology/how-facebook-ads-work.html)" (2017) – targeting factors that Facebook uses for ads, the inception of ads into a content stream, some treatment of the Russia issue + * Cole Nemeth for Sprout Social: "[How the Twitter Algorithm Works in 2020](https://sproutsocial.com/insights/twitter-algorithm/)" (2020) before "How to turn off the Twitter algorithm" – a really short one just highlighting the factors involved + * Will Oremus for Slate: "[Twitter's New Order](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/cover_story/2017/03/twitter_s_timeline_algorithm_and_its_effect_on_us_explained.html)" (2017) – much more in depth (not just how but why and future directions) but pretty long + * Josh Constine for TechCrunch: "[How Facebook News Feed Works](https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/06/ultimate-guide-to-the-news-feed/)" (2016) before "An Updated List Of News Feed Algorithm Changes" + +*Optional bonus readings* +* Naomi Wu's experience with media manipulation & being "content moderated" off of several funding platforms she had used to make a living: [part 1](https://medium.com/@therealsexycyborg/shenzhen-tech-girl-naomi-wu-my-experience-with-sarah-jeong-jason-koebler-and-vice-magazine-3f4a32fda9b5) and [part 2](https://medium.com/@therealsexycyborg/shenzhen-tech-girl-naomi-wu-part-2-over-the-wall-and-into-the-fire-5e8efc5c1509) – this is very interesting and topical but too long to include in the required reading +* [Flame Warriors](https://www.politicsforum.org/flame-warriors/), if you'd like a lighter take, is a tongue-in-cheek characterization of the various types of people moderators encounter +* The end of the Casey Newton "[Bodies in Seats](https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/19/18681845/facebook-moderator-interviews-video-trauma-ptsd-cognizant-tampa)" article, from "Last week, I visited the Tampa site with a photographer." to the end, interesting additional perspective re trying to figure out how this stuff *should* be done + +## Themes +* Power and who has it + * Over what you see + * Via influence achieved through platforms +* Consequences without intentions: influence of algorithms +* Are we "owed" platforms? +* Should we expect our privately held digital platforms to take responsibility + * For equitable treatment of users? + * For the fallout of their moderation choices? + * For the jobs they contract out? +* Advertisements + * Who sees them and why? + * Who buys them and how much power do they have to target? + * What guidelines are appropriate to set? +* Community & polity + * Can you share a story of a sense of community you experienced solely through a digital platform? + * How does your (regular? real life? family? chosen family?) community communicate? (What about your polity?) + * If you changed (digital) platforms for communication, how would that impact your community? + * What are guidelines your community uses in online spaces? + +## Discussion + +## Chat log \ No newline at end of file From 112dac518d6c05f5aa1a1677980abcf699f20b11 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Tue, 5 May 2020 14:48:19 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 38/65] Updates date for data monopolies --- README.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index fe04452..c6784cc 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -27,7 +27,7 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in - [Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice](#algorithmic-racism--environmental-data-justice) (March 17) [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/0Vg-A9eK-14)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md)   - [Content Moderation and Consent](#content-moderation-and-consent) (April 7) -- [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (May 5) +- [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (May 12) - [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human) (June 2) - [Private Data & Policies](#private-data-policies) (July 7) - [Polity](#polity) (August 4) From b1299a626c6b2058b54ce613c64f07312fefafe4 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Breseman Date: Tue, 12 May 2020 14:40:03 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 39/65] adds some readme linking --- README.md | 4 ++-- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index fe04452..1d72bdf 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -25,8 +25,8 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in ## Themes -- [Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice](#algorithmic-racism--environmental-data-justice) (March 17) [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/0Vg-A9eK-14)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md)   -- [Content Moderation and Consent](#content-moderation-and-consent) (April 7) +- [Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice](#algorithmic-racism--environmental-data-justice) (March 17)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/0Vg-A9eK-14)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md)   +- [Content Moderation and Consent](#content-moderation-and-consent) (April 7)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/Sb9pJfypvfg)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/2-content-moderation-consent-2020-04-07.md)   - [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (May 5) - [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human) (June 2) - [Private Data & Policies](#private-data-policies) (July 7) From 189b0a034195736c7eeb950388d3beb19b3070e2 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Breseman Date: Tue, 12 May 2020 17:33:25 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 40/65] adds data monopolies readings --- README.md | 25 +++++++++++++++++++++++-- 1 file changed, 23 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index c6784cc..04bbb1b 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -79,12 +79,33 @@ This topic covers factors that impact the content that we see. How do platforms * The end of the Casey Newton "[Bodies in Seats](https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/19/18681845/facebook-moderator-interviews-video-trauma-ptsd-cognizant-tampa)" article, from "Last week, I visited the Tampa site with a photographer." to the end, interesting additional perspective re trying to figure out how this stuff *should* be done ### Data Monopolies -**May 5** +**May 12** Most of our data and information is controlled by a handful of companies. How did this come to be, what are examples of responsible and irresponsible holding of this power, and how do we imagine we might slip the trap of data monopolies? **Readings:** -[Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/75) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. +*Anti competitiveness, and how did we get here?* +* Modern day monopolies: Matt Stoller, Wall Street Journal (2019): [Why U.S. Businesses Want Trustbusting](https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-u-s-businesses-want-trustbusting-11570803088) +* Adam Davidson, New Yorker (2017): [Teddy Roosevelt Would Not Understand the E.U.’s Antitrust Fine Against Google](https://www.newyorker.com/business/adam-davidson/teddy-roosevelt-wouldnt-understand-the-eus-antitrust-fine-against-google) +* Prof. Dr. Wernhard Möschel (2007): US vs EU Antitrust Law: [pdf download](ftp://ftp.zew.de/pub/zew-docs/veranstaltungen/rnic/papers/WernhardMoeschel.pdf) + +*What are the things we worry about with monopolies?* +* Economic / social / political bads as outcomes of monopolistic power: Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica (2018): [Internet rages after Google removes \"view images\" button, bowing to Getty](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after-google-removes-view-image-button-bowing-to-getty/) +* Getty (2016): [Getty Images to file competition law complaint against Google](http://press.gettyimages.com/getty-images-files-competition-law-complaint-against-google/) + +*Data Monopolies in a COVID era?* +* Contact tracing and privacy? Kim Lyons, The Verge (May 2020): +[Senators’ plan for reining in contact tracing apps doesn’t make a lot of sense](https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/1/21243977/gop-senators-contact-tracing-data-coronavirus-covid-19-privacy) +* Data Privacy bill in response: U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Press Release (Apr 2020): [Wicker, Thune, Moran, Blackburn Announce Plans to Introduce Data Privacy Bill](https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2020/4/wicker-thune-moran-blackburn-announce-plans-to-introduce-data-privacy-bill) +* Contact tracing proposal from Apple / Google: Google Blog (2020): +[COVID-19 Exposure Notification Using Bluetooth Low Energy](https://www.blog.google/documents/66/Overview_of_COVID-19_Contact_Tracing_Using_BLE_1.pdf) + +*Optional bits to play around with for discussion:* +* Can data monopolies be a force for good? Facebook Data for Good: +[Disease Prevention Maps](https://dataforgood.fb.com/tools/disease-prevention-maps/) +* Google/FB/Apple reports about data movement: +[Facebook Data for Good Mobility Dashboard](https://visualization.covid19mobility.org/) +* More reading on modern monopolies: Harry Lambert, NewStatesman (2019): [Matt Stoller's Goliath: the rise of big tech](https://www.newstatesman.com/goliath-matt-stoller-review) ### Trust (Cryptographic and Human) **June 2** From 9ccf5543e4e1d825e6bb090e7bf80544a6084230 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Breseman Date: Thu, 28 May 2020 23:23:51 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 41/65] adds transcript and chat log --- ...2-content-moderation-consent-2020-04-07.md | 179 +++++++++++++++++- .../3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md | 67 +++++++ 2 files changed, 245 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) create mode 100644 notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md diff --git a/notes/semester_03_2020/2-content-moderation-consent-2020-04-07.md b/notes/semester_03_2020/2-content-moderation-consent-2020-04-07.md index c38327c..6588f66 100644 --- a/notes/semester_03_2020/2-content-moderation-consent-2020-04-07.md +++ b/notes/semester_03_2020/2-content-moderation-consent-2020-04-07.md @@ -50,5 +50,182 @@ This topic covers factors that impact the content that we see. How do platforms * What are guidelines your community uses in online spaces? ## Discussion +**KELSEY**: So if y'all are ready, I can launch into our reading discussion. -## Chat log \ No newline at end of file +And I have some themes and questions in the hackMD that we share, which is now in the chat. And I wanted to open by asking if everybody could just go around and share the story, one story of a sense of community you experienced through a purely digital platform. So I think I want to frame today's discussion around how much our lives can be mediated by by platforms that are within or beyond our control, but digital platforms that have mechanisms for control kind of built in. I can start with my little story, which is, I spent a summer working at a website called Instructables, which is— it kind of rose at the beginning of the maker movement. And it's this tutorial site where people log on and they make stuff. I really admire that this site, they're very specific about trying to have a kind of community that... they're very inclusive with their definition of "maker". One of the things that they have in their kind of makerspace/lab area, is that they're very careful to have a test kitchen. And the founder was talking to me about this: people who make robots and stuff, they know they're makers, but a lot of people who make stuff all the time just kind of consider it like maintainership work, or "women's work" type of stuff. Making in a kitchen is also making; making with a sewing machine is also making; making with wires is also making; making with code is also making. So I really admired that about that community and also their comment policy, which is literally "be nice". And as a user, you can flag a comment not just as spam or inappropriate, but as "not nice" to have it reviewed by a moderator. And that's the first time I ever felt like I had friends who I never met other than through their online presence because you get this sort of core of people who you kind of get windows into their lives because they post these step by step photo instructions for different stuff that they're making. And then they look at other people's and they comment and they show you that they made it too. Yeah, that's one community. + +**KEVIN**: I can share next. Actually EDGI is the first time I've had community through digital platform because EDGI is completely distributed, so for a long time, like I only interacted with people either through Zoom, Slack, or GitHub. It's really amazing when you have consistent interactions through all these mediums that, a year later when I was able to attend an in-person meeting and was meeting folks for the first time in person, it didn't feel that way at all. It just felt like we had known each other for so long already but we were like wait, I've never actually given you a hug before! EDGI is continuing, going strong, and continues to be my community. + +**LOURDES**: For me it is the Midwest 90s Emo Facebook group that I am part of. A few of us, the main posters in the group, have branched off, and we've created our smaller group that's private and we've become really good friends. Lately we've been having zoom calls with, like 20 of us. I've met a few people in different cities now. So it's sort of cool knowing I have friends across the country. + +**DAWN**: I don't have a good— EDGI is that for me, but when you said that, I didn't think of a good recent example; I thought of an old one, which is probably an early one for me, which then I was thinking about in the context of these readings. I was really into modding Morrowind, so I was an active member of a forum called Tamriel Rebuilt, which was all about people who wanted to build this one mod, which was like rebuild the whole continent in the Elder Scrolls game Morrowind, which just had one little island of it, sort of a quixotic project that was maybe not possible in the constraints of the game engine at the time. I think they're still going. I actually just googled, they're still going, that mod is active if you want to play Morrowind again. That came out when I was in high school, so like a good 15 years ago. + +I had been active in forums like IRC and stuff like that before, but that was one of the first places where I really got to know other people—and kind of at a time where there weren't a lot of these remote collaboration tools, in the same way, so even the way I knew them is so different. And I think in a way I'm lucky to know people I work with remotely now. So I felt like I knew these people well, because we just posted in forums together, you know, and you kind of got to know who they were from that. Maybe it came a little bit to, like, say somewhat Something Awful was for folks. I just sort of eventually stopped making mods. That's kind of how I stepped out of that community. Which, in hindsight, feels a little sad. + +**GREG**: I had something actually in mind. With Liz Barry I had been organizing this process of discussing this phenomenon of emergent, spontaneous, civic hacking disaster responders. And I just published this piece yesterday that that shares principles that we articulated for network-centric crisis response. My own experience during Hurricane Irma, I wasn't in Miami, which is where I'm from and where I am now, but I was watching the storm as it emerged and headed right at us and I set up a Slack. I saw a whole bunch of people talking about how the storm was coming, but in different forums. And so I set up a slack for people who wanted to prepare. And within a couple of days there were like, 700 or almost 1000 people in it. And they were doing all kinds of things. And I felt responsible for this space that I'd set up. And so I was working 18 hour days, to just, like, manage all the things that all these people were doing. But you know, a lot of which were actually like, not very good ideas. All really well intentioned, but a lot of times, people just came up with something and they're like, let's get to work. And let's, you know, put this data together and it was just like, Who did you talk to? Who said that was a good idea? You know, how, like, blah, blah, blah. And I just had a really challenging experience trying to organize this community and Slack. As fun as it was as it was coming together, I had very few tools at my disposal for sorting through noise and for evaluating the quality of different kinds of things that were going on. And it was only through connecting with other organizers who were experienced with this kind of community curation and network organizing that we got some measure of control by doing things– like, every channel should have a document that says what's happening in this channel, you know, at the top of the channel, and, you know, it was like we had to actually figure out how to make it work. And so I sort of walked away being like, I would like to help others learn from our mistakes so that they can make more interesting mistakes. + +**KELSEY**: That's really interesting. That's a great transition, actually to– I wanted to make sure everybody had a moment of community community enabled by these types of platforms that they could kind of hold in their hearts as we talk about these articles, which are largely pretty negative, about what it means to do moderation. The topic is moderation in general in theory, but when I picked articles, I definitely focused on digital spaces and sort of power, control, responsibility, and what we owe to each other as participants. I really thought it was interesting, Greg, that you brought up the word responsibility so quickly. Do you still feel responsible to your community? I'm curious how you handled that, too, in terms of bringing on new moderators and such. + +**GREG**: Absolutely. In the time, I felt responsible for the network that I'd convened, but also responsible to ensure that that network was accountable to members of the community. So I was spending a lot of my time going out and finding people who would never join our Slack, talking to them, and then bringing back that perspective into this platform. There must be a better way. That was partially why I wrote these principles– I didn't write the principles, I facilitated these conversations and, but having something on hand to be like, this is why we're going to go to the extra effort to hear from somebody before we put this out into the world. People just like, you know, they're, they're in Slack, and they're seeing everybody in Slack. And when I'm talking about like, why are we doing this? It's like, well, we're all here, we're doing this. There, there wasn't really a framework for how do we locate this digital virtual community in some real world context, and I did feel responsible for bridging that gap. Which made me very popular in my own Slack. + +**KELSEY**: Lourdes, do you want to talk about what you're mentioning in the chat? + +**LOURDES**: Has anyone heard the podcast Last Podcast on the Left? It's a comedy podcast about murders and paranormal stuff and conspiracy theories. On my drive from Boston to Texas, I listened to like all the episodes, and I got really into it. And I joined the the group on Facebook and I started posting a lot. And then all of a sudden, little did I know, I became a moderator. And it was a whole world like, so there was a group of mods, and you know, we had our own group. So this was another extension group. And we have this chat and the mods on purpose chose people from, like, different perspectives. So, in the chat there were these far right dudes that were really into guns. And then there is me like, far left lady of color, who was totally like, on them all the time. And, but, you know, we have this sense of camaraderie, too. And we and even a group name for ourselves, it's so weird. But this was a job. This is like a couple hours a day. And thousands of people were in this group that we modded, so and so the the reading about Facebook, the Facebook moderators, I mean, that's a whole other level. But there is some stuff that people posted and I saw and I was just like, humanity, what is up with humanity. And why are we unpaid group mods for this group like, why are we doing this? + +**KELSEY**: Would it have been better if you were paid? + +**LOURDES**: I think so. I mean, I guess the the payment was like, being "in", being friends with these people and being the cool mod in the cool group. + +**KELSEY**: Dawn, did you want to bring your chat into the conversation? There's not that many of us today. It's nice. + +**DAWN**: First, just to acknowledge that that was a lot of labor, Lourdes. I know. Yeah, it takes a lot and a lot of time a lot of emotional energy. + +Yeah, it kind of came up when I was thinking also about the Facebook article. And even the Something Awful one, which is like, or also you, I guess Something Awful touched on YouTube, it wasn't discussed, but kind of in the background in my mind was that really great article by James Bridle about like auto-generated content targeting children on YouTube, which is deeply creepy and disturbing. That came out a year and a half ago maybe. And Lisa Nakamura wrote this like article and thinking through this thing, which was like, we see these postings of all of this hateful, misogynist, racist, and deeply disturbing graphic content as aberrations. But what if we took that seriously as an expected outcome? So let's not treat it as an unintended consequence of what these platforms do. But read them as like, no, this is one of their products. And have that help think about how these spaces are built and maintained. Because I just don't actually know if I think that any of these models are sustainable when what they require is– I think what Facebook and YouTube and some of these big platforms are doing is basically trying to just throw as much cheap labor and people's dignity at a problem and hope that they're going to get good enough at automating from what they learn from that at the cost of all of these people's emotional wellbeing and see if that'll get them to a point where they expect that no one's gonna have to look at it, but I just don't think that that's going to work if you build systems that magnify or create it, where virality is encouraged. And so it's not just that one video gets posted once, it's that it gets posted hundreds of thousands of times as they mix and sort of flows through multiple channels. I just felt like that was a piece there, which wasn't explicitly addressed, but brought up in those articles. And then I like how Lisa Nakamura talks about it as a way to think about the design intentions. + +**KELSEY**: Yeah, I guess I'm thinking of, like in junior high, everybody would share those videos, those GIFs that would just go on being peaceful and nothing for a long time and then suddenly, a scary face would pop out. And there was something so delightful about it to like every 12 and 13 year old that would cause that to go viral. Even though it was like kind of awful. In response to what you're talking about with the YouTube generation of content that appeals to young children, but is kind of horrifying to adults, my niece, whenever she got access to a phone for long enough, you'd look over and she'd just be like in that part of YouTube. And it's like weird stuff, like, adults or teenagers pretending to be babies. Just really weird, like, I don't know, but something about how disturbing that is or how unusual that is. There's got to be something biological about how attractive that is to somebody very young. And I guess I wonder if that comes back to the question of responsibility to moderate. The existence of Something Awful is interesting by itself, right? Or a 4chan, like there is an audience that's explicitly looking for the sorts of things that like I in my adult life would like to be moderated out of my feed. + +**LOURDES**: As I see it, I have a couple of thoughts turning in my head. And I like well, first of all, I'm thinking of the internet, like when I was in middle school, and just how completely unregulated it was. You find really, really messed up stuff. I'm thinking of one website, I forgot the name of it, but it just has graphic images. I think this was like in 2001, 2002, during the war in Iraq. And it was just images from the war and a lot of other gross things, and and a lot of really messed up stuff that's not moderated. But I think you really had to... I was like a 12 year old stumbling upon it. It was pretty easy to get to. So this isn't a new issue. But what's new is the capitalism that is being prepared that it perpetuates and is being perpetuated by it. Like now, people make money off of this content in a way. These companies that are contracting with Facebook and exploiting their workers, there's a whole industry made from this messed up content. + +**DAWN**: That end of the article about Cognizant, one of the last lines was pretty evocative about how it's a system where the people who work there thought, this is my first step into being a knowledge worker working at a tech company, but it's really Facebook controlling costs and risk by like outsourcing the messy work of finding and training human beings, laying them off all when the contract ends. Have the vendors hit some just-out-of-reach metric and let them figure out how to get there. In one way, I agree, it's nothing new, but it does feel like it's just such an acceleration of existing patterns. That model of outsourcing risk is an old pattern. That, when combined with the scale that some of these platforms are operating at, fine tuning that's happening on them for certain behaviors or types of attention, like that whole article on Twitter's introduction of their new algorithm—they're all compounding into this acute state. + +**KELSEY**: I wonder if there's been something fruitful, we could look at in the most profit-driven version of this, which is the the articles on advertisements. I think that what's really interesting, just to get into the advertisements slightly, is that unlike, say, the Facebook newsfeed or Twitter generally, we don't really have an expectation that advertisements should be equitable. + +**GREG**: What do you mean by equitable? + +**KELSEY**: I guess, Facebook and Twitter feel to a lot of people like they're supposed to be a public forum, even though they're very literally not. But an advertisement, you know that that's because somebody paid for it to be there. I think that there's a really interesting balance there, and I don't even have an article in the selection, I'm now realizing around like the ability to buy bots to promote your stuff as though they're people or to buy people to promote your stuff as though they're individual people. + +**GREG**: Yeah, I mean, Facebook conflates, in its messaging on this stuff, it conflates the concept of freedom of speech in multiple directions. First of all, freedom of speech just means like, the government can't arrest you. The First Amendment does not apply to Facebook. Facebook can choose whatever policies it wants. So for them to say "free speech" is not really coherent. And and then yeah, like they hide behind free speech. To defend their position on allowing deceptive political advertisements. + +I have some friends who've worked at Facebook for a very long time, like since the mid aughts, since the beginning. And I've argued with them about this stuff for a long time. And those arguments over the last five years have become really touchy. But it's worth at least understanding where they're coming from. From their perspective, they have this pseudo-sophisticated view of human nature as like, A) yes, humans are flawed, and so bad things are going to happen on Facebook, but B), the marketplace of ideas is inherently good. And so though there are bad things that happen, on net, freedom of speech, people being able to say whatever they want, is good, right? It all it's all going to work out in the end, and trying to like, curtail freedom of speech, they're like, well, who gets to decide what's true? From my perspective, I'm like, that's a really interesting question. It would be worth asking that question. Let's have that conversation, as opposed to it just being like, haha! hard question to answer, so therefore, end of story. But it is really worth thinking, and I don't know, I don't necessarily have ready answers as to, how should they beside what constitutes truth. But like, it is hard, right? I don't think it's as irreconcilable as they make it out to be. But I think their perspective is bad, and I would like to see other opportunities to demonstrate that there really is a coherent alternative to the civil libertarian "there's nothing we can do" approach. + +**LOURDES**: There's a really good book that is relevant to this conversation called Words that Wound, and it's about hate speech, especially in a university setting, and it's in response to this whole libertarian idea that all speech should be free, with the argument that words can be violent, they have a physical impact and especially when it's a racist or homophobic slur or diatribe, it can actually affect someone's livelihood + +**KELSEY**: I very nearly but didn't quite include an article in the reading list around the punching of Richard Spencer. + +**GREG**: Yeah, that was effective, right? For all that hand wringing about punching fascists, the fascists were like, every time we go into public, we get punched, so we're gonna stop doing that. I think. It seems like he doesn't go into public anymore, right? It was effective. + +**KELSEY**: Yeah, I would like to see a retrospective take on that, actually. It was really hot for a minute. + +**LOURDES**: If you're doing violence, you're gonna get violence in return. I'm sorry. It's like, at that point, it's defense to punch him because he's just such a violent character. + +**KELSEY**: I guess I'm curious how platforms play into this discussion of violence and public forums and freedom of speech. Do you think that if Facebook and Twitter didn't appear to be such big civic forums, do you think that we would request one from the government, a digital space to discuss things? + +**DAWN**: There are various governments that have attempted to create those sort of platforms, but they tend to be a capture for consent or, you know, resistance to ideas. Canada is a very consultation-heavy country. So we get consulted a lot using consultation platforms. I think there's other countries that have models like that, like Decidim, on a different scale in Barcelona, I know Greece had a way that they were doing these online consultations, but like, not necessarily in this model of like a public forum that maybe Twitter operates at now and Facebook. But those places were not that in their original intent, right? One of the articles you posted shows that sort of shift in Twitter. And I think the history of Facebook is also a history of shifting and the way that Zuckerberg reformulated their mission multiple times, I guess, like sort of reflects his changing thinking on what their goal is. I think now it's supposed to connect the entire world, right? So the question about like, would people demand it, I don't know. I think that's a different model of how identities get performed or articulated at a nation level, probably not, because a lot of those are fictions anyway that are stitched together by a variety of forces. But I think that there have been very powerful more regional ways that there has been bottom up, wanting of that kind of space. But also to bring in here is the nationalized efforts, right, like people who want to nationalize some of these larger things, and/or break them apart, or the activist stakeholders who basically want to buy out Twitter and make it a platform co-op. I think there's some interesting ideas circulating around converting those spaces. + +**GREG**: Do y'all have experience with the decentralized alternatives like Mastodon? Because I tried. It wasn't so much fun. + +**LOURDES**: Oh, wait, I did try, yeah! + +**KELSEY**: Wait, Greg, what was not fun for you? + +**GREG**: It wasn't actually clear how to how to do it. I managed to do it after, like a half hour, I managed to join a, you know, a little group or whatever, like a node or an instance, I couldn't figure out how to see people on other nodes or how to communicate with them. I believe deeply in the concept of federation, right, and decentralized networks and so on, but I couldn't figure it out! If you had a community that you went there and built on, and you like, just made it work for a specific community, it seemed promising, but yeah, it was hard for me to imagine it catching hold. + +**KELSEY**: I totally understand. I have been on Mastodon since I think 2015, and I have sub 100 followers there and no one responds to anything I do, and I don't know anybody there. When you make a new Twitter account, in order to get followers, you go out and you follow like 1000 people. On mastodon, I tried to do that, and it was just like, I got nothing. But I wonder if that's what's powerful about Slack for people. You can have Twitter lists and other kind of subcommunities and subforums. But I've been I was trying to think of, like, semi-decentralized, even though it's proprietary, platforms for creation of community. And I feel like that's been Slack for a lot of people. I'm in a space called We All JS, which is a Slack community for like explicitly inclusive for different identities who do JavaScript. And they have a bunch of kind of special moderation bots and rules where if you say something, you say "you guys", for example, Slackbot will respond and correct your language, which is something that Slack explicitly enabled, for you to set up that kind of interaction. I wonder if that's actually more decentralized than Mastodon because you don't have to be a deeply committed decentralized technologist to use it. + +**DAWN**: I mean with Mastodon there's a really interesting I mean, tension there. I think there's been two waves of moves to Mastodon, which opened up some questions around it. Gab switched to using it last summer in July so the alt-right/far right had a space everyone who got deplatformed from Twitter went to build their space so they could be white supremacists. They had a different underlying tech stack, and they switched to using Mastodon servers, but like with sort of more selective roles on how to federate them, and that spawned this whole crisis, or maybe just a question, within the Mastodon community, of, do we want to federate these things? But they came as a community to that space. And so I think that became rather self-contained and functional fairly quick to those people who were kind of it was like an in-group that wanted in-group connections. There was another one more recently, I think, at the beginning of this year, where there was a lot of censorship going on in India, and a bunch of journalists actually all made a move collectively to Mastodon at the same time and were trying to think about censorship resistance and what these federated and decentralized alternatives offer. I think that opens up some of these questions around how moderation or how content works, or when there aren't one in these federated models: what some of these questions mean when there isn't a universal view, unlike Twitter, where like, you know, extensively I should I can access unless someone blocked me. And I'm logged into the platform. In many ways, I have a view that can be pretty universal of a whole platform space. But that is actually something you can definitely play with in something like Mastodon and if you come as a community, maybe it's a good community, or maybe it's a community that the existing Mastodon users don't want. You can kind of choose, I think, how porous that boundary is in and out of you. I mean, this issue has come up as well with Scuttlebutt, SSB, right. So they had some pubs where people were blocking, but the issue with how content is syndicated is people were worried that, without them seeing it, they were still syndicating content from pubs that were like, I guess kind of like anarcho-capitalist/libertarian veering into more right-wing, and I think some of the users or devices' identities, were doing alt-right or white supremacist content. So there's a lot of things there that I think are so interesting around moderation that these federated and peer-to-peer models open up. + +**KELSEY**: I'm a bit curious if folks here—so, my partner is also very into the decentralized web. And so when we one-on-one chat, it is typically through Riot, which is by Matrix and decentralized, even though It is significantly less reliable than our former platform Facebook Messenger. And I've also tried to get my family over on to Signal for our group messaging. Partly because Signal is, you know, better than using Facebook for a lot of reasons, but also partly because I just want it to work on my laptop, and I can't if they're not on it, and everyone but my sister, by the way, joined. I don't know why she wants she doesn't know why either. But I'm curious if you guys have made that kind of decision with your families or communities on which platform to be on, and why. + +**LOURDES**: For a while, I was like, only message me on Signal, but now I don't have a smartphone. So. + +**GREG**: +I did actually get my family on Slack a few years ago, which they resisted until they figured out how to embed animal GIFs. They were so mad that I was trying to get them to use this tool. And then once they saw that they could share GIFs everybody took to it. And there's like 30 channels. + +**DAWN**: Yeah, I work with a lot of different people. And I try to collaborate with a lot of people who are very value driven in how they work with technology. So think these questions about, like, how far down our own stack, or what are our tools that we use, comes up a lot. So in one organization, our main space is Matrix, I use Riot, so Matrix chat, and it's always walking that tradeoff with like proprietary versus open and decentralized alternatives. And that is probably also true in my personal life. I have a lot of Signal groups, but also WhatsApp ones. And I'm just not on some platforms, like Facebook. But I think with all the mutual aid stuff going on right now, it's kind of been on my mind a lot more. So I started like a pod in my building, and we're using WhatsApp. It's that perennial organizing problem: you have to go where the people are. I think a lot of that model, too, is also one of harm reduction, not Puritanism. You can't be like, no, we'll only talk if you first install x new tools and I don't know air gap your machine to generate your key, you gotta be like, okay, let's get working, but let's start thinking actively about how to reduce risks to ourselves and what risks we face as a individual or small group or community. I think you're seeing that right now with Zoom: all of this stuff around this sort of this little misleading 'e'. This is not end-to-end encrypted! Just sayin'. And/or privacy and some of those tradeoffs. I think that's an active tension. It's not something to be resolved. I think it's probably just often something to negotiate. + +**LOURDES**: And the other thing is, WhatsApp is global, and it's integrated with our cell phone numbers. But then it's owned by Facebook. Yeah, so going with what you're saying, Dawn, it's a whole tension that we have to face. But WhatsApp is pretty useful. + +**KELSEY**: I had some interesting conversations with my mom around what gets communicated over different spaces. I was trying to convince her to try Scuttlebutt. I don't remember why. I don't, in retrospect, think it would work super well for her, due to having no friends on Scuttlebutt. But she was talking about how on Facebook, there's a lot of stuff that she just doesn't bother posting anymore, which I think is generally true for people: once you get past a certain number of friends, you kind of don't want to post anything anymore. Or, not anything like real or raw. I guess I've been thinking about how we self-moderate on these platforms and how that kind of interplays with the moderation that's built into the platform, or how these platforms I guess nudge us to behave in certain ways towards each other. + +**LOURDES**: I have a meme that I'm gonna find that addresses this question. I can't find the good meme, but this is... the 16 candles one. + +**DAWN**: It has, what's his face? Emilio Estevez's character is Twitter. Molly Ringwald is Instagram, and then what's his face is LinkedIn. My Instagram is, I just have friends there, so I can let loose. And then my Facebook is like, just everyone in my life. So I keep it pretty restrained unless I'm in my special private groups. Even though all my data is on there, but yeah, we mold different platforms to different aspects of how we want to present ourselves to the outside world, to our audience. There's all this performativity in internet life. + +**KELSEY**: I'm trying to figure out a way to frame this conversation around ways that we could take power over these spaces. And it's very difficult. Because it's like, I can't suggest anything, you know? + +**DAWN**: I mean, I think that's again, I just been really interested. This is not my project, but were I in the mood to suggest research projects to people, I actually think revisiting what moderation means, in some of these shifts in peer-to-peer systems that authenticate identity per device as opposed to in some other ways, but you verify it, is quite interesting. thing. So like, you know SSB, you generate a keypair, it's tied to a device. So you see people have multiple identities on SSB that are actually just like, this is my phone. And I don't do it, but it'd be like dcwalk-laptop, dcwalk-mobile, or something. And what gets I get like identified with you or associated with you, and what "you" is, when that changes, I think that really opens up how you want to think about some of these questions of moderation. And they actually have a really lovely, you know, I don't know, if you if any of you have read, I don't know if this was a previous reading topic, the principles that the Scuttlebutt community has defined but they have this concept where they talk about near moderation, in the, I think is right beside where they talk about interdependent abundance, which is also lovely. So yeah, like I say, I think they're really trying to get at opening up some of these topics from a very different angle that maybe comes from different architectural choices, but I think can speak back in cool ways too. + +**KELSEY**: That's really interesting. That would have been a great reading. It reads as maybe directly coming out of influence from Enspiral, if you know them. + +**DAWN**: Yeah, there's a lot of overlap there, in terms of early people in Scuttlebutt and Enspiral. The other thing I would say is like a power take-back mechanism that comes out of some of the mutual aid stuff is like just even visibility, right? I think people have flags, when people are going and doing this more pod-style or neighborhood-level collaborating and working to each other, like those don't surface or get brought up on a single platform, the model that Facebook is perpetuating is this universal space. I think that many scholars have really, very convincingly critiqued that what the problem is with was framing or designing for a universal, and I think that that model doesn't work. So I feel like thinking about ideas like federation probably are better represent a more pluralistic approach to like, a lot of different people all over the world connected rather than like a universal platform. + +**LOURDES**: So what does Federation mean? + +**DAWN**: I've been talking a lot. I can do an explanation, but I know Greg, you said you're interested in it. So do you want to? + +**GREG**: Federation, as I understand it is like, you have a lot of different semi-autonomous systems that are a part of one system. One distinction that I think is really important, although sometimes I think these get fudged, is the difference between federation and confederation. A confederation is sort of like allies who aren't necessarily formally bound to each other. Whereas federation is like, actually, we are members, we are bound by specific set of rules. Sometimes that distinction, I think, when talking about networks, is not always so clear. The United States is a federation of states. The states have their own governing scopes and processes, but the federal government sets some standards and does some things on their behalf, collectively. And so, a federated network, it's not always clear to me whether a federated network is like, whether there issome sort of central organizing entity, or whether a federated network just means, like, there are different nodes that can communicate to each other using common protocols, but they're not necessarily actually bound through some sort of central coordinating entity. + +**LOURDES**: I'm just thinking Star Wars. + +**GREG**: Like the Empire versus the like the Federation. From like, the first three episodes. + +**LOURDES**: Yeah, like the Galactic Federation, they communicate with each other, but they usually stay out of each other's business unless it's to defeat the Empire. + +**GREG**: Yeah, I think Star Trek, as well like Star Trek has highly functioning Federation. + +**LOURDES**: Wait, is that the Galactic Federation? + +**DAWN**: No, that was Star Wars but there's different federations depending on where you are in the Star Wars timeline. + +**KELSEY**: But I do think that's actually a really valuable point. Especially, like, Greg, what you're talking about with not being sure in a decentralized technology context, whether we really did mean federated in the sense of having some powers delegated to a unifying authority. I think that's super interesting. I don't hear that discussed much. + +**GREG**: I'm really interested in how Americans seem to have lost the capacity to understand the concept of federation. Like, Americans do not understand this concept. And when you talk about federation, it makes them very uncomfortable, I find, which is so bizarre because like, we were the first to really do it. Not the very first. The Native Americans actually did it before us, but like, that's the whole American idea, is that you have local, state, federal, and and we just don't really understand that culturally anymore. + +**LOURDES**: Do you think it has to do with how we see subjectivity and shared values? In my mind, a federation would be held together by shared values, but in the US, we're so into subjectivity. And you know, the idea that there's no universal morality, but it's like Dude, there is. You know, hurting other things and people is not moral. But yeah, I think it's the shying away from it just like with the freedom of speech thing, with colorblindness, shying away. + +**GREG**: It's really interesting that you hone in on values there. I study the commons, governing the commons, the whole field of common pool resource management that's largely associated with Elinor Ostrom, the Bloomington school, and in the last 10 years, there's become a subfield that focuses on knowledge commons and digital resources as commons even though traditionally these are these are fields that study, like, watersheds and fisheries and woodsheds, natural resources systems, but there are definitely some similarities. But the tricky thing is when it comes to digital commons, for about 10 years, I think the open source field had a lot of hype and tooted its own horn a lot, but got a lot of things wrong. And I was finding that as an organizer who was totally sold on the "here comes everybody" Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks approach. And then once I started doing these projects, I'm like, this is all like, this doesn't work. And I was trying to figure out why, and when I started reading Ostrom's stuff, which is super technical and jargony and boring, and it's also like the most important stuff, she has a set of principles for the design of institutions that can sustainably share resources. Principle number one is boundaries. And this was really tricky for open source and open knowledge communities to wrap their heads around. And when I was talking about Ostrom's work like with real anarchist hacker types, they just get immediately turned off by the notion of boundaries, because the whole idea is like, a network is more valuable if more people are in it, so how would you set up boundaries? And I actually think that the key is to understand that the values set the boundaries. The values help a community determine what's in and therefore what actually must be—even though this is an open network, if you're not in line with these values, then you're out. And we have mechanisms to remove them. + +**KELSEY**: I'm resonating a lot with that. And I'm trying to figure out which part of that to discuss. One of the things that I see in in open source—I'm a lapsed maintainer of an open source project called Tessel, which is hardware which people are continuing to buy, but I think I might be the most active maintainer, which is not good. And there's a sense of responsibility that is hard. But then there's also this sense of, like, we really did have this very embracing approach to maintainership. Which is to say anyone could show up and say, hey, teach me how to use GitHub so that I can be a contributor and we did this sort of radical yes to that. But I would definitely not recommend that to your average open source project. And I think I've talked about this with Rob within EDGI a bit, but different open source projects have different meanings when they say open source, and that's okay. It has to be okay to say that, because the maintainer is not—first of all, the maintainer is typically not getting paid. It is not their job to, A) make your feature, B) accept your pull request, C) listen to you talk about what you do and don't like about the thing they gave you for free. Open source can just mean I let you see it; open source can mean I let you suggest things but not contribute; it can mean I let you contribute; it can even mean I help you contribute, but that substitution is frequently not made. And I think part of that has to do with it being still kind of a new field. But part of it also has to do with people coming in with too much idealism. And I say that with a cringe in my body. But boundaries matter a lot. If you can't make any, you don't have anything meaningful inside of them. + +**LOURDES**: I'm thinking about the beginning-of-the-internet stuff. Like I'm sure people have read You Are Not a Gadget, that book by Jaron Lanier, and the whole idea that the internet was some sort of anarchist idea, or vision, that then became co-opted by capitalism and by our ideas of what a computer interface should look like, of a group of people's idea of what a computer interface should look like is what people are in are now interacting with for, now, decades, like the whole idea of a file folder, the fact that we store our information that way. And I don't know where I'm going with this, but I think having no boundaries or set of principles going in, allows other principles to take over. I think that's how a lot of the technology we've built has become co-opted by systems of surveillance and advertising and capital. + +**DAWN**: I mean, I think with some of that stuff around early networks, there's also historiography around how ARPANET and internet unfolded is like really gnarly as something that I've been reading a lot about for my dissertation, but I think that there's also just a way that it unfolded that actually speaks to kind of having an intentional flexibility that got kind of like recast in ways that were maybe unintended. And so I do think that there was sort of like an underdefinition of certain values that allowed them to be kind of empty buckets that could be filled with a lot of discordant things. And I think that that is a hard problem, or that's a problem that I'm interested in, is sort of these projects that are very value-driven, but still use these like flexible terms like decentralization, which kind of like stands in for multiple different values. But it's sort of like thinking about how you pair that with other values that actually give shape or a definition or a trajectory to your work or actually speak to the types of social change that you're pursuing, that is what I'm interested in. + +Kelsey, I was just wondering, I was thinking about when you were shaping these readings, I was wondering about how you were thinking about, I guess, power and moderation and community. Or if there's another piece of that, that it feels like we haven't touched on yet. Just thinking about how you maintain spaces at a much smaller level. There's a lot of "moderation" work that never counts as moderation work, which is actually just maintaining social ties. And I guess that was something that was in my mind, is what is formally or has to formally be understood around moderation, and what are these other ways that— you talked about consent, or I think that's in the title— if there's something you want to touch on that. + +**KELSEY**: Yeah. Actually the one article we haven't really touched at all is Human Centered Design Considered Harmful. + +**GREG**: Hell, yeah. + +**KELSEY**: This is so interesting. I'm excited that there is an article about this; I was expecting to have to go and look for articles around how, like, notifications and badges and stuff draw from casinos. Are you familiar with this? + +**LOURDES**: I didn't know that. + +**KELSEY**: Like, there's there's addictive design patterns that are built into a lot of different apps and notification styles. I think someone recommended this one in GitHub and said, maybe even you, Dawn, around around human centered design, and how things that begin— I don't know, I'm seeing the broader pattern of things that begin with these really genuine intentions, like the creation of a community that needs to talk to each other, can turn into these crazy things when with these other interests, influences, and, you know, people, when people get involved, it gets messy, but also when money gets involved, it gets warped in this weird way. What did you guys get out of this? + +**GREG**: Yeah, I've been waiting for an article like that for a long time I find the user-centered design discourse maddening. Which isn't to say it can't be useful as a tactic for a certain phase of a process, but it seems to have been a huge miseducation for an entire generation of would-be do-gooders, to just like, be like, well, we just have to think about, like, who the specific user is and how do we design for them, and it just involves this whole process of simplification. I understand the objective of that process, but when you're dealing with things like infrastructure and complex systems, that process of simplification is a process of erasure. And it's eventually going to come back to bite you in the ass. You're probably going to fail, or if you succeed, you're going to end up becoming a part of somebody else's problem. By just starting with human centered design principles. I just shared this set of principles that I found last month, society centered design principles, which may be a helpful corrective, although I really only read through it once, but I was like, yeah, this is what I want to see in the world. + +**LOURDES**: Also, I just received Sasha Costanza-Chock's book Design Justice, and I started reading it, and I think their argument is right on point, and we've been drawing a lot from it in EDGI with the Environmental Data Justice group, that design really needs to happen from the bottom up instead of top down and through capital surveillance. But what also resonated me with it was his argument about anthropocentrism. That this, you quote, Human Centered Design is anthropocentric and ignores everything else in the world. It reminded me of a geographer, I forgot who it was. And it's a jumble in my head, I can't really articulate it, but like, turns the ideas of anthropocentrism on its head, and critiques the whole mainstream environmental movement as anthropocentric, because with ecological systems, it's saying, we need to take care of the wild and of the wilderness because we're humans, and we need to survive instead of looking at environmental justice issues, which is not anthropocentric. It's more society-centric. I'm going on a tangent, but I think what's weaving these together is this idea of a collective moving towards collective-oriented design and thought, in decisions as opposed to individual and alienated decisions that will destroy the world. + +**DAWN**: There's been some really good critiques of user-centered design. I think a lot of design scholars would also, more broadly than these narrow terms like human-centered, user-centered, that just like speak to in design, especially kind of coming up with some industrial design, an operationalizing tendency, which turns focus to product and then like thinks about an individual engagement with the product as the site to design for. + +That Design for the Real World book is like an early hot take, which is pretty fun. You see in the way theory or ideas around design get developed, I think Don Norman is like the seminal figure in design thinking and that sort of space, like kind of took a theory from psychology like affordances, about a relational approach, ecological psychology I guess. And then narrowed it down to this narrow way you think about an individual perceiving or having seen these affordances in an object. So I think there's this tendency that I actually don't know if we're at a good point to unwind. But there's a lot of really cool ways in, where people are trying to challenge that. Thinking about say, like, Sasha Costanza-Chock's work, and so Design Justice and that very participatory approach, there's that lineage of participatory design, and workplace studies stuff, which was super rad starting in the 60s and 70s. I think this is really hard. This, to me is like a thing where there's a lot of people kind of coming at it, but there aren't ways through yet that I think are reproducible. They're these micro-moments, but I don't know if we've escaped the gravity well that is getting trapped in designing a specific product. And when you have to design a thing, you just fall back on those patterns. I don't know, I found myself doing that when I do project management work. You're like, okay, let's write user stories. Personas. You just start doing that thing just because you need to move forward. + +**KELSEY**: That's definitely something we've talked about before in these discussions, is that sense of a need for momentum. And we know that we need it to stay motivated at things. But it can be the most harmful thing we do, is like, make progress intentionally. On the other hand, I get really frustrated with the bottom-up design question and the decentralization question. We can say that it's good theory all we want, but how do you deploy a thing like that without without starting at the top, I guess? + +**DAWN**: Trans-local, non-hierarchical distribution. That's it. That's the way. I actually think there are, again, the glimmers of really cool processes around that. They don't scale, because scale is part of the problem, there's a tension in that that's not resolved. + +I was also gonna say I said in the chat, so the Toronto node of the design Justice Network is starting to do a read along of the book. I think we're doing like a chapter a meeting. Garance at EDGI, known to you all in EDGI, is, I think, kind of leading it with Victoria, who is an old Design Justice Network person. There's a crew in Toronto. And it's all online now obviously, because of the moment we're in, so easily joinable. And part of what some of the design justice people are doing, which I think is cool, is doing this like reflective process of projects they work on, applying or thinking through the design justice principles, and doing a retrospective. So I feel like that is a nice model for trying to notice that lag and do rethinking work, trying to weave back principles and practice. + + +## Chat log +00:04:41 D Walker: sorry I missed what's going on but hoping things are okay as can be Kevin <3 +00:07:54 Lourdes Vera: totally added 1 cent! +00:11:24 Kelsey Breseman: https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw?both +00:18:25 Greg Bloom: https://medium.com/@greggish/introducing-the-principles-of-equitable-disaster-response-89f0e2b44de9 +00:21:18 Lourdes Vera: I forgot to mention I was a mod for the last podcast on the left group on facebook and it was crazy +00:25:38 D Walker: I always think of that Lisa Nakamura article about Glitch Racism in the context of the kinds of content that gets posted +00:25:43 Kevin: Sorry all, gotta cut early, but so nice to see friendly faces for a bit and nice to meet you, Greg. Thanks for joining! +00:26:59 Kelsey Breseman: omg my niece seriously got into that stuff too +00:27:07 Kelsey Breseman: she’s 5 now +00:54:53 Lourdes Vera: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/747245763149860665/ +00:58:34 Kelsey Breseman: https://scuttlebutt.nz/docs/principles/ +01:08:11 Greg Bloom: Through a series of “SustainOSS” events, I helped develop these principles for open source community governance (based on Ostrom’s principles for governing the commons): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OLjzRT9u-vjswnVj4AVYtmI8-eYkQPszigkYEkzcH-k/edit +01:09:41 Kelsey Breseman: oh wow maybe I met you at the SustainOSS event at Github a long time ago? +01:11:06 Greg Bloom: oh yeah! the first one! +01:14:34 D Walker: There are a bunch! And some great old design crank takes on this!! +01:15:25 Greg Bloom: Have y’all seen these, i think it just came up recently - https://societycentered.design/ +01:17:21 D Walker: Lourdes! all! the design justice toronto node is doing a chapter a meeting read-a-long! +01:19:47 Lourdes Vera: I wanna come! +01:23:28 Kelsey Breseman: that would be really cool! Want to send out over the mailing list? +01:24:59 Greg Bloom: @greggish \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md b/notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3c29012 --- /dev/null +++ b/notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md @@ -0,0 +1,67 @@ +# Data. Together. Let's read about it + +## Data Monopolies (May 12) + +[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/9RovyYAuPds) + +## Intro +Most of our data and information is controlled by a handful of companies. How did this come to be, what are examples of responsible and irresponsible holding of this power, and how do we imagine we might slip the trap of data monopolies? + +## Readings +**Anti competitiveness, and how did we get here?** +* Modern day monopolies: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-u-s-businesses-want-trustbusting-11570803088 +* Teddy Roosevelt Would Not Understand the E.U.’s Antitrust Fine Against Google: https://www.newyorker.com/business/adam-davidson/teddy-roosevelt-wouldnt-understand-the-eus-antitrust-fine-against-google +* Anti trust in the EU/US: ftp://ftp.zew.de/pub/zew-docs/veranstaltungen/rnic/papers/WernhardMoeschel.pdf + +**What are the things we worry about with monopolies?** +* Economic / social / political bads as outcomes of monopolistic power +https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after-google-removes-view-image-button-bowing-to-getty/ +http://press.gettyimages.com/getty-images-files-competition-law-complaint-against-google/ + +**Data Monopolies in a COVID era?** +* Contact tracing and privacy? +https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/1/21243977/gop-senators-contact-tracing-data-coronavirus-covid-19-privacy +* Data Privacy bill in response: https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2020/4/wicker-thune-moran-blackburn-announce-plans-to-introduce-data-privacy-bill +* Contact tracing proposal from Apple / Google +https://www.blog.google/documents/66/Overview_of_COVID-19_Contact_Tracing_Using_BLE_1.pdf + +**Optional bits to play around with for discussion:** +* Can data monopolies be a force for good? +https://dataforgood.fb.com/tools/disease-prevention-maps/ +* Google/FB/Apple reports about data movement +https://visualization.covid19mobility.org/ +* More reading on modern monopolies: https://www.newstatesman.com/goliath-matt-stoller-review + +## Themes +* Anti competitiveness, and how did we get here? +* Anti trust in the EU/US +* What are the things we worry about with monopolies? +* Data Monopolies in a COVID era? +* Can data monopolies be a force for good? +* Monopoly vs centralization +* Impact on freedom + + +## Notes +* Pure consumption vs what bads result from monopolies +* Value of innovation: end in itself vs to the end of reduced consumer prices. What do we measure? +* We care because we believe in some moral harm +* The existence of antitrust laws is an admission that we don't think unbridled capitalism is a good +* Failure to "price in" certain problems/existence of externalities +* Bezos masterful on getting around current concept of monopoly +* What exactly is a data monopoly? +* Market position around data services around which an entity has full control +* Role of open source? +* This is not a pricing issue, this is a power issue. And how is that power leveraged? +* Monopoly from what context? User context, regulatory context? +* Is it a monopoly, or is it an economy of scale? E.g. apple has an economy of scale, they're hard to compete with but you can. +* Monopoly: when an actor in a market uses position to diminish competition +* In what contexts is a data reservoir a pure power aggregator which precludes the formation of alternatives +* Data is a resource; the market is publicity +* Economic framing perhaps unhelpful. Problem that matters the most is the holding of power that by nature continues to concentrate + +## Discussion + + +## Chat log + From 8145cc1473ee3b85705f8682ee81d87e229af6e9 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Breseman Date: Thu, 28 May 2020 23:35:07 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 42/65] updates linking, adds chat log to last discussion, fixes date for june --- README.md | 4 +- .../3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md | 95 +++++++++++++++++++ 2 files changed, 97 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index f334dca..173884d 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -27,8 +27,8 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in - [Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice](#algorithmic-racism--environmental-data-justice) (March 17)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/0Vg-A9eK-14)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md)   - [Content Moderation and Consent](#content-moderation-and-consent) (April 7)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/Sb9pJfypvfg)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/2-content-moderation-consent-2020-04-07.md)   -- [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (May 12) -- [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human) (June 2) +- [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (May 12)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/9RovyYAuPds)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md)   +- [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human) (June 9) - [Private Data & Policies](#private-data-policies) (July 7) - [Polity](#polity) (August 4) diff --git a/notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md b/notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md index 3c29012..9e41d64 100644 --- a/notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md +++ b/notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md @@ -64,4 +64,99 @@ https://visualization.covid19mobility.org/ ## Chat log +00:14:18 Kelsey Breseman: January! +00:14:24 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: IN THE BEFORE TIME +00:14:34 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: :facepalm: +00:15:23 maceo.mercey: don't make too much of an effort o nthe bullshit front. +00:18:21 Kelsey Breseman: https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw?both +00:20:00 Peter Abrahamsen: rainhead +00:23:03 maceo.mercey: I htink you start is good +00:23:40 Kelsey Breseman: Apparently it was Bork who did that? Or at least that’s what Goliath suggested +00:25:13 Kelsey Breseman: this is the key article for that https://www.newyorker.com/business/adam-davidson/teddy-roosevelt-wouldnt-understand-the-eus-antitrust-fine-against-google +00:28:17 Kelsey Breseman: I like it bc it’s two potentially valid takes +00:34:20 Kelsey Breseman: lol just read The Shock Doctrine in which Klein gives a litany of all the places Friedman’s thought has caused massive harm +00:34:33 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: omg that book +00:34:41 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: pinochet +00:37:36 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: oOooOOOOOoooo +00:37:37 Kelsey Breseman: good question +00:39:26 Jonathan Victor: https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/ +00:39:31 Jonathan Victor: (Not in the reading) +00:43:11 Kelsey Breseman: for varying connotations of “amazing" +00:43:25 Kelsey Breseman: was wondering if that would come up +00:45:47 maceo.mercey: for me the issue is: in what contexts is a data reservoir a pure power aggregator which precludes the formation of alternatives -- and I personally care less about what happens in the market than what happens in other parts of our lives. +00:46:33 Kelsey Breseman: “People You May Know"? +00:46:51 maceo.mercey: so you are the source of truth about yourself, and that means fb can never have a monopoly? +00:47:06 Peter Abrahamsen: data as commodity -- Facebook data isn't a commodity +00:47:10 maceo.mercey: peter did you have a hand up? +00:47:15 Peter Abrahamsen: meh +00:47:45 Kelsey Breseman: how ‘bout Google+ +00:47:52 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: to me, that’s an “dataset of scale" +00:48:37 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: totally, the “right to be forgotten" +00:52:05 maceo.mercey: I think that's a real questin. I wonder too. Maybe we need better examples +00:52:38 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: chronological tweets plz +00:53:13 maceo.mercey: b5 you next +00:53:17 maceo.mercey: and kelsey +00:53:54 maceo.mercey: credit score seems like a really good examle to me. +00:53:57 Kelsey Breseman: want to revisit centralization vs monopoly (esp in gvt context) +00:54:20 Peter Abrahamsen: what market is being monopolized in the case of credit scores? +00:54:30 Peter Abrahamsen: or social security numbers +00:54:31 maceo.mercey: so maybe a good question is: why do we tolerate the ssn monopoly? +00:54:42 Kelsey Breseman: define “we” +00:55:52 maceo.mercey: and "facebook is terrible" may be better grounded in other features, many of them easily enumerable. +00:57:23 Peter Abrahamsen: data is a resource; the market is publicity +00:57:37 Kelsey Breseman: oo I want to hear that expanded ^ +00:59:34 maceo.mercey: b5 has a hand +01:00:58 maceo.mercey: so now we're getting closer to dweb style arguments. source of truth +01:01:05 Kelsey Breseman: I’d say gvt is not a monopoly bc their mandate is to serve the people &&! they are accountable to democratic election, unlike a company +01:01:48 Kelsey Breseman: to the extent we believe that’s true, SSN monopoly is fine yeah? +01:01:57 maceo.mercey: i disagree -- govt's have monopolostic power overe.g. violence. that claim to authority is central to the operation of the state. +01:02:13 Kelsey Breseman: ^ +01:02:40 maceo.mercey: freedom of hte indivudual and the *social good* maybe +01:02:48 Kelsey Breseman: for the greater good +01:03:30 maceo.mercey: we're in a crazy moment. +01:04:04 Kelsey Breseman: sounds like what Matt’s saying in chat a bit tbh +01:09:57 maceo.mercey: brendan has to put a quarter i nthe swearing jar +01:10:10 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: HAh! +01:10:13 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: I will +01:11:21 maceo.mercey: so why do we call that monopoly? +01:13:10 Kelsey Breseman: I mean, they bought all these other companies +01:13:12 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: google is infamously short on info about your social graph +01:15:31 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: jonathan we don’t have a good way to get your hand +01:15:35 Kelsey Breseman: free/“free” +01:15:35 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: (if you have a thought) +01:15:42 maceo.mercey: yes I was thinking tht too. +01:16:19 Kelsey Breseman: ha well otherwise we’re just talking about decentralization again +01:17:34 Kelsey Breseman: the “can you walk away from it” metric? +01:18:31 Kelsey Breseman: comes back to Obfuscation: A User’s Guide to Privacy and Protest +01:19:48 maceo.mercey: that's cause apple is such a great affective manipulator +01:20:09 maceo.mercey: so you don't feel owned, maybe +01:20:15 Peter Abrahamsen: I trust Apple more than Google or Facebook, because I feel I understand their motivations better +01:21:51 Kelsey Breseman: is this like why you’re not supposed to let a guy buy your dinner +01:22:01 maceo.mercey: ^ I hink so +01:22:58 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: literally, what does facebook even do +01:23:01 Kelsey Breseman: tbh it’s not that good +01:23:20 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: you can geotarget on facebook for $1000 +01:24:49 Peter Abrahamsen: incompetence shouldnt' be reassuring +01:25:02 Kelsey Breseman: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45029192-a-human-algorithm +01:25:23 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: I’m thinking a lot about the right to be forgotten +01:26:47 Kelsey Breseman: the growing sense that we can be easily manipulated +01:27:42 maceo.mercey: the squirrels under my roof are massing troops and tanks and preparing an invasion of my room. +01:27:50 maceo.mercey: it's distracting +01:28:07 Peter Abrahamsen: invite them in, it'll be adorable +01:28:26 Kelsey Breseman: also it feels like we’ve been letting all this stuff be tracked forever but … smartphones were post-2000, that’s not v long ago for us to know much +01:29:02 Kelsey Breseman: the right to accidental forgiveness +01:29:20 maceo.mercey: it's not just culture, right? it's part of what makes action possible. ty cataloging every bad thing you did, then seeify ou cna wake up and getout of bed he next mrning. +01:30:08 maceo.mercey: I'm gonna have to go right at 7 my time +01:30:09 maceo.mercey: 4 yrs +01:30:33 Kelsey Breseman: thanks for facilitating! Want to help us wrap up, or delegate? +01:31:20 maceo.mercey: finish your thought! +01:31:41 maceo.mercey: oh my god they are so close to breaking in, I can ehear htem. +01:31:52 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: lawl +01:32:03 maceo.mercey: i thought so too +01:32:03 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: this has been a delightful discussion! +01:32:29 Kelsey Breseman: a data together classic, not reading the readings +01:32:36 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: ^^ +01:33:08 Kelsey Breseman: https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/74 +01:33:38 Kelsey Breseman: Trust +01:33:41 Kelsey Breseman: not antitrust From b4b77669ddb8dea1f08b9d61e41901d524d1c2a3 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: dcwalk Date: Sat, 30 May 2020 16:34:25 -0400 Subject: [PATCH 43/65] Add trust readings --- README.md | 9 +++++++-- 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 173884d..02d36d7 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -108,12 +108,17 @@ Most of our data and information is controlled by a handful of companies. How di * More reading on modern monopolies: Harry Lambert, NewStatesman (2019): [Matt Stoller's Goliath: the rise of big tech](https://www.newstatesman.com/goliath-matt-stoller-review) ### Trust (Cryptographic and Human) -**June 2** +**June 9** New technologies attempt to free us from (data) monopolized spaces, but does cryptographic trust truly map onto or enable better human-to-human (or human-to-company or human-to-technology) trust? **Readings:** -[Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/74) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. +* [Optional] doteveryone. (2020). _Executive Summary **only**_ from [People, Power and Technology: The 2020 Digital Attitudes Report](https://www.doteveryone.org.uk/report/peoplepowertech2020/) _for a take on trust in the technology context more broadly_ +* Wikipedia contributors. (2020, May 15). [Trust (social science)](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trust_(social_science)&oldid=956870314) +* Satoshi Nakamoto. (2009). _Introduction **only**_ from [Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf) _for the thing that kicked off this wave of trust-free technology_ +* Libra Association Members (2020). _Cover Letter (pp. 1-3) and Libra Association (pp. 24-26) **only**_ from [Libra White Paper v2.0](https://libra.org/en-US/white-paper/) _for a view on gatekeeping and trust_ +* David Cohen and William Mougayar (2015, Jan 18). [After The Social Web, Here Comes The Trust Web](https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/18/after-the-social-web-here-comes-the-trust-web/) +* Finn Brunton (2019). _Chapter 3 (pp. 33-46) and "The Trust Bulb" in Chapter 10 (pp. 165-170) **only**_ from [Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists who created Cryptocurrency](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691179490/digital-cash) ### Private Data & Policies **July 7** From 84113214065ab5bfcdab911b426055313c9bbfda Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Breseman Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2020 17:04:36 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 44/65] adds notes minus transcript and updates readme --- README.md | 2 +- notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md | 146 +++++++++++++++++++ 2 files changed, 147 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) create mode 100644 notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 173884d..2108b84 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in - [Algorithmic Racism & Environmental Data Justice](#algorithmic-racism--environmental-data-justice) (March 17)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/0Vg-A9eK-14)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/1-algorithmic-racism-edj-2020-03-17.md)   - [Content Moderation and Consent](#content-moderation-and-consent) (April 7)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/Sb9pJfypvfg)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/2-content-moderation-consent-2020-04-07.md)   - [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (May 12)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/9RovyYAuPds)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md)   -- [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human) (June 9) +- [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human) (June 9)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/dgQuGy5BdAw)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md)   - [Private Data & Policies](#private-data-policies) (July 7) - [Polity](#polity) (August 4) diff --git a/notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md b/notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c7f095c --- /dev/null +++ b/notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md @@ -0,0 +1,146 @@ +# Data. Together. Let's read about it + +## Trust (May 12) + +[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/dgQuGy5BdAw) + +## Intro +New technologies attempt to free us from (data) monopolized spaces, but does cryptographic trust truly map onto or enable better human-to-human (or human-to-company or human-to-technology) trust? + +## Readings +* [Optional] doteveryone. (2020). _Executive Summary **only**_ from [People, Power and Technology: The 2020 Digital Attitudes Report](https://www.doteveryone.org.uk/report/peoplepowertech2020/) _for a take on trust in the technology context more broadly_ +* Wikipedia contributors. (2020, May 15). [Trust (social science)](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trust_(social_science)&oldid=956870314) +* Satoshi Nakamoto. (2009). _Introduction **only**_ from [Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf) _for the thing that kicked off this wave of trust-free technology_ +* Libra Association Members (2020). _Cover Letter (pp. 1-3) and Libra Association (pp. 24-26) **only**_ from [Libra White Paper v2.0](https://libra.org/en-US/white-paper/) _for a view on gatekeeping and trust_ +* David Cohen and William Mougayar (2015, Jan 18). [After The Social Web, Here Comes The Trust Web](https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/18/after-the-social-web-here-comes-the-trust-web/) +* Finn Brunton (2019). _Chapter 3 (pp. 33-46) and "The Trust Bulb" in Chapter 10 (pp. 165-170) **only**_ from [Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists who created Cryptocurrency](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691179490/digital-cash) + +## Themes +- Human and Cryptographic +- Misuse / co-option, leveraging of the term trust +- Why are the dominant metaphors for trust in tech financial? + + +## Notes +- Human and Cryptographic +- Misuse / co-option, leveraging of the term trust +- EDGI history: lack of trust in the state + - recent context with protest: who do we trust; police? no; barricades controlling access to TAZ that has been set up in Seattle + - e.g., John Brown Gun Club against Proud Boys + - A building of community trust in moment + - Not "trust" in decentralization in a concept... not sustainable, still a need for something? + - Still wanting to use twitter + - dc: follow up: "not a consensus of trust" +- Tech mixed up with trust relationships? + - dc: trustless tech, silicon valley deals with this too: any social reputation system mediates that +- Social perspective on trust: + - based on vulnerability + - tech-based trust: based on invulnerability... based on feeling comfortable that nothing is gonna happen + - ... conceptualizing it as trust the opposite of what it actually is + - Ke: building tech relationships within EDGI... the way was through: reliability... showing up for each other on a weekly basis; + - M: feedback loop of trust (and mistrust)... in interpersonal situations. A process but in terms of "tech" trust: it's a first-principles /structure over process + - B5: "real relationship of trsut starts with no protocol, evolves over time." + - lead with vuln, move forward + - in protocol perspective: reign in, define + - following defunding, a committment to work on a new thing as a way forward. An interesting display of trust? Framing of decentralization falls apart here + - different trust convo: not trusting police + - DC: there are people trying to bring dweb (blockchain) tech to this moment, srsly! PURE IDEOLOGY + - DC: protocol as model: what about ways that they can be used to create space for trust and relationship building and maintenence... indigineous STS labs and the way those do so and grow + - K: truth-default theory; following protocol as being actual good will +- DC: move into cryptographic trust, cryptocurrencies +- M: connect to last week and monopolies. Intersection of health data with blockchain + - if you abuse trust & fail to activate the negative feedback, there is limited possibility to rescind trust +- B5: notion of being de-anonymized in any PII. Implication of anonymity on platforms. + - Blockchain is a technology – you can move things off + - Z-cash: anonymization optimized in this space + - Intersects "do I trust the tech" and "what types of trust does the tech enable" + - If you can have a fully anon blockchain, can you prevent contract tracing NSA problem. Collection of individually owned things + - Libra paper speaks to antithesis – unclear why there is a blockchain +- DC: Brunton quotes (paraphrased af, obvi) +> Bitcoin is an incremental tech so the actual tech advance small, but implication connects to larger history of digital cash schemes + +> The coin in bitcoin. Bitcoin as an electronic coin is chain of signatures. No existence outside of the chain of verification. + +> Deliberate inefficiency as replacement for trusted third party. Trust in scarcity rather than in people + +- B5: contextualization of this tech. Came out of libertarian groups. Contrast w trust web article in techcrunch. + - "smart contract" invokes notion of law + - beauty of BC as a project is its scope. Digital scarcity is applied to a ledger +- DC: even in intro to bc paper, intent was nothing less than replacement of entire financial system + - Set of different underlying technological assumptions +- B5: Cryptographic definition of trust is this concept that economics can save us. If we can wrest away control of money, we can move forward and design better futures +- KB: corruptive influence of using tangibles to sub for intangibles "value" "trust" +- DC: people conflating affordances of these technologies. Bail block fund uses distributed computing to raise bail for people +- Via M: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bail-bloc-founder-says-how-monero-mining-can-help-ice-detainees +- DC: Also Black Socialists of America app "Dual App" + - a reworking of underpinnings of these technologies? +- Kelsey: RE: bailgiving money to the state + +- Kevin: enforced system of markets, use money because we have to + - blockchain models of reform not enough, not accounting for like what would happen to gift economies + +- b5: barter conomies, independence and freedom +- k: trust requires choice +- b5: co-option of language... "Trust" +- ke: circular trades and reowkring barter + +- Abolition https://theappeal.org/justice-in-america-episode-20-mariame-kaba-and-prison-abolition/ +- M: User control of rings of trust. Technical enablement of actual in-person trust + +## Discussion + + +## Chat log +00:11:24 Kelsey Breseman: I read that book on audiobook a while ago, would recommend! Can dip in and out and there’s always something interesting being discussed +00:12:10 Dawn, dc (she/her): Pad for notes: https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw# +00:13:28 Kelsey Breseman: esp compared w the illustration on that same techcrunch article +00:13:33 Kelsey Breseman: v misleading conflation +00:20:43 Kelsey Breseman: “what we want tech to be or enable re trust" +00:21:59 Kelsey Breseman: & there is really strong call for trust & accountability on the hashtag– somebody says X and people reply confirmations or ask for confirmations +00:23:04 Kelsey Breseman: trust is *earned* +00:25:03 Kelsey Breseman: role of protocol is an interesting q +00:25:16 Kelsey Breseman: protocol as guiderails for how to earn trust in a specific community? +00:26:06 Kelsey Breseman: ^ more abusable than no-protocol? +00:27:00 mash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth-default_theory +00:30:08 b5 | Brendan O'Brien (he/him): deeeeep agree +00:33:43 Dawn, dc (she/her): WHAT ABOUT BGP!!!!!! +00:40:30 Kelsey Breseman: thanks for that Novi article, really helped +00:45:08 Kelsey Breseman: how apocalyptic is that, to choose to trust scarcity rather than the reliability of people +00:47:23 Kelsey Breseman: super deontological +00:49:29 Kelsey Breseman: ugh my audio is messing up +00:50:19 Dawn, dc (she/her): The audio is on my end -- gonna see what I can do on my end +00:50:45 Kelsey Breseman: abolish money +00:51:29 Dawn, dc (she/her): #defundthepolice #exitcapitalism +00:52:43 Dawn, dc (she/her): Was also gonna say: the Black Socialist of America Dual Power app +00:54:01 mash: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bail-bloc-founder-says-how-monero-mining-can-help-ice-detainees +00:56:47 Kelsey Breseman: lots of money = proxy for lots of trust, goes with “are they poor because they’re ___” +00:57:50 Kevin @lightandluck: +1 +00:57:55 Kelsey Breseman: trust impossible if you have no choice +00:58:06 mash: +1 +00:59:39 mash: gift economy? +01:00:16 mash: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt32bcgj ? +01:02:35 Dawn, dc (she/her): Also happy to share a pdf of it +01:03:08 mash: https://theappeal.org/justice-in-america-episode-20-mariame-kaba-and-prison-abolition/ ? +01:04:57 Dawn, dc (she/her): http://criticalresistance.org/abolish-policing/ I think has a comparison of abolition and non-abolition techniques +01:05:22 Kelsey Breseman: also straight-up love that in fact its GoT because everybody watched that so they can replicate +01:08:21 Kelsey Breseman: Google+! ahahaha +01:09:30 mash: LOL +01:09:48 Kelsey Breseman: useful bc it doesn’t try to “create” trust, just lets you more accurately map the existing trust relationships you build +01:10:10 Kelsey Breseman: also why blocking someone on Fb, even now when nobody loves Fb, is still like a top-level insult +01:15:55 b5 | Brendan O'Brien (he/him): so sorry folks, gotta jet (kid needs a bath) +01:16:03 Kelsey Breseman: bye brendan! +01:16:06 Kevin @lightandluck: take care Brendan! +01:16:07 mash: byebye! +01:16:15 b5 | Brendan O'Brien (he/him): stay safe all, and thanks for the great talk +01:16:32 Dawn, dc (she/her): bye! +01:17:45 Kelsey Breseman: whole other can of worms, but they also use our individuality. Cops on roof were shining flashlights down and pointing at individuals. +01:18:01 Kelsey Breseman: unclear why, but I know they have a partnership w Amazon’s facial recog +01:22:09 Kelsey Breseman: David Graeber/Debt is sooo good on that stuff +01:22:29 Dawn, dc (she/her): thanks for catching my mic! My mouse died and is charging :(( +01:24:14 Kevin @lightandluck: credit +01:24:58 mash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years +01:25:09 Kelsey Breseman: oh right 5000 heh +01:25:25 Kevin @lightandluck: +1 that "heuristic" part stood out to me too +01:26:36 Kevin @lightandluck: +1 agree, having privacy/secret is important too +01:27:03 Kelsey Breseman: Privacy is our next topic! +01:27:11 Kelsey Breseman: https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/76 \ No newline at end of file From 6cef3569fa7c84fca522a18f051fe67278b2445c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Thu, 2 Jul 2020 12:45:29 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 45/65] update date for privacy --- README.md | 4 ++-- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 02d36d7..48e4a29 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -29,7 +29,7 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in - [Content Moderation and Consent](#content-moderation-and-consent) (April 7)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/Sb9pJfypvfg)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/2-content-moderation-consent-2020-04-07.md)   - [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (May 12)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/9RovyYAuPds)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md)   - [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human) (June 9) -- [Private Data & Policies](#private-data-policies) (July 7) +- [Private Data & Policies](#private-data-policies) (July 14) - [Polity](#polity) (August 4) ## Sessions @@ -121,7 +121,7 @@ New technologies attempt to free us from (data) monopolized spaces, but does cry * Finn Brunton (2019). _Chapter 3 (pp. 33-46) and "The Trust Bulb" in Chapter 10 (pp. 165-170) **only**_ from [Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists who created Cryptocurrency](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691179490/digital-cash) ### Private Data & Policies -**July 7** +**July 14** How have particular implementations of data privacy policies impacted humans, economics, and legal systems? What are appropriate expectations around data privacy, and who should inform, create, or enforce policies? From 1e09fca2b276a9be1b6ef37f4a18dd086d748805 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: jnthnvctr Date: Wed, 8 Jul 2020 21:16:11 -0400 Subject: [PATCH 46/65] Update README.md --- README.md | 21 ++++++++++++++++++++- 1 file changed, 20 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 48e4a29..23ef7cd 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -126,7 +126,26 @@ New technologies attempt to free us from (data) monopolized spaces, but does cry How have particular implementations of data privacy policies impacted humans, economics, and legal systems? What are appropriate expectations around data privacy, and who should inform, create, or enforce policies? **Readings:** -[Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/76) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. + +Grounding +* Brookman & Hans, Center for Democracy & Technology (2013) [Why Collection Matters: Surveillance as a De Facto Privacy Harm](https://cdt.org/insights/report-why-collection-matters-surveillance-as-a-de-facto-privacy-harm/) on why data collection matters +* (optional) Hochfellner, Lane, and Kreuter, Responsible Data Science, NYU Center for Data Science (2019) [Privacy and Confidentiality](https://dataresponsibly.github.io/courses/spring19/) slides 1-9, 14, 18-19, 35-37 definitions and introductions to challenges and tools + +Attempted and proposed solutions +* Sobers, Varonis (a cybersecurity company) (2020) [A Year in the Life of the GDPR: Must-Know Stats and Takeaways](https://www.varonis.com/blog/gdpr-effect-review/) a review of one year of GDPR implementation +* Office of the Press Secretary, The White House (2012) [We Can’t Wait: Obama Administration Unveils Blueprint for a “Privacy Bill of Rights” to Protect Consumers Online](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2012/02/23/we-can-t-wait-obama-administration-unveils-blueprint-privacy-bill-rights) Obama White House proposed approach +* O'Connor, Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program, Council on Foreign Relations (2018) [Reforming the U.S. Approach to Data Protection and Privacy](https://www.cfr.org/report/reforming-us-approach-data-protection) a critique of current U.S. approach and suggestion for path forward +* (optional) Balkin & Zittrain, The Atlantic (2016) [A Grand Bargain to Make Tech Companies More Trustworthy](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/information-fiduciary/502346/) on applying the legal concept of a fiduciary to information as well as to finances (intersection with Trust conversation) + +Other optional readings +* (optional) FTC (2017) [Informational Injury Workshop](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/events-calendar/2017/12/informational-injury-workshop#:~:text=The%20Federal%20Trade%20Commission%20hosted,Acting%20FTC%20Chairman%20Maureen%20K.&text=The%20FTC%20invites%20comments%20from,topics%20covered%20in%20the%20workshop.) insight on how the U.S. government collects public comment on this topic +* (optional) [Challenging algorithmic profiling: The limits of data protection and anti-discrimination in responding to emergent discrimination](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2053951719895805) + +#### Themes +* Intersections with Trust conversation: does it make sense to apply the concept of trust to a corporation? +* Intersections with Monopolies and Consent conversations: does "consent" really apply in situations where you have to click "ok" to access the one service you need? +* Feasibility & implementation vs principles (esp with respect to GDPR reading) +* Intersections with algorithmic racism: how do our policy choices (wrt protection of private data) potentially enable unintentional algorithmic racism ### Polity **August 4** From b34daa8abcf45217b65383e7f8be703d7408ec55 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2020 09:21:57 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 47/65] updates a link and removes themes from private data reading selections --- README.md | 8 +------- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 7 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 23ef7cd..bc3135a 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -129,7 +129,7 @@ How have particular implementations of data privacy policies impacted humans, ec Grounding * Brookman & Hans, Center for Democracy & Technology (2013) [Why Collection Matters: Surveillance as a De Facto Privacy Harm](https://cdt.org/insights/report-why-collection-matters-surveillance-as-a-de-facto-privacy-harm/) on why data collection matters -* (optional) Hochfellner, Lane, and Kreuter, Responsible Data Science, NYU Center for Data Science (2019) [Privacy and Confidentiality](https://dataresponsibly.github.io/courses/spring19/) slides 1-9, 14, 18-19, 35-37 definitions and introductions to challenges and tools +* (optional) Hochfellner, Lane, and Kreuter, Responsible Data Science, NYU Center for Data Science (2019) [Privacy and Confidentiality](https://dataresponsibly.github.io/courses/documents/spring19/Lecture4.pdf) slides 1-9, 14, 18-19, 35-37 definitions and introductions to challenges and tools Attempted and proposed solutions * Sobers, Varonis (a cybersecurity company) (2020) [A Year in the Life of the GDPR: Must-Know Stats and Takeaways](https://www.varonis.com/blog/gdpr-effect-review/) a review of one year of GDPR implementation @@ -141,12 +141,6 @@ Other optional readings * (optional) FTC (2017) [Informational Injury Workshop](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/events-calendar/2017/12/informational-injury-workshop#:~:text=The%20Federal%20Trade%20Commission%20hosted,Acting%20FTC%20Chairman%20Maureen%20K.&text=The%20FTC%20invites%20comments%20from,topics%20covered%20in%20the%20workshop.) insight on how the U.S. government collects public comment on this topic * (optional) [Challenging algorithmic profiling: The limits of data protection and anti-discrimination in responding to emergent discrimination](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2053951719895805) -#### Themes -* Intersections with Trust conversation: does it make sense to apply the concept of trust to a corporation? -* Intersections with Monopolies and Consent conversations: does "consent" really apply in situations where you have to click "ok" to access the one service you need? -* Feasibility & implementation vs principles (esp with respect to GDPR reading) -* Intersections with algorithmic racism: how do our policy choices (wrt protection of private data) potentially enable unintentional algorithmic racism - ### Polity **August 4** From 1a59e157dd65060687f7b619cd89cb630e375331 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2020 13:51:29 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 48/65] fixes link for private data & sets dates unscheduled --- README.md | 8 ++++---- 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 27439eb..7843900 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -29,8 +29,8 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in - [Content Moderation and Consent](#content-moderation-and-consent) (April 7)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/Sb9pJfypvfg)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/2-content-moderation-consent-2020-04-07.md)   - [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (May 12)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/9RovyYAuPds)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md)   - [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human) (June 9)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/dgQuGy5BdAw)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md)   -- [Private Data & Policies](#private-data-policies) (July 14) -- [Polity](#polity) (August 4) +- [Private Data & Policies](#private-data--policies) (Date TBD) +- [Polity](#polity) (Date TBD) ## Sessions @@ -121,7 +121,7 @@ New technologies attempt to free us from (data) monopolized spaces, but does cry * Finn Brunton (2019). _Chapter 3 (pp. 33-46) and "The Trust Bulb" in Chapter 10 (pp. 165-170) **only**_ from [Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists who created Cryptocurrency](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691179490/digital-cash) ### Private Data & Policies -**July 14** +**Date TBD** How have particular implementations of data privacy policies impacted humans, economics, and legal systems? What are appropriate expectations around data privacy, and who should inform, create, or enforce policies? @@ -142,7 +142,7 @@ Other optional readings * (optional) [Challenging algorithmic profiling: The limits of data protection and anti-discrimination in responding to emergent discrimination](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2053951719895805) ### Polity -**August 4** +**Date TBD** Who are the groups of people to whom we are connected in systems of governance? To whom do we owe allegiance? From 30eb31d3746ae4ef1b286d5adb6908ec56c0d53f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2020 14:26:46 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 49/65] Updates dates for final two sessions --- README.md | 8 ++++---- 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 7843900..4c60fbe 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -29,8 +29,8 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in - [Content Moderation and Consent](#content-moderation-and-consent) (April 7)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/Sb9pJfypvfg)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/2-content-moderation-consent-2020-04-07.md)   - [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (May 12)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/9RovyYAuPds)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md)   - [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human) (June 9)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/dgQuGy5BdAw)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md)   -- [Private Data & Policies](#private-data--policies) (Date TBD) -- [Polity](#polity) (Date TBD) +- [Private Data & Policies](#private-data--policies) (September 15) +- [Polity](#polity) (October 6) ## Sessions @@ -121,7 +121,7 @@ New technologies attempt to free us from (data) monopolized spaces, but does cry * Finn Brunton (2019). _Chapter 3 (pp. 33-46) and "The Trust Bulb" in Chapter 10 (pp. 165-170) **only**_ from [Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists who created Cryptocurrency](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691179490/digital-cash) ### Private Data & Policies -**Date TBD** +**September 15** How have particular implementations of data privacy policies impacted humans, economics, and legal systems? What are appropriate expectations around data privacy, and who should inform, create, or enforce policies? @@ -142,7 +142,7 @@ Other optional readings * (optional) [Challenging algorithmic profiling: The limits of data protection and anti-discrimination in responding to emergent discrimination](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2053951719895805) ### Polity -**Date TBD** +**October 6** Who are the groups of people to whom we are connected in systems of governance? To whom do we owe allegiance? From cb1329167a97c5d5eeb5abb35ed1e75352c0f6ca Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2020 17:31:49 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 50/65] Update README.md --- README.md | 4 ++-- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 4c60fbe..24f9e0d 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -29,7 +29,7 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in - [Content Moderation and Consent](#content-moderation-and-consent) (April 7)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/Sb9pJfypvfg)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/2-content-moderation-consent-2020-04-07.md)   - [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (May 12)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/9RovyYAuPds)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md)   - [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human) (June 9)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/dgQuGy5BdAw)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md)   -- [Private Data & Policies](#private-data--policies) (September 15) +- [Private Data & Policies](#private-data--policies) (September 22) - [Polity](#polity) (October 6) ## Sessions @@ -121,7 +121,7 @@ New technologies attempt to free us from (data) monopolized spaces, but does cry * Finn Brunton (2019). _Chapter 3 (pp. 33-46) and "The Trust Bulb" in Chapter 10 (pp. 165-170) **only**_ from [Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists who created Cryptocurrency](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691179490/digital-cash) ### Private Data & Policies -**September 15** +**September 22** How have particular implementations of data privacy policies impacted humans, economics, and legal systems? What are appropriate expectations around data privacy, and who should inform, create, or enforce policies? From 97df6fc05026c5b555253ba0282d330d194adee2 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: dcwalk Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2020 16:38:08 -0400 Subject: [PATCH 51/65] Add polity readings (#95) * Add polity readings * update date and readings --- README.md | 10 +++++++++- 1 file changed, 9 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 24f9e0d..3cf435d 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -142,13 +142,21 @@ Other optional readings * (optional) [Challenging algorithmic profiling: The limits of data protection and anti-discrimination in responding to emergent discrimination](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2053951719895805) ### Polity -**October 6** +**November 3** Who are the groups of people to whom we are connected in systems of governance? To whom do we owe allegiance? **Readings:** [Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/77) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. +- Grounding (volunteerism and polities in technology): + - [The Internet Relies on People Working for Free](https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-relies-on-people-working-for-free-a79104a68bcc) +- [Microstructures and Design Elements of Liberating Structures](http://www.liberatingstructures.com/design-elements/) +- [🎬 Democracy --> Sociocracy (un)learning individual and group patterns [whoel video encouraged!]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvFZL2tGLiM&t) +- [The Catalan Integral Cooperative: an organizational study of a post-capitalist cooperative](https://p2pfoundation.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/The-Catalan-Integral-Cooperative.pdf), _focus on 1. Introduction, 3. CIC in a nutshell, 9. Summing up..._ + +Other material: +- (optional) ['Indigenous people are a polity'. On sovereignty and constitutional recognition](https://theconversation.com/indigenous-people-are-a-polity-on-sovereignty-and-constitutional-recognition-44287) ## Facilitation From 796d4b12427cd301d89e0846c7b2ababdf1836c0 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kevin Nguyen <3014813+lightandluck@users.noreply.github.com> Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2020 11:37:04 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 52/65] Fix type in README --- README.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 3cf435d..3790395 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -152,7 +152,7 @@ Who are the groups of people to whom we are connected in systems of governance? - Grounding (volunteerism and polities in technology): - [The Internet Relies on People Working for Free](https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-relies-on-people-working-for-free-a79104a68bcc) - [Microstructures and Design Elements of Liberating Structures](http://www.liberatingstructures.com/design-elements/) -- [🎬 Democracy --> Sociocracy (un)learning individual and group patterns [whoel video encouraged!]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvFZL2tGLiM&t) +- [🎬 Democracy --> Sociocracy (un)learning individual and group patterns [whole video encouraged!]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvFZL2tGLiM&t) - [The Catalan Integral Cooperative: an organizational study of a post-capitalist cooperative](https://p2pfoundation.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/The-Catalan-Integral-Cooperative.pdf), _focus on 1. Introduction, 3. CIC in a nutshell, 9. Summing up..._ Other material: From b46a22a1d5dbf689a59714244df3b97debe14b1f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2020 13:16:31 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 53/65] Update formatting to match --- README.md | 13 ++++++------- 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 3790395..ab7e0e3 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -147,16 +147,15 @@ Other optional readings Who are the groups of people to whom we are connected in systems of governance? To whom do we owe allegiance? **Readings:** -[Suggest readings for this topic here!](https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/77) The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. -- Grounding (volunteerism and polities in technology): - - [The Internet Relies on People Working for Free](https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-relies-on-people-working-for-free-a79104a68bcc) -- [Microstructures and Design Elements of Liberating Structures](http://www.liberatingstructures.com/design-elements/) -- [🎬 Democracy --> Sociocracy (un)learning individual and group patterns [whole video encouraged!]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvFZL2tGLiM&t) -- [The Catalan Integral Cooperative: an organizational study of a post-capitalist cooperative](https://p2pfoundation.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/The-Catalan-Integral-Cooperative.pdf), _focus on 1. Introduction, 3. CIC in a nutshell, 9. Summing up..._ +* Grounding (volunteerism and polities in technology): + * [The Internet Relies on People Working for Free](https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-relies-on-people-working-for-free-a79104a68bcc) +* [Microstructures and Design Elements of Liberating Structures](http://www.liberatingstructures.com/design-elements/) +* [🎬 Democracy --> Sociocracy (un)learning individual and group patterns [whole video encouraged!]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvFZL2tGLiM&t) +* [The Catalan Integral Cooperative: an organizational study of a post-capitalist cooperative](https://p2pfoundation.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/The-Catalan-Integral-Cooperative.pdf), _focus on 1. Introduction, 3. CIC in a nutshell, 9. Summing up..._ Other material: -- (optional) ['Indigenous people are a polity'. On sovereignty and constitutional recognition](https://theconversation.com/indigenous-people-are-a-polity-on-sovereignty-and-constitutional-recognition-44287) +* (optional) ['Indigenous people are a polity'. On sovereignty and constitutional recognition](https://theconversation.com/indigenous-people-are-a-polity-on-sovereignty-and-constitutional-recognition-44287) ## Facilitation From 6a3e8aac804939a4b8f0850505766541191c4467 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Breseman Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2020 14:01:19 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 54/65] adds notes from private data and policies session --- README.md | 2 +- .../semester_03_2020/5-privacy-2020-09-22.md | 105 ++++++++++++++++++ 2 files changed, 106 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) create mode 100644 notes/semester_03_2020/5-privacy-2020-09-22.md diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index ab7e0e3..5bc731d 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -29,7 +29,7 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in - [Content Moderation and Consent](#content-moderation-and-consent) (April 7)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/Sb9pJfypvfg)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/2-content-moderation-consent-2020-04-07.md)   - [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (May 12)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/9RovyYAuPds)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md)   - [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human) (June 9)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/dgQuGy5BdAw)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md)   -- [Private Data & Policies](#private-data--policies) (September 22) +- [Private Data & Policies](#private-data--policies) (September 22)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/Qiw-WKBQ8A4)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/5-privacy-2020-09-22.md)   - [Polity](#polity) (October 6) ## Sessions diff --git a/notes/semester_03_2020/5-privacy-2020-09-22.md b/notes/semester_03_2020/5-privacy-2020-09-22.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..030f94f --- /dev/null +++ b/notes/semester_03_2020/5-privacy-2020-09-22.md @@ -0,0 +1,105 @@ +# Data. Together. Let's read about it + +## Private Data & Policies (May 12) + +[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/Qiw-WKBQ8A4) + +## Intro +How have particular implementations of data privacy policies impacted humans, economics, and legal systems? What are appropriate expectations around data privacy, and who should inform, create, or enforce policies? + +## Readings +Grounding +* Brookman & Hans, Center for Democracy & Technology (2013) [Why Collection Matters: Surveillance as a De Facto Privacy Harm](https://cdt.org/insights/report-why-collection-matters-surveillance-as-a-de-facto-privacy-harm/) on why data collection matters +* (optional) Hochfellner, Lane, and Kreuter, Responsible Data Science, NYU Center for Data Science (2019) [Privacy and Confidentiality](https://dataresponsibly.github.io/courses/documents/spring19/Lecture4.pdf) slides 1-9, 14, 18-19, 35-37 definitions and introductions to challenges and tools + +Attempted and proposed solutions +* Sobers, Varonis (a cybersecurity company) (2020) [A Year in the Life of the GDPR: Must-Know Stats and Takeaways](https://www.varonis.com/blog/gdpr-effect-review/) a review of one year of GDPR implementation +* Office of the Press Secretary, The White House (2012) [We Can’t Wait: Obama Administration Unveils Blueprint for a “Privacy Bill of Rights” to Protect Consumers Online](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2012/02/23/we-can-t-wait-obama-administration-unveils-blueprint-privacy-bill-rights) Obama White House proposed approach +* O'Connor, Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program, Council on Foreign Relations (2018) [Reforming the U.S. Approach to Data Protection and Privacy](https://www.cfr.org/report/reforming-us-approach-data-protection) a critique of current U.S. approach and suggestion for path forward +* (optional) Balkin & Zittrain, The Atlantic (2016) [A Grand Bargain to Make Tech Companies More Trustworthy](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/information-fiduciary/502346/) on applying the legal concept of a fiduciary to information as well as to finances (intersection with Trust conversation) + +Other optional readings +* (optional) FTC (2017) [Informational Injury Workshop](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/events-calendar/2017/12/informational-injury-workshop#:~:text=The%20Federal%20Trade%20Commission%20hosted,Acting%20FTC%20Chairman%20Maureen%20K.&text=The%20FTC%20invites%20comments%20from,topics%20covered%20in%20the%20workshop.) insight on how the U.S. government collects public comment on this topic +* (optional) [Challenging algorithmic profiling: The limits of data protection and anti-discrimination in responding to emergent discrimination](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2053951719895805) + +## Themes +- Intersections with Trust conversation: does it make sense to apply the concept of trust to a corporation? and other questions +- Intersections with Monopolies and Consent conversations: does "consent" really apply in situations where you have to click "ok" to access the one service you need? +- Feasibility & implementation vs principles (esp with respect to GDPR reading) +- Intersections with algorithmic racism: how do our policy choices (wrt protection of private data) potentially enable unintentional algorithmic racism + + +## Notes +### Grounding +* Brookman & Hans, Center for Democracy & Technology (2013) [Why Collection Matters: Surveillance as a De Facto Privacy Harm](https://cdt.org/insights/report-why-collection-matters-surveillance-as-a-de-facto-privacy-harm/) on why data collection matters + * > In terms of privacy protection, some theorists have insisted that advocates must articulate a concrete harm as a prerequisite for legislated rules + * > Others have argued that privacy protections should focus exclusively on curtailing controversial uses rather than on the collection of personal information. + * > This paper argues that consumers have a legitimate interest in the mere collection of data by third parties. That is, big data collection practices per se, rather than bad uses or outcomes, are sufficient to trigger an individual’s privacy interests. +1) Data Breach +2) Internal Misuse +3) Unwanted Secondary Usage and Changes in Company Practices +4) Government Access +5) Chilling Effects + +* (optional) Hochfellner, Lane, and Kreuter, Responsible Data Science, NYU Center for Data Science (2019) [Privacy and Confidentiality](https://dataresponsibly.github.io/courses/documents/spring19/Lecture4.pdf) slides 1-9, 14, 18-19, 35-37 definitions and introductions to challenges and tools + * *Privacy* includes the famous “right to be left alone,” and the ability to share information selectively but not publicly (White House 2014) + * *Confidentiality* means “preserving authorized restrictions on information access and disclosure, including means for protecting personal privacy and proprietary information” (McCallister, Grance, and Scarfone 2010). + * > Why confidentality important + * Promise, ethical, legal, practical implications + * Attribute, identity, residual (combining to get confidential info) disclosure + * Notification is either comprehensive or comprehensible, but not both. (Nissenbaum 2011) + * > Collection and analysis often no longer within same entity. Ownership of data less clear + * > The challenge in the case of big data is that data sources are often combined, collected for one purpose and used for another and users often have no good understanding of it or how their data will be used. + + +### Attempted and proposed solutions + +* Sobers, Varonis (a cybersecurity company) (2020) [A Year in the Life of the GDPR: Must-Know Stats and Takeaways](https://www.varonis.com/blog/gdpr-effect-review/) a review of one year of GDPR implementation + - Changing the landscape of data protection — The GDPR put a large spotlight on data protection and it’s being taken much more seriously across the board. + - Greater reliance on third parties and data experts — There has been increased hiring around data protection and GDPR law advice. + - Businesses were overall unprepared — Due to the strict penalties and open-ended nature of the legislation, very few companies felt confident in their level of compliance. + - Fewer fines have been given than expected — It seems as though this first year has been somewhat of a grace period as everyone continues to adjust their practices. + - Enforcement agencies overwhelmed with scope — There seem to be staffing shortages that hindered some agencies from keeping up with complaints and notifications. + - Mixed feelings among consumers + - Relatively minimal enforcement - seems like the success is largely self reported. + - what are we gaining for the cost incurred? + - Curious that some businesses chose to straight up leave the market + - Mixed feelings about trust that this has been propely executed. + - Notably many of the items that were supposed to be implemented seem quite fuzzy as a standard "wherever possible" +* Office of the Press Secretary, The White House (2012) [We Can’t Wait: Obama Administration Unveils Blueprint for a “Privacy Bill of Rights” to Protect Consumers Online](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2012/02/23/we-can-t-wait-obama-administration-unveils-blueprint-privacy-bill-rights) Obama White House proposed approach + * Transparency: Consumers have a right to easily understandable information about privacy and security practices. + * Respect for Context: Consumers have a right to expect that organizations will collect, use, and disclose personal data in ways that are consistent with the context in which consumers provide the data. + * Security: Consumers have a right to secure and responsible handling of personal data. + * Access and Accuracy: Consumers have a right to access and correct personal data in usable formats, in a manner that is appropriate to the sensitivity of the data and the risk of adverse consequences to consumers if the data are inaccurate. + * Focused Collection: Consumers have a right to reasonable limits on the personal data that companies collect and retain. + * Accountability: Consumers have a right to have personal data handled by companies with appropriate measures in place to assure they adhere to the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. +* O'Connor, Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program, Council on Foreign Relations (2018) [Reforming the U.S. Approach to Data Protection and Privacy](https://www.cfr.org/report/reforming-us-approach-data-protection) a critique of current U.S. approach and suggestion for path forward + * Harmonization of data + * Base-level privacy policies + * Standardization across industry of application +* (optional) Balkin & Zittrain, The Atlantic (2016) [A Grand Bargain to Make Tech Companies More Trustworthy](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/information-fiduciary/502346/) on applying the legal concept of a fiduciary to information as well as to finances (intersection with Trust conversation) + * Information Fiduciary + +> Compliance with state legislation and common law—and the threat of class-action suits and actions by state attorneys general—have become sufficiently burdensome that some companies, such as Microsoft, already have indicated that they are open to comprehensive federal privacy legislation that would preempt conflicting state regulation. Congress could respond with a “Digital Millennium Privacy Act” that offers a parallel trade-off to that of the DMCA: accept the federal government’s rules of fair dealing and gain a safe harbor from uncertain legal liability, or stand pat with the status quo. + +> The DMPA would provide a predictable level of federal immunity for those companies willing to subscribe to the duties of an information fiduciary and accept a corresponding process to disclose and redress privacy and security violations. As with the DMCA, those companies unwilling to take the leap would be left no worse off than they are today—subject to the tender mercies of state and local governments. But those who accept the deal would gain the consistency and calculability of a single set of nationwide rules. Even without the public giving up on any hard-fought privacy rights recognized by a single state, a company could find that becoming an information fiduciary could be far less burdensome than having to respond to multiple and conflicting state and local obligations. + +### Other optional readings + +* (optional) FTC (2017) [Informational Injury Workshop](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/events-calendar/2017/12/informational-injury-workshop#:~:text=The%20Federal%20Trade%20Commission%20hosted,Acting%20FTC%20Chairman%20Maureen%20K.&text=The%20FTC%20invites%20comments%20from,topics%20covered%20in%20the%20workshop.) insight on how the U.S. government collects public comment on this topic +* (optional) [Challenging algorithmic profiling: The limits of data protection and anti-discrimination in responding to emergent discrimination](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2053951719895805) + +## Discussion +* JV: really liked first article. Paper tries to frame: why do we care about data privacy? What are by-default risk items? By virtue of how these systems are constructed, you can either assume harm is introduced either when harm occurs, or when the possibility of harm occurs. +* KB: Getting things in under the wire +* JV: risks - tradeoffs. Interesting tension btw minimally regulating vs regulating before the harm occurs. What do we define as PII? How do we make it not so hard for people to implement but functional +* KB: thinking about where we do and don't desire rules/regulations. Interplay with trust. +* JV: What is the sum of the total harm we are avoiding? What is the sum of the total harm we are creating? +* KB: Is that harm distributed in ways that are sensible to compare? + +## Chat log +00:15:28 Greg Bloom: hello! +00:51:16 Jonathan Victor: I really miss the complacency :( +01:06:35 Kelsey Breseman: have to go find a charger, I’m still on audio +01:17:10 Kelsey Breseman: some of my friends have a 10-year bet going re whether then the date arrives there will be some US city where non automatically driven cars are illegal +01:18:43 Kelsey Breseman: https://www.manifestno.com/ \ No newline at end of file From 4d02225c0827f96572efdae0bbcd48667e72c3e4 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Breseman Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2020 14:02:46 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 55/65] updates date --- notes/semester_03_2020/5-privacy-2020-09-22.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/notes/semester_03_2020/5-privacy-2020-09-22.md b/notes/semester_03_2020/5-privacy-2020-09-22.md index 030f94f..a600af9 100644 --- a/notes/semester_03_2020/5-privacy-2020-09-22.md +++ b/notes/semester_03_2020/5-privacy-2020-09-22.md @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ # Data. Together. Let's read about it -## Private Data & Policies (May 12) +## Private Data & Policies (September 22) [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/Qiw-WKBQ8A4) From 7285503e7e51f687df56889c488605f0ed54e374 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2020 12:36:40 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 56/65] fix date --- README.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 5bc731d..2ecdb89 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -30,7 +30,7 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in - [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (May 12)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/9RovyYAuPds)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md)   - [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human) (June 9)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/dgQuGy5BdAw)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md)   - [Private Data & Policies](#private-data--policies) (September 22)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/Qiw-WKBQ8A4)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/5-privacy-2020-09-22.md)   -- [Polity](#polity) (October 6) +- [Polity](#polity) (November 3) ## Sessions From 374b982992963042569d3d7f21f63e968e720648 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 10:37:32 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 57/65] Adds discussion notes to data monopolies --- .../3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md | 160 ++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 160 insertions(+) diff --git a/notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md b/notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md index 9e41d64..54ceacd 100644 --- a/notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md +++ b/notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md @@ -61,7 +61,167 @@ https://visualization.covid19mobility.org/ * Economic framing perhaps unhelpful. Problem that matters the most is the holding of power that by nature continues to concentrate ## Discussion +**JONATHAN**: Yeah, I mean, so just to maybe kind of take a step back as at least the themes that I think we sort of discussed prior—One of the things that I think was super interesting as we were trying to come up with ideas for how to organize this was trying to at least have some sort of grounding on, how did we get to where we are? In monopolies and anti-competitiveness, I think there are some interesting things that hopefully we can dive into in a second, about what is good and bad about a monopoly. And I think without having that grounding, it's hard to identify: what are the bad things that can come out of what we see today? Because I do think there is a version, and especially when we think about the modern application of, how do we treat things like a COVID response, coming up with, what are the things that we're trying to protect against? And where is like, their good and where's their bad? And also monopoly versus centralization? Are those two necessarily the same thing? These are kind of interesting points. +I think the genesis of this, as we were discussing, in preparation for the call, was trying to figure out how do we get some sort of basis so we can talk about, what are ways that—and I wouldn't even argue that the three listings that we have are comprehensive, they're just like how the EU and the US historically looked at monopolies and anti-competitive work. And whether those are even sufficient definitions is maybe an interesting opening place to start, but then try to dive into if those are at least necessary, some bounding conditions, are they sufficient for like all the scope of things? Because they focus in ambiguous– well, in some ways very specific, some more ambiguous, then trying to piece out: what are the things that we think we should address? What are the things that are potentially good/bad that can come from them? And then diving into: What are we seeing today? Because I think we have a really practical example that we could talk about. + +So maybe starting at least at the beginning here with the anti-competitiveness thing. I'm not sure who was able to actually take a look or read. Is there someone who'd like to give a quick summary or high-level take from the readings? I can give my two cents: if I was to give my takeaways from the readings, how I see the differences between like EU and US and like how they think about the world. + +My understanding—and people, correct me if I have walked away with a false one—is that the way that the US has historically approached antitrust has changed pretty significantly. I think it was Milton Friedman who proposed that the way that we should consider antitrust is from a very consumer-driven lens, where the primary argument ends up being around—and I think the actual history of this, which is not in a reading, there's some really interesting antitrust case that was brought against some supermarkets that got like 10% market share or something in some region, and there was an antitrust case brought against them. And then Milton Friedman wrote this whole thing that became very popular, which was like, if it's not hurting the consumer, then why do we care, which is basically like how the US thinks about the world. + +Largely, I think the legislation that's been passed and the way that it's been pursued in courts, has been around price. And it's interesting because when we talk about consumer harm, we're talking about a specific lens of consumer harm. We're talking about it from this one kind of imperfect metric, did you pay too much or not? And I think that's an interesting contrast to the European definition. + +There's functional differences in the law as well, where the European law is not written as specifically. I forgot which article, one of them talks about this where like the two key operative words inside of the EU legislation is "for example", where they say like, this should not hurt consumers, and for example, there's a number of things that are listed, but by saying, "for example", it gives the European courts a lot of flexibility when they define what has actually violated consumer need or what is disadvantaging consumers, and that's been pretty broadly interpreted to also include things that have been stifling competition or made it less useful. Not less useful for users, necessarily, but things that would prevent one group from having too much power. + +So I think that's the high level grounding. I think both views of the world, the EU and the US, center on, we want to do things that are good for consumers. I think the definition of what "good" is, is, I think, where things are kind of fuzzy. And in the US and in the classic American forum, we think of it as the purely economic lens of the world, and not necessarily, what are the other externalities? Are we truly pricing in all the other forms of harm, whether it be fewer options, which is how the European courts have interpreted it, or does it mean to violations or potential violations of civil liberties? You can even look at other readings that were not included, like what are potential national security risks, if you think about it from, if one org has too much data, and Saudi Arabia, like they did with Twitter, pays a Twitter employee $300,000 to leak information, is that dangerous to me? + +Sorry, that is going a little too far, I think, from a grounding perspective. I'd love to hear other people's reactions or thoughts. + +**KELSEY**: That's a really great summary. The only thing that I would maybe pick on a little bit is, the US one definitely has this metric around price, versus the EU one—based on that New Yorker article, my impression was that, in both of them, the the intent was to not stifle innovation. The idea was that monopolies stifle innovation. But then it was kind of a question of, innovation to what end? And the American interpretation ended up being, innovation to the end of consumer protection, versus the EU take is maybe innovation as an end in itself. And sort of contrast that with, from the Goliath reading, there was that Brandeis quote, which is, "Anyone living under a monopoly, subject to the whim and caprice of a few self-appointed industrialists, is therefore not a free citizen," versus this concept, which is much more Friedman, that regulation of any kind is inherently bad and stifling to free democracy. + +**MATT**: I mean, I think that there are these—well, the EU/US divide, to me, in some ways is, you know, it was useful to hear, but is like, for me, sort of uninteresting. I don't care what's been instantiated as law in different jurisdictions. I am interested in what models exist for describing: what are the ills that can result from monopolistic capitalism, or just from monopolies in general? And it seems to me that there are two main conceptions at work in the conversation so far. One is purely about consumption, and the other has been described here as innovation. But it seems to me it just has a broader conception of what bads result from monopolies. So these are really two different lenses. One is, is there an economic penalty that we pay for the existence of monopoly?; and the other is, is there some form of social good which is sacrificed when a monopoly comes into being? And that social good could be economic in a broad sense—so, it could involve innovation. Or it could have a less well-defined ill effect, a kind of moral effect, on how we live, how we think of ourselves, how we relate to one another in a society. As Brandeis says, it has some effect on on freedom, whatever that means. + +It seems to me that, ultimately, this broader conception is the one that's interesting, right? Like, we wouldn't be all up in arms about the monopolies that Google and Apple exercise for the sake of $7 a month or, you know, $28 a year, like that. I just can't believe that that would, you know, get our boxers twisted in a knot. You know, I think it's the idea that there's some moral harm that comes to us as a result of living under a monopoly, and that's why we care. + +**BRENDAN**: Yeah, I think you make a lot of really good points, Matt. The broader theme is the one that's interesting. But I think that the specifics of the of, as Kelsey pointed out in chat, this idea that having these two interpretations are really important. I think antitrust is a really interesting category of work, right? It's this very strange pressure release valve for, an otherwise balanced-seeming—to some—balanced capitalist equation, right? This idea that, you know, it all works hunky dory, it's fine. But like, again, this isn't necessarily my view. But in, in the traditional interpretation of society as a functioning working thing, you have this: capitalism is great, unbridled capitalism is a problem. Generally, we need some sort of referee. Right. And that's, I think, sort of where antitrust—the existence of antitrust as a category of thoughts, as a category of laws and enforcement, the existence of the regulation that derives from that—is all, it is an admission that there's a rounding error here. There's a thing that needs to be brought in to balance this this seemingly perfect equation. + +And I think that it's really interesting to dive into, to quote Malcolm Gladwell's podcast, to descend into the particulars on this on this one and really see how it shakes out. I think the framing of "consumer good" that you see in the US is like Exhibit A of where a data monopoly—it is, as Jonathan said, a failure to price in certain problems, become really, like they sort of become a way to like carve around a lot of this. + +If you read any of Jeff Bezos, his letters to his investors, .it's a magnum opus on antitrust, right? Like he's just, he's a masterful mind when it comes to designing something that evades the current understanding of antitrust in the world. And then, I think the EU's interpretation something has been far more broad, but also like I mean, he was continually accused of being nonspecific and the sort of like, big American engines that got the Googles and Apples of the world are very frustrated with the right down to like requiring the USBC ports, or USB mini, what did they settle on for charging phones? Yeah, I think there's like a really—and I think those particulars are really interesting, and they're a really interesting point for departure, because they get you back to the the big conversations really quickly. Because they're the result of a lot of thought, right, the results of someone trying to say, just reduce it down to this. A frequent characterization of consumer good or consumer benefit is—Milton Friedman had a lot of ideas that really didn't scale well, and this this might be one of them. + +**JONATHAN**: I think one of the interesting points, just to build off what you were saying, that touches on the one specific example, and the what are things we worry about with monopolies, those two readings—basically, it's an interesting use case looking at the Getty and Google thing, where it's like, here is an example where there is a clear harm, maybe not to the direct consumer, but to the suppliers. Google is enabling the piracy, whether willfully or not, of a bunch of information. They're stealing ad revenue, too, from Getty, and that's causing material harm to all the people up that chain. And so of course the EU does what seems like the right thing and like enables getting you to actually pursue and win a case against Google, and yet that leads to "outrage" from people. And, there is a question. $7 a month is not a huge fee if that's what you were paying for Google services, but are we too cheap to even do it? Should it just be like a matter of, what is the choice and the optionality? I think about this a lot. With all the sites that have done GDPR stuff, they require you to acknowledge. We have gone from, you have no choice, to because you have so much choice, you will just on autopilot be like, Yep, okay, I just want to get to my site. I think there's a design question here. Can you even get away from it? Because if the volume of things that you need to end up doing in order to protect against some of these bad things is so high friction, people collapse under their weight. + +**KELSEY**: Just from what you were talking about, and this diverges from the readings, so I guess everybody's welcome to bullshit on this, but what do we see as the role of open source in combating that gap between, well, we don't want to pay for stuff, but also we want stuff to be good and free and not a monopoly company? + +**BRENDAN**: I think it's really dangerous. I think that burdening open source with filling some missing piece is so problematic. I think that that's the bad side of open source, this expectation that there's this untapped vast well of developer that is willing to fill the necessary gaps in our stack. It's just painful. And I think that the GDPR stuff really speaks to this. There's been how much ink spilled over the way that the regulations put out through GDPR places undue burden on small companies that are far less able to deal with this, and "oh, somebody will open source something". Yeah, but like you've said, it's a very frustrating thing. That is another issue in another queue. And another person, another burnt out developer somewhere, no thanks. That's another license change to somebody saying, we no longer can support the open source side of this. I think that's it. That's it. Yeah, that's my that's my rant. + +**KELSEY**: I'm not saying it's a solution. I'm not saying that I mean, like, it doesn't work if all open source is done for free, but it doesn't have to be the same thing. Right? I'm a firm believer in the existence of some middle ground utopia where you can have open source and paid developers. It must exist. + +**PETER**: So, the title here is data monopolies. Have we defined a data monopoly? Or is there a definition in the reading that we agree on? + +**MATT**: Yeah, I think so far we've mostly been, I've been wanting to get to a data monopoly proper instead of just monopolistic activity more broadly. And somebody else should say what we really mean by data monopolies, since I haven't thought too much about it, but... + +**PETER**: Can you give examples of what feels like a data monopoly to you? + +**MATT**: So, one thing that that Jonathan was discussing was the geographical data sets owned by Google and Apple. "Monopoly" is maybe a little too strict a term, but these are non-competitive databases for two sets of users. And the possession of those datasets confers to the owners a set of privileges, that market position in two ecosystems— that's an advantage multiplier. They have these these market positions that are already well-entrenched, and the the construction of their services around data over which they and only they have control is a way of rendering permanent their market advantages. + +So that's one way to think about that movement data. And then it's been interesting during COVID to watch them try to figure out how to deploy that data in something like the common good. And so that's sort of an example, Peter, and maybe Jonathan has something to say? + +**JONATHAN**: I don't know if we actually ever formally defined it. I think the idea of a data monopoly, as I am currently defining it in my head, is taking the ideas of like, why do we refer to it as monopoly? And that's where we're usefully grounding ourselves in, how have we thought about what a monopoly is previously, and applying it to your specific context, which is: when we think about data, and exactly what you were describing, I actually linked to something that I did not include in the cut for the reading, which is, Ben Thompson talks about this idea of aggregator theory. And he applies it more broadly than just for the specific tech platforms that are doing things with user data, he applies it to Netflix and other things as well, but I think there's a point that you made that I think really nicely intersects there. You have this ephemeral thing that you could think of as the social graph, of, how do we know each other and know other things? That's not something that is owned by Facebook, but there is a function, by us all having put in that data into this specific organization, they now sort of are claiming ownership of the maintenance of that those relationships. + +There's something to be said about how that has—there's market potential where Facebook can cut off access to other apps, and from other aspects, like economic impacts from companies that can or cannot exist or need to exist within the rule of Facebook. But I think there's an underlying issue, which is not a pricing issue. This is a power issue. When we think about, how is that power leveraged, the main issue is when you have these types of things that have a whirlpool effect, where as more people adopt, more of this data is pumped into this one monopoly, and if we don't challenge the notion that this data should be owned by an organization, then I think there's questions that fall out. What are the restrictions on power? Or do they have unbridled power? + +One of the things that's interesting, I think, that we may or may not see in this COVID era, is, there are applications for having these organizations with such a vast reach and pretty comprehensive, ability to use the data how they need to, has led to some positive social outcomes, where like Facebook is publishing data, like how fast are people spreading—or, not maintain maintaining quarantine. Google and like Apple are able to leverage those data assets to publish or create this content or large-scale contact tracing thing for the world, which is amazing. + +I think there are questions still about, how is that decision being made? There's still other questions about other consequences. And also, one thing we haven't even touched on, which I didn't even think about prior to the reading is natural monopolies as a thing that exists as well, with like utilities, where we agree that there are certain things where it makes sense to have one entity just build and maintain the thing, and there are rules and restrictions around it. But we haven't really talked about that in a tech context either. But to bring it back to your point, I think that is what I think of when I think of data monopolies. I'm thinking mainly from the user context. And that then ends up boiling down to a handful of very specific tech entities. + +**BRENDAN**: I have a definition of a data monopoly that I personally use, and it's more boring, less useful, and has a bit of a higher bar, I think. Higher bar not in that it's more valuable. I think it's important to distinguish between—the way that I understand this problem is like through the idea of, Is this an a monopoly? Or is this an economy of scale? Meaning, like, if we consider the original notion of monopoly, you could say, hey, Apple has a monopoly on the iPhone, or Apple has a monopoly on great laptops. No, they have an economy of scale. It's very expensive to spin up a company that makes laptops, and they've figured out a way to get there. I think that's kind of healthy innovation, where you see a lot of folks who can sit in garages and figure out ways to create these breakthrough things that work well. + +And then I think, a monopoly—if we use the classic thing and then sort of leverage ourselves into the data side, monopoly is quite specifically, when an actor in a market leverages their position to suppress competition. That may not be the right definition, but that's generally kind of the vibe we're working with. + +When we talk about the phrase "data monopoly", I think it's really important to distinguish those two things. And I think that I subscribe pretty heavily to the belief that all data is about people and all data has some grounding. In reality, almost everything is—all data, at some level is an observation of what we call the real world, structured into some way and jammed into a database somewhere. I think that's really important when you talk about a data monopoly, because I think for something to constitute a data monopoly, the actual correctness of the data must reside with the owner of the data, which is distinct from the observed world style of data. And I think that the Facebook example is really great. I actually don't think that Facebook's social graph is a data monopoly, because at the end of the day, my friends are my friends and I choose who they are. And if I ever in if I ever logged on to Facebook, and said, unfriend this person and Facebook said no, or if I discovered that they continued to advertise us as friends elsewhere, I would be very frustrated. I might leave Facebook. Because there, I know a thing to be true, I believe a thing to be true. And Facebook is not the arbiter of that truth. And this gets sticky, but bear with me for a second. I think it should be a very high bar for someone to say that you have a data monopoly. Monopoly should imply that, if we change this number in this database, you are no longer friends. That should be the bar for a social graph monopoly. + +**JONATHAN**: I'm going to posit that there is—to use a different example, and maybe this is a good and useful one, it's like, does Amazon have monopoly on online sales? Like, functionally? You could argue, no, you could easily stand up your own website. But like, what percent of ecommerce is going through Amazon? I think there's a similar effect. Even if you, as the user, get to modify and update the data, there is a question to: what is the ability of a competing social network or anyone else to actually create that data asset? And does Facebook by its mere existence negate that like network effect? + +Some of it is anticompetitive in the actions Facebook takes, so like, obviously look at like, what does Instagram do when Snapchat is about to release something: rip as quickly as possible. But I think there's also this lock-in mechanism as well, which is, what do they do that is kind of anti-user but pro-Facebook? There's specific actions on the platform, but I think then also, if you were to say, I need to leave Facebook, how do they enable that? Yes, you do own the correctness of the data, or if you were to turn off your profile, I think now, with GDPR, there are more rights associated with you. But there are still questions about, what has already been scraped and pulled elsewhere? Clearview AI has been in the news as super creepy on this front. Do you even have control at that point? + +I think there's then an underlying technology. So there's really two divergent thoughts, but like the first one being, maybe it is an economy of scale, and at a certain functional scale, you suffocate everyone else. The act of you building out your social network, again, is pretty high. And maybe one might argue that that's not impossibly high. But I do wonder if there is something there. And then two is, what are the choices? What sort of choices do we then subscribe to based on if Facebook has the ability to keep most of us on there and retain this information? What choices are we subjected to outside of that? From, what algorithms or value choices that are made on our behalf that get serviced? And all of this stems, I think from, they can maintain the data, or they have an ability to make it harder to migrate off of their platforms. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it doesn't meet the bar of monopoly, but it is something. I don't know what it is. + +**PETER**: Yeah, it's hard, like, there's a real loss coming out. The biggest things in relationship to Facebook is this feeling of loss of control. And it isn't just about data, right? It isn't just about data, or representation, it's about, you know, to what extent we can shape our social relationships and so forth. Where do our intuitions for monopolies come from? For me, it's the company town, the company store, and your ability to choose alternatives. And in that environment, it's pretty clear what an alternative to the company store might look like. But what service is Facebook providing? I'm sure they have some very carefully chosen narratives that their lawyers would present in answering that question, but each of us actually does use it quite a bit differently. It plays a whole bunch of different kind of roles in social life, in organizing community events, and getting your brand out there, whatever. So it's really hard to think about. I think any one of those people might be able to bring a case about how they don't have a real alternative. + +Is data central to that? I mean, I guess, is data the unit of control? Is it is it the mechanisms at the forum, I don't know. On a philosophical level, I don't really know how to grapple with this. But it is really close to my heart. In particular, that that sense of control is not just the data itself that I put in there, you know, the particular records or interactions or whatever, but my ability to shape those interactions, which is a bit more what people are concerned with, with the timeline, which is actually super disempowering. Because nobody knows even how it works. If they shape the UI in a particular way and that and that impacts how I can interact with the world, or they change the spam control or whatever, that's one thing I couldn't say, I understand that. I have no idea what's going on. I can't say, show me all of the coefficients for how much you think I like this person so I can tweak them. So I don't really know where to start I think Facebook is an especially confusing place for me to start. If we think that there's a class of things that are data monopolies, Google Maps is a little bit easier for me to grapple with. + +**BRENDAN**: I think I would posit your social security number, your credit score. Those, I think, are better examples of things that are, in fact, condoned monopolies. If someone changes yourself, security number, your life is over. The source of truth for social security numbers—when somebody looks up a social security number and whatever answer they get back, that's a source of truth. Your credit score, right? Whoever controls the association between your name and your credit score, that that is where there is an inversion between what's real on the ground, my actions, and a figure in a database and where a modification of that database has horrific real impacts that go the other way, that impact the real world, not starting from who my friends are and propagating outward. To me, those would be examples of monopolies that I think are an easier framework for understanding what a monopoly is. I think it's really important to cleave apart something that can be frustrating or bad or an economy of scale from where we need to step in from the regulatory perspective. That should be a it's a really, really, "break glass in case of emergency" moment in my mind. There should be other mechanisms to fix stuff like Facebook being terrible. + +**KELSEY**: So, coming all the way back to Peter's question, what's a data monopoly? what's become clear to me here is that we don't have a great solid definition, which I think is a valuable and unsurprising result. So I checked the dictionary online in the meanwhile, and a monopoly is "the exclusive possession or control of the supply of a traded commodity or service". I think that's from Oxford. Which is really not what we're talking about here. Brendan's definition definitely talked about active suppression, which leads me to the question of, is it possible then to accidentally or incidentally be in a monopoly if you're, if you're not being evil, per se , can you still be a monopoly? Because, kinda yeah, I think. Then there's the pragmatic definition that you can get out of the Getty lawsuit. they had this great quote, which is that the Getty folks were suing Google over this whole image available in HD thing, they were saying, well, nobody visits our site anymore because your site just finds our stuff and surfaces it to people better, which—totally sensible. And then, Google said, well, fine, we can exclude you if you want, you can either be on our site or not be on our site. And the Getty response was that that was no option at all: "allowing the harm to continue, or becoming invisible on the internet". And that's a pretty great pragmatic definition of monopoly: you do it our way, or you don't exist. + +**MATT**: I think that's important. That was an important moment because it shows—Google has monopolistic power as a search provider. That is, however, power over data. So what it fundamentally has is a gigantic database of links and how they're related to each other. It leverages that power in lots of different ways, in this case with Getty, to force conformance to its to its parameters. That's distinct from what Brendan was talking about, it seems to me, because I don't think it's the same thing as being the source of truth. I thought that, nonetheless, I was really interested in why we tolerate a government monopoly on the assignment of social security numbers. And it seems to me there are probably really good reasons to do so. Right? Which you might question if you start to question the legitimacy of the state. I don't know, I was pretty interested in both. I didn't want to drop that. But I thought that what Kelsey said there was really insightful. + +**PETER**: I can expand on that, paired up in the in the chat, in the case of Getty versus Google, Google has a bunch of data that protects it from from competition by other search engines. Getty's problem is one of publicity, and Google is the only way that you can get that. It's Google or nothing. So those are two different issues, or issues at two different levels. + +**KELSEY**: I thought it was really interesting. Just by itself, it's an important point. There's a lot of different ways that that very wise-looking quote could be interpreted. + +**BRENDAN**: Yeah, I think he did a really good job of cleaving apart the two. I think there is a classic monopoly. Today, we're talking about data monopolies. We're exploring wha this term even means; we kind of just threw it at the wall. And I think that this is the perfect way to do this. . If we spend the whole time defining a data monopoly, I think that's a really worthwhile exercise. We had some talk about the notion of data monopolies in the era of Coronavirus. I want to turn us a little bit and pivot on the idea of a social security number. And take the idea that there's a foundation of a sort of immutable thing, right? Let's use a credit score, actually, because it's better. There's this truth that is intrinsic to the world that we're trying to model with the database, right? Just basically your financial reputation. Actually measuring the raw thing is impossible. And so we use these proxies, and we write down those proxies. And then we rely on the people that keep the proxies. And so we get these sort of chains where there's a thing that is true in the world, and then there are people who are in the business of writing down that thing and becoming a proxy for truth. That sort of organization is particularly problematic when the thing that you are modeling is immutable, such as: Are you or are you not presently infected with a virus? Or, what is the current status of your health? There's a reason that we really care about healthcare data and that we have a massive amount of regulation about what you can and cannot do with it. It's the kind of information that, once learned, if it is learned truly, it can't be unlearned, because it's tied to a truth in the world. + +**BRENDAN**: I have to I have to come out and admit—I hate admitting this on this call. I have done a bit of a 180 on blockchains in the in the world of Coronavirus. I know. Because if you really think about it, if you tie this question of trust in state—for me the the frustration with blockchains has always been that they seem like a lot of work for very little payoff, but when we talk about this idea of, okay, now we have these immutable sources of information. And we're going to put some intermediary between us and that thing. We now have a very pressing need for accuracy on this. We need to know, to be able to contact trace, to actually understand how a virus is propagating through the community. This is a situation where the freedoms of the individual and the freedoms of the of the group are in direct, diametric pressure, and they need to be solved. And if you end up in a situation where someone steps forth and says, okay, we will put one person forth and they will become the arbiter of contact racing, or Apple and Google's sort of partnership to put forth a framework for this. I find that to be subpar. I think that, in the long run—this is fundamentally healthcare data, this fundamentally cannot change. And putting all the cards in that sack—long term, imagine we had enough time—this should be on blockchain. We should actually be using a decentralized ledger for this kind of thing, and participation in this should be— I personally now have switched to the view that you should probably just be mandated to participate in that sort of thing. I know, it sounds crazy. To those who know me, the idea of me being okay with the idea of a blockchain, it's a weird feeling. But it feels like it's a problem for which many of the existing solutions just don't cut it. How do you not get the NSA out of whoever holds those keys? How do you not get some really dramatic... This is a lot of material, it will affect some people's lives, and the disposal of that information is really problematic. So I'll just back away from that, but I wanted to try and tie this to Coronavirus because that was in the reading. + +**MATT**: Can I ask a clarifying question? I think that other people want to respond. I just was a little confused at the end there. I mean, the problem that I see is that the thing that's an obvious problem is is privacy with healthcare data. It wasn't clear to me how blockchain fixes that, because blockchain allows you to authorize, you know, to validate a claim. But it doesn't really help you keep things private, does it? + +**BRENDAN**: It can also be used to mean that the number of actors in a space cannot be totally known. So you can actually set up a blockchain so that everybody participating—it's basically like a network of only social security numbers that can change but have to change in a causal way. This isn't a blockchain in the classic sense, but any sort of system design that involves a central arbiter that says, we are going to be the source of truth on this—I think that it's important to highlight the problem here. You have an immutable source of information, snd then a lot of people who are vying to be a central arbiter of truth. And to me, that is the definition of a data monopoly, that we're being asked to be granted a monopoly over a sort of truth-granting style of information. And anybody can join the mining process of a blockchain, right? Anybody can participate in, I could right now create a keypair and buy bitcoin and assign it to a wallet. I can be an actor in a sort of system that allows me to be a part of it. So anybody can start participating in a blockchain that properly hides your identity, but allows you to control the disclosure of information. + +**MATT**: I feel like I'm a little bit slow on it. But I want to let other people respond. I think other people have responses. + +**PETER**: No. I don't feel like talking about blockchain. + +**BRENDAN**: I know it's I know it's anathema in many in many contexts. I'm sorry. + +What if we, instead of saying blockchain, let's take away this radicalizing word, and just talk about decentralization, because that's the characteristic that we need to focus on. I think that we need a system where, ideally, we would be seeking out alternatives to this type of data monopoly. + +**PETER**: Have you been keeping up with the design of privacy and their solutions? + +**BRENDAN**: Yeah, that they're putting forth, specifically the Apple-Google paper? + +**PETER**: Yeah, there was that, and then I think France had another model, France and Germany, although last I knew, Germany capitulated to—there was a privacy tradeoff, right? I don't remember very well now, but the design of that system was such that—if I remember correctly, and it's been a little while and I didn't pay that much attention, but like the design was such that a person could find out whether they'd been in contact with other people infected, without there being a central database of people. Google, despite being you know, they don't do evil, big evil corporation was the one advocating for you know, people can find out, I think it was with more precision, geographic and time precision that you could actually figure out exactly who it was, whereas the European solution would just tell you that you had been around somebody who had been infected, but that required more of a central source of truth, as you say, a synoptic view of the world, whereas the Google solution just sort of matched numbers up, and then you knew you knew your numbers, the the set of numbers that you'd advertise yourself under. So that seemed okay. + +**BRENDAN**: Yeah, and I should have backed away from the phrase blockchain, it was the wrong phrase to use at the time because it's too problematic. So that's the point that I'm trying to seek in on. Although it is not classically called a blockchain, it is leveraging many, many, many techniques that have been really hardened and improved in the blockchain space. I honestly don't think that we would be in a position to vet those papers—just personally, there's no way I would have been able to without reading around cryptography that we do for privatized decentralized ledgers. I don't want to be triggering with the phrase blockchain, but I very much agree. I think that that's, that's the thing we want, right? We want the Apple-Google paper as proposed, in the sense of being a decentralized source of information. + +**PETER**: I'm just going to start sipping whiskey over here. And now I don't know what were we talking about? We're sorry, talking about social security numbers and credit card squares. Are we still mining that thread? as it were? + +**KELSEY**: I have a totally different direction, if anyone wants that. + +**PETER**: Sure. + +**KELSEY**: Yeah, so I'm curious about, um, and this might be a short topic, because some of you might be more informed than me on this. But if we take say that a monopoly is having the sole source of a particular thing, or type of thing.... an exercise that I would like to do sometime, and if this exists somewhere, I would love to see it, is I want to see the parts of me that Google has come to own over the years. The most dramatic of those, I think, is when they bought Fitbit. Quietly, most people don't even know that. It's just like, Huh, so you have been reading my emails for years, know who all of my contacts are and where I go based on my phone, and you're probably in my home, listening to every word that I say, and there's a camera. And additionally, you know my heart rate every day at every moment. + +If we take all that, and feed that into a machine learning model, the number of columns they've added means that they can make categorically different models of people than anybody else. So I'm kind of positing that as a data monopoly that's quite different from our other definitions. + +**PETER**: It's really interesting. I'm trying to model that philosophically, like, what's going on? Who has a monopoly on what? They have a great deal of information. That's a resource that allows them to do certain things that other people can't provided to me. I have no alternative. They do a better job of certain things, because they have all that data. But it's not actually that much better of a job, to be honest. + +**KELSEY**: Well, I guess I should clarify, right? So I don't mean that as a consumer, we have no choice but to be owned by Google. What I'm saying is that, if I were purchasing models of people, Google would be the only supplier of this complete of a model. + +**MATT**: You know, why isn't that just because they have a better product than other people? + +**KELSEY**: Isn't that where monopolies come from? + +**MATT**: I don't think so. I mean, a lot of them come from guns and dollars. A lot of the oil monopolies come from suppressing various kinds of dissent over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So yeah, I don't think it's about being better. + +**PETER**: But I mean, it is a good question. Is doing something really well, or having a lot of power in that sense, a threat in a similar way to a monopoly? I guess that wasn't the point you were making, because you're talking about if I wanted to buy personas. I'm still in the consumer frame. + +**MATT**: This is where I really think that the economic origin of the term monopoly is is unhelpful, because I think that the problem that monopolies pose is a concentration of power, which is difficult to dislodge. So it's a concentration of power, that by its nature increases. It arises perhaps apart from the market position, and so it maybe has its origins in economic phenomena, but the problem that matters the most is the increasing scope of the corporate entities' control over your actions. + +What we're wary of, I think, is this sense of a positive feedback loop for corporations operating on a certain scale, with data at a certain scale, that makes it increasingly difficult for alternatives to emerge, whether those are other companies or other ways of life. That's what seems to me like the evil that we're concerned about. + +**PETER**: Yeah, and and the mechanism, at least in Google, Facebook, Twitter's cases, is actually making things free, which is sort of interesting. That's the lock-in. People lament the loss of Google Reader, not just because it was such a wonderful thing, but because they made it free and totally took all the oxygen out of the system. + +**BRENDAN**: I really like your framing a lot better, Matt: how do we dislodge people who have ended up in positions of power? I think that the "data monopoly" term that we initially came up with and built a whole reading group around puts an economic slant on things, that creates this self-disqualifying thought loop. Because I think that every time we've gone to talk about a data monopoly, we kind of want to talk, we want to talk about the sense of powerlessness, we want to talk about this sense of frustration. + +I think I sort of helped poison the well with the economies of scale thing. Because there is a point where this tops out, where Google just gets so deep into your life that nobody else could ever get that deep into your life. No one could ever amass such a complete picture because of these positive feedback loops. Sort of like, well, we bought Fitbit, and then we bla bla bla, and it becomes something that could not ever be replicated and worsens. But I think that's not nearly as important as the question that you've put forth, Matt, of like, how do we have a framework for understanding a threshold at which it feels like someone has amassed a picture of you that you are now beholden to, instead of it being beholden to you? + +Can I just throw a heuristic out there: every now and then, I'll pretty routinely just try and change my behavior really aggressively on the internet, including writing bots that will go to very different websites, or do all kinds of weird stuff, just to see if I can shake the ads, the bucketing of which thing I'm in, into like a more interesting... It's purely for fun, but it's fun to see how easy it is to get the machine to think that you're somebody else. And it makes me feel really re-empowered. Because it's like, oh, cool. I've just been out searching for pregnancy tests and, you know, a bunch of different things that would not match my typical characteristics. I think it's, it's just fun and interesting, but that feels like really like a guerrilla tactic, and really like a last resort to what is admittedly a sense of helplessness in the face of a very complete picture of who I am as a person. + +**PETER**: To me, those are issues of privacy and autonomy. Are you saying those are more interesting than data monopolies? Or are you saying that those are related to the ideas of monopolies? + +**BRENDAN**: I think it is, I think we have the framing wrong. And then, I want to talk about that, that sense of helplessness and like that. Where does that come from? And how do we take it back? + +**PETER**: I think that's the drive behind the whole decentralization wave, is wanting to sort of cut free. + +**JONATHAN**: I think there's an interesting test for this. If you were to think of Apple, do you feel like Apple has a data monopoly, for those of you who use Apple devices? Do you feel like Apple has a data monopoly on your data? When I pose that test to myself, I don't feel the same way that I do about Facebook and Google. And it's interesting to try to tease apart why I think that is. There's definitely a lock-in you get. There's a running joke with my roommates about how we will not let someone into our apartment is not on iMessage because we can't have the roommate group chat. So there are lock-in events that could take the anti-competitive bit, but fundamentally, I don't think there's the same feeling, aside from maybe like USB ports, that there is a lack of control over my information. But then I do notice, if anyone has ever ventured to check out Apple Maps in the last decade, it does do some weird stuff if you ever tried using it. I was using it when I was up in my mountain cabin. It does pick up things, where it gets kind of awkward. It will give you directions because on Thursdays you go to this restaurant to order stuff. Or like, we think this is home for you. When I was like in Canada, it guessed my Airbnb as home, and it marks it as home. And it was creepy from Apple's perspective, but knowing what Apple has already said, it felt less creepy, but there's something there about autonomy of choice. + +Maybe it is business models versus motivations. When a business model is very clearly aligned with ads and the access of your information, it feels a little bit different, and it's also then compounded by, they will make more money if you stay on, so how do they engage you, and this idea of psychological manipulation. Apple, while overpriced, is very direct. You're just gonna hand us money and that's gonna be the end of this transaction. + +**BRENDAN**: I think that's a really important characteristic. It seems that your belief that you are not being dominated by a power structure is tied to your faith in the institution that you are participating in. Fair? + +**JONATHAN**: I think so. I think there's something about, and not to get back into the DWebby side of this, but I do think there is something about how these technologies came to be. There is always like an implicit choice. And some of it is a function of the technology stack. It feels like it is much more natural for things that are funded by ads to imply that there is some sort of access—I don't know if anyone's ever tried this as an experiment. I signed up for their ads platform, just to see, if I was an advertiser, what would I have access to? It is interesting. You basically can put in a bunch of keywords and you can specify a geography and stuff. Or you can even like take a look and see, Facebook now lets you see what they think they know about you, and it's wildly off. And so there is definitely a lot of outrage, and I think rightly so. There is directionally correct outrage, I guess, is maybe the right thing to phrase it as. I think there are principles that are not necessarily enshrined in any law, or like, there's no faith that Facebook is abiding by things that are giving freedom of choice. And then in this black box, people get really worried about, what are all the ways in which this can be misused and used incorrectly. And I think that's part of the issue, where there's not a ton of trust. And especially when the business model would skew heavily in the favor of this other organization, this other organization being Facebook, the business model would be benefited greatly by abusing that trust. Then it's really hard. Facebook is the specific example where the CEO has, many times, been like, "I don't care about privacy". So like, there's also that, + +**KELSEY**: I was gonna say, we're all kind of ribbing on Facebook's ability to give advertisers—the ways you can get around the algorithms and how the targeting is honestly not that good. I'm trying to remember what book it was that I was reading, that made this point. But basically, just because they're not good at it now, doesn't mean that the huge amount of data that they have and are continuing to gather won't become usable in much better models. And in fact, that is the most likely outcome. + +**MATT**: It's hard to know if maybe the term "data monopolies" is not so useful, and really all we care about is the coercive power of data stores. Maybe there's something to be said for the way in which the distribution of that data creates coercive power. So if you're the principal actor that has access to this particular data store, then you have the capacity to coerce the market but also to coerce people into certain kinds of actions. And I think maybe a lot of our thinking in the last three, four years is influenced by the this idea that there's this kind of dark nexus between experimental psychology and fine-grained profiling that creates a manipulative power that is incompatible with democratic practice and also incompatible with the Enlightenment, with the idea that it's possible to to create a state of free individuals who are capable of autonomous rational thought. I think that there there's something about data concentration that undermines that. Probably that's something that's along the lines of what we care about with data monopolies, but "data monopoly" is not actually great term for describing that. + +**BRENDAN**: I just want to build on what Matt was saying. I think that the the notion of the dark nexus is the is the capacity to build a constant personalized hallucination, right? This idea that we could—I posted in chat that I'm thinking a lot about the right to be forgotten. We are moving forward in time, and that that is always the case, but right now we are very much at the dawn of a of a place where people are starting to amass these profiles, and we're in new territory, right? We don't know what this is like. We don't know what the effects of this level of knowledge totality or perceived knowledge totality really are. And the scary thing is, like there are many of us, maybe I'm one of them, everyone falls somewhere on the spectrum of realizing at some point that the database that accumulates of you is the sum choice of every decision you've ever made on any platform, right? So every time you choose to post, every single time you choose to disclose something, it is this like little karat that accumulates and accumulates and accumulates. And it is a unidirectional knowledge acquisition. And that is a very scary thing when you look backwards, right? When you realize that you have no capacity to control the tail of this thing. I think when we move through the world, that we, as a species, forget stuff. We don't all as a culture—I don't remember every bad interaction I've had with everybody in the world. Databases don't, and they don't have that forgetfulness property when maintained properly. That's a very cognitively difficult thing to get your head around. It's really hard to understand what it's like to live in a world that is permanent in some ways and ephemeral in others, depending on where you are, who you're speaking to, and how you are communicating. I think that's the kernel that we're getting at with this data monopolies framing that the conversation has evolved out of this. I want the capacity to turn to that memory machine and say, I would selectively like you to forget about this, and have an enshrined law that says that I have the choice to do that, that I as a rational person know that this is a one-way thing and I will suffer some loss in service quality for it. But I want to do it anyway. + +**PETER**: Who has the right to be forgotten? Is that an EU thing? Yeah. + +So I just wanted to pull out, sort of categorize—I'm not proud of it, but, there's my information, which is in no way a priority. It's the things that are my interactions and things that I say, my emails and so forth and control over that is sort of one bucket, which I've been thinking about a lot. It's where my brain has been most of the time, there's information about me and how I'm seeing, which is I think what you're talking more about. And then there's sort of information that's basically a commodity. Whether it's Getty Images, or Google's indexes, or Amazon's listings, things that probably could be reproduced, or things have been published, public observations about the world, Google Maps and so forth. Each of those things, we could go down and it would be its own domain. I'd love to create the space for that. Just the concerns are very different, and the tools we have available are very different. Your questions about like, the role of open source, the role of government, the role of trust in non governmental organizations like Google and Apple—I'd love to get a chance to talk about the more personal stuff, if there's a space for that. ## Chat log 00:14:18 Kelsey Breseman: January! From 2eea40344440453df62e9381fbae88d696608139 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2020 14:23:31 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 58/65] Adds discussion from Trust conversation --- notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md | 276 +++++++++++++++---- 1 file changed, 223 insertions(+), 53 deletions(-) diff --git a/notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md b/notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md index c7f095c..7461ddb 100644 --- a/notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md +++ b/notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md @@ -88,59 +88,229 @@ New technologies attempt to free us from (data) monopolized spaces, but does cry - M: User control of rings of trust. Technical enablement of actual in-person trust ## Discussion +**DAWN**: We're midway through the 2020 season of the Data Together reading group. The topic this week was trust, both cryptographic and human. I didn't realize that piece until I read it again today, that we had that subtitle to it. Brendan and I will be facilitating. I thought we could start off with a go around about what people thought. We had a bunch of readings, but they're quite brief. So I thought we might just start with general impressions around the topic, and then try and move through the core ones and see where people are at. Does anyone want to go first about what came up for them when they were reading this stuff. +**KELSEY**: I don't have a whole lot to say, but my immediate impression was that that Doteveryone piece talking about how people work with technology and whether it's accessible and whether they feel like they have power over it—I want to read that whole paper, that was really, really cool. It really brought home a lot of the concepts that we talked about in the Monopolies reading; there was a quote in there that was along the lines of, well, it doesn't really matter if I understand the issue, my option is to turn it on or off. + +**KEVIN**: I didn't get much chance to read. I skimmed everything. I realized I really wanted to read the Brunton one, because it's like story bait. And it's the longest one, so I didn't get to get through it. I guess I'm more interested in the human aspect of trust than the cryptographic part, generally. I didn't see that much yet in the readings. + +**BRENDAN**: I'll chime in I guess it's because I can maybe do some connecting work there. Some of the initial basis for this talk came out of the relationship between cryptographic trust and human trust. Specifically, one of the things we were trying to get at was a little bit of the co-opting of the phrase "trust", or the repurposing of the phrase "trust", as it relates to... and looking at it through both sides of the mirror, or however many sides of the prism, choose your object. But I think the thing that for me really jumped out was that, Kelsey I was really with you on the Doteveryone. From one side you're seeing this population that just feels completely beholden to the whims of a technology, and a degraded faith and a sense of lack of control being expressed in a number of places. And then at the other side, you also have the TechCrunch article talking about how, Oh, yes, we're going to rebuild the trust web. And they're describing something that is at the same time more complicated, and less and less about trusting, in the human sense. I think that was what was exciting about Doteveryone in juxtaposition to the cryptographic concept of trust. + +**BRENDAN**: For me, what really jumped out is, if you read the Bitcoin white paper, just that first paragraph, it sort of talks about how, oh, we're gonna solve the trust problem. But it's a fairly narrow definition, right? The double spending problem is really what they're talking about. And the double spending problem is just being able to prove that a single dollar was only spent once, or once at a time. And that quickly spirals into a lexicon that co-opts or leverages the phrase "trust". I really wanted to talk about that today. I wanted to see what others think about the way that the word "trust" is used and reused, and what it means to different people in this space. There's more more questions and observations, but that's where my head's at. + +**DAWN**: Yeah. I'll build on that, and then maybe that'll help us go into a direction for discussion. I echo, Brendan, those things you brought up, and what everyone else has mentioned as being on my mind, and also when we were thinking about selecting this. I think the other thing that we were trying to complement, and I think it'd be fun to talk about even if folks didn't get to read it, is a little bit of that history that came out of Finn Brunton's book Digital Cash, about some of the things that were going on to help redefine "trust" as it got redefined in this cryptographic way, and then taken up by these decentralistas. And I think that other piece of Libra, which maybe makes sense to bring up at the end, was trying to think about this role of gatekeepers, who those trusted parties are. It's skewed pretty financial-heavy in terms of, there's the Bitcoin white paper. Libra association is also in this very financialized technology. Take the social web, here comes to trust web, even though it's broadly trying to be about something else, really falls into talking about trust in a very specific technology way. And it's very informed by cryptocurrency. But then we wanted to open that up a little bit and do that comparison work, or think about the ways that that term is being leveraged in those contexts. And that's why we chose that Doteveryone summary, because I think it does a nice like, hey, what are people currently thinking about their relationship to technology? And then it was helpful to take a spend a bit of time looking at that Wikipedia article and being like, Oh, right, what are all of the different contexts that trust is used in and a lot of them are not about financial transactions. So why is this such a dominant source to mind for inspiration when we talk about technology? There is a very specific lineage there. + +**KELSEY**: It's impossible to not remember in this moment that EDGI got into the decentralized web because of a lack of trust in the state. I'm reading these articles while at a protest over facing off against militarized police. The one barricade the police have erected is between them and the peaceful protesters, and meanwhile, like two days ago, someone drove from the street into the crowd. Every other protest I've ever been at, there's been a barricade erected by the police to protect protesters from traffic. There's no trust here. + +**KELSEY**: Yesterday, a big event in the Seattle protest is that the police actually left the faceoff. And so, we took the precinct, they'd boarded it up, but the street that had been blocked for over a week was now available. And it's really this interesting space where everyone's talking about, well, who do we trust? The police are obviously not allowed in this space. There are still barricades up controlling access. There's no one leader here. The barricades are controlled by different people who are just showing up, honestly, it could be anyone. The John Brown Gun Club, which is a far left second amendment group, has shown up to do security against threats of Proud Boys. That's been a rumor around for days. And everything inside the zone is—it feels very Burning Man, to be honest. There's just incredible amounts of free stuff and people walking by several times an hour offering you food and earplugs and hand sanitizer and stuff. And so there's this really strong outpouring of community trust in this moment, especially over trust of state, trust of sanctioned authority. But there's not there's not a real strong trust in decentralization as a concept. And it's really hard to believe that we've reached some kind of sustainable state. So there is still need for something, and it feels like we want tech to be the answer, in general space, not here specifically, that lets us have both. + +**DAWN**: Can I ask you to say a little more about this one last part? I think you gave us a lot to connect back to the readings. But this idea of, there's not trust in decentralization as a concept—what do you mean? Do you mean people are using the term decentralization to think about that space? I've seen people on Twitter referring to it as CHAZ, as an Autonomous Zone, as very much drawing on, a set of anarchist literature and organizing tactics, but I'm very much at a distance. + +**KELSEY**: Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And it's crazy, because even when you're standing there, you're still getting most of your information from the Twitter hashtag—which is part of the issue. But there are other people present who absolutely do trust these anarchy principles. That's definitely a thing that's happening. But broadly as a society, and even as a group of protesters, there is not a consensus of trust. + +**DAWN**: Maybe we can unpack this a little more before we go into the Brunton reading and the Satoshi Nakamoto first Bitcoin paper—I think this comes up so much in all of our previous reading groups, the wanting to use the tech, or what that needs to look like. Maybe we could talk more about how we've experienced people wanting to rely on tech for trust or what forms those currently look like. I would say that the way that certain decentralized protocols want to replace trust or be "trustless" is only one thread in that. I think even in Silicon Valley, there's a new mode, we want to use new forms of technical mediation to replace or augment how you think about a relationship you have with a trusted party. Any reputation system that anyone decides to implement where you vote on people is an example. But maybe we could talk a little bit about how tech is being mixed up with trust relationships, first. That might help us set the stage. + +**MASH**: I think, in terms of the social perspective on trust, it's based on vulnerability, and based on whether you feel comfortable being vulnerable with somebody, whereas technological or tech-based trust isn't actually based on vulnerability. It's based on invulnerability. So you're not actually trusting, it's more that you feel comfortable that nothing's actually going to happen, just because of the way that the technology is structured. In terms of the experience, it's very different. Obviously trust plays a role, but I think conceptualizing it as trust is the opposite of what it actually is. + +**KEVIN**: Yeah, I agree with that. I got through the Doteveryone paper and was thinking about how I built trusting relationships with people with EDGI. It was mediated through Slack and Zoom, through technological processes. For me, I felt like the way that I built trust with folks here was just through reliability, people showing up for each other on a weekly basis. We were always showing up for each other, and we depended on each other. And I don't see how any form of technology creates that reliability. + +**MASH**: Yeah, I think the way that I conceptualize trust from a social perspective or interpersonal perspective is a feedback loop. If you give a little bit of vulnerability to someone, then they will return that and then gradually more trust is built. Then there's also a negative feedback loop, too, where if you let somebody know that you mistrust them, then they will be more guarded around you and they'll mistrust you. So over time, there will be more and more mistrust. So it's a process. But in terms of technological trust, it's a first principles sort of approach where it's not about the process; it's about the the rules or the structure. + +**BRENDAN**: I love, Mash, that you honed in the vulnerability characteristic. The thing that I think highlights that is the way that a relationship, a real relation of trust, starts with no protocol and evolves over time, right? You're referring to this cycle of like, Okay, I'm going to lead with with a little bit of vulnerability in an effort to move things forward. But from the protocol design perspective, or from cryptocurrency, you have a much more constrained definition of trust, that has to arrest every possible interaction that could happen and codify it, and we use the phrase trustlessness. And it's been this assuming bad actors sort of methodology. + +**BRENDAN**: I, like Kelsey, have been spending a lot of time thinking about the police, and particularly following very closely Minnesota's defunding promise. This stepping forward, which is a very human capacity, to say, look, we don't understand what we're going to do, but we know that this isn't working. And we've at least had some public commitment on behalf of politicians to work on a new thing right now, a way forward. It's such an interesting display of trust. I think that one could very much argue that the phrasing that we use for decentralization really starts to fall apart here, where there has been a transition of power, by virtue of protests that have managed to start to achieve the outcomes that they desire. But if we were to call that decentralization, that sounds like shoehorning things in a way that doesn't feel right. And so I think there's an interesting way in which, to me, a lot of what's been happening in the Black Lives Matter movement and in the protests that we're seeing across the world right now, just don't in any way graph on to this into this sort of crypto-digital currency—it's amazing how stale some of these particles feel in the current context. All of this fundamentally is about a lack of trust in the police, right? This is a trust conversation. It's just not the one that we picked the readings for, in some ways, and in other ways, it really is. I just want to highlight the limit of the framing here and how much the current events has really blown that open. + +**DAWN**: I think we've had success in previous readings trying to bring up pretty disparate things. I remember we were talking about the relationship to the state and the civic, and we had that No One is Illegal reading, and I think that has always been really helpful to open up things. In this case, we have a much tighter set of readings that are about a very narrow technological take on trust but that yeah, I think current events and witnessing state violence, police brutality, the the murder of George Floyd, Regis Korchinski-Paquet and her death here in Toronto, it's showing the paucity of some of this to explain what I would say is more at stake in most people's relationship to tech. + +**DAWN**: But I do want to say that I don't know if you've noticed, but there are absolutely some Bitcoin people on Twitter who have tried to make a case for cryptographic protocols in this moment, I'm not even joking. I wish I was joking. They are wild ride Twitter thread reads. You're like, I don't even know where you're going with this. They involve, like, hand-drawn charts, they're about the financial system, and then at the end, they're like, oh, and this is why it will solve police brutality. And you're like, what? This is ideology. This is pure ideology at this point. You can't even drop your your thing for a moment and actually engage, separate from that with what's going on? Sorry, I saw a couple of those yesterday, and I'm still thinking about them. + +**DAWN**: Okay, so that is an aside, I actually thought something that you said, and that builds on what Mash just said, would be the thread that would be more meaningful to carry forward was this idea of first principle structure over process. Brendan, you said this idea of a real relationship of trust starts with no protocol and evolves over time. I think both of what you said opens up some really interesting possibilities. And this is not to agree or disagree, it's just to offer more to that conversation. I absolutely think there's something about how stuff evolves, or the process side, is very underconsidered in how a design gets specced out or implemented. The format of a white paper is this, like, Oh, I made an argument that will hold up over time, as the final instantiation of this thing, this proof of concept, that maybe has an intellectual lineage that sets itself up to be bad like that. But actually, I think that protocol in different contexts, say in indigenous communities, in the way that some labs that are indigenous STS labs have drawn on protocol, I think allows for an evolution, or allows for a structure that builds trust. So I feel like there maybe are models to think about what a scaffold is that provides that space that you can build relationships in. That's different than this weird, rigid, Oh, we made a protocol that's not flexible and didn't consider a full range of things, and now everyone has to operate in the narrow confines. + +**KELSEY**: Yeah, I really appreciate Mash when she brought in. There were a bunch of frameworks, and I'm spinning them all around in my head. This may not come out super coherent. I especially really like the truth default theory concept, where we're saying that people by default think that other people are telling the truth. And I feel like there is a really interesting place where the protocol aspects plug in. Mash, you talked about positive feedback loops and negative feedback loops for trust. But I think there's got to be nuances in there that are that are kind of the problem. Not to pick it out or anything, but specifically you called out vulnerability, and I think that's really accurate. But I think that we often take following a protocol as a proxy for being of actual good will. + +**KELSEY**: And then we have this problem of a classic abusive relationship of any kind, whether it's state with people or person with person, is where that negative cycle doesn't kick in. You keep trusting them even though they betray your trust. That's kind of a failure of our trust mechanisms. And then there's this part where protocol comes in, and I've been formulating phraseologies that I haven't thought all the way out, of, what if protocols are guidelines for how you can how you can earn trust in a specific community? Because it absolutely is part of what goes on in terms of, if you dress a certain way, if you know how to act at a certain kind of dinner, the community that cares about how you act at that certain kind of dinner can use that as a proxy for you being of the community trustable by the community. But then when you have different protocols, this is this is pure conflation here, but you know, if you have UDP try to talk to HTTP, you're just not going to have a success at all. There's nothing there. + +**DAWN**: I think there's something interesting though about that site of protocol and the way that word is used in different areas. Again, this idea is a narrow technical sense, how it's used. I think maybe in particular, around a current wave of decentralized projects is very different than even that broader history of protocols in computing and digital communications, to be honest, because most of them are old, and grow in weird and over time in the history of how they get defined and redefined is quite interesting and intense. not totally my area. I made a BGP joke not very well, but we know some people who are really into BGP, who are Data Together friends. Um, I wonder actually, if maybe this does help us segue a little bit into talking about that cryptographic trust, and maybe that we can rely on Brunton, but we don't have to exclusively think about that. He just provides a couple of anecdotes and moments from this early history of when it was getting developed that are helpful to understand some of the intellectual underpinnings or what was motivating those folks, which I think definitely inflect how those concepts get used, in the technologies that go with them. + +**MASH**: I want to connect what Kelsey said with I watched the video of your last month's talk. And somebody brought up the idea of the blockchain intersecting with medical data. Kelsey brought up this idea of the switch into the negative feedback loop or the distrust cycle. It kind of conflicts with the ledger aspect of blockchain. If somebody abuses the trust in that type of system, if information is supposed to be private, and it becomes public as a result of an abuse of trust, then there's limited recourse in terms of what you can do to—well, I mean, you can't undo it, but then also, how would a negative feedback loop work in that kind of context is what I'm asking. + +**BRENDAN**: I think it's interesting, it's not this is another misappropriation of a phrase, but the notion of being outed, when you're using a permanent append-only log is—by "outed", I don't mean that in the closet sense. I mean, in the de-anonymization sense. When we sort of start intermingling, I really think you can abstract past medical data and really any kind of personal identifiable information right, even your transaction history itself forms a sort of unique behavioral pattern. Bitcoin has struggled with this for a long time. It's never claimed to be anonymous, but it's sort of implied it. I don't think that that means that a blockchain is —it's a data structure, at the end of the day, and so you have mechanisms for, you can control for that, to some degree, by moving things off of the chain that don't need to be on it. And I think we see a lot of stuff like z cash, which is a really great example of trying to take anonymization to the nth degree in a blockchain and have those two ideas sit in the same space at the same time and be relatively cohesive. + +**BRENDAN**: I guess there's it intersects with, do I trust the technology, and then, what types of trust has the technology enabled? I think are the two questions that jumped to mind for me. And the reason I brought it up in the last call was, I think that contact tracing and blockchain-adjacent technologies have some merit; if you wave a magic wand and assume that z cash approach works, and you can have an sufficiently anonymous blockchain, does it help you create a situation where, because you don't have a central authority governing a ledger, are you able to prevent the NSA problem when it comes to managing a contact tracing framework? Because I think that when we look at our, our own health data, and I think really what it is, at the end of the day is a collection of individually owned things, is the way I sort of perceive it. Which is your own health information. Everybody has their own health record, but there's a collective interest in us being able to trust each other and and share important moments of intersection, right. The classic, you and I have been in the same space and no classic Wow, talking about things that are three months old... but you know, you and I have been in the same space and we both would like to have some sort of zero-knowledge method of exchanging that information. + +**BRENDAN**: I think the Libra paper speaks to the antithesis of this, where you have a blockchain for the sake of saying the word blockchain. That's part of the reason I wanted to assign some of the super dry reading for this, of the Libra thing, because I thought it was really important to look at oh, Libra Networks is a company and Libra Association... there's a Libra board that is inside of the Libra company, and they govern the network, and you're supposed to just sort of look at all this and say, Yes, we can trust this. And I think that that's this very interesting intersection there. And the reason I bring it up in answer to the question about healthcare data and blockchains is governance and protocol and process where we have this, the section on governance of a lot of these projects is really where I think we have a lot of questions of is this really centralization? Is that a lot of questions and histories for sure out there. + +**DAWN**: I mean, if it's okay, I would actually maybe we could start. There's a couple of really succinct but opinionated takes that Finn Brunton has in the section, the last section I recommended, which might be cool to respond to, which would get us into thinking about both those three readings. If that feels Okay, if there's more, maybe Mash that you want to directly respond to in what Brendan said, I will leave it to you, but otherwise, I thought I could give us a couple quotes. + +**DAWN**: So I think we have a short section in chapter 10, which is the synthesis of Finn Brunton's argument and then that background in cryptography in chapter three. So the parts that I wanted to surface from chapter 10 are his analysis of Bitcoin, which I think is compelling in an interesting way. His argument is on page 155: Bitcoin is an incremental technology. So the actual technological advance is small, but it had a striking theoretical breakthrough. So it combined a lot of work that came out of cryptography and computation from peer to peer networking and also ways that they dealt with digital timestamps that connected it to this larger history of digital cash schemes which very much came out of a libertarian background. + +**DAWN**: And then he has, this is on page 161, from Nakamoto. The direct quote from that paper is "and Bitcoin is an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures". And then I think this is a Brunton quote, "it's a system for collective verification of ownership with no existence outside the system of verification". So it's both a technical structure and then an ownership convention is part of what Brunton wants to make very clear. And to that point that Brendan said about anonymity. So there's this notion of anonymous sort of, but it's using money that's unconditionally visible, traceable and public, always. So what anonymity means there, it's fallen down over the years in terms of how people use it or can review those public transactions. But this is where I think there's sort of two more really interesting arguments he makes. So how he sees that there is a form of trustworthiness operating in the systems that are different than trust on a third party again, so Bitcoin is really responding to a very narrow take on type of trust before that was in financial context, which is on page 68. "The process of policing transactions and preventing double spending and thereby, the perception of trustworthiness, confidence and value of currency in the eyes of its holders required turning the physics of quantum computation into a kind of friction, or brake." So a deliberate inefficiency in a system as a replacement for a trusted third party. And how that was done in Bitcoin is through hash collisions. So it's a trust in scarcity, rather than a trust in the value of a currency that would rely on others; what the system has set out to do is prove to you how difficult it is to make more of it and that it's verifiable that this amount was that amount of difficulty to make. And so I think his concluding take is that this whole apparatus, the apparency of the ledger, the verification of ownership, the proof of work process and foreknowledge, of the introduction of the remaining quantity of new money are actually designed to produce a predictable amount of scarcity that you would call verifiable, distributed and trustless. But it's actually putting this as a scarce object into a specific infrastructure. So it's the ledger of the blockchain and how it works. And it's sort of like this. I mean, one that relies on as I think folks have seen in the development of the actual technology, new types of trust, or ways to relate a set of people to each other. So it's interesting that it's a trustless system, but as a system that has a community and maybe you could not say good things about its governance, but has a governance around the underlying production of that system. + +**DAWN**: So maybe that was a little heavy. I'm realizing that I always read things that are academic, so I think I sometimes say things really densely. But I thought that was such a great opinionated take on Bitcoin but I think is very interesting about like what trust was removed and then what a new form or infrastructure that it created. + +**BRENDAN**: I think that that really is such an interesting, it's the beauty of the Bitcoin paper and the beauty of the history of this. I think that it's really interesting that this came out of libertarian groups and the bringing up of this origins of this thinking. And I think that, the contextualization is an incremental technology is quite interesting. It's often heralded as this revolutionary concept, and then at the same time, if you connect that to the Trust Web article from TechCrunch, it's like, no, no digital currencies are infrastructure, they're a thing that you can use to get to smart contracts. Which we didn't really talk about a ton, but I think are also really interesting. When you use the word smart contract it often invokes the notion of law, which is closer to sort of some of today's thinking, or today's problems. But I think that the beauty of the Bitcoin as a project is its scope. It's it's a contained thing, its definition of trust is centered around digital scarcity. And that digital scarcity is applied to creating a ledger and it's clean, it's it's straightforward. It has what it can do and what it can't do, and that's that's kind of that. My concern is that the specter that that has invoked, people showing up on Twitter saying that Bitcoin can solve problems of racial tension, somewhere in there the dish ran away with the spoon. + +**DAWN**: I think it ran away from the beginning, to be honest. I take the point of like, in one sense it was a system that set out to do a very specific thing, like Bitcoin, but you point correctly to how quickly smart contracts developed as a way to think about ledger and blockchain technology, which is them being like, oh but if we write a contract and put it on a blockchain, it can be applied to everything, that explosion happened immediately. And also, if you look at, and it was great that you suggested this Brendan, even the intro of the Bitcoin paper, it wants nothing less than to replace the entire financial system. It was always grandiose. It was always escaping at the seams of a narrow scope. I think it poses a question. It's a set of different underlying ideological assumptions. + +**BRENDAN**: I think you're right to point to the opening paragraph of the Bitcoin paper. I want to ask the group, I think that the cryptographic definition of trust implicitly seems to direct us to believe that economics can save us; there's some notion of using money to solve our problems. And if we can just engineer digital money, if we can wrest control of money from classic old school structures, like governments and Facebook, then we'll be able to move forward and design better futures for ourselves. That's my read of the crypto space. I don't know how well that argument holds up in the context of billions of people at home, very angry about their relationship to certain governing structures. + +**BRENDAN**: Does anybody want to take the bait on that? + +**KELSEY**: I mean, I put "abolish money" in the chat. And, you know, it's not something I ardently believe. But we have talked again and again in these discussions about the corrupting power of finances that enter the system. And it's not even necessarily money itself. It's not even necessarily the power that it both is and represents. It tends to be the conflation of something intangible for something tangible, and I think that's where we get hung up with the technology as well. + +**BRENDAN**: Totally, the notion of digital scarcity is really interesting, and how that creates the tangibility of fungibility—it's really interesting notion, right? At the same time, I think a project that would be interesting to bring up here as something of a counterpoint is the crypto Harlem project here in New York, which is focused on fenceline communities leveraging digital currencies and cryptography and techniques to both evade the surveillance state and to empower themselves to catch the next wave of economic prosperity. And so maybe this is a double edged sword. Maybe you can engage with it for your own good. + +**BRENDAN**: It's really hard to think about things in context of what's going on outside our windows in the streets + +**DAWN**: I think there are these examples of people actually subverting almost the affordances of these technologies. I think he mentioned the Bail Block Fund where people use crypto miners in the browser. It was a progressive publication. They built this crypto miner that helped raise funds to pay for people's fail, if you visit their website in the browser and allow them to use it. I also mentioned the Black Socialists of America have this decentralized organizing app that's called a dual power and also builds on the concept of dual power, thinking about building alternative cooperative economies. And this idea of how you can use these technologies in ways that subvert the premise of markets and money as the site for change. I think those are all really interesting as cool examples. They're interventions in a space, but they might not rework trust. I shouldn't say that. I think maybe something like Bail Block is more than an intervention, I think some of the other ones that you mentioned, and I think the dual power app, maybe is really trying to fundamentally rework trust through how it uses those technologies. And then I'm interested in how they're seeking to accomplish it, and wondering what they're going to change to get there because it can't just be an off the shelf way of using these things. + +**KELSEY**: The bail concept, there's so much about it. But the really hard to get around one is that you're literally giving money to the state that you don't think should be imprisoning people. + +**DAWN**: Yeah, Who's with me next semester. Abolition. + +**BRENDAN**: Down. + +**KEVIN**: I just wanted to add to the money question that Brendan brought up. For me, how it ties to trust is, I feel like money is this thing that we've been taught that represents value and can be traded for resources. And it's like, no, you're born to this system that you didn't choose. So it feels like the system of coersion more than trust. We can exchange money, not because we trust each other, but because we've been forced to do so. And so, how you're saying, the systems that are just trying to not reform or revolutionize financial systems aren't enough because it doesn't take into account the things that Kelsey was mentioning, at the protests, people were giving hand sanitizer and stuff for free. There's not this monetary transaction that's happening; that's slowly building trust. + +**BRENDAN**: Yeah, I deeply agree with you, Kevin. I think some of you have heard me on this topic. But my chief concern with the design of some of the systems that co-opt the language of trust, I think that it points back to what, Mash, you were saying. My personal definition of the word trust is something that is very open and free-form. And while I completely want to honor and respect, Dawn, the importance of protocol here, because I really think that's a massive piece, protocol not in the digital sense in the human interaction sense in the way of the way of living to the world sense. But setting that aside for a second, I think that, Kevin, you're getting at the point that I care about the most, which is that I trust, for me, comes from a system that feels like I have both agency and freedom to do whatever I want. And that, for me personally, really is one of the reasons I gravitate toward barter economies, and why I think the central principle of open source is such an important thing here, where I don't have to do anything, I don't have to exchange value by any pre-determined means. I can participate according to different skill sets, I can make contributions that are not necessarily fungible. And to me, that's a really important part of my definition of trust and part of my definition of a framework in which a genuine definition of trust can emerge. And part of the reason that I was so infuriated by that TechCrunch article that claimed that the next thing that was going to emerge was the trust web, and that it was going to be a collection of cryptocurrencies, to me that is just a total co-option of language that starts with the Bitcoin paper, paragraph one, and ends with people on Twitter claiming that money fixes everything and we should make it digital. Sorry, that's my rant. + +**KEVIN**: I agree with you, I just wanted to throw that in there and the idea of revolutionising barter. I've been reading about circular trades, and how that solves the problem of the need for the people exchanging to want things from each other. If you have a circular trade, it facilitates larger possibilities of trade. I'm curious about that type of stuff right now myself. + +**DAWN**: There's a great book, it's very accessible, called Taking Back the Economy by JK Gibson Graham. It's all about actual concrete forms that are not the market as a way of thinking about economies or the free market in this narrow capitalist sense. It talks about local currencies, which are similar to building circular economies through bartering forums, it does mention gift economies, and it has a bit of a transition approach, in that it identifies concrete steps that maybe aren't totally, all the way—the ways you get there without requiring you to justify that you're going to build a new system that's coherently going to pop up and be fully formed from this to that tomorrow, which, I've been reading and listening to a lot more about abolition. Not only, but in light of everything that's happening, and now, there is a great podcast Justice in America with Mariame Kaba. + +**DAWN**: She talks about this idea of how you think about abolition, it's a process to go back to what Mash said, you ask yourself this question at each step, which is, is this meaningfully dismantling the system or working towards dismantling the system? If so, then we do it. If it's something that could make the system "more humane", and get us stuck in a way that actually perpetuates it, then we don't do it. That's how a lot of people who are abolitionists make arguments for or against certain types of reforms. Some people would maybe align with abolition, but other ones would not. That's why I think almost all people who are into abolition are against bodycams, because that's not going to do anything. It's actually putting more money for specific things. It's like no, what you should do is have police stop showing up in certain kinds of calls, disarm them, cut their budgets, because these will actually move in that direction, even if it's not like, tomorrow there are zero police. + +**DAWN**: I wonder if there's more that we want to take from any particular readings, I actually think kind of what we're continuing to return to is the paucity of the readings to explain the kinds of ways we need to think about trust right now in relation to technology. So yeah, what do we want to talk more about? Is there anything from those readings we need to say, or do we just want to scheme together for a better future with a different way we think about trust in technology. + +**KELSEY**: +I'm curious about ideas of constructive trust. We just had the abolition conversation briefly. It's a lot easier to oppose something than to build something good. And if it's not cryptographic economy, what is it? + +**BRENDAN**: +I'm a big fan of that. And I'd like to ask the question of using not just characteristic of vulnerability, or others can put in forth other phrases, but what systems can we think of that actually allow some degree of vulnerability? + +**BRENDAN**: +I find it very interesting, the relationship between the protesters and the mayor of Minnesota, where the recent interaction they had where it was just like, are you going to abolish the police? Yes or no. And then he was like, hesitation, and they were just like, shame, shame. It was like, Oh my god, this is Game of Thrones, while I very much agree with the end goal. And then you contrast that with the nine city council members who come forward with a much more cohesive plan and present. I think there's a degree of vulnerability there. I'd love to just pivot to talking about everything non cryptographic. Kelsey, I have no suggestion for you other than the hard work of people with concerns and people who are the subject of those concerns sitting at the same table. And I would submit that there are others far more equipped than me on the call to talk about processes that surround mediating that conversation. + +**KELSEY**: +And I do think that it's interesting to bring back into that space for a moment, because right now there's this really intense trust and really intense solidarity. And it's super multiracial and from protesters in the movement, and I've never felt anything quite like it. And the reason is, people are bodily vulnerable. And people have needed to really use that bodily vulnerability. It's not a fake thing at all. It's very real and very, very real community solidarity and very real identifying problem elements surrounding them and having them exit the crowd or helping somebody up off the ground who's been hit with a blast ball or any of this stuff, it's because of this extreme vulnerability. That's the point of nonviolent direct action: because you're extremely vulnerable, you're suddenly much more trustworthy. + +**MASH**: +Yeah, I mean, it makes me think of mutually assured destruction, where part of how deescalation happens is the possibility of harm to both sides. And then it becomes incentivized to deescalate, because of that possibility of harm. And again, that plays into the idea of equity and power. And you can't really deescalate if one side has all the power, because they don't have any vulnerability. + +**KELSEY**: +Just to build on that, they abandoned the precinct and boarded it up, and they publicly stated it was a show of trust, because they were like, they're probably just going to burn it down. And we were like, is this trust? Like, you abandoned a building? Assuming we would burn it? that doesn't feel like trust. + +**MASH**: +It's not a cryptographic system, but I kind of like the way that Facebook thinks about trust. I mean, obviously, there's many criticisms of Facebook out there, but I think the way that it conceptualizes human relationships in terms of rings of trust, because you can designate people as close friends or people who can even verify your account, but then you can also have lists of people that you trust. Personally, I shitpost on main, but but I have a list of people that really get my random memes I post. But then I also have more family friends, who I only post appropriate stuff to. The thing is, the user has control over the rings of trust, and they can move individuals between rings at their own discretion. Maybe that's a way to conceptualize trust from a technological perspective, because the technology facilitates that, as opposed to Twitter, where you're posting publicly. I think they're gradually introducing a little bit more control, but it's not to the same degree. + +**DAWN**: +I would just add to that. That is maybe an imperfect read on trust, because if it's only one sided, as how that relationship gets representedt there's something about how that gets codified in social networks which is very interesting. I've brought this up before on calls, but I'll say it again, I think the way that SSB really tries to think about interdependence, or a way of thinking about how things are related to each other in a way that's not one-sided offers something. + +**DAWN**: +I think we could design much less operationalized technology. Things could be so much more speculative, is my firm belief, or experimental in these ways, but I think we're stuck in a very narrow way of developing. + +**BRENDAN**: +That's a really interesting point, this emphasis on experimentation and speculation, this lack of canonical—this method of codependence, the phrase disintermediation really jumps out to me here, where Scuttlebutt is really a disintermediated platform, right? We often use the word centralization, but I think if you substitute that for disintermediation, I think some of what we're seeing here is a situation whereby we have a lot of people who are now disintermediated; we have people in the political system speaking directly to citizens. Okay, interesting example of this intermediation, but you also have the opposite of that, which is this heightened amount of contact between police and protester, which is, I don't think that there's any disintermediation happening there. But I think there's something really interesting about the capacity for failure, or tolerance for failure. And the varying expectations of tolerance for failure, that all come to the mix in a in a group setting, that is really important to highlight in these conversations, because I think when we talk about trust, one of the hardest expressions of a form of trust is like, hey, trust me, we're going to abolish the police. We're going to take a bold step forward. And really, we're going to do this knowing that we don't know the answers. We absolutely do not fully understand what's on the other side of this, but we know that we believe that what's on this side is bad. And I think that that's interesting, where SSB, on the technical side, gives us a mechanism for saying no, you don't have the complete record, there's no such thing as a complete record. The whole thing is predicated on, your network is who you see and who you are interact with, and who cares what every transaction ever is, and why are we so concerned with the digital consistency or consensus? I think that creates a much more interesting space for failure states. And I think that it's interesting that the users of SSB are so much more willing to take risks and not concerned about whether tweets are delivered inside of two milliseconds, which I think is an interesting characteristic to look at here in the group settings. It's really interesting to think about the scaling factors of this trust phrase. And I think to me that tolerance of failure is a biggie. + +**MASH**: +I don't know if disintermediation is always a good thing. In the case where there's an imbalance of power and you have interactions with somebody, then the fact that it's a direct interaction that's not mediated by anything means that the imbalance of power is presented in a pure state, whereas if you have something that's mediating that interaction, then it's a little bit more balanced. If protesters are interacting with police in the flesh, then they're very vulnerable, but they can yell at the police department on social media, and then because it's a public thing, everyone can see what they're saying. And so everyone can understand like, oh, wow, the police department just posted some bullshit, and everyone's calling out on it. So I feel like maybe sometimes it's not a bad thing to have an intermediary. + +**DAWN**: +Because I'm preparing for an AGM for a cooperative I was thinking in the other direction. The ways when, by design, you need—the principle that was in my mind is, one, no voting by proxies. One person, one vote, is baked in as this way that you help folks closer to each other, or to help with governance, where it's like, well, everyone's gonna have one vote, no one's gonna have any proxies. That kind of closeness of a close community is actually super important and baked into some of these other principles. But I take the point. I think though you're flagging an intense power asymmetry between the state and people, individuals and folks who may be non-citizens in some cases. + +**KEVIN**: +Thinking about the interaction between the protestors and the police, and how there can't be any trust there, I think one aspect of it is the anonymity. The police are covering up their badges and their names, and they're not really individuals anymore, you know, they're just this blob of force. And besides just the outright brutality, how can you know them, ever, in that context? They're not creating even an environment for trust because of that. + +**DAWN**: +Uh huh. This is something that I don't know a lot about. I wonder if other folks on this call have some of this context. I listened to one interview with someone who wrote a book about the history of policing and obviously, its connection to slavery and the slave trade, but then also its long connection to militarism and imperial actions abroad. But but there was a specific piece of that story which was the way the Blue Coat wall of silence or however people refer to it where you don't narc on other cops basically became a thing I think maybe speaks to how that is used tactically, what you pointed out, Kevin. + +**DAWN**: +But I think there's another thing though about who gets rendered visible; they get to be a uniform force or a wall. But then they have all these technologies and tools that render and individualize each person they're facing. And so people who are protesting then bear that weight of being visible. + +**KEVIN**: +So Kelsey, just put it in the chat. I agree. + +**KELSEY**: +So there's some pretty interesting crowd—they're trying to have that asymmetry, but I'm not sure to what extent they actually do, because the Twitterverse is real good at identifying license plates immediately, and found out who the shooter was the other day before the cops did, that kind of thing. + +**DAWN**: +I mean, I think that just reopens the conditions of possibility. It's beyond police realism. We don't need these systems. This doesn't have to be this way. They're spending all this money to convince us it's impossible for them to be otherwise, but it's not. You don't need that institutionalized violence. + +**KELSEY**: +There's also something really interesting in this concept, and I don't know if this is the conversation to have this in, but there's I guess this comes from the same argument as folks who talk about nuclear power and nuclear waste and whether that could ever be safe, and there exists ambient radiation in uranium ore that you don't mine. So if you set your limit for tolerance, if you ignore that and just say you're it can only be zero and not below the ambient unmined, you create an impossible situation. That's a long way of getting to my point, which is, we the public are fallible, definitely. But our guardrail shouldn't be whether we're fallible, it should be whether we're better than the fallibility that is already inherent in the system. + +**MASH**: +I want to bring back what Kevin and also Kelsey said about anonymity and I think part of what—I don't think trust is really possible. I think there's some contexts where anonymity is very important. But I think that we can't really have trust in an anonymous situation because trust depends on continuity of relationship. I guess there are contexts where there is a one-time trust, but even in terms of social experiments about altruism and things like that, where if it's a one time interaction, you're less likely to be altruistic. But if you know that you are gonna have to collaborate with a person again and again in the future, then you're kind of necessitated to act a little bit more prosocially, in order to gain the possibility of trust later in the future. Something we talked about a little bit, maybe in the middle of the discussion was about the the monetization aspect and how it kind of facilitates a quid pro quo or tit for tat mentality. Whereas, I think trust, there's an element of ephemerality in it, and an element of eternal aspect of it because if I'm building a trusting relationship with somebody, I guess a lot of people do conceptualize it as, there has to be a balance in terms of give and take, but there's also an element of, the trust itself being valuable, and not just the individual transactions that are happening. And so I think in an anonymous context, you don't have that to facilitate it, and so again, bringing back the police thing, the anonymity has to be symmetrical in order to have trust or it has to be completely no anonymity. + +**KEVIN**: +Yeah, I agree they shouldn't be hiding themselves. And the other thing that you're saying, I don't keep a ledger of how I spend time and help my friends and stuff like that, you know, like they bought me a meal this one time, I owe them a meal another time, we don't do that. That idea of transactions and ledger does not factor into how I build relationships and trust with my family and my friends. + +**KELSEY**: +David Graeber is so good on this. If you haven't read Debt the First 1000 Years by David Graeber, I super recommend it. He talks a lot about the origins of money as, what's important is not the money but actually the debt and the importance of, you build a community by not ever canceling the debt. If you always owe each other something, you know that the relationship must continue. So there exist cultures even now, where if you fully pay off a debt, that's a huge insult, because it means that you may now part ways forever. + +**MASH**: +Sort of like how your credit score goes down if you pay off a loan. + +**DAWN**: +Actually, this where I found really helpful the Wikipedia take on different domains that use trust. It spoke about how in most social contexts, trust is more used like a heuristic. It's a type of process that allows for a quick register of how you act in a situation, but it's not codified so granularly, as you all mentioned, down to the transaction level. I think there's something to that I wanted to reflect on more. But also when you were talking about anonymity and trust, I was thinking about the alternative, which is not anonymity but secret and how that relates to trust as being very valuable. So say, thinking about putting mechanisms like open balloting is one. But in many cases, you always also have provisions for when you do secret ballots. And that is a part of a way that you maintain committee cohesion and trust. And if you think about democratic participation, that's actually a way to build trust in the democratic process in a larger scale, is if people know that they can express their opinions without looking over their shoulders as they do it. + +**DAWN**: +I don't know exactly how to unpack secret, but I think there's something really cool there and how that relates to building trust, but that that is quite distinct from anonymity. + +**DAWN**: +It made me think of, if you're buying federal bonds, treasury bonds or whatever, it's commonly accepted that they will eventually be paid off no matter what. It's the most secure bond or whatever. And I think part of that echoes that idea of, a future expectation that's always in the future, which creates trust, because it forms a sort of economic backbone. ## Chat log -00:11:24 Kelsey Breseman: I read that book on audiobook a while ago, would recommend! Can dip in and out and there’s always something interesting being discussed -00:12:10 Dawn, dc (she/her): Pad for notes: https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw# -00:13:28 Kelsey Breseman: esp compared w the illustration on that same techcrunch article -00:13:33 Kelsey Breseman: v misleading conflation -00:20:43 Kelsey Breseman: “what we want tech to be or enable re trust" -00:21:59 Kelsey Breseman: & there is really strong call for trust & accountability on the hashtag– somebody says X and people reply confirmations or ask for confirmations -00:23:04 Kelsey Breseman: trust is *earned* -00:25:03 Kelsey Breseman: role of protocol is an interesting q -00:25:16 Kelsey Breseman: protocol as guiderails for how to earn trust in a specific community? -00:26:06 Kelsey Breseman: ^ more abusable than no-protocol? -00:27:00 mash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth-default_theory -00:30:08 b5 | Brendan O'Brien (he/him): deeeeep agree -00:33:43 Dawn, dc (she/her): WHAT ABOUT BGP!!!!!! -00:40:30 Kelsey Breseman: thanks for that Novi article, really helped -00:45:08 Kelsey Breseman: how apocalyptic is that, to choose to trust scarcity rather than the reliability of people -00:47:23 Kelsey Breseman: super deontological -00:49:29 Kelsey Breseman: ugh my audio is messing up -00:50:19 Dawn, dc (she/her): The audio is on my end -- gonna see what I can do on my end -00:50:45 Kelsey Breseman: abolish money -00:51:29 Dawn, dc (she/her): #defundthepolice #exitcapitalism -00:52:43 Dawn, dc (she/her): Was also gonna say: the Black Socialist of America Dual Power app -00:54:01 mash: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bail-bloc-founder-says-how-monero-mining-can-help-ice-detainees -00:56:47 Kelsey Breseman: lots of money = proxy for lots of trust, goes with “are they poor because they’re ___” -00:57:50 Kevin @lightandluck: +1 -00:57:55 Kelsey Breseman: trust impossible if you have no choice -00:58:06 mash: +1 -00:59:39 mash: gift economy? -01:00:16 mash: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt32bcgj ? -01:02:35 Dawn, dc (she/her): Also happy to share a pdf of it -01:03:08 mash: https://theappeal.org/justice-in-america-episode-20-mariame-kaba-and-prison-abolition/ ? -01:04:57 Dawn, dc (she/her): http://criticalresistance.org/abolish-policing/ I think has a comparison of abolition and non-abolition techniques -01:05:22 Kelsey Breseman: also straight-up love that in fact its GoT because everybody watched that so they can replicate -01:08:21 Kelsey Breseman: Google+! ahahaha -01:09:30 mash: LOL -01:09:48 Kelsey Breseman: useful bc it doesn’t try to “create” trust, just lets you more accurately map the existing trust relationships you build -01:10:10 Kelsey Breseman: also why blocking someone on Fb, even now when nobody loves Fb, is still like a top-level insult -01:15:55 b5 | Brendan O'Brien (he/him): so sorry folks, gotta jet (kid needs a bath) -01:16:03 Kelsey Breseman: bye brendan! -01:16:06 Kevin @lightandluck: take care Brendan! -01:16:07 mash: byebye! -01:16:15 b5 | Brendan O'Brien (he/him): stay safe all, and thanks for the great talk -01:16:32 Dawn, dc (she/her): bye! -01:17:45 Kelsey Breseman: whole other can of worms, but they also use our individuality. Cops on roof were shining flashlights down and pointing at individuals. -01:18:01 Kelsey Breseman: unclear why, but I know they have a partnership w Amazon’s facial recog -01:22:09 Kelsey Breseman: David Graeber/Debt is sooo good on that stuff -01:22:29 Dawn, dc (she/her): thanks for catching my mic! My mouse died and is charging :(( -01:24:14 Kevin @lightandluck: credit -01:24:58 mash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years -01:25:09 Kelsey Breseman: oh right 5000 heh -01:25:25 Kevin @lightandluck: +1 that "heuristic" part stood out to me too -01:26:36 Kevin @lightandluck: +1 agree, having privacy/secret is important too -01:27:03 Kelsey Breseman: Privacy is our next topic! -01:27:11 Kelsey Breseman: https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/76 \ No newline at end of file +* 00:11:24 Kelsey Breseman: I read that book on audiobook a while ago, would recommend! Can dip in and out and there’s always something interesting being discussed +* 00:12:10 Dawn, dc (she/her): Pad for notes: https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw# +* 00:13:28 Kelsey Breseman: esp compared w the illustration on that same techcrunch article +* 00:13:33 Kelsey Breseman: v misleading conflation +* 00:20:43 Kelsey Breseman: “what we want tech to be or enable re trust" +* 00:21:59 Kelsey Breseman: & there is really strong call for trust & accountability on the hashtag– somebody says X and people reply confirmations or ask for confirmations +* 00:23:04 Kelsey Breseman: trust is *earned* +* 00:25:03 Kelsey Breseman: role of protocol is an interesting q +* 00:25:16 Kelsey Breseman: protocol as guiderails for how to earn trust in a specific community? +* 00:26:06 Kelsey Breseman: ^ more abusable than no-protocol? +* 00:27:00 mash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth-default_theory +* 00:30:08 b5 | Brendan O'Brien (he/him): deeeeep agree +* 00:33:43 Dawn, dc (she/her): WHAT ABOUT BGP!!!!!! +* 00:40:30 Kelsey Breseman: thanks for that Novi article, really helped +* 00:45:08 Kelsey Breseman: how apocalyptic is that, to choose to trust scarcity rather than the reliability of people +* 00:47:23 Kelsey Breseman: super deontological +* 00:49:29 Kelsey Breseman: ugh my audio is messing up +* 00:50:19 Dawn, dc (she/her): The audio is on my end -- gonna see what I can do on my end +* 00:50:45 Kelsey Breseman: abolish money +* 00:51:29 Dawn, dc (she/her): #defundthepolice #exitcapitalism +* 00:52:43 Dawn, dc (she/her): Was also gonna say: the Black Socialist of America Dual Power app +* 00:54:01 mash: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bail-bloc-founder-says-how-monero-mining-can-help-ice-detainees +* 00:56:47 Kelsey Breseman: lots of money = proxy for lots of trust, goes with “are they poor because they’re ___” +* 00:57:50 Kevin @lightandluck: +1 +* 00:57:55 Kelsey Breseman: trust impossible if you have no choice +* 00:58:06 mash: +1 +* 00:59:39 mash: gift economy? +* 01:00:16 mash: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt32bcgj ? +* 01:02:35 Dawn, dc (she/her): Also happy to share a pdf of it +* 01:03:08 mash: https://theappeal.org/justice-in-america-episode-20-mariame-kaba-and-prison-abolition/ ? +* 01:04:57 Dawn, dc (she/her): http://criticalresistance.org/abolish-policing/ I think has a comparison of abolition and non-abolition techniques +* 01:05:22 Kelsey Breseman: also straight-up love that in fact its GoT because everybody watched that so they can replicate +* 01:08:21 Kelsey Breseman: Google+! ahahaha +* 01:09:30 mash: LOL +* 01:09:48 Kelsey Breseman: useful bc it doesn’t try to “create” trust, just lets you more accurately map the existing trust relationships you build +* 01:10:10 Kelsey Breseman: also why blocking someone on Fb, even now when nobody loves Fb, is still like a top-level insult +* 01:15:55 b5 | Brendan O'Brien (he/him): so sorry folks, gotta jet (kid needs a bath) +* 01:16:03 Kelsey Breseman: bye brendan! +* 01:16:06 Kevin @lightandluck: take care Brendan! +* 01:16:07 mash: byebye! +* 01:16:15 b5 | Brendan O'Brien (he/him): stay safe all, and thanks for the great talk +* 01:16:32 Dawn, dc (she/her): bye! +* 01:17:45 Kelsey Breseman: whole other can of worms, but they also use our individuality. Cops on roof were shining flashlights down and pointing at individuals. +* 01:18:01 Kelsey Breseman: unclear why, but I know they have a partnership w Amazon’s facial recog +* 01:22:09 Kelsey Breseman: David Graeber/Debt is sooo good on that stuff +* 01:22:29 Dawn, dc (she/her): thanks for catching my mic! My mouse died and is charging :(( +* 01:24:14 Kevin @lightandluck: credit +* 01:24:58 mash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years +* 01:25:09 Kelsey Breseman: oh right 5000 heh +* 01:25:25 Kevin @lightandluck: +1 that "heuristic" part stood out to me too +* 01:26:36 Kevin @lightandluck: +1 agree, having privacy/secret is important too +* 01:27:03 Kelsey Breseman: Privacy is our next topic! +* 01:27:11 Kelsey Breseman: https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/76 From bc2103a3c9e8e7f302990c249b4adc5d4d08f0ce Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2020 14:46:59 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 59/65] Create 6-polity-2020-11-03.md --- notes/semester_03_2020/6-polity-2020-11-03.md | 28 +++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 28 insertions(+) create mode 100644 notes/semester_03_2020/6-polity-2020-11-03.md diff --git a/notes/semester_03_2020/6-polity-2020-11-03.md b/notes/semester_03_2020/6-polity-2020-11-03.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7c219b8 --- /dev/null +++ b/notes/semester_03_2020/6-polity-2020-11-03.md @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +# Data. Together. Let's read about it + +## Polity (November 3) + +[🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/dLuJC7rkud8) + +## Intro + +Who are the groups of people to whom we are connected in systems of governance? To whom do we owe allegiance? + +## Readings + +Suggest readings for this topic here! The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion. + +* Grounding (volunteerism and polities in technology): + * [The Internet Relies on People Working for Free](https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-relies-on-people-working-for-free-a79104a68bcc) +* [Microstructures and Design Elements of Liberating Structures](http://www.liberatingstructures.com/design-elements/) +* [🎬 Democracy --> Sociocracy (un)learning individual and group patterns [whole video encouraged!]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvFZL2tGLiM&t) +* [The Catalan Integral Cooperative: an organizational study of a post-capitalist cooperative](https://p2pfoundation.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/The-Catalan-Integral-Cooperative.pdf), _focus on 1. Introduction, 3. CIC in a nutshell, 9. Summing up..._ + +Other material: +* (optional) ['Indigenous people are a polity'. On sovereignty and constitutional recognition](https://theconversation.com/indigenous-people-are-a-polity-on-sovereignty-and-constitutional-recognition-44287) + + +## Go-around + +Take a moment to check-in, a statement of gratitude not part of the big picture going on right now with the US election going in on the background + From f1368f2aaed2f91e5ace177be0c1f0c130c3b101 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2020 14:52:30 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 60/65] Links notes and recording for Polity conversation --- README.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 2ecdb89..ae0b32e 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -30,7 +30,7 @@ What is the role of an individual in a system where we hold civic roles both in - [Data Monopolies](#data-monopolies) (May 12)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/9RovyYAuPds)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md)   - [Trust (Cryptographic and Human)](#trust-cryptographic-and-human) (June 9)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/dgQuGy5BdAw)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md)   - [Private Data & Policies](#private-data--policies) (September 22)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/Qiw-WKBQ8A4)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/5-privacy-2020-09-22.md)   -- [Polity](#polity) (November 3) +- [Polity](#polity) (November 3)   [🎬 **Recorded Call**](https://youtu.be/dLuJC7rkud8)   [🗒 **Notes**](./notes/semester_03_2020/6-polity-2020-11-03.md)   ## Sessions From ec5d119e3e9d2b4cb44058b6d85ee32e8a005595 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2020 16:18:09 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 61/65] format chat log --- .../3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md | 190 +++++++++--------- 1 file changed, 95 insertions(+), 95 deletions(-) diff --git a/notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md b/notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md index 54ceacd..c485122 100644 --- a/notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md +++ b/notes/semester_03_2020/3-data-monopolies-2020-05-12.md @@ -224,99 +224,99 @@ Maybe it is business models versus motivations. When a business model is very cl So I just wanted to pull out, sort of categorize—I'm not proud of it, but, there's my information, which is in no way a priority. It's the things that are my interactions and things that I say, my emails and so forth and control over that is sort of one bucket, which I've been thinking about a lot. It's where my brain has been most of the time, there's information about me and how I'm seeing, which is I think what you're talking more about. And then there's sort of information that's basically a commodity. Whether it's Getty Images, or Google's indexes, or Amazon's listings, things that probably could be reproduced, or things have been published, public observations about the world, Google Maps and so forth. Each of those things, we could go down and it would be its own domain. I'd love to create the space for that. Just the concerns are very different, and the tools we have available are very different. Your questions about like, the role of open source, the role of government, the role of trust in non governmental organizations like Google and Apple—I'd love to get a chance to talk about the more personal stuff, if there's a space for that. ## Chat log -00:14:18 Kelsey Breseman: January! -00:14:24 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: IN THE BEFORE TIME -00:14:34 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: :facepalm: -00:15:23 maceo.mercey: don't make too much of an effort o nthe bullshit front. -00:18:21 Kelsey Breseman: https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw?both -00:20:00 Peter Abrahamsen: rainhead -00:23:03 maceo.mercey: I htink you start is good -00:23:40 Kelsey Breseman: Apparently it was Bork who did that? Or at least that’s what Goliath suggested -00:25:13 Kelsey Breseman: this is the key article for that https://www.newyorker.com/business/adam-davidson/teddy-roosevelt-wouldnt-understand-the-eus-antitrust-fine-against-google -00:28:17 Kelsey Breseman: I like it bc it’s two potentially valid takes -00:34:20 Kelsey Breseman: lol just read The Shock Doctrine in which Klein gives a litany of all the places Friedman’s thought has caused massive harm -00:34:33 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: omg that book -00:34:41 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: pinochet -00:37:36 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: oOooOOOOOoooo -00:37:37 Kelsey Breseman: good question -00:39:26 Jonathan Victor: https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/ -00:39:31 Jonathan Victor: (Not in the reading) -00:43:11 Kelsey Breseman: for varying connotations of “amazing" -00:43:25 Kelsey Breseman: was wondering if that would come up -00:45:47 maceo.mercey: for me the issue is: in what contexts is a data reservoir a pure power aggregator which precludes the formation of alternatives -- and I personally care less about what happens in the market than what happens in other parts of our lives. -00:46:33 Kelsey Breseman: “People You May Know"? -00:46:51 maceo.mercey: so you are the source of truth about yourself, and that means fb can never have a monopoly? -00:47:06 Peter Abrahamsen: data as commodity -- Facebook data isn't a commodity -00:47:10 maceo.mercey: peter did you have a hand up? -00:47:15 Peter Abrahamsen: meh -00:47:45 Kelsey Breseman: how ‘bout Google+ -00:47:52 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: to me, that’s an “dataset of scale" -00:48:37 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: totally, the “right to be forgotten" -00:52:05 maceo.mercey: I think that's a real questin. I wonder too. Maybe we need better examples -00:52:38 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: chronological tweets plz -00:53:13 maceo.mercey: b5 you next -00:53:17 maceo.mercey: and kelsey -00:53:54 maceo.mercey: credit score seems like a really good examle to me. -00:53:57 Kelsey Breseman: want to revisit centralization vs monopoly (esp in gvt context) -00:54:20 Peter Abrahamsen: what market is being monopolized in the case of credit scores? -00:54:30 Peter Abrahamsen: or social security numbers -00:54:31 maceo.mercey: so maybe a good question is: why do we tolerate the ssn monopoly? -00:54:42 Kelsey Breseman: define “we” -00:55:52 maceo.mercey: and "facebook is terrible" may be better grounded in other features, many of them easily enumerable. -00:57:23 Peter Abrahamsen: data is a resource; the market is publicity -00:57:37 Kelsey Breseman: oo I want to hear that expanded ^ -00:59:34 maceo.mercey: b5 has a hand -01:00:58 maceo.mercey: so now we're getting closer to dweb style arguments. source of truth -01:01:05 Kelsey Breseman: I’d say gvt is not a monopoly bc their mandate is to serve the people &&! they are accountable to democratic election, unlike a company -01:01:48 Kelsey Breseman: to the extent we believe that’s true, SSN monopoly is fine yeah? -01:01:57 maceo.mercey: i disagree -- govt's have monopolostic power overe.g. violence. that claim to authority is central to the operation of the state. -01:02:13 Kelsey Breseman: ^ -01:02:40 maceo.mercey: freedom of hte indivudual and the *social good* maybe -01:02:48 Kelsey Breseman: for the greater good -01:03:30 maceo.mercey: we're in a crazy moment. -01:04:04 Kelsey Breseman: sounds like what Matt’s saying in chat a bit tbh -01:09:57 maceo.mercey: brendan has to put a quarter i nthe swearing jar -01:10:10 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: HAh! -01:10:13 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: I will -01:11:21 maceo.mercey: so why do we call that monopoly? -01:13:10 Kelsey Breseman: I mean, they bought all these other companies -01:13:12 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: google is infamously short on info about your social graph -01:15:31 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: jonathan we don’t have a good way to get your hand -01:15:35 Kelsey Breseman: free/“free” -01:15:35 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: (if you have a thought) -01:15:42 maceo.mercey: yes I was thinking tht too. -01:16:19 Kelsey Breseman: ha well otherwise we’re just talking about decentralization again -01:17:34 Kelsey Breseman: the “can you walk away from it” metric? -01:18:31 Kelsey Breseman: comes back to Obfuscation: A User’s Guide to Privacy and Protest -01:19:48 maceo.mercey: that's cause apple is such a great affective manipulator -01:20:09 maceo.mercey: so you don't feel owned, maybe -01:20:15 Peter Abrahamsen: I trust Apple more than Google or Facebook, because I feel I understand their motivations better -01:21:51 Kelsey Breseman: is this like why you’re not supposed to let a guy buy your dinner -01:22:01 maceo.mercey: ^ I hink so -01:22:58 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: literally, what does facebook even do -01:23:01 Kelsey Breseman: tbh it’s not that good -01:23:20 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: you can geotarget on facebook for $1000 -01:24:49 Peter Abrahamsen: incompetence shouldnt' be reassuring -01:25:02 Kelsey Breseman: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45029192-a-human-algorithm -01:25:23 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: I’m thinking a lot about the right to be forgotten -01:26:47 Kelsey Breseman: the growing sense that we can be easily manipulated -01:27:42 maceo.mercey: the squirrels under my roof are massing troops and tanks and preparing an invasion of my room. -01:27:50 maceo.mercey: it's distracting -01:28:07 Peter Abrahamsen: invite them in, it'll be adorable -01:28:26 Kelsey Breseman: also it feels like we’ve been letting all this stuff be tracked forever but … smartphones were post-2000, that’s not v long ago for us to know much -01:29:02 Kelsey Breseman: the right to accidental forgiveness -01:29:20 maceo.mercey: it's not just culture, right? it's part of what makes action possible. ty cataloging every bad thing you did, then seeify ou cna wake up and getout of bed he next mrning. -01:30:08 maceo.mercey: I'm gonna have to go right at 7 my time -01:30:09 maceo.mercey: 4 yrs -01:30:33 Kelsey Breseman: thanks for facilitating! Want to help us wrap up, or delegate? -01:31:20 maceo.mercey: finish your thought! -01:31:41 maceo.mercey: oh my god they are so close to breaking in, I can ehear htem. -01:31:52 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: lawl -01:32:03 maceo.mercey: i thought so too -01:32:03 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: this has been a delightful discussion! -01:32:29 Kelsey Breseman: a data together classic, not reading the readings -01:32:36 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: ^^ -01:33:08 Kelsey Breseman: https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/74 -01:33:38 Kelsey Breseman: Trust -01:33:41 Kelsey Breseman: not antitrust +* 00:14:18 Kelsey Breseman: January! +* 00:14:24 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: IN THE BEFORE TIME +* 00:14:34 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: :facepalm: +* 00:15:23 maceo.mercey: don't make too much of an effort o nthe bullshit front. +* 00:18:21 Kelsey Breseman: https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw?both +* 00:20:00 Peter Abrahamsen: rainhead +* 00:23:03 maceo.mercey: I htink you start is good +* 00:23:40 Kelsey Breseman: Apparently it was Bork who did that? Or at least that’s what Goliath suggested +* 00:25:13 Kelsey Breseman: this is the key article for that https://www.newyorker.com/business/adam-davidson/teddy-roosevelt-wouldnt-understand-the-eus-antitrust-fine-against-google +* 00:28:17 Kelsey Breseman: I like it bc it’s two potentially valid takes +* 00:34:20 Kelsey Breseman: lol just read The Shock Doctrine in which Klein gives a litany of all the places Friedman’s thought has caused massive harm +* 00:34:33 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: omg that book +* 00:34:41 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: pinochet +* 00:37:36 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: oOooOOOOOoooo +* 00:37:37 Kelsey Breseman: good question +* 00:39:26 Jonathan Victor: https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/ +* 00:39:31 Jonathan Victor: (Not in the reading) +* 00:43:11 Kelsey Breseman: for varying connotations of “amazing" +* 00:43:25 Kelsey Breseman: was wondering if that would come up +* 00:45:47 maceo.mercey: for me the issue is: in what contexts is a data reservoir a pure power aggregator which precludes the formation of alternatives -- and I personally care less about what happens in the market than what happens in other parts of our lives. +* 00:46:33 Kelsey Breseman: “People You May Know"? +* 00:46:51 maceo.mercey: so you are the source of truth about yourself, and that means fb can never have a monopoly? +* 00:47:06 Peter Abrahamsen: data as commodity -- Facebook data isn't a commodity +* 00:47:10 maceo.mercey: peter did you have a hand up? +* 00:47:15 Peter Abrahamsen: meh +* 00:47:45 Kelsey Breseman: how ‘bout Google+ +* 00:47:52 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: to me, that’s an “dataset of scale" +* 00:48:37 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: totally, the “right to be forgotten" +* 00:52:05 maceo.mercey: I think that's a real questin. I wonder too. Maybe we need better examples +* 00:52:38 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: chronological tweets plz +* 00:53:13 maceo.mercey: b5 you next +* 00:53:17 maceo.mercey: and kelsey +* 00:53:54 maceo.mercey: credit score seems like a really good examle to me. +* 00:53:57 Kelsey Breseman: want to revisit centralization vs monopoly (esp in gvt context) +* 00:54:20 Peter Abrahamsen: what market is being monopolized in the case of credit scores? +* 00:54:30 Peter Abrahamsen: or social security numbers +* 00:54:31 maceo.mercey: so maybe a good question is: why do we tolerate the ssn monopoly? +* 00:54:42 Kelsey Breseman: define “we” +* 00:55:52 maceo.mercey: and "facebook is terrible" may be better grounded in other features, many of them easily enumerable. +* 00:57:23 Peter Abrahamsen: data is a resource; the market is publicity +* 00:57:37 Kelsey Breseman: oo I want to hear that expanded ^ +* 00:59:34 maceo.mercey: b5 has a hand +* 01:00:58 maceo.mercey: so now we're getting closer to dweb style arguments. source of truth +* 01:01:05 Kelsey Breseman: I’d say gvt is not a monopoly bc their mandate is to serve the people &&! they are accountable to democratic election, unlike a company +* 01:01:48 Kelsey Breseman: to the extent we believe that’s true, SSN monopoly is fine yeah? +* 01:01:57 maceo.mercey: i disagree -- govt's have monopolostic power overe.g. violence. that claim to authority is central to the operation of the state. +* 01:02:13 Kelsey Breseman: ^ +* 01:02:40 maceo.mercey: freedom of hte indivudual and the *social good* maybe +* 01:02:48 Kelsey Breseman: for the greater good +* 01:03:30 maceo.mercey: we're in a crazy moment. +* 01:04:04 Kelsey Breseman: sounds like what Matt’s saying in chat a bit tbh +* 01:09:57 maceo.mercey: brendan has to put a quarter i nthe swearing jar +* 01:10:10 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: HAh! +* 01:10:13 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: I will +* 01:11:21 maceo.mercey: so why do we call that monopoly? +* 01:13:10 Kelsey Breseman: I mean, they bought all these other companies +* 01:13:12 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: google is infamously short on info about your social graph +* 01:15:31 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: jonathan we don’t have a good way to get your hand +* 01:15:35 Kelsey Breseman: free/“free” +* 01:15:35 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: (if you have a thought) +* 01:15:42 maceo.mercey: yes I was thinking tht too. +* 01:16:19 Kelsey Breseman: ha well otherwise we’re just talking about decentralization again +* 01:17:34 Kelsey Breseman: the “can you walk away from it” metric? +* 01:18:31 Kelsey Breseman: comes back to Obfuscation: A User’s Guide to Privacy and Protest +* 01:19:48 maceo.mercey: that's cause apple is such a great affective manipulator +* 01:20:09 maceo.mercey: so you don't feel owned, maybe +* 01:20:15 Peter Abrahamsen: I trust Apple more than Google or Facebook, because I feel I understand their motivations better +* 01:21:51 Kelsey Breseman: is this like why you’re not supposed to let a guy buy your dinner +* 01:22:01 maceo.mercey: ^ I hink so +* 01:22:58 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: literally, what does facebook even do +* 01:23:01 Kelsey Breseman: tbh it’s not that good +* 01:23:20 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: you can geotarget on facebook for $1000 +* 01:24:49 Peter Abrahamsen: incompetence shouldnt' be reassuring +* 01:25:02 Kelsey Breseman: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45029192-a-human-algorithm +* 01:25:23 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: I’m thinking a lot about the right to be forgotten +* 01:26:47 Kelsey Breseman: the growing sense that we can be easily manipulated +* 01:27:42 maceo.mercey: the squirrels under my roof are massing troops and tanks and preparing an invasion of my room. +* 01:27:50 maceo.mercey: it's distracting +* 01:28:07 Peter Abrahamsen: invite them in, it'll be adorable +* 01:28:26 Kelsey Breseman: also it feels like we’ve been letting all this stuff be tracked forever but … smartphones were post-2000, that’s not v long ago for us to know much +* 01:29:02 Kelsey Breseman: the right to accidental forgiveness +* 01:29:20 maceo.mercey: it's not just culture, right? it's part of what makes action possible. ty cataloging every bad thing you did, then seeify ou cna wake up and getout of bed he next mrning. +* 01:30:08 maceo.mercey: I'm gonna have to go right at 7 my time +* 01:30:09 maceo.mercey: 4 yrs +* 01:30:33 Kelsey Breseman: thanks for facilitating! Want to help us wrap up, or delegate? +* 01:31:20 maceo.mercey: finish your thought! +* 01:31:41 maceo.mercey: oh my god they are so close to breaking in, I can ehear htem. +* 01:31:52 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: lawl +* 01:32:03 maceo.mercey: i thought so too +* 01:32:03 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: this has been a delightful discussion! +* 01:32:29 Kelsey Breseman: a data together classic, not reading the readings +* 01:32:36 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: ^^ +* 01:33:08 Kelsey Breseman: https://github.com/datatogether/reading_datatogether/issues/74 +* 01:33:38 Kelsey Breseman: Trust +* 01:33:41 Kelsey Breseman: not antitrust From 92fdad5da50f58d4b99dcd1adffa2e82d1a26438 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2020 16:39:29 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 62/65] format fixes --- notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md | 96 ++++++++------------ 1 file changed, 36 insertions(+), 60 deletions(-) diff --git a/notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md b/notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md index 7461ddb..8023fe1 100644 --- a/notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md +++ b/notes/semester_03_2020/4-trust-2020-06-09.md @@ -96,13 +96,13 @@ New technologies attempt to free us from (data) monopolized spaces, but does cry **BRENDAN**: I'll chime in I guess it's because I can maybe do some connecting work there. Some of the initial basis for this talk came out of the relationship between cryptographic trust and human trust. Specifically, one of the things we were trying to get at was a little bit of the co-opting of the phrase "trust", or the repurposing of the phrase "trust", as it relates to... and looking at it through both sides of the mirror, or however many sides of the prism, choose your object. But I think the thing that for me really jumped out was that, Kelsey I was really with you on the Doteveryone. From one side you're seeing this population that just feels completely beholden to the whims of a technology, and a degraded faith and a sense of lack of control being expressed in a number of places. And then at the other side, you also have the TechCrunch article talking about how, Oh, yes, we're going to rebuild the trust web. And they're describing something that is at the same time more complicated, and less and less about trusting, in the human sense. I think that was what was exciting about Doteveryone in juxtaposition to the cryptographic concept of trust. -**BRENDAN**: For me, what really jumped out is, if you read the Bitcoin white paper, just that first paragraph, it sort of talks about how, oh, we're gonna solve the trust problem. But it's a fairly narrow definition, right? The double spending problem is really what they're talking about. And the double spending problem is just being able to prove that a single dollar was only spent once, or once at a time. And that quickly spirals into a lexicon that co-opts or leverages the phrase "trust". I really wanted to talk about that today. I wanted to see what others think about the way that the word "trust" is used and reused, and what it means to different people in this space. There's more more questions and observations, but that's where my head's at. +For me, what really jumped out is, if you read the Bitcoin white paper, just that first paragraph, it sort of talks about how, oh, we're gonna solve the trust problem. But it's a fairly narrow definition, right? The double spending problem is really what they're talking about. And the double spending problem is just being able to prove that a single dollar was only spent once, or once at a time. And that quickly spirals into a lexicon that co-opts or leverages the phrase "trust". I really wanted to talk about that today. I wanted to see what others think about the way that the word "trust" is used and reused, and what it means to different people in this space. There's more more questions and observations, but that's where my head's at. **DAWN**: Yeah. I'll build on that, and then maybe that'll help us go into a direction for discussion. I echo, Brendan, those things you brought up, and what everyone else has mentioned as being on my mind, and also when we were thinking about selecting this. I think the other thing that we were trying to complement, and I think it'd be fun to talk about even if folks didn't get to read it, is a little bit of that history that came out of Finn Brunton's book Digital Cash, about some of the things that were going on to help redefine "trust" as it got redefined in this cryptographic way, and then taken up by these decentralistas. And I think that other piece of Libra, which maybe makes sense to bring up at the end, was trying to think about this role of gatekeepers, who those trusted parties are. It's skewed pretty financial-heavy in terms of, there's the Bitcoin white paper. Libra association is also in this very financialized technology. Take the social web, here comes to trust web, even though it's broadly trying to be about something else, really falls into talking about trust in a very specific technology way. And it's very informed by cryptocurrency. But then we wanted to open that up a little bit and do that comparison work, or think about the ways that that term is being leveraged in those contexts. And that's why we chose that Doteveryone summary, because I think it does a nice like, hey, what are people currently thinking about their relationship to technology? And then it was helpful to take a spend a bit of time looking at that Wikipedia article and being like, Oh, right, what are all of the different contexts that trust is used in and a lot of them are not about financial transactions. So why is this such a dominant source to mind for inspiration when we talk about technology? There is a very specific lineage there. **KELSEY**: It's impossible to not remember in this moment that EDGI got into the decentralized web because of a lack of trust in the state. I'm reading these articles while at a protest over facing off against militarized police. The one barricade the police have erected is between them and the peaceful protesters, and meanwhile, like two days ago, someone drove from the street into the crowd. Every other protest I've ever been at, there's been a barricade erected by the police to protect protesters from traffic. There's no trust here. -**KELSEY**: Yesterday, a big event in the Seattle protest is that the police actually left the faceoff. And so, we took the precinct, they'd boarded it up, but the street that had been blocked for over a week was now available. And it's really this interesting space where everyone's talking about, well, who do we trust? The police are obviously not allowed in this space. There are still barricades up controlling access. There's no one leader here. The barricades are controlled by different people who are just showing up, honestly, it could be anyone. The John Brown Gun Club, which is a far left second amendment group, has shown up to do security against threats of Proud Boys. That's been a rumor around for days. And everything inside the zone is—it feels very Burning Man, to be honest. There's just incredible amounts of free stuff and people walking by several times an hour offering you food and earplugs and hand sanitizer and stuff. And so there's this really strong outpouring of community trust in this moment, especially over trust of state, trust of sanctioned authority. But there's not there's not a real strong trust in decentralization as a concept. And it's really hard to believe that we've reached some kind of sustainable state. So there is still need for something, and it feels like we want tech to be the answer, in general space, not here specifically, that lets us have both. +Yesterday, a big event in the Seattle protest is that the police actually left the faceoff. And so, we took the precinct, they'd boarded it up, but the street that had been blocked for over a week was now available. And it's really this interesting space where everyone's talking about, well, who do we trust? The police are obviously not allowed in this space. There are still barricades up controlling access. There's no one leader here. The barricades are controlled by different people who are just showing up, honestly, it could be anyone. The John Brown Gun Club, which is a far left second amendment group, has shown up to do security against threats of Proud Boys. That's been a rumor around for days. And everything inside the zone is—it feels very Burning Man, to be honest. There's just incredible amounts of free stuff and people walking by several times an hour offering you food and earplugs and hand sanitizer and stuff. And so there's this really strong outpouring of community trust in this moment, especially over trust of state, trust of sanctioned authority. But there's not there's not a real strong trust in decentralization as a concept. And it's really hard to believe that we've reached some kind of sustainable state. So there is still need for something, and it feels like we want tech to be the answer, in general space, not here specifically, that lets us have both. **DAWN**: Can I ask you to say a little more about this one last part? I think you gave us a lot to connect back to the readings. But this idea of, there's not trust in decentralization as a concept—what do you mean? Do you mean people are using the term decentralization to think about that space? I've seen people on Twitter referring to it as CHAZ, as an Autonomous Zone, as very much drawing on, a set of anarchist literature and organizing tactics, but I'm very much at a distance. @@ -118,17 +118,17 @@ New technologies attempt to free us from (data) monopolized spaces, but does cry **BRENDAN**: I love, Mash, that you honed in the vulnerability characteristic. The thing that I think highlights that is the way that a relationship, a real relation of trust, starts with no protocol and evolves over time, right? You're referring to this cycle of like, Okay, I'm going to lead with with a little bit of vulnerability in an effort to move things forward. But from the protocol design perspective, or from cryptocurrency, you have a much more constrained definition of trust, that has to arrest every possible interaction that could happen and codify it, and we use the phrase trustlessness. And it's been this assuming bad actors sort of methodology. -**BRENDAN**: I, like Kelsey, have been spending a lot of time thinking about the police, and particularly following very closely Minnesota's defunding promise. This stepping forward, which is a very human capacity, to say, look, we don't understand what we're going to do, but we know that this isn't working. And we've at least had some public commitment on behalf of politicians to work on a new thing right now, a way forward. It's such an interesting display of trust. I think that one could very much argue that the phrasing that we use for decentralization really starts to fall apart here, where there has been a transition of power, by virtue of protests that have managed to start to achieve the outcomes that they desire. But if we were to call that decentralization, that sounds like shoehorning things in a way that doesn't feel right. And so I think there's an interesting way in which, to me, a lot of what's been happening in the Black Lives Matter movement and in the protests that we're seeing across the world right now, just don't in any way graph on to this into this sort of crypto-digital currency—it's amazing how stale some of these particles feel in the current context. All of this fundamentally is about a lack of trust in the police, right? This is a trust conversation. It's just not the one that we picked the readings for, in some ways, and in other ways, it really is. I just want to highlight the limit of the framing here and how much the current events has really blown that open. +I, like Kelsey, have been spending a lot of time thinking about the police, and particularly following very closely Minnesota's defunding promise. This stepping forward, which is a very human capacity, to say, look, we don't understand what we're going to do, but we know that this isn't working. And we've at least had some public commitment on behalf of politicians to work on a new thing right now, a way forward. It's such an interesting display of trust. I think that one could very much argue that the phrasing that we use for decentralization really starts to fall apart here, where there has been a transition of power, by virtue of protests that have managed to start to achieve the outcomes that they desire. But if we were to call that decentralization, that sounds like shoehorning things in a way that doesn't feel right. And so I think there's an interesting way in which, to me, a lot of what's been happening in the Black Lives Matter movement and in the protests that we're seeing across the world right now, just don't in any way graph on to this into this sort of crypto-digital currency—it's amazing how stale some of these particles feel in the current context. All of this fundamentally is about a lack of trust in the police, right? This is a trust conversation. It's just not the one that we picked the readings for, in some ways, and in other ways, it really is. I just want to highlight the limit of the framing here and how much the current events has really blown that open. **DAWN**: I think we've had success in previous readings trying to bring up pretty disparate things. I remember we were talking about the relationship to the state and the civic, and we had that No One is Illegal reading, and I think that has always been really helpful to open up things. In this case, we have a much tighter set of readings that are about a very narrow technological take on trust but that yeah, I think current events and witnessing state violence, police brutality, the the murder of George Floyd, Regis Korchinski-Paquet and her death here in Toronto, it's showing the paucity of some of this to explain what I would say is more at stake in most people's relationship to tech. -**DAWN**: But I do want to say that I don't know if you've noticed, but there are absolutely some Bitcoin people on Twitter who have tried to make a case for cryptographic protocols in this moment, I'm not even joking. I wish I was joking. They are wild ride Twitter thread reads. You're like, I don't even know where you're going with this. They involve, like, hand-drawn charts, they're about the financial system, and then at the end, they're like, oh, and this is why it will solve police brutality. And you're like, what? This is ideology. This is pure ideology at this point. You can't even drop your your thing for a moment and actually engage, separate from that with what's going on? Sorry, I saw a couple of those yesterday, and I'm still thinking about them. +But I do want to say that I don't know if you've noticed, but there are absolutely some Bitcoin people on Twitter who have tried to make a case for cryptographic protocols in this moment, I'm not even joking. I wish I was joking. They are wild ride Twitter thread reads. You're like, I don't even know where you're going with this. They involve, like, hand-drawn charts, they're about the financial system, and then at the end, they're like, oh, and this is why it will solve police brutality. And you're like, what? This is ideology. This is pure ideology at this point. You can't even drop your your thing for a moment and actually engage, separate from that with what's going on? Sorry, I saw a couple of those yesterday, and I'm still thinking about them. -**DAWN**: Okay, so that is an aside, I actually thought something that you said, and that builds on what Mash just said, would be the thread that would be more meaningful to carry forward was this idea of first principle structure over process. Brendan, you said this idea of a real relationship of trust starts with no protocol and evolves over time. I think both of what you said opens up some really interesting possibilities. And this is not to agree or disagree, it's just to offer more to that conversation. I absolutely think there's something about how stuff evolves, or the process side, is very underconsidered in how a design gets specced out or implemented. The format of a white paper is this, like, Oh, I made an argument that will hold up over time, as the final instantiation of this thing, this proof of concept, that maybe has an intellectual lineage that sets itself up to be bad like that. But actually, I think that protocol in different contexts, say in indigenous communities, in the way that some labs that are indigenous STS labs have drawn on protocol, I think allows for an evolution, or allows for a structure that builds trust. So I feel like there maybe are models to think about what a scaffold is that provides that space that you can build relationships in. That's different than this weird, rigid, Oh, we made a protocol that's not flexible and didn't consider a full range of things, and now everyone has to operate in the narrow confines. +Okay, so that is an aside, I actually thought something that you said, and that builds on what Mash just said, would be the thread that would be more meaningful to carry forward was this idea of first principle structure over process. Brendan, you said this idea of a real relationship of trust starts with no protocol and evolves over time. I think both of what you said opens up some really interesting possibilities. And this is not to agree or disagree, it's just to offer more to that conversation. I absolutely think there's something about how stuff evolves, or the process side, is very underconsidered in how a design gets specced out or implemented. The format of a white paper is this, like, Oh, I made an argument that will hold up over time, as the final instantiation of this thing, this proof of concept, that maybe has an intellectual lineage that sets itself up to be bad like that. But actually, I think that protocol in different contexts, say in indigenous communities, in the way that some labs that are indigenous STS labs have drawn on protocol, I think allows for an evolution, or allows for a structure that builds trust. So I feel like there maybe are models to think about what a scaffold is that provides that space that you can build relationships in. That's different than this weird, rigid, Oh, we made a protocol that's not flexible and didn't consider a full range of things, and now everyone has to operate in the narrow confines. **KELSEY**: Yeah, I really appreciate Mash when she brought in. There were a bunch of frameworks, and I'm spinning them all around in my head. This may not come out super coherent. I especially really like the truth default theory concept, where we're saying that people by default think that other people are telling the truth. And I feel like there is a really interesting place where the protocol aspects plug in. Mash, you talked about positive feedback loops and negative feedback loops for trust. But I think there's got to be nuances in there that are that are kind of the problem. Not to pick it out or anything, but specifically you called out vulnerability, and I think that's really accurate. But I think that we often take following a protocol as a proxy for being of actual good will. -**KELSEY**: And then we have this problem of a classic abusive relationship of any kind, whether it's state with people or person with person, is where that negative cycle doesn't kick in. You keep trusting them even though they betray your trust. That's kind of a failure of our trust mechanisms. And then there's this part where protocol comes in, and I've been formulating phraseologies that I haven't thought all the way out, of, what if protocols are guidelines for how you can how you can earn trust in a specific community? Because it absolutely is part of what goes on in terms of, if you dress a certain way, if you know how to act at a certain kind of dinner, the community that cares about how you act at that certain kind of dinner can use that as a proxy for you being of the community trustable by the community. But then when you have different protocols, this is this is pure conflation here, but you know, if you have UDP try to talk to HTTP, you're just not going to have a success at all. There's nothing there. +And then we have this problem of a classic abusive relationship of any kind, whether it's state with people or person with person, is where that negative cycle doesn't kick in. You keep trusting them even though they betray your trust. That's kind of a failure of our trust mechanisms. And then there's this part where protocol comes in, and I've been formulating phraseologies that I haven't thought all the way out, of, what if protocols are guidelines for how you can how you can earn trust in a specific community? Because it absolutely is part of what goes on in terms of, if you dress a certain way, if you know how to act at a certain kind of dinner, the community that cares about how you act at that certain kind of dinner can use that as a proxy for you being of the community trustable by the community. But then when you have different protocols, this is this is pure conflation here, but you know, if you have UDP try to talk to HTTP, you're just not going to have a success at all. There's nothing there. **DAWN**: I think there's something interesting though about that site of protocol and the way that word is used in different areas. Again, this idea is a narrow technical sense, how it's used. I think maybe in particular, around a current wave of decentralized projects is very different than even that broader history of protocols in computing and digital communications, to be honest, because most of them are old, and grow in weird and over time in the history of how they get defined and redefined is quite interesting and intense. not totally my area. I made a BGP joke not very well, but we know some people who are really into BGP, who are Data Together friends. Um, I wonder actually, if maybe this does help us segue a little bit into talking about that cryptographic trust, and maybe that we can rely on Brunton, but we don't have to exclusively think about that. He just provides a couple of anecdotes and moments from this early history of when it was getting developed that are helpful to understand some of the intellectual underpinnings or what was motivating those folks, which I think definitely inflect how those concepts get used, in the technologies that go with them. @@ -136,17 +136,17 @@ New technologies attempt to free us from (data) monopolized spaces, but does cry **BRENDAN**: I think it's interesting, it's not this is another misappropriation of a phrase, but the notion of being outed, when you're using a permanent append-only log is—by "outed", I don't mean that in the closet sense. I mean, in the de-anonymization sense. When we sort of start intermingling, I really think you can abstract past medical data and really any kind of personal identifiable information right, even your transaction history itself forms a sort of unique behavioral pattern. Bitcoin has struggled with this for a long time. It's never claimed to be anonymous, but it's sort of implied it. I don't think that that means that a blockchain is —it's a data structure, at the end of the day, and so you have mechanisms for, you can control for that, to some degree, by moving things off of the chain that don't need to be on it. And I think we see a lot of stuff like z cash, which is a really great example of trying to take anonymization to the nth degree in a blockchain and have those two ideas sit in the same space at the same time and be relatively cohesive. -**BRENDAN**: I guess there's it intersects with, do I trust the technology, and then, what types of trust has the technology enabled? I think are the two questions that jumped to mind for me. And the reason I brought it up in the last call was, I think that contact tracing and blockchain-adjacent technologies have some merit; if you wave a magic wand and assume that z cash approach works, and you can have an sufficiently anonymous blockchain, does it help you create a situation where, because you don't have a central authority governing a ledger, are you able to prevent the NSA problem when it comes to managing a contact tracing framework? Because I think that when we look at our, our own health data, and I think really what it is, at the end of the day is a collection of individually owned things, is the way I sort of perceive it. Which is your own health information. Everybody has their own health record, but there's a collective interest in us being able to trust each other and and share important moments of intersection, right. The classic, you and I have been in the same space and no classic Wow, talking about things that are three months old... but you know, you and I have been in the same space and we both would like to have some sort of zero-knowledge method of exchanging that information. +I guess there's it intersects with, do I trust the technology, and then, what types of trust has the technology enabled? I think are the two questions that jumped to mind for me. And the reason I brought it up in the last call was, I think that contact tracing and blockchain-adjacent technologies have some merit; if you wave a magic wand and assume that z cash approach works, and you can have an sufficiently anonymous blockchain, does it help you create a situation where, because you don't have a central authority governing a ledger, are you able to prevent the NSA problem when it comes to managing a contact tracing framework? Because I think that when we look at our, our own health data, and I think really what it is, at the end of the day is a collection of individually owned things, is the way I sort of perceive it. Which is your own health information. Everybody has their own health record, but there's a collective interest in us being able to trust each other and and share important moments of intersection, right. The classic, you and I have been in the same space and no classic Wow, talking about things that are three months old... but you know, you and I have been in the same space and we both would like to have some sort of zero-knowledge method of exchanging that information. -**BRENDAN**: I think the Libra paper speaks to the antithesis of this, where you have a blockchain for the sake of saying the word blockchain. That's part of the reason I wanted to assign some of the super dry reading for this, of the Libra thing, because I thought it was really important to look at oh, Libra Networks is a company and Libra Association... there's a Libra board that is inside of the Libra company, and they govern the network, and you're supposed to just sort of look at all this and say, Yes, we can trust this. And I think that that's this very interesting intersection there. And the reason I bring it up in answer to the question about healthcare data and blockchains is governance and protocol and process where we have this, the section on governance of a lot of these projects is really where I think we have a lot of questions of is this really centralization? Is that a lot of questions and histories for sure out there. +I think the Libra paper speaks to the antithesis of this, where you have a blockchain for the sake of saying the word blockchain. That's part of the reason I wanted to assign some of the super dry reading for this, of the Libra thing, because I thought it was really important to look at oh, Libra Networks is a company and Libra Association... there's a Libra board that is inside of the Libra company, and they govern the network, and you're supposed to just sort of look at all this and say, Yes, we can trust this. And I think that that's this very interesting intersection there. And the reason I bring it up in answer to the question about healthcare data and blockchains is governance and protocol and process where we have this, the section on governance of a lot of these projects is really where I think we have a lot of questions of is this really centralization? Is that a lot of questions and histories for sure out there. **DAWN**: I mean, if it's okay, I would actually maybe we could start. There's a couple of really succinct but opinionated takes that Finn Brunton has in the section, the last section I recommended, which might be cool to respond to, which would get us into thinking about both those three readings. If that feels Okay, if there's more, maybe Mash that you want to directly respond to in what Brendan said, I will leave it to you, but otherwise, I thought I could give us a couple quotes. -**DAWN**: So I think we have a short section in chapter 10, which is the synthesis of Finn Brunton's argument and then that background in cryptography in chapter three. So the parts that I wanted to surface from chapter 10 are his analysis of Bitcoin, which I think is compelling in an interesting way. His argument is on page 155: Bitcoin is an incremental technology. So the actual technological advance is small, but it had a striking theoretical breakthrough. So it combined a lot of work that came out of cryptography and computation from peer to peer networking and also ways that they dealt with digital timestamps that connected it to this larger history of digital cash schemes which very much came out of a libertarian background. +So I think we have a short section in chapter 10, which is the synthesis of Finn Brunton's argument and then that background in cryptography in chapter three. So the parts that I wanted to surface from chapter 10 are his analysis of Bitcoin, which I think is compelling in an interesting way. His argument is on page 155: Bitcoin is an incremental technology. So the actual technological advance is small, but it had a striking theoretical breakthrough. So it combined a lot of work that came out of cryptography and computation from peer to peer networking and also ways that they dealt with digital timestamps that connected it to this larger history of digital cash schemes which very much came out of a libertarian background. -**DAWN**: And then he has, this is on page 161, from Nakamoto. The direct quote from that paper is "and Bitcoin is an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures". And then I think this is a Brunton quote, "it's a system for collective verification of ownership with no existence outside the system of verification". So it's both a technical structure and then an ownership convention is part of what Brunton wants to make very clear. And to that point that Brendan said about anonymity. So there's this notion of anonymous sort of, but it's using money that's unconditionally visible, traceable and public, always. So what anonymity means there, it's fallen down over the years in terms of how people use it or can review those public transactions. But this is where I think there's sort of two more really interesting arguments he makes. So how he sees that there is a form of trustworthiness operating in the systems that are different than trust on a third party again, so Bitcoin is really responding to a very narrow take on type of trust before that was in financial context, which is on page 68. "The process of policing transactions and preventing double spending and thereby, the perception of trustworthiness, confidence and value of currency in the eyes of its holders required turning the physics of quantum computation into a kind of friction, or brake." So a deliberate inefficiency in a system as a replacement for a trusted third party. And how that was done in Bitcoin is through hash collisions. So it's a trust in scarcity, rather than a trust in the value of a currency that would rely on others; what the system has set out to do is prove to you how difficult it is to make more of it and that it's verifiable that this amount was that amount of difficulty to make. And so I think his concluding take is that this whole apparatus, the apparency of the ledger, the verification of ownership, the proof of work process and foreknowledge, of the introduction of the remaining quantity of new money are actually designed to produce a predictable amount of scarcity that you would call verifiable, distributed and trustless. But it's actually putting this as a scarce object into a specific infrastructure. So it's the ledger of the blockchain and how it works. And it's sort of like this. I mean, one that relies on as I think folks have seen in the development of the actual technology, new types of trust, or ways to relate a set of people to each other. So it's interesting that it's a trustless system, but as a system that has a community and maybe you could not say good things about its governance, but has a governance around the underlying production of that system. +And then he has, this is on page 161, from Nakamoto. The direct quote from that paper is "and Bitcoin is an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures". And then I think this is a Brunton quote, "it's a system for collective verification of ownership with no existence outside the system of verification". So it's both a technical structure and then an ownership convention is part of what Brunton wants to make very clear. And to that point that Brendan said about anonymity. So there's this notion of anonymous sort of, but it's using money that's unconditionally visible, traceable and public, always. So what anonymity means there, it's fallen down over the years in terms of how people use it or can review those public transactions. But this is where I think there's sort of two more really interesting arguments he makes. So how he sees that there is a form of trustworthiness operating in the systems that are different than trust on a third party again, so Bitcoin is really responding to a very narrow take on type of trust before that was in financial context, which is on page 68. "The process of policing transactions and preventing double spending and thereby, the perception of trustworthiness, confidence and value of currency in the eyes of its holders required turning the physics of quantum computation into a kind of friction, or brake." So a deliberate inefficiency in a system as a replacement for a trusted third party. And how that was done in Bitcoin is through hash collisions. So it's a trust in scarcity, rather than a trust in the value of a currency that would rely on others; what the system has set out to do is prove to you how difficult it is to make more of it and that it's verifiable that this amount was that amount of difficulty to make. And so I think his concluding take is that this whole apparatus, the apparency of the ledger, the verification of ownership, the proof of work process and foreknowledge, of the introduction of the remaining quantity of new money are actually designed to produce a predictable amount of scarcity that you would call verifiable, distributed and trustless. But it's actually putting this as a scarce object into a specific infrastructure. So it's the ledger of the blockchain and how it works. And it's sort of like this. I mean, one that relies on as I think folks have seen in the development of the actual technology, new types of trust, or ways to relate a set of people to each other. So it's interesting that it's a trustless system, but as a system that has a community and maybe you could not say good things about its governance, but has a governance around the underlying production of that system. -**DAWN**: So maybe that was a little heavy. I'm realizing that I always read things that are academic, so I think I sometimes say things really densely. But I thought that was such a great opinionated take on Bitcoin but I think is very interesting about like what trust was removed and then what a new form or infrastructure that it created. +So maybe that was a little heavy. I'm realizing that I always read things that are academic, so I think I sometimes say things really densely. But I thought that was such a great opinionated take on Bitcoin but I think is very interesting about like what trust was removed and then what a new form or infrastructure that it created. **BRENDAN**: I think that that really is such an interesting, it's the beauty of the Bitcoin paper and the beauty of the history of this. I think that it's really interesting that this came out of libertarian groups and the bringing up of this origins of this thinking. And I think that, the contextualization is an incremental technology is quite interesting. It's often heralded as this revolutionary concept, and then at the same time, if you connect that to the Trust Web article from TechCrunch, it's like, no, no digital currencies are infrastructure, they're a thing that you can use to get to smart contracts. Which we didn't really talk about a ton, but I think are also really interesting. When you use the word smart contract it often invokes the notion of law, which is closer to sort of some of today's thinking, or today's problems. But I think that the beauty of the Bitcoin as a project is its scope. It's it's a contained thing, its definition of trust is centered around digital scarcity. And that digital scarcity is applied to creating a ledger and it's clean, it's it's straightforward. It has what it can do and what it can't do, and that's that's kind of that. My concern is that the specter that that has invoked, people showing up on Twitter saying that Bitcoin can solve problems of racial tension, somewhere in there the dish ran away with the spoon. @@ -154,13 +154,13 @@ New technologies attempt to free us from (data) monopolized spaces, but does cry **BRENDAN**: I think you're right to point to the opening paragraph of the Bitcoin paper. I want to ask the group, I think that the cryptographic definition of trust implicitly seems to direct us to believe that economics can save us; there's some notion of using money to solve our problems. And if we can just engineer digital money, if we can wrest control of money from classic old school structures, like governments and Facebook, then we'll be able to move forward and design better futures for ourselves. That's my read of the crypto space. I don't know how well that argument holds up in the context of billions of people at home, very angry about their relationship to certain governing structures. -**BRENDAN**: Does anybody want to take the bait on that? +Does anybody want to take the bait on that? **KELSEY**: I mean, I put "abolish money" in the chat. And, you know, it's not something I ardently believe. But we have talked again and again in these discussions about the corrupting power of finances that enter the system. And it's not even necessarily money itself. It's not even necessarily the power that it both is and represents. It tends to be the conflation of something intangible for something tangible, and I think that's where we get hung up with the technology as well. **BRENDAN**: Totally, the notion of digital scarcity is really interesting, and how that creates the tangibility of fungibility—it's really interesting notion, right? At the same time, I think a project that would be interesting to bring up here as something of a counterpoint is the crypto Harlem project here in New York, which is focused on fenceline communities leveraging digital currencies and cryptography and techniques to both evade the surveillance state and to empower themselves to catch the next wave of economic prosperity. And so maybe this is a double edged sword. Maybe you can engage with it for your own good. -**BRENDAN**: It's really hard to think about things in context of what's going on outside our windows in the streets +It's really hard to think about things in context of what's going on outside our windows in the streets **DAWN**: I think there are these examples of people actually subverting almost the affordances of these technologies. I think he mentioned the Bail Block Fund where people use crypto miners in the browser. It was a progressive publication. They built this crypto miner that helped raise funds to pay for people's fail, if you visit their website in the browser and allow them to use it. I also mentioned the Black Socialists of America have this decentralized organizing app that's called a dual power and also builds on the concept of dual power, thinking about building alternative cooperative economies. And this idea of how you can use these technologies in ways that subvert the premise of markets and money as the site for change. I think those are all really interesting as cool examples. They're interventions in a space, but they might not rework trust. I shouldn't say that. I think maybe something like Bail Block is more than an intervention, I think some of the other ones that you mentioned, and I think the dual power app, maybe is really trying to fundamentally rework trust through how it uses those technologies. And then I'm interested in how they're seeking to accomplish it, and wondering what they're going to change to get there because it can't just be an off the shelf way of using these things. @@ -178,86 +178,62 @@ New technologies attempt to free us from (data) monopolized spaces, but does cry **DAWN**: There's a great book, it's very accessible, called Taking Back the Economy by JK Gibson Graham. It's all about actual concrete forms that are not the market as a way of thinking about economies or the free market in this narrow capitalist sense. It talks about local currencies, which are similar to building circular economies through bartering forums, it does mention gift economies, and it has a bit of a transition approach, in that it identifies concrete steps that maybe aren't totally, all the way—the ways you get there without requiring you to justify that you're going to build a new system that's coherently going to pop up and be fully formed from this to that tomorrow, which, I've been reading and listening to a lot more about abolition. Not only, but in light of everything that's happening, and now, there is a great podcast Justice in America with Mariame Kaba. -**DAWN**: She talks about this idea of how you think about abolition, it's a process to go back to what Mash said, you ask yourself this question at each step, which is, is this meaningfully dismantling the system or working towards dismantling the system? If so, then we do it. If it's something that could make the system "more humane", and get us stuck in a way that actually perpetuates it, then we don't do it. That's how a lot of people who are abolitionists make arguments for or against certain types of reforms. Some people would maybe align with abolition, but other ones would not. That's why I think almost all people who are into abolition are against bodycams, because that's not going to do anything. It's actually putting more money for specific things. It's like no, what you should do is have police stop showing up in certain kinds of calls, disarm them, cut their budgets, because these will actually move in that direction, even if it's not like, tomorrow there are zero police. +She talks about this idea of how you think about abolition, it's a process to go back to what Mash said, you ask yourself this question at each step, which is, is this meaningfully dismantling the system or working towards dismantling the system? If so, then we do it. If it's something that could make the system "more humane", and get us stuck in a way that actually perpetuates it, then we don't do it. That's how a lot of people who are abolitionists make arguments for or against certain types of reforms. Some people would maybe align with abolition, but other ones would not. That's why I think almost all people who are into abolition are against bodycams, because that's not going to do anything. It's actually putting more money for specific things. It's like no, what you should do is have police stop showing up in certain kinds of calls, disarm them, cut their budgets, because these will actually move in that direction, even if it's not like, tomorrow there are zero police. -**DAWN**: I wonder if there's more that we want to take from any particular readings, I actually think kind of what we're continuing to return to is the paucity of the readings to explain the kinds of ways we need to think about trust right now in relation to technology. So yeah, what do we want to talk more about? Is there anything from those readings we need to say, or do we just want to scheme together for a better future with a different way we think about trust in technology. +I wonder if there's more that we want to take from any particular readings, I actually think kind of what we're continuing to return to is the paucity of the readings to explain the kinds of ways we need to think about trust right now in relation to technology. So yeah, what do we want to talk more about? Is there anything from those readings we need to say, or do we just want to scheme together for a better future with a different way we think about trust in technology. -**KELSEY**: -I'm curious about ideas of constructive trust. We just had the abolition conversation briefly. It's a lot easier to oppose something than to build something good. And if it's not cryptographic economy, what is it? +**KELSEY**: I'm curious about ideas of constructive trust. We just had the abolition conversation briefly. It's a lot easier to oppose something than to build something good. And if it's not cryptographic economy, what is it? **BRENDAN**: I'm a big fan of that. And I'd like to ask the question of using not just characteristic of vulnerability, or others can put in forth other phrases, but what systems can we think of that actually allow some degree of vulnerability? - -**BRENDAN**: + I find it very interesting, the relationship between the protesters and the mayor of Minnesota, where the recent interaction they had where it was just like, are you going to abolish the police? Yes or no. And then he was like, hesitation, and they were just like, shame, shame. It was like, Oh my god, this is Game of Thrones, while I very much agree with the end goal. And then you contrast that with the nine city council members who come forward with a much more cohesive plan and present. I think there's a degree of vulnerability there. I'd love to just pivot to talking about everything non cryptographic. Kelsey, I have no suggestion for you other than the hard work of people with concerns and people who are the subject of those concerns sitting at the same table. And I would submit that there are others far more equipped than me on the call to talk about processes that surround mediating that conversation. -**KELSEY**: -And I do think that it's interesting to bring back into that space for a moment, because right now there's this really intense trust and really intense solidarity. And it's super multiracial and from protesters in the movement, and I've never felt anything quite like it. And the reason is, people are bodily vulnerable. And people have needed to really use that bodily vulnerability. It's not a fake thing at all. It's very real and very, very real community solidarity and very real identifying problem elements surrounding them and having them exit the crowd or helping somebody up off the ground who's been hit with a blast ball or any of this stuff, it's because of this extreme vulnerability. That's the point of nonviolent direct action: because you're extremely vulnerable, you're suddenly much more trustworthy. +**KELSEY**: And I do think that it's interesting to bring back into that space for a moment, because right now there's this really intense trust and really intense solidarity. And it's super multiracial and from protesters in the movement, and I've never felt anything quite like it. And the reason is, people are bodily vulnerable. And people have needed to really use that bodily vulnerability. It's not a fake thing at all. It's very real and very, very real community solidarity and very real identifying problem elements surrounding them and having them exit the crowd or helping somebody up off the ground who's been hit with a blast ball or any of this stuff, it's because of this extreme vulnerability. That's the point of nonviolent direct action: because you're extremely vulnerable, you're suddenly much more trustworthy. -**MASH**: -Yeah, I mean, it makes me think of mutually assured destruction, where part of how deescalation happens is the possibility of harm to both sides. And then it becomes incentivized to deescalate, because of that possibility of harm. And again, that plays into the idea of equity and power. And you can't really deescalate if one side has all the power, because they don't have any vulnerability. +**MASH**: Yeah, I mean, it makes me think of mutually assured destruction, where part of how deescalation happens is the possibility of harm to both sides. And then it becomes incentivized to deescalate, because of that possibility of harm. And again, that plays into the idea of equity and power. And you can't really deescalate if one side has all the power, because they don't have any vulnerability. -**KELSEY**: -Just to build on that, they abandoned the precinct and boarded it up, and they publicly stated it was a show of trust, because they were like, they're probably just going to burn it down. And we were like, is this trust? Like, you abandoned a building? Assuming we would burn it? that doesn't feel like trust. +**KELSEY**: Just to build on that, they abandoned the precinct and boarded it up, and they publicly stated it was a show of trust, because they were like, they're probably just going to burn it down. And we were like, is this trust? Like, you abandoned a building? Assuming we would burn it? that doesn't feel like trust. -**MASH**: -It's not a cryptographic system, but I kind of like the way that Facebook thinks about trust. I mean, obviously, there's many criticisms of Facebook out there, but I think the way that it conceptualizes human relationships in terms of rings of trust, because you can designate people as close friends or people who can even verify your account, but then you can also have lists of people that you trust. Personally, I shitpost on main, but but I have a list of people that really get my random memes I post. But then I also have more family friends, who I only post appropriate stuff to. The thing is, the user has control over the rings of trust, and they can move individuals between rings at their own discretion. Maybe that's a way to conceptualize trust from a technological perspective, because the technology facilitates that, as opposed to Twitter, where you're posting publicly. I think they're gradually introducing a little bit more control, but it's not to the same degree. +**MASH**: It's not a cryptographic system, but I kind of like the way that Facebook thinks about trust. I mean, obviously, there's many criticisms of Facebook out there, but I think the way that it conceptualizes human relationships in terms of rings of trust, because you can designate people as close friends or people who can even verify your account, but then you can also have lists of people that you trust. Personally, I shitpost on main, but but I have a list of people that really get my random memes I post. But then I also have more family friends, who I only post appropriate stuff to. The thing is, the user has control over the rings of trust, and they can move individuals between rings at their own discretion. Maybe that's a way to conceptualize trust from a technological perspective, because the technology facilitates that, as opposed to Twitter, where you're posting publicly. I think they're gradually introducing a little bit more control, but it's not to the same degree. -**DAWN**: -I would just add to that. That is maybe an imperfect read on trust, because if it's only one sided, as how that relationship gets representedt there's something about how that gets codified in social networks which is very interesting. I've brought this up before on calls, but I'll say it again, I think the way that SSB really tries to think about interdependence, or a way of thinking about how things are related to each other in a way that's not one-sided offers something. +**DAWN**: I would just add to that. That is maybe an imperfect read on trust, because if it's only one sided, as how that relationship gets representedt there's something about how that gets codified in social networks which is very interesting. I've brought this up before on calls, but I'll say it again, I think the way that SSB really tries to think about interdependence, or a way of thinking about how things are related to each other in a way that's not one-sided offers something. -**DAWN**: I think we could design much less operationalized technology. Things could be so much more speculative, is my firm belief, or experimental in these ways, but I think we're stuck in a very narrow way of developing. -**BRENDAN**: -That's a really interesting point, this emphasis on experimentation and speculation, this lack of canonical—this method of codependence, the phrase disintermediation really jumps out to me here, where Scuttlebutt is really a disintermediated platform, right? We often use the word centralization, but I think if you substitute that for disintermediation, I think some of what we're seeing here is a situation whereby we have a lot of people who are now disintermediated; we have people in the political system speaking directly to citizens. Okay, interesting example of this intermediation, but you also have the opposite of that, which is this heightened amount of contact between police and protester, which is, I don't think that there's any disintermediation happening there. But I think there's something really interesting about the capacity for failure, or tolerance for failure. And the varying expectations of tolerance for failure, that all come to the mix in a in a group setting, that is really important to highlight in these conversations, because I think when we talk about trust, one of the hardest expressions of a form of trust is like, hey, trust me, we're going to abolish the police. We're going to take a bold step forward. And really, we're going to do this knowing that we don't know the answers. We absolutely do not fully understand what's on the other side of this, but we know that we believe that what's on this side is bad. And I think that that's interesting, where SSB, on the technical side, gives us a mechanism for saying no, you don't have the complete record, there's no such thing as a complete record. The whole thing is predicated on, your network is who you see and who you are interact with, and who cares what every transaction ever is, and why are we so concerned with the digital consistency or consensus? I think that creates a much more interesting space for failure states. And I think that it's interesting that the users of SSB are so much more willing to take risks and not concerned about whether tweets are delivered inside of two milliseconds, which I think is an interesting characteristic to look at here in the group settings. It's really interesting to think about the scaling factors of this trust phrase. And I think to me that tolerance of failure is a biggie. +**BRENDAN**: That's a really interesting point, this emphasis on experimentation and speculation, this lack of canonical—this method of codependence, the phrase disintermediation really jumps out to me here, where Scuttlebutt is really a disintermediated platform, right? We often use the word centralization, but I think if you substitute that for disintermediation, I think some of what we're seeing here is a situation whereby we have a lot of people who are now disintermediated; we have people in the political system speaking directly to citizens. Okay, interesting example of this intermediation, but you also have the opposite of that, which is this heightened amount of contact between police and protester, which is, I don't think that there's any disintermediation happening there. But I think there's something really interesting about the capacity for failure, or tolerance for failure. And the varying expectations of tolerance for failure, that all come to the mix in a in a group setting, that is really important to highlight in these conversations, because I think when we talk about trust, one of the hardest expressions of a form of trust is like, hey, trust me, we're going to abolish the police. We're going to take a bold step forward. And really, we're going to do this knowing that we don't know the answers. We absolutely do not fully understand what's on the other side of this, but we know that we believe that what's on this side is bad. And I think that that's interesting, where SSB, on the technical side, gives us a mechanism for saying no, you don't have the complete record, there's no such thing as a complete record. The whole thing is predicated on, your network is who you see and who you are interact with, and who cares what every transaction ever is, and why are we so concerned with the digital consistency or consensus? I think that creates a much more interesting space for failure states. And I think that it's interesting that the users of SSB are so much more willing to take risks and not concerned about whether tweets are delivered inside of two milliseconds, which I think is an interesting characteristic to look at here in the group settings. It's really interesting to think about the scaling factors of this trust phrase. And I think to me that tolerance of failure is a biggie. -**MASH**: -I don't know if disintermediation is always a good thing. In the case where there's an imbalance of power and you have interactions with somebody, then the fact that it's a direct interaction that's not mediated by anything means that the imbalance of power is presented in a pure state, whereas if you have something that's mediating that interaction, then it's a little bit more balanced. If protesters are interacting with police in the flesh, then they're very vulnerable, but they can yell at the police department on social media, and then because it's a public thing, everyone can see what they're saying. And so everyone can understand like, oh, wow, the police department just posted some bullshit, and everyone's calling out on it. So I feel like maybe sometimes it's not a bad thing to have an intermediary. +**MASH**: I don't know if disintermediation is always a good thing. In the case where there's an imbalance of power and you have interactions with somebody, then the fact that it's a direct interaction that's not mediated by anything means that the imbalance of power is presented in a pure state, whereas if you have something that's mediating that interaction, then it's a little bit more balanced. If protesters are interacting with police in the flesh, then they're very vulnerable, but they can yell at the police department on social media, and then because it's a public thing, everyone can see what they're saying. And so everyone can understand like, oh, wow, the police department just posted some bullshit, and everyone's calling out on it. So I feel like maybe sometimes it's not a bad thing to have an intermediary. -**DAWN**: -Because I'm preparing for an AGM for a cooperative I was thinking in the other direction. The ways when, by design, you need—the principle that was in my mind is, one, no voting by proxies. One person, one vote, is baked in as this way that you help folks closer to each other, or to help with governance, where it's like, well, everyone's gonna have one vote, no one's gonna have any proxies. That kind of closeness of a close community is actually super important and baked into some of these other principles. But I take the point. I think though you're flagging an intense power asymmetry between the state and people, individuals and folks who may be non-citizens in some cases. +**DAWN**: Because I'm preparing for an AGM for a cooperative I was thinking in the other direction. The ways when, by design, you need—the principle that was in my mind is, one, no voting by proxies. One person, one vote, is baked in as this way that you help folks closer to each other, or to help with governance, where it's like, well, everyone's gonna have one vote, no one's gonna have any proxies. That kind of closeness of a close community is actually super important and baked into some of these other principles. But I take the point. I think though you're flagging an intense power asymmetry between the state and people, individuals and folks who may be non-citizens in some cases. -**KEVIN**: -Thinking about the interaction between the protestors and the police, and how there can't be any trust there, I think one aspect of it is the anonymity. The police are covering up their badges and their names, and they're not really individuals anymore, you know, they're just this blob of force. And besides just the outright brutality, how can you know them, ever, in that context? They're not creating even an environment for trust because of that. +**KEVIN**: Thinking about the interaction between the protestors and the police, and how there can't be any trust there, I think one aspect of it is the anonymity. The police are covering up their badges and their names, and they're not really individuals anymore, you know, they're just this blob of force. And besides just the outright brutality, how can you know them, ever, in that context? They're not creating even an environment for trust because of that. -**DAWN**: -Uh huh. This is something that I don't know a lot about. I wonder if other folks on this call have some of this context. I listened to one interview with someone who wrote a book about the history of policing and obviously, its connection to slavery and the slave trade, but then also its long connection to militarism and imperial actions abroad. But but there was a specific piece of that story which was the way the Blue Coat wall of silence or however people refer to it where you don't narc on other cops basically became a thing I think maybe speaks to how that is used tactically, what you pointed out, Kevin. +**DAWN**: Uh huh. This is something that I don't know a lot about. I wonder if other folks on this call have some of this context. I listened to one interview with someone who wrote a book about the history of policing and obviously, its connection to slavery and the slave trade, but then also its long connection to militarism and imperial actions abroad. But but there was a specific piece of that story which was the way the Blue Coat wall of silence or however people refer to it where you don't narc on other cops basically became a thing I think maybe speaks to how that is used tactically, what you pointed out, Kevin. -**DAWN**: -But I think there's another thing though about who gets rendered visible; they get to be a uniform force or a wall. But then they have all these technologies and tools that render and individualize each person they're facing. And so people who are protesting then bear that weight of being visible. +**DAWN**: But I think there's another thing though about who gets rendered visible; they get to be a uniform force or a wall. But then they have all these technologies and tools that render and individualize each person they're facing. And so people who are protesting then bear that weight of being visible. -**KEVIN**: -So Kelsey, just put it in the chat. I agree. +**KEVIN**: So Kelsey, just put it in the chat. I agree. -**KELSEY**: -So there's some pretty interesting crowd—they're trying to have that asymmetry, but I'm not sure to what extent they actually do, because the Twitterverse is real good at identifying license plates immediately, and found out who the shooter was the other day before the cops did, that kind of thing. +**KELSEY**: So there's some pretty interesting crowd—they're trying to have that asymmetry, but I'm not sure to what extent they actually do, because the Twitterverse is real good at identifying license plates immediately, and found out who the shooter was the other day before the cops did, that kind of thing. -**DAWN**: -I mean, I think that just reopens the conditions of possibility. It's beyond police realism. We don't need these systems. This doesn't have to be this way. They're spending all this money to convince us it's impossible for them to be otherwise, but it's not. You don't need that institutionalized violence. +**DAWN**: I mean, I think that just reopens the conditions of possibility. It's beyond police realism. We don't need these systems. This doesn't have to be this way. They're spending all this money to convince us it's impossible for them to be otherwise, but it's not. You don't need that institutionalized violence. **KELSEY**: There's also something really interesting in this concept, and I don't know if this is the conversation to have this in, but there's I guess this comes from the same argument as folks who talk about nuclear power and nuclear waste and whether that could ever be safe, and there exists ambient radiation in uranium ore that you don't mine. So if you set your limit for tolerance, if you ignore that and just say you're it can only be zero and not below the ambient unmined, you create an impossible situation. That's a long way of getting to my point, which is, we the public are fallible, definitely. But our guardrail shouldn't be whether we're fallible, it should be whether we're better than the fallibility that is already inherent in the system. -**MASH**: -I want to bring back what Kevin and also Kelsey said about anonymity and I think part of what—I don't think trust is really possible. I think there's some contexts where anonymity is very important. But I think that we can't really have trust in an anonymous situation because trust depends on continuity of relationship. I guess there are contexts where there is a one-time trust, but even in terms of social experiments about altruism and things like that, where if it's a one time interaction, you're less likely to be altruistic. But if you know that you are gonna have to collaborate with a person again and again in the future, then you're kind of necessitated to act a little bit more prosocially, in order to gain the possibility of trust later in the future. Something we talked about a little bit, maybe in the middle of the discussion was about the the monetization aspect and how it kind of facilitates a quid pro quo or tit for tat mentality. Whereas, I think trust, there's an element of ephemerality in it, and an element of eternal aspect of it because if I'm building a trusting relationship with somebody, I guess a lot of people do conceptualize it as, there has to be a balance in terms of give and take, but there's also an element of, the trust itself being valuable, and not just the individual transactions that are happening. And so I think in an anonymous context, you don't have that to facilitate it, and so again, bringing back the police thing, the anonymity has to be symmetrical in order to have trust or it has to be completely no anonymity. +**MASH**: I want to bring back what Kevin and also Kelsey said about anonymity and I think part of what—I don't think trust is really possible. I think there's some contexts where anonymity is very important. But I think that we can't really have trust in an anonymous situation because trust depends on continuity of relationship. I guess there are contexts where there is a one-time trust, but even in terms of social experiments about altruism and things like that, where if it's a one time interaction, you're less likely to be altruistic. But if you know that you are gonna have to collaborate with a person again and again in the future, then you're kind of necessitated to act a little bit more prosocially, in order to gain the possibility of trust later in the future. Something we talked about a little bit, maybe in the middle of the discussion was about the the monetization aspect and how it kind of facilitates a quid pro quo or tit for tat mentality. Whereas, I think trust, there's an element of ephemerality in it, and an element of eternal aspect of it because if I'm building a trusting relationship with somebody, I guess a lot of people do conceptualize it as, there has to be a balance in terms of give and take, but there's also an element of, the trust itself being valuable, and not just the individual transactions that are happening. And so I think in an anonymous context, you don't have that to facilitate it, and so again, bringing back the police thing, the anonymity has to be symmetrical in order to have trust or it has to be completely no anonymity. -**KEVIN**: -Yeah, I agree they shouldn't be hiding themselves. And the other thing that you're saying, I don't keep a ledger of how I spend time and help my friends and stuff like that, you know, like they bought me a meal this one time, I owe them a meal another time, we don't do that. That idea of transactions and ledger does not factor into how I build relationships and trust with my family and my friends. +**KEVIN**: Yeah, I agree they shouldn't be hiding themselves. And the other thing that you're saying, I don't keep a ledger of how I spend time and help my friends and stuff like that, you know, like they bought me a meal this one time, I owe them a meal another time, we don't do that. That idea of transactions and ledger does not factor into how I build relationships and trust with my family and my friends. -**KELSEY**: -David Graeber is so good on this. If you haven't read Debt the First 1000 Years by David Graeber, I super recommend it. He talks a lot about the origins of money as, what's important is not the money but actually the debt and the importance of, you build a community by not ever canceling the debt. If you always owe each other something, you know that the relationship must continue. So there exist cultures even now, where if you fully pay off a debt, that's a huge insult, because it means that you may now part ways forever. +**KELSEY**: David Graeber is so good on this. If you haven't read Debt the First 1000 Years by David Graeber, I super recommend it. He talks a lot about the origins of money as, what's important is not the money but actually the debt and the importance of, you build a community by not ever canceling the debt. If you always owe each other something, you know that the relationship must continue. So there exist cultures even now, where if you fully pay off a debt, that's a huge insult, because it means that you may now part ways forever. -**MASH**: -Sort of like how your credit score goes down if you pay off a loan. +**MASH**: Sort of like how your credit score goes down if you pay off a loan. -**DAWN**: -Actually, this where I found really helpful the Wikipedia take on different domains that use trust. It spoke about how in most social contexts, trust is more used like a heuristic. It's a type of process that allows for a quick register of how you act in a situation, but it's not codified so granularly, as you all mentioned, down to the transaction level. I think there's something to that I wanted to reflect on more. But also when you were talking about anonymity and trust, I was thinking about the alternative, which is not anonymity but secret and how that relates to trust as being very valuable. So say, thinking about putting mechanisms like open balloting is one. But in many cases, you always also have provisions for when you do secret ballots. And that is a part of a way that you maintain committee cohesion and trust. And if you think about democratic participation, that's actually a way to build trust in the democratic process in a larger scale, is if people know that they can express their opinions without looking over their shoulders as they do it. +**DAWN**: Actually, this where I found really helpful the Wikipedia take on different domains that use trust. It spoke about how in most social contexts, trust is more used like a heuristic. It's a type of process that allows for a quick register of how you act in a situation, but it's not codified so granularly, as you all mentioned, down to the transaction level. I think there's something to that I wanted to reflect on more. But also when you were talking about anonymity and trust, I was thinking about the alternative, which is not anonymity but secret and how that relates to trust as being very valuable. So say, thinking about putting mechanisms like open balloting is one. But in many cases, you always also have provisions for when you do secret ballots. And that is a part of a way that you maintain committee cohesion and trust. And if you think about democratic participation, that's actually a way to build trust in the democratic process in a larger scale, is if people know that they can express their opinions without looking over their shoulders as they do it. -**DAWN**: I don't know exactly how to unpack secret, but I think there's something really cool there and how that relates to building trust, but that that is quite distinct from anonymity. -**DAWN**: It made me think of, if you're buying federal bonds, treasury bonds or whatever, it's commonly accepted that they will eventually be paid off no matter what. It's the most secure bond or whatever. And I think part of that echoes that idea of, a future expectation that's always in the future, which creates trust, because it forms a sort of economic backbone. ## Chat log From 50e22662d380b9aeb8d9cdb31e0685b68a2dbbb6 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2020 12:44:09 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 63/65] Adds discussion notes --- .../semester_03_2020/5-privacy-2020-09-22.md | 175 +++++++++++++++++- 1 file changed, 168 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-) diff --git a/notes/semester_03_2020/5-privacy-2020-09-22.md b/notes/semester_03_2020/5-privacy-2020-09-22.md index a600af9..b3b0e7e 100644 --- a/notes/semester_03_2020/5-privacy-2020-09-22.md +++ b/notes/semester_03_2020/5-privacy-2020-09-22.md @@ -90,16 +90,177 @@ Other optional readings * (optional) [Challenging algorithmic profiling: The limits of data protection and anti-discrimination in responding to emergent discrimination](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2053951719895805) ## Discussion -* JV: really liked first article. Paper tries to frame: why do we care about data privacy? What are by-default risk items? By virtue of how these systems are constructed, you can either assume harm is introduced either when harm occurs, or when the possibility of harm occurs. -* KB: Getting things in under the wire -* JV: risks - tradeoffs. Interesting tension btw minimally regulating vs regulating before the harm occurs. What do we define as PII? How do we make it not so hard for people to implement but functional -* KB: thinking about where we do and don't desire rules/regulations. Interplay with trust. -* JV: What is the sum of the total harm we are avoiding? What is the sum of the total harm we are creating? -* KB: Is that harm distributed in ways that are sensible to compare? +**JONATHAN**: I can get started with my initial gut reaction. One of the things I really liked was that first article. The short summary of it is the paper tries to reframe the question of, why do we care about private data, and why do we care about worrying about these policies, through the lens of not so much saying, do we need to prove that there's a harm, but then actually eliciting what are the things that are by default risk items that exist? I thought it was an interesting take. A thing that's a fact but not necessarily acknowledged, is that by virtue of how these systems are started constructed, and how we think about what is the default state, you can either assume harm is only introduced when a bad thing happens, or harm is introduced the moment that there is a risk of a bad thing happening. And it's interesting, tying that to some of the downstream things about, how do you think about proper regulation—it ties into what Jonathan Zittrains's things. The thing I thought was super interesting is, I don't think I've seen that framing before. Actually, you could probably comment better than I, I think a lot of the times when we think about environmental regulation, we think of it as, okay, after we've done a thing, how do we apologize? And figure out, Oh, yeah, that was truly a bad thing. Or you think about it in the context of Starlink, you shoot off all these satellites, which is theoretically a good, providing internet for everyone, but also really messing with astronomers and their ability to map out stars and planets and stuff. + +**KELSEY**: It's a getting it under the wire before anybody tells us not to kind of feeling + +**JONATHAN**: Which I think fundamentally highlights one of the ways that I think regulation is interesting, where a lot of times regulation is like, we don't want to stifle innovation. And so as a result, we tend to bias towards under-regulating. I think GDPR, this is really just tying all of them together. The thing I thought was interesting is having seen GDPR in practice at my old job, and then seeing it also in that other article, what is the impact after a year, you notice that when you're in the EU, you click through a lot and in theory, it does some stuff. But then it's not necessarily enforceed. They were saying in that other article, it's not like they necessarily are actually having people enforce all of it. And so there's still this question. 63% of Europeans still don't feel like their data is properly protected. And so I guess there's this question of, how do we think about regulation both from a, there is a harm that can be introduced, and in fact, we do materially see it when nothing is done, because there is a risk that we are just not acknowledging, as well as, how do you implement this in such a way that it doesn't actually stifle people trying to do stuff and it's actually easily applicable. I think it's an interesting tension. + +One of the things that, again, from one of the other readings that I thought was super cool, is this idea that, maybe we just take a step back and realize, okay, there's a hodgepodge of things you've already applied here, we have HIPAA that thinks about things in a medical context, we have CAPA thinking about children. But truly, data is quite arbitrary. And you get these weird slices of things. And then maybe what we need is a meta model of these things to think about, so what do we define as PII. And if we started thinking from that lens, if you have this marking of PII on a specific column or data, then how do you need to treat that? + +So I guess that loops through most of the articles way too quickly. But I feel like there's a really interesting theme there of, how do we actually write the regulation in such a way where it could be uniformly applied so there's actual confidence that this is doing the thing that we want it to do, which is providing some layer of security? How do we then make it not so hard for people to actually implement? And then also, how do we make sure that we're doing better than the status quo in the US? + +**KELSEY**: Yeah, I think that's really interesting. And you looped through so many things that I couldn't even write down my thoughts fast enough. I'm sure we'll loop back around. These conversations are always big spirals. And I think that that's one of the things that's cool about them, is that somebody brings up a whole bunch of ideas, and then we rabbit hole on one or two of them for a little bit and figure out the next one. The last thing you said really reminded me of a quote from Nissenbaum that was quoted in that one slideshow: "notification is either comprehensive or comprehensible, but not both". It's very much along the lines of, how do we make this both functional and parseable? How can we have a regulation that actually works and that people understand and that they can implement? My product management professor had this concept of the Iron Triangle, where you have time, cost, and quality, and you can rotate it. But you can't have three fixed points, you only get to choose two of the points. There's some of that going on. The other thing that you were talking about was this tendency, and this is the one I want to drill into, this tendency to not regulate things if we don't have to. I come at this from a lot of different perspectives. One is that you were talking about that lens they were using of what is harm; does harm exist when the possibility for harm exists, or does harm exist when the harm actually occurs? + +That touches on a lot of the different conversations we've had, perhaps the harm exists when the possibility for harm is likely. And it really ties into our trust conversation. I guess one of the things about regulation, I've set up a lot of different communities from scratch and gone into communities and tried to set them up to be healthier places. As an open source person, and as a community-oriented person, there are certain things that I do and don't do right at the beginning. One of the things I do right at the beginning is write a code of conduct. And that's less because I actually expect a code of conduct to come into play and more because I'm aware that that's a signal for people about whether or not this is the kind of space where they're likely to be welcome and listened to. But one of the things that I don't do and really try to explicitly not do is the kind of bikeshedding area of making rules for things that aren't problems yet. + +That's kind of an interesting balance. It is a lot of work to pre create regulation, for problems that you don't yet have but can imagine being harmful. But I don't think that scales. And we always talk about what scales here. Because of course, you can have trust within a unit of five people, and you can't have the same kind of trust within a unit of 1000 people. And of course, a country is much, much bigger than that. So then you have this problem of, within a small community, within the kind of community that I'm likely to create, I think that you don't want to create a lot of regulations at the beginning, I think you want to leave it underdone. There's two main reasons. One is that it's a lot of work to make and try and enforce regulations. And the other is that it doesn't create the atmosphere that you're trying to create, where you actually depend on each other and trust each other. + +But if you're scaling an organization, so that works up to 12 ish people. And this comes from startup. Once you get past about a dozen people, you don't necessarily know what everybody's doing anymore. And even if you actually are working in really good faith, you probably aren't going to understand, this is where you start needing some kind of daily scrum check in, this is where you might start needing a manager where somebody checks in and is like, Hey, is this stuff actually happening? are you communicating? Are you amassed in a community where you actually all have the same dream and intention? And so what usually happens with these organically growing communities is that you build regulations as you need them. And it can be a really communitarian exercise to start thinking about, what are the rules that we now need? And it's challenging. + +But what we're talking about on a governmental level is always retrofitting, and it's weird to impose rules on an existing community at a grand scale, in ways that are definitely going to negatively impact businesses, because there's no new regulation that doesn't negatively impact some business, but that might negatively impact some individuals because of those businesses, or unrelatedly. But also not making it might also negatively impacted individuals. And so it's a really different question at that level of scale, what it is to create a regulation. And that's all a precursor to the other question that we've asked in the trust conversation of, well, are companies worthy of trust? Or does the concept even apply to a company, or is a corporate entity, something that if you don't regulate it, it will just grow? It will just do everything that it can to consume everything that it can. + +**JONATHAN**: Two things, I think, are really interesting about that. Thing number one. I think it's interesting when we talk about retrofitting, because technology and the Internet has been a thing for a bit now. And we've seen the version of bad, so it's weird in the US. We seem not interested in getting a GDPR type version. So Obama administration put out some principles. Trump was like, why do we need this. But we're actually seeing I think what you're describing, California coming up with their own, we've seen Europe come up with their own. And so it's not even rooted in a reasonable principle. We also see data breaches and here are material bad things. It's not like it's a theoretical; it is a thing that is happening. Literally the tradeoff seems to be, so what is the sum of the total harm o- post harm thing, if we were to do aggregate number of people in the Equifax breach summed up, how bad is that versus the economic harm of companies implementing this? And I think this is where the question of, how hard is it actually to implement some of these things? And one of the questions I have is, is there a way that you could make this easier, if you were thinking about it from some of the technology side, I think about the large companies that are actually trying to do this stuff, they mostly contract from, there's open source things like Postgres or whatever. Could Postgres have specific markings that you can allocate to tables and stuff? I don't know. There might be something interesting about, how can we use technology to help scale from that perspective? + +The other thing that I thought was interesting, Can we trust organizations or companies specifically? I'd be curious to know what your thoughts were on Zittrain's thing about privacy fiduciaries, because fiduciaries do exist. Generally, they are doing that for their clients, that is a legal requirement for them. I don't think I caught the trust conversation. I do think there is something about, how can we use the legal framework as a hammer or a stick to guarantee that whether you believe that they are completely rational, there is this other option of, you make it a thing that they could be designated if they want these rights, and there's a legal recourse if they don't honor that end of the bargain. Which, yeah, it doesn't have to be trustless. It could also be, it's "trustless", because there's a huge economic cameras that could in theory be swung against you, if you abuse that trust. + +**KELSEY**: Yeah, ideologically, I really like it. Conceptually, I really like that there can be a legal thing. Like the legal responsibility that a corporation's people, I don't know if it's a corporation, or the CEO and board of directors, or whatever has to the shareholders to increase revenue. + +That's just a regular fiduciary? Yeah. Well there we go. So I really like the idea of this counterpressure, or ideally counterpressure. I have a lot of cynicism about the idea that it could work, because it, has a lot of feeling to me—the phraseology used by companies like Microsoft have already indicated their interest in pre-complying with regulations that aren't yet imposed. And I look at that, and I kind of roll my eyes because I'm like, Okay, I'm very familiar with companies trying to ward off regulation by creating their own loophole-y version of it first, that says, you can't make a different one, this is covered. + +**JONATHAN**: This isn't a complete parallel, but I have an example in this vein, too. I hear the same thing a lot about oil companies, especially now as oil companies in Europe are divesting more and more from oil as they invest in green tech. And they're selling all of their stuff to American oil companies. And so it seems weird to say, these are better oil companies than those. I do think there is something to this, as the dynamics of power change, you do actually see incentive alignment. And specifically, in this context, I would point to Apple, depending on how you feel about iOS 14, I do think that's an interesting incentive alignment; Apple is doing what it thinks is best for the privacy of its customers. And it's using that as a unique selling point. And there is this collapse of irrational and it doesn't mean that it's not opinionated, and there could be divergence of, how is Apple forming its opinion, what enforcement mechanisms do we have if we think that Apple is doing something that's not far enough? But I do think, especially as this becomes a hotter and hotter topic, there is more consumer power. And you see it also with Twitter, Jack Dorsey has talked about this too, not in the same context of data privacy, but as we think about algorithms and what is the role of social media, I know he's talked to a couple of times about, what is Twitter's role in that as, we want to keep you engaged in the short term, but the long term view of, can we do better? I will not say that I think Twitter is succeeding, but they're trying. + +**KELSEY**: Well, there's a little bit of that, how much are they trying? I'm a cynic, but a human optimist. I'd like to believe that nobody's trying to do evil things, even within their corporate role. So I don't disbelieve that it could happen. + +**GREG**: On that note, the phrase I usually use along those lines is Gramsci's: it's a skepticism of the intellect and optimism of the will. And I gotta say, the optimism of my will is really damp. It's really depressed right now. I'm not a technologist, but over the last five years, I've inserted myself into technology conversations, and I've been bringing up these questions about privacy, in a very specific cross section of health, human and social service, with the technology and innovation types. And nobody in these conversations were having conversations about harm. And for the first couple years, the response in these spaces was, Oh, the cybersecurity subcommittee is taking care of that, or, we have that all worked out, we have issues of consent worked out in the data use agreements, that's under legal. And I'm like, No, I don't know if you all are hearing me, I'm talking about harms that are lawful, and potentially from non-bad actors, and it just never occurred to them. And when I tried to learn from GDPR, and tried to bring some of those principles, of revocability, data transfer should be monitorable, thinking through Nissenbaum's distinction between comprehensive or comprehensible. And when I start bringing these things back, people get really quiet. + +I haven't figured out how to stimulate the conversation, because it's so overwhelming. The technical people get quiet, because some of the things that I'm pointing out need to be accounted for, they're like, I don't know if that's possible. And the policy people get really quiet because the points that I'm makingt about the gaps between what's compliant with regulation versus what's ethical, they're like, I don't know what to say to that. And basically my sense of, what it is that we need, and maybe this relates to the conversation you're having about, is the harm the risk of harm? I don't know if I followed that. I might want to clarification on that. But my question in all these spaces is, who's going to be able to decide? Who's going to be able to evaluate and who's going to be able to decide? Because right now, there's some hand waving that goes on, behind the notion of individual consent, where it's like, oh, yeah, we'll ask for everybody's consent, but that just doesn't work at all as a method of giving people agency and thinking through the potential repercussions and the tradeoffs and unanticipated consequences. Individual consent, as a model, doesn't work. And also I don't see other models out there for how can communities make decisions about this stuff. The closest I get in these spaces is trying to get these—basically the issue in health human and social services in my field is, after Obamacare passed, hospitals and health insurance companies suddenly realized that people are sick because they're poor. And they suddenly cared about people not coming back to the hospital. They wanted them to stop getting sick, which apparently before Obamacare, actually it was fine if they kept coming back to the hospital because they kept getting sick because they were poor. And so now, health care is like, we've got to get everybody out of the hospital. We got to send them to social services. So we've got to get every community organization onto the same platform so that we can refer people directly to them and know exactly what happened with the social service organization and the case management system. And it all needs to be integrated. And when I come up, and I'm like, have you considered the harms of that, even though this is driven by healthcare, the prospect of do no harm as a first principle has never come up. But I've made the case, now people are turning to me, and they're saying, Okay, what should we do? And I don't know. + +**JONATHAN**: I'm curious if you could maybe go into that a little bit more. Is it about data leaking? Or, in what contexts, or how does that manifest? + +**GREG**: I think there's a range of possible harms. I might want to try to put this on the range of like, good and bad actors conscious conscious or just an unknowing, nature, because most people, when they think of harms, they think of like cyber hacking. But there's also deanonymization. Especially when we're talking about bringing data from all these different systems and linking them together, deanonymization seems to be a much greater risk than many of the people in the spaces seem to want to recognize. But I'm also thinking beyond deanonymization, of the tremendous potential harms that can come from the use of aggregate data from all these different systems in algorithmic decision making and regulation. + +In the context of health care, these systems are building algorithms that decide who gets what kind of care. And they can make those decisions according to things like—most recently, Native American women coming in for COVID tests were separated from their children by an algorithm in New Mexico, by the New Mexico health system, because some algorithm decided that those children are at risk, because of some data that was fed to it. And so every time a Native American woman came in to get tested for COVID, they were separated from their child. And this might not have been a conscious intention; that policy might have emerged from just a bunch of decisions made by essentially machine learning and artificial intelligence that maybe nobody is specifically accountable for. And in other contexts, there's lots of talk in this space about improving health outcomes, but what it really means is saving money for the hospital system, and the proxy for, is something good or bad, is like, does it save money or not? And because poor people, especially in black people, in particular, have more health problems associated with themselves, they end up getting shunted by algorithms out of certain kinds of care contexts and into others, that the hospital system is just like, I don't have to deal with that, because that's going to be more expensive. And it's going to be a less valuable use of my resources. And also, the potential intervention is less impactful, because it might stack up against all these other problems that the person has, so they don't deserve to get it. There are all kinds of ways in which this data just serves as input into the system that yields all these inequitable outcomes. And so privacy doesn't really cut it. + +It's also like, how is the aggregate set of this data being used to allocate resources in ways that might re-entrench existing patterns? And I don't know that people, certainly in the elite conversation, when you get people on a panel talking about how awesome healthcare interoperability is, these issues don't come up. And then when I ask these questions, and they're like, oh, gosh, we hadn't thought about that, it's the nurses who come up to me and say, thank you for asking that question, because I've been wondering about that. The technology innovators just don't really think about it, the healthcare executives just don't really think about the potential for these things to go wrong. It's the people who've seen things go wrong over and over again, who are the ones who might not know exactly what's gonna go wrong, but they know fuckery is underway. And so my question here is, how do we get those nurses into governing bodies? When when privacy comes up, that's what I'm wondering, is how do we get the people who actually deal with the shit to be involved in the process of making decisions about what should and should not happen? + +And that is a very unpopular question, I'm finding. + +**KELSEY**: Have you heard of Buurtzorg? This is a key example that is used in a book called Reinventing Organizations. I haven't read this in a while, but the example is that basically a group of health care workers working for a company and experiencing a lot of those issues, and also experiencing a lot of labor justice issues, on a personal level, kind of threw everything out and form this nurse cooperative, that's quite big. I think it covers a pretty large amount of a country, the Netherlands, maybe. I don't want to be the radical on the call who's like, cooperatize, it'll solve all your problems. But what they've done is create this really direct line of communication between actually doing the care and managing how care is done. It is a cooperative in this case, + +**GREG**: You're not going to be the radical on this call if you start talking about cooperatives as the mode of solution for many of these problems. We might end up forming a cooperative. + +You all talked about Ostrom, right? + +**KELSEY**: We have before, not in a while. + +**GREG**: Building off of Nissenbaum's work, there's a branch of Ostrom's common pool resource management school of academic thought that's specifically about knowledge, commons, I think y'all read some of those. Some of those folks have recently taken Nissenbaum's framework for contextual integrity as the important thing about privacy in this interconnected world, as opposed to, does the government know what's going on with me, it's more just, is information that I share in this specific context going to be appropriately translated or blocked from being used in a different context? The old mode of privacy doesn't really apply to that. And this actually does lend itself to thinking about privacy and trust, to both of these earlier points as a resource, and people's dignity as a resource. And the collective of that trust and dignity is a common pool resource of sorts, in that it can be easily squandered and polluted, and there are ways to potentially cope with the threats to that vulnerable resource, and those ways essentially entail institutional design. So maybe a company is capable of stewarding some piece of this puzzle, but that that steward needs to be monitored, based on what we know about vulnerable resources. You can have an appropriator who has the power to deal with this resource, but who's gonna monitor that appropriator? Who's gonna monitor the monitors? How are rules about what is being monitored set? Are those rules set by people whose stakes are involved in the management of the resource? And I appreciate having this frame. But the thing about common pool resources is, the more complex it gets, and the bigger the scale gets, and the more diverse interests are involved, the harder that shit is, and it's hard on simple scenarios, right? The more I learn about this stuff, the the less hope I have, which is a scary situation. + +**KELSEY**: I think you hit it on the head earlier, when you were talking about, how do we get the nurses to be the ones making the decisions? I guess my point about cooperatives is I don't think that they're by themselves a panacea, I've definitely seen them done poorly. But I think that that's a big piece of what we're trying to reach for in a participatory democracy model. Maine has ranked choice voting, at least in theory, and that starts to get towards our ability to trust that our vote does something, and that starts to create this idea that a government might actually work for its people, it's very hard to not have the very American context centered right now of, we're about to go into this, what has already been a shitshow of an election cycle, and nothing is working and nobody trusts anybody. We used to get this lovely complacency of, well, we don't really have to worry about it, because it doesn't really impact us that much. And as untrue as that might have been, it's never been less true. Nobody's feeling that anymore. + +One of the projects I'm working on right now is, the point of EPA is to enforce environmental regulations. And a big chunk of EDGI's work over the last few years has been showing that they basically just don't. My own research project that I didn't publish, because I'm a nervous data scientist, basically showed no correlation between violating a regulation and receiving enforcement action, nationwide. + +And that just seems not good. We're doing a much more intensive reviewed process right now to get that much more specifically. But there is that problem of, you can make a regulation, but what happens next? You have actually yesterday to actually follow it. I don't even think these regulations are that good. They're literally permission to pollute. There's work around that. But even this very little bit that we have, there's not really any good reason to take it seriously. + +**JONATHAN**: It feels like there's two separate threads that you could pick out. One is going back to Greg's scenario, this question of who designs the algorithms, what data is shared either willingly or not, and then, what are the conclusions and the facts, because there is a sort of arbiter of truthiness, that ends up coming in, as you decide, if we're all going to defer trust to the algorithm, we want to believe that the algorithm has fair inputs. We understand the caveats. Anyone who's tried to write an algorithm knows exactly how caveat intense that might be. But I think, especially in business contexts, when you get these layers of abstraction, that definitely falls away, and people just like, Oh, yeah, the thing spit out the score, and therefore, we do the thing. The other thing that Kelsey touched on, I think there's this other question of, weirdly, I feel like this comes into the immigration debate too, where you can have this policy, and there's no way that the policy is actually enforced, and so what is the point of the policy? And it leads to this question of, what is the policy doing? In the environmental context, it might be, you have this regulation, or even taxes, if you have all these rules for taxes, and you defund the IRS, no one's like, gonna go audit anyone. So then what is the point of the rule? It effectively is undercut by the fact that we can't actually monitor this stuff. + +**GREG**: In my field, basically, I have to start at the remedial place of helping people think about the difference between infrastructure and application. Facebook, 15 years of Web 2.0 has has polluted an already dull American mind that thinks software applications are infrastructure. I guess there are some contexts in which you can make that argument but, what we need in this field of health, human and social services is infrastructure on which various applications can work, but people are seriously just stuck in, what will the software look like that everybody will use? That's their level. And so I'm trying to make the point of, infrastructure, you don't know what it looks like, I know you all want the solution in your hands, but we've got to actually build the things that stand behind the things that people use that enable those things to work. So finally, I'm on the path. And I'm helping people understand, what does that mean? And I had to get down to the level of, the data exchange pipes, the data lake, all that shit is infrastructure, but also the meetings where you review what's happening in the pipes and in the lake, that's infrastructure, and the process of making decisions over what should happen in the lake, and what should be able to go through the pipe, that process is infrastructure. Understanding that it's not just the thing itself, but the way we use the thing that's really at stake here is a level of education that I'm exhausted to have to get down and basically be a schoolmarm about. People have just been mystified by this Silicon Valley culture of, it just works, and they're not able to think in terms of complex systems, which seems like a priority. + +I think that's also reflected in this notion that individuals will consent once to something that's spelled out according to some contract that was signed five years ago when the software was procured, and then that's it. + +**KELSEY**: Which you didn't read in the first place, probably. + +**GREG**: But this notion of individual consent, they take it as a given that people should own their own data, but I'm like, think about it for a second, man, a woman going into a social service provider has three kids, an ex-husband, the kid has a boyfriend, there's a caregiver involved. And her data is tied up in all those people's data, right? If she's going to talk to her social worker about this stuff, or her health care provider, they're going to ask her these questions, because if they want to address her social determinants of health, which is what it's all about, they need to know all this information about her home situation, her family life. So she's sharing all this data about other people. That's her data. She consented to share it, but what about them? We have no framework for thinking about how do you protect people whose data is entangled with other people? + +**KELSEY**: Jonathan was talking earlier about that positioning of harm. Does the harm exist when it occurs? Or does it exist when the opportunity for harm is first created? + +**GREG**: Explain this to me a little bit more? Because you said it a couple of times, and I don't know if I get it. + +**JONATHAN**: It's very simple. Imagine you have a store. You get a bunch of credit card information, because people buy stuff from you, you have all their personal, Where are you shipping it to, their full name, all that good stuff. Is the harm introduced at the moment when Kelsey hacks me and that data is leaked? Or is the harm introduced the moment I didn't encrypt your data, such that even if she hacked my system, she wouldn't be able to read anything? + +**GREG**: Right. So it's, is the bad thing, making the harm possible? + +**JONATHAN**: Yeah. And I think the point that Kelsey is making is, there is this interesting question of especially when, even as a social thing, you think about what data permissions do we give to each other? Kelsey volunteered Cameron's email to me when I needed a contact. And there is some sort of social trust that we imbue on people. In a human context, it feels normal. If I was to look at Kelsey's contact list and see every person she's emailed in the last year, clearly very different. And so there's a version of, what are the socially acceptable versions of what we share, and then also, what right and in what contexts do I have the right of veto. Even think of Facebook, when back in 2011, or 2008 or whatever they were trying to really make the social graphs an API that anyone could plug into, that's an interesting example of the same issue of, do I get to volunteer the fact that we are friends to the world or some application that you may not want to know? + +**GREG**: Yeah, and how do we navigate that tension between comprehensiveness and comprehensibility? I want people to have tools so that they can gradually think through the implications of different things. I think about this stuff all the time, and when I'm presented with a consent form, do you agree to these terms of service, I'm like, fuck this, if I really don't trust this place, I'm not going to agree. But if I feel like I need to get in there, then even if I only distrust it a little bit, I'm still gonna agree, because it's like, I gotta get in there. I'm presented with this binary choice, and it's disempowering. So, are there examples of methods that enable people to navigate between what they can immediately comprehend and the broader comprehensive universe of potential implications? + +**KELSEY**: Well that's kind of fun, too. If you're asking me to consent to a data service, and it's a new niche one, and I'm picking one among many, I'm less likely to read the whole Terms of Service and more likely to read the founder bios. That's how I'm going to know whether I trust them. + +**JONATHAN**: That's super interesting. + +**GREG**: But you're super savvy, though, so what about other people? + +**JONATHAN**: I do think there is an interesting model where something kind of similar has happened before. I think about open source licensing. And you think about how, especially, companies have different policies about the types of things that they can use. And so the tools that have been written to automatically flag when certain types of policies are embedded in dependencies or other things inside of projects. It does feel like there is an analogous thing that you want, where, I don't know how one actually goes about enforcing, but something to the effect of, you want some sort of general framework that can be applied over and over again, so I'm not trying to understand the 15 different flavors of Microsoft's version versus Facebook's, or whatever. There's a standard thing that I sort of know. I can then more explicitly give consent, because I know what I'm signing up for. It feels like that well-trodden path, and it also gives you the ability to, you can even imagine, in a browser, this is getting way too specific about a technical solution, but you can imagine the sorts of things that you may be able to configure, and say, I want to, for certain types of applications, enable these things, maybe by default, these things not by default, and then explicitly be able to, one, be able to review, who have you given whatever to, and be able to revoke those permissions. + +**GREG**: Isn't this what Solid does? It's Tim Berners Lee's new modular approach to web browsing, where I think Solid you're able to, I think it gives you those kinds of granular controls over what's happening with any given site that you go to, is it? Is that right, Kelsey, are you familiar with this? + +**KELSEY**: I feel like I ought to know. I've quoted him on the subject. But I still don't have a great understanding of it. It's very hard to read good explanations of this decentralized web stuff, because it's like, what level do you want it on? The basic "you can get it" level or the level where you still won't understand even when I told you everything it does? + +**JONATHAN**: Is this the thing that's like everyone has like their own personal data capsule or whatever? + +**GREG**: Yep, I think so. Yeah. + +I've signed up for a whole hour and a half workshop tomorrow at one of these Internet symposiums about design patterns for decentralized technologies. So I'm not a designer or technologist, but I'm ready to hear what's up. I downloaded Mastodon, I looked at that shit, and I had no idea what to do. + +**KELSEY**: Yeah, I mean, you should drop those notes in the chat if you take any tomorrow, because I'm really curious. + +I wanted to circle back on, Jonathan, really early on the conversation, you brought up this idea. I had talked about how, for example, GDPR, or any retrofit regulation that applies very broadly, is going to negatively and positively impact people and companies. And you talked about, let's try to enumerate the harms, maybe we could do some version of looking at how much it hurts various communities. I'm curious what you think in terms of where the concept of equity fits into that? + +**JONATHAN**: I don't know if I was making a comment about how things should be, more an observation how they are. I think when we talk about, the harm imposed, it tends to be this balance of some probability. If I was to imagine how Equifax prior to them getting hacked talked about things, I assume it was something on the order of like, we have this list of priorities. I'm sure it was on someone's to do list, whatever security stuff they need to build. But it was lower priority. And the reason it was lower priority is there's some sort of tradeoff between, what is the cost of this thing getting leaked, versus actually doing the fix? And the math balanced out to—and maybe that can also be, humans are bad at gauging risk—but clearly, there was, somehow, in whatever manager's function, some sort of discounting that was happening. + +I do think there is this question about if we think about what is the harm that's introduced, I think it can really vary depending on what data and in what context, what conclusions that leads to, which can also make it really hard to make an argument from trying to quantify harm to even begin with, because it really does matter how that data ends up getting leaked and what it can be used again for, which is why I don't know if it leads to a convincing argument. Just because you could really go deep, or you could be like, Oh, yeah, but what's the probability that actually happens? So I don't know if I have a specific thought there, other than I don't know if that actually leads to a good. It feels like the wrong path to try to convince someone of why they should do a thing. + +**KELSEY**: Yeah, there's something—Jon and I were both talking earlier about how ridiculously busy we are right now, while in the process of implementing technological infrastructure. I took a antiracism workshop this summer, that was really, really good, by the Adaway Group. And one of the things that it said that I hadn't heard anywhere before, was this concept that busyness is a tool of white supremacy. And there's a lot of different nuances to this. But one of the ways that I think that that can be true, is, if you're the person in the position of implementing the change, you're worried about you, and you're worried about what your boss is going to say if you don't get the change done on time, and that's one of the ways that we have these data vulnerabilities. Somebody's just trying to get stuff done in a system that says, sooner is better, no matter what the tradeoff is, as long as we don't notice a big gaping hole, quick merge. + +**JONATHAN**: Do you wonder if—part of this is maybe a broader question about policy, it does feel like one of the most useful things that government can do, I think there's many useful things it could do, but one is, how you explicitly rebalance an equation that is unbalanced? How do you make this a higher priority, explicitly make it much more expensive if it goes wrong? I mean, in theory, this is how things work. You want this in many forms, but what is the right check and balance? You could argue, in theory that is the EPA. But what point does that get undercut, depending on who's in power and their actual commitment to trying to get into a specific outcome? + +The economist in me really loves the idea that the thing that the government is doing is somehow collapsing the rational with the moral to just make it so incentivized or deincentivized that, the good thing is the thing that you get. But it's really hard to predict all the ways people will figure out how to do the bad thing that is still okay. + +**KELSEY**: Where we got to in our trust conversation is mostly agreeing that trust is a human-to-human thing. One of the things that's kind of interesting, and this comes up in environmental conversations all the time is, what if there was personal rather than corporate responsibility for violation of laws and regulations? + +**GREG**: You mean like, shouldn't Mark Zuckerberg go to jail? + +**KELSEY**: Yeah. If it can be proven that he had control over the thing, and didn't fix it, and/or didn't anticipate the problem, or if he was the expert who should have known? Shouldn't he be personally vulnerable in the same way as his users are personally vulnerable when our data is used? + +**GREG**: And his board members, that's when it would get really interesting. + +**KELSEY**: Even just saying that, it's not like he made the code. It's not like he was on the process of auditing it. + +**JONATHAN**: I do think there is an organizational thing that's hard to deal with, too. To pick an example, I don't know if you guys watched the congressional things where they interviewed all the CEOs. Bezos was asked point blank, does Amazon use pricing data from the website, to do something. And he was like, "it is a matter of policy that we don't," but he wouldn't explicitly say, "I know for a fact that we don't". + +Maybe this is exactly the point. You may have a policy, but if there's no consequence for violating the policy, then you're not actually implementing. If someone discovered it, yes, they would be reprimanded or whatever. But no one has their neck on the line, because Bezos is worried about him personally being responsible. I do wonder what negative ramifications that could have. When you're talking about these super large actors, it's very clear and obvious, but I actually think they're the least likely, the very, very large ones, to have the same sort of issues as, think about Clearview, well, Clearview is also maybe a very bad example because they seem very intentionally trying to go into a specific area. Clearview, if you're not familiar, scraped a ton of data off the internet for facial recognition. I think it tends to be smaller companies that end up being the ones that—there's this counterbalance of, to what degree are we okay just solidifying Facebook's lead here, and just being like, Facebook is the one that will be the arbiter of power, because the new hurdles for anyone else is gonna be quite high. And part of me is like, we need to figure out how to both make it so that we can make it cheaper for people to be compliant and do the right thing, and also make it more expensive to not do that right thing. + +**KELSEY**: Right in the beginning, you were talking about Starlink, different ways in which we try something in order to find out if it works, or in order to find out if it's viable, I guess. I read a book of environmentalist essays, back before I was really in this scene. Actually, at the time, I was very, very much in the tech startup scene, and was also very much on that train of: throw stuff out there. Make your name as fast as you can. Whatever way you can, if people are willing to give you money, it's good enough, it'll work, make it happen, ship it. And one of the essays was all about the zero harm policy or something. It's an argument that's used against using genetically modified foods that says, if you can't prove that it's harmless, you shouldn't do it. At the time, I had this reaction, Oh, come on, we would never do anything, because you can never prove that it's harmless. It's very interesting to look at that with my current perspective, because I'm not sure I totally disagree with me for myself. But I get it a lot more. + +**JONATHAN**: I think one context I think about, which is really deviating from privacy, but self driving cars, depending on your definition, it will either be here very soon or never, because it really does come down to, how do you define harm? And what are reasonable levels of harm? I think it's an interesting, we will have to write a lot about this one thing, but I do think it could also be applicable elsewhere. What is the gating threshold? The other way of looking at it is by default, there is some harm that's involved. We are accepting the status quo of, let's take genetically modified food, you could talk about a golden rice, how many people are unable to get access to rice, and by having this genetically modified option, your choices are either less food overall, or this risky food. And so I think in specific contexts, it might be worth also piecing apart, are we already implicitly saying, the status quo is the acceptable thing? + +In the Starlink example, I think you could maybe put it as, it's easy for us to say that Oh, yes, if we do this thing, we're introducing space junk and whatever. The other question is, what about the people who don't have access to the internet, but want it? What are we implicitly saying about, because you weren't born in the right area, you don't deserve access to all of this wealth of free knowledge that is just there. + +**KELSEY**: I've seen a similar argument used around nuclear power, where we have this idea that you can't use nuclear unless you have no waste, where you can store it for literally forever. Versus, how much radiation is emitted by uranium unharvested? Can we at least get to that level? Now you have a reasonable-seeming line, where before you just had this, let's just never use it. + +**GREG**: Have y'all seen the feminist data Manifest-no? manifestno.com. In my field, I'm known as the leftmost edge, but reading this, I was like, Oh, fuck, they are far to my left, and they seem correct. Where they're just like, they're basically like, we refuse to operate under the assumption that risk and harm associated with data practices can be bounded to mean the same thing for everyone everywhere at the same time. That's just how it starts. And it gets harder from there. And I'm reading through this, and I'm like, you're right. And at the end of it, I don't know what I'm left with, as someone who wants to reduce harm in these fields. What they're basically making the case for is refusal and rejection, and it seems solid to me, which is worrisome, because where does that leave me as someone who's trying to do ethical work? I've made my peace with it to date, but looking ahead to what I expect will be a very bad situation next month, and what I expect will become much worse in January, these fields are going to want to continue pretending everything's basically fine, and politics is so weird, indefinitely. And I think that, I'm personally approaching a point in my professional work where I'm going to have to start taking this manifest-no more seriously under an explicitly fascist administration. Hospitals shouldn't be collecting people's personal information and sharing it with Child and Family Services. It shouldn't happen, at all! + +**KELSEY**: I think you're right, Greg. I think this thing is totally right. I don't think it means you can't do anything with data, I think it means you have to do things with data that specifically are really participatory. + +**GREG**: Right. And, I don't know, the field that I'm in, I was already struggling just to be like, let's create a group of people who aren't just users, but who are setting priorities for this entire system and evaluating outcomes. And maybe that's a little bit what this is. Maybe that's a version of this. But yeah, I am concerned that the forces of power are inherently going to have the upper hand when it comes to complex information systems, no matter what kind of participatory action research you throw at them. That's my concern. And in a situation where we've gone from passive white supremacy in this country to active white supremacy, I think that leaves those of us who who believed in innovation in a very in a very difficult spot. + +**KELSEY**: I'm wondering in our last eight minutes if there's more ground we want to cover because I feel like we've thoroughly talked through and depressed ourselves about this. + +**GREG**: No, give me some bright spots! What's working? Give me appreciative inquiry: have you seen it gone well? Who's doing it right? Other than Buurtzorg. + +**KELSEY**: Buurtzorg is good. I like what we're doing with the Environmental Enforcement Watch, we're trying to get different people involved with EPA enforcement data. + +**GREG**: I mean, Design Justice as a text, and the many networks of thought and activism that Sasha points to there was really helpful for me to bring into some spaces. And they specifically linked to Our Data Bodies, which I find to be a really good start as far as a report that brings some of these ideas into a digestible framework. + +**KELSEY**: Max Liboiron's lab in Canada does a lot of data justice and true academia moving the needle on who's allowed to be participatory in what spaces. + +**GREG**: How can I talk to people about the risks of deanonymization? + +**KELSEY**: I mean, honestly, you came in and you were like, I feel like I've been the first person in a lot of these spaces to think about harms that aren't just legal harms. And I feel very similarly, including in leading a decentralized web meetup here in Seattle. There's definitely a cycle going on of, you can become a technologist, because you had access to the materials and the community. And so some of the people doing it just haven't really thought that far beyond how cool it is that you can do the thing. I've had a lot of conversations here; somebody said to me, it'd be so cool if every car had a camera on it, and you could monetize, just by driving around, showing wait times at restaurants. And I was like, I don't want anything about that. Can I break that down for you? That's kind of a source of hope, what you're doing, integrating into different communities. And saying, hey, have you been asked this question, have you thought about this? That's what I want Data Together to be too, for people, a space to really think about this stuff. + +**GREG**: I feel like we need grief counseling for technologists. Our peers are going through it. I've seen many people going through it, and it's clearly painful. But more people need to go through the process of mourning for the internet that we grew up believing in, and for the notions that inspired us to do this work. We have to grieve. We have to let it go, and see what comes up through that process. What are we left with? + +**KELSEY**: I think I asked someone on the last Data Together call how do we implement this idea on a broader scale? How do we implement trust on a larger scale? And I can't remember who it was who just basically clapped back at me and said, you don't. You grow it from the ground every time. + +**KELSEY**: And that's not wrong. + +**GREG**: Yeah, yeah. It's what I was worried about. + +**KELSEY**: We can build better infrastructure, too. I've got some ideas for how the EPA can have better hygiene on their enforcement data practices. ## Chat log 00:15:28 Greg Bloom: hello! 00:51:16 Jonathan Victor: I really miss the complacency :( 01:06:35 Kelsey Breseman: have to go find a charger, I’m still on audio 01:17:10 Kelsey Breseman: some of my friends have a 10-year bet going re whether then the date arrives there will be some US city where non automatically driven cars are illegal -01:18:43 Kelsey Breseman: https://www.manifestno.com/ \ No newline at end of file +01:18:43 Kelsey Breseman: https://www.manifestno.com/ From dab9f14d507ae0df8eba8d55bc13ff0feff83e79 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2020 11:43:19 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 64/65] Add discussion to notes --- notes/semester_03_2020/6-polity-2020-11-03.md | 100 +++++++++++++++++- 1 file changed, 98 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/notes/semester_03_2020/6-polity-2020-11-03.md b/notes/semester_03_2020/6-polity-2020-11-03.md index 7c219b8..26ca5c1 100644 --- a/notes/semester_03_2020/6-polity-2020-11-03.md +++ b/notes/semester_03_2020/6-polity-2020-11-03.md @@ -22,7 +22,103 @@ Other material: * (optional) ['Indigenous people are a polity'. On sovereignty and constitutional recognition](https://theconversation.com/indigenous-people-are-a-polity-on-sovereignty-and-constitutional-recognition-44287) -## Go-around +## Discussion -Take a moment to check-in, a statement of gratitude not part of the big picture going on right now with the US election going in on the background +**DAWN**: We talked a little bit about anti-productive spaces and meeting spaces when we were preparing for this call, but that has come up in a lot of other groups I'm a part of too is, how do we be together, but rescale the amount of work we're doing, or have the act of meeting be part of the work? Which resonates with me. I also do have a lot of work I'm supposed to be doing. So I can't do no work, I have to figure out how to do only the right amount of work. But I'm not there yet. + +**KELSEY**: Yeah, and I'm wondering if we can slow this down. I know that some people don't show up at these Data Together sessions because they're like, Well, I didn't have time to do the readings and I don't want to show up every time having not done the readings, and I get it. + +It's legit, and having done this a bunch, curating the readings is amazingly hard and time consuming. EDGI did a pretty good session, we did an antiracism training, we got a good dozen people through it with an outside consultancy this summer. It was really cool. And we even have this follow-on, part of every other all-EDGI meeting now is devoted to an in-meeting antiracism workshop for everybody. And one of the specific elements of it is that there's no pre work. If we're reading something, it's something we're going to read during that time. And I'm wondering if we could pick that up here. + +**STEFAN**: So when you were saying, what to do, I was gonna suggest, my partner and I, we used to run this thing called the Wayward School ages ago. And it was skill and knowledge sharing events distributed around the city of Victoria in spaces that were underutilized, closed down businesses and warehouse spaces and backyards and all of this. But one of the one of the formats that we experimented—because we were running seasons of programming around a theme. The first one was home economics. And it would just be anything that we could find within our community. So if there's anybody who wanted to teach something, we created the platform for them to come in and do it. And one of the things that we did was, we had this thing called the out-loud reading group, which was very open, you don't have to read anything to come to this reading group, because we're gonna read it out loud here. + +We would pick just one text that was really juicy, foundational in some way, you know, just there's a lot to it. And we would literally just pass that text around the table. And we would get like 20 people from the community at these things, just passing around this printout of this essay or whatever it is. And we would make our way through like four paragraphs, because every time somebody would start reading, it was like, what this makes me think about is da-da-da-da-da. And that would lead to a bit of a conversation and then kind of turn to the next person, they'd read a couple of lines, and then stop and go, yeah, and then this and this and this. It was a really interesting way, and it required no advanced reading. You could if you wanted to, you could read it in advance. The option was always there if you wanted to digest the whole thing before you came, but you didn't have to. + +**DAWN**: Yeah, that reminds me of a couple of things. There was a standing event here called choir choir choir, where you would go and learn a song to sing aloud as a group choral activity, and so you'd show up, I don't think they always announce the song in advance, sometimes you won't know. But all the prep and getting ready to sing together would happen there. You'd pick up a sheet with the lyrics, walk through it as an exercise together, and by the end have accomplished something. But that didn't require that work in advance. But also, the other thing that reminds me of, which actually works, and I really love it, is in a few organizations I'm a part of, but probably the largest one that does, this is one of the union I'm a member of as a grad students, GP3902. And they read their anti-oppression positionality statement, as a group, by passing off paragraph to paragraph around the room before every meeting, I think it is a lovely gesture. + +**KELSEY**: I don't want to let Data Together drop, I want to have another semester of it next year. I'm wondering if maybe that's a good way to do it, have people volunteer to bring a piece that feels appropriate that we all kind of read in the space. And then, and I really liked, Stefan, what you were talking about with people just feeling comfortable pausing and saying, I want to discuss this. + +I love the variety of people that come to Data Together and the backgrounds they come from. The readings are great, but parsing it with other people is what really unlocks them. + +**STEFAN**: Yeah, there's so many fun formats to do with it as well, too. There's another exercise that I really quite like, called narrative reauthoring, which is a little more out there. I know all of these different formats and tools and everything, because this is what I teach all the time. So I'm more than happy to help share ideas around format. And I thought, coming back to what Dawn was saying, in terms of, what do we do for this call right now? I think this conversation is a good part of that. And then maybe we experiment or have a feel for one of the structures that we can actually do, the three of us, right now, if we want to. And then from that, get a sense of, at least some measure of differentiation. + +Everybody here has done facilitated things with people. So that's fairly common, but we can do one, we could do the spiral journal if we wanted to right now. We could do narrative reordering, if you guys wanted to. But they're more reflective, they're more slowing down. If we had a bigger group, we could do some of these other breakout ones, and then get a get a different feeling from each, because the thing that I find with with gatherings of people, whether they're coming together for a very tight purpose, they all understand, we all work together. We're all fairly interdependent in our work, versus a group of people more like Data Together, where we're loosely held together by an interest in the topic and an interest in the conversations in the community that gets created around that conversation. + +In both of those instances, there's ways to leverage purpose in different ways. + +One thing that I'm kind of curious about, Kelsey, is, for Data Together—and maybe this is just me being unfamiliar with the space—for Data Together and EDGI, is there an overlap? Or are they two completely different things? In terms of folks who come to Data Together? Are they also part of EDGI? How does how does that mixture work? + +**KELSEY**: Yeah, well, I think Dawn, is this your brainchild originally? I feel like I took it over from you. I assume you originated it. + +**DAWN**: Um, yeah, but I would say I don't actually totally know the answer anymore. So when it started, it grew out of mostly EDGI facilitator energy. And at the time, I was doing most of that. That would have been like three years ago. And an active engagement that also involves software development, and a lot of time and energy with Qri and Protocol Labs. So it was imagined as a tri-partnership. We had imagined always splitting that coordinating work and tried to set up a very loose governance approach around that, and then planned to have an annual meeting once a year to check in on the various things that were going on. The first year was around multiple different channels, and then by the second year, that really focused in on what I would say were EDGI strengths, which are creating this as a space for a certain type of conversation that wasn't happening, I think, totally within EDGI otherwise, but it drew a lot from conversations that EDGI has facilitated. And then also, that maybe weren't happening around Protocol Labs and Qri at the time. But yeah, I don't actually know if I have a strong handle on how things are now or how much this feels like it overlaps with EDGI. I would sort of turn that to Kelsey. + +**KELSEY**: Yeah, I mean, it's, it's really interesting, because it has this history, right, like Dawn was saying, of intending to be a technical challenge that people take on together. And even through last year, we were having an in-person annual meeting, and we had representatives from Protocol Labs and Qri. And we would generally have somebody from Protocol Labs and Qri and EDGI at every session, although I took over the coordinating, which Dawn had been basically handling, I think Kevin had a stint in there where he was doing a lot of coordinating too. And now it's sort of odd, because over the same time period, EDGI originally started as a big data saving archiving operation. And it hasn't been that for multiple years, basically two, since I was hired to coordinate it, and hired to coordinate the archiving, specifically, which we don't do. + +We're in this really interesting space where a big part of the original intention was to have a more ethical and more citizen-controlled way to be saving data than we had. And it spun into this much more theoretical discussion, because Brendan actually made Qri, my understanding is, kind of based on the Data Together conversations. Qri is a decentralized dataset software company that he started. And then, IPFS, they're very engaged with us sometimes, and other times, not. When they just did their Filecoin big launch in September, they reached out to me and they're like, Hey, we're ready for your data. All that data you have, we want to put it on the dweb. And I unfortunately had to respond to that with, I'm so sorry, I'm very busy and I don't know where the data is. I actually got to reach out to them this week and say, hey, we're ready now. + +That's the dream we had originally, so that'd be cool if we could say yes to it. + +But it's sort of strange because Rob, who been in a lot of these recent meetings, I'm not sure if you've had any crossover with him, Stefan, but he still very much cares about these principles and he's very active at EDGI still, he's one of few folks who's had this very consistent through line since Trump's election at EDGI where he does this exact type of data work. I've felt like this is a space where EDGI comes in with this very strong environmental data justice angle and holds space for other people to come in and bring their perspectives. So we have folks like you, Stefan, and Dawn, working on understanding collectivist spaces in, having these really strong experiences in community organizing. We have people coming in from citizen science backgrounds, we have people coming in, who maybe have no real background in justice issues or community organizing at all, who are building protocols. And they've maybe never had a time or space to think about, if I make this technical decision, how does that play out in terms of who's able to use it and how they're able to use it? And it's this really cool intersection, when it works, which I feel like it honestly often does. But to directly answer your question, I can't say that there's a lot of overlap with EDGI, because we don't do that anymore. It's just me, but I work for EDGI, and I'm still sort of holding that space at EDGI, too, when we have data conversations. I'm the technical one in the room, usually saying, hey, well, we should consider doing it this way. We should be present in these spaces. And I feel like a representative in a lot of the technical conferences outside of the EDGI sphere and say, Hey, I have a real use case for data decentralization, which isn't often the case in data decentralization nerd meetups. + +**DAWN**: Which I still find so intensely interesting, a few years in, that this still is a maybe a really strong use case. So I think something like say the Starlink project, I don't know if you spoken to Jonathan Golden, he'd be a good person to invite to some sort of Data Together event. They are similarly thinking about needing to archive important witness testimony related to things that were recorded with the intent of being publicly available from now and into the future, thinking about these questions of trust and holding this sort of data, but it also has this resonance in so many important communities at very strong orientation towards justice, it's not the environmental justice angle, in the same way, it's more a human rights and witnessing emphasis, but it was very resonant, and they have a really strong use case. And they've done some testing and working with IPFS folks. And actually, Ben from Hypha, the worker's cooperative I'm a member of, also has worked with them. And they did a launch this year, so there are some of these use cases, but there aren't a huge amount of them. There's a lot of interesting apps that are being built, but there isn't totally these fully thickened, rich contexts where this is a space to think about the implications of this and how it's used and understand how we should think about building this out, individually. For what it's worth, I think there could be another season or another term, or maybe a reimagined version of it. + +**STEFAN**: I'm gonna suggest a mild intervention in this moment here. If you'll allow me, I'd like to interrogate the two of you using Nine Whys, which is another helpful liberating structure. And maybe we can get to some bedrock material for why Data Together. I heard a lot of context there that was super helpful in understanding the overlap of these different spaces and also early intentions that were held by Dawn and then passed on to Kelsey. And I feel like getting at your guys's shared why would be really helpful for whoever watches this recording. And then we could also leap off of that, and into spiral journal to have a reflective closeout. Any objections to that proposal for the remainder of our meeting? + +**DAWN**: Sounds great. + +**KELSEY**: Always good to have a facilitator in the room. + +**STEFAN**: So let's start. Why Data Together? Why the purpose around Data Together? + +**KELSEY**: A very basic thing for me is that I really like it. I feel the most intellectually stimulated in this space that I get to be, because I'm talking to all these people who are working on really real things and have all this theoretical background. And it's perspectives that I haven't heard, and I can watch them hear perspectives that they've never heard. It's kind of amazing. It unlocks and shifts concept in my head, and I can feel it happening during these conversations. + +**DAWN**: I think it's actually not too dissimilar of a reason why Data Together to me, was that it felt like there was a gap between, at the time, the way we were trying to use these technologies, decentralizing and peer technologies. The promise, we could see in these technologies, and the rich and careful and nuanced, ways that we that and from an EDGI side were thinking about justice around data. It was a way for me to have conversations that helped demystify the technology, or remove some of that allure of the technology from folks who maybe don't build it as much. And then also have the people who build it have that connection into understanding some of these very important framings or approaches or critical understandings that inform action. So it's a way to have disparate expertises meet and commingle. + +**STEFAN**: Okay, I hear similarity, but also interesting difference there. Or at least, additional concepts, like this notion that there's a gap that's been filled, that Dawn mentioned. And then Kelsey, I think a lot of what you said, around just this diverse group of folk coming together to think together about these questions. There's a lot in line there with what Dawn was just saying, I think. So, why is that important? + +**KELSEY**: I think this technology is interesting enough that it's going to get built, and I'm afraid that it's going to be built without all of the perspectives that it needs. One of the things that makes the space cool is that a lot of the people in it, a lot of the base technologists even, are dreaming the same dreams that I am in terms of what our society can be if we treat each other differently, if we if we hold things differently, and there's this deep interest that's held in having this other world made possible by technology, but there's also, Dawn had this exactly right, and this has been in my head too, there is this big gap, where they want the right things, but they don't have all the people who need to be in the room to make those things happen. We don't have all the people in our room either, but we try to bring it in at least through text. + +**DAWN**: Yeah, I would say probably it feels very similar to me. I think it's important because if these technologies are to meet the potential that I think the creators desire for them, and the users and those who are in this decentralized and political space want, I worry that they won't do it, if it happens through tech as usual, being built, which either through, say, Silicon Valley style, or even the existing norms and paradigms in open source and open culture, I think are insufficient. And there are a rich array of other ways of imagining otherwise, and alternatives that have existed for a long time, but also are being actively enacted in grassroots movements, activist spaces, and that tie into areas in academia that are not often in conversation with the technical. So for me, it's about trying to attach those conversations. And I think you see, certain ones get attached in are in vogue, say something like Digital Commons, I think Commons now occupies that as an imaginary, is present enough that I think it is engaged with, but to me, it's like, what about things like abolition and abolitionist tools, or data sovereignty, drawing from Indigenous sovereignty, and that as an understanding, or anticolonial and decolonial ways of thinking, or just transition, or transfer, more of a transformation approach, which I can draw from sustainability, and just sustainability spaces. There's just so many of those that I think offer something really rewarding. And I would like to see those ideas circulate. + +**STEFAN**: Why is this important? + +**KELSEY**: There's a lot of historical reasons why these perspectives aren't in the room. And I think that there's a lot of varied history to the internet that we have. But the people building our new internet are not fundamentally that different from the people who built the other one. I think this is the difference between not racist and antiracist. You have to do a lot of conscious work, if you're looking to actually address and not have inequity in a system that starts not equitable. So I think that's the the concern with letting that gap exist, or letting letting the people who are building it, decide what to do. + +There's even really small things about open source; there's the what gets measured gets managed, but then there's also, I've been an engineer in a roomful of engineers who are certain that nothing matters but the engineering. That company failed because we never hired a marketing person. There's a lot of that sentiment in open source, and there's this beautiful feeling that anyone could contribute, but that has to be anyone who's able to make a GitHub commit in the source code, and that is really a small "anyone". You can't even have a designer say, hey, this should look like this, and then do it. You're still reliant on the people who write the code. And the people who write the code, we already know, is a pretty small demographic that has a lot of skew in it. And if that's who builds it, especially if they build it open source, they're going to build it around what they want, what they need, what their passions are, unless they have a really good reason not to. + +**DAWN**: Yeah, I mean, so I think it again feels very similar. My answer about why these things are important is, I think we're at a moment, we're at multiple moments of pressing need. This sort of work feels like, there's no going back to normal in those domains is very apparent. And so I think about how, to take that seriously, we have to rethink the modes, the ways that we produce knowledge, or the ways that we produce these systems, the ways that we produce these technologies. And I think a lot about how to build these technologies, which I think are maybe a parallel attempt to others to actually think about a pluralistic future we could live in, we have to build in ways that escape that technodeterminist way that mystifies them as technology. And I don't think we can do that with the existing tools. So we have to do that horrible, messy process of, work with the tools we've got, which kind of suck, and build new tools at the same time that we're trying to make this new world that we want. But we have to try. Or, what's the alternative, not trying? I'm not prepared to do that. + +**STEFAN**: I'm gonna ask you why, Dawn: why all of what you said, we have to rethink the ways we reproduce knowledges and technologies to build a pluralistic future away from techno-determinism. Why is that important? + +**DAWN**: I think we have, at this point, heartbreaking and overly documented evidence of the damage that these systems have caused. And that harm, I don't know if the the way out is to abandon everything, I don't think we can just critique our way out of this situation. I think what we've developed is an extremely robust set of ways to critique these systems, or at least certain areas of academia have that I draw from, and I am super indebted to those as ways of ways of seeing, but I am committed to also thinking about how to make it so those critiques don't have to be used, because we aren't in that world anymore. And I think my why would be that rethinking is the way I think we get out of it. + +**KELSEY**: I have a sort of personal dichotomy that I've probably mentioned in this group before: this idea of work to change the world, I use the dichotomy of frontliners and utopians. And you really do need both. You need people fighting, actively engaged with the world as it is and seeking change, saying, hey, something else is better, and we should work for it. And then there's also this other set of people, utopians are in the space of saying, Hey, I think that we can try it. Let's start with the world we want. Let's make an assumption that it is possible. How do we how do we live it right now? And how do we iterate on those systems so that there is something specific that is proven that we're aiming for. And I'm much more of a utopian. And I think that what Dawn was saying about rethinking the technologies that are imperfect, and having to use them while we rebuild, that's exactly that. That's saying, okay, if this were perfect, what would it be? And how do we get to that as soon as we possibly can? How can we actually live our values? + +**STEFAN**: I think we're getting deeper into some layers here. There's a lot going on around avoiding the damages and harm caused by the previous system, but also being trapped in this funny dichotomy, where we have to use those same tools from the previous system to rebuild the new one. And then this interesting notion of the frontlines and the utopians. And I like that, I think there's a lot of fruitful play space in these ideas here. We can stop here and build out a future present scenario, but I want to go a little deeper. So why Data Together? In the context of all of these things, why Data Together? + +**DAWN**: Data Together started as a place where there was a confluence of those things. We were building the bridge two steps in front of us. We were doing like eight other things, and we were trying to grapple with what it all meant. That's how it started. We were building this tech, and we needed a place to understand how we built it. And there's these dusty GitHub repos kicking around, and then there was the realizing that even how we think about what could at face value appear to be pretty innocuous concepts, like data, is not innocuous at all. There's so much to unpack there. That is a rich and fruitful conversation. So we need to have those conversations too. And then also, it was a way to think, to be in that shared space together and think and do together. + +**STEFAN**: Now my frame zoomed out a bit back to why Data Together. But why all of these things that have been discussed so far in relationship to this entity, Kelsey? I think, Dawn, you're getting at it, you brought it down, but why is this important? Why does this matter? Why? + +**KELSEY**: I mean, that confluence, where it is, it's at the crux of it right there. There are all these amazing concepts. There's nothing new in philosophy. + +I read the biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote the Rights of Woman and decided to go be a war journalist at the French Revolution. She was deeply antimarriage and all this other shit that you just really aren't allowed to be at that time. And you're still not really, and nothing is new, right? But somebody was already living this crazy, radical future way back then. And I love to think about her in that context. So I don't think we're going to be inventing something here. But I think that in our modern context, we have to find the ideas that we need in the moment. And I think that that's not available, especially in technology spaces. + +People who do a lot of tech spend a lot of time learning how to do it. I've personally spent all day trying to figure out how to fix one line of code, or even just trying to understand the documentation on one function within one line of code. It's very hard and you are seldom invited to zoom out and say, what is the context of my work? What is the purpose of this? And am I building something in a world that I want? + +The concept of work, we've discussed that here, too, but the concept of work is challenging because most people spend all of their work in busyness, without ever saying, this thing that I'm spending the majority of my energy on, do I care what it does? It makes me money, is that what I'm looking for? + +This Data Together space, it's that invitation that says, hey, whatever it is you're doing, have you thought about it? Have you thought about it on a grand scale? Have you looked at what it's for, in a long time? It's an invitation to see ideas that maybe nobody ever showed to you, because you were a code monkey. Or maybe it's you actually getting to talk to technologists about the thing you've been fighting for on the streets for years, maybe you've protested Google or Facebook with a picket sign, but you probably never talked to the engineer and said, Hey, why didn't you do this thing better? + +This is the kind of space, I want it to be the kind of space where that can happen, where you can say, hey, you really can't make that decision, because it'll impact my life, and I need you to know that. + +I think that in general, intersectionality of backgrounds, when they can be focused productively on a topic, can be really, really fruitful for for everyone involved, just because it's often new for each person in some way. + +**DAWN**: I think there's two things in there which really resonated. The first one is this idea of meeting ideas for the moment. I think sometimes we've under-resourced certain certain forms of production with all of the ideas that could give them the space for things to be better. So it's a lot of work for folks who are in those spaces to search out and then engage with those ideas. + +I think people do that with technology, I think people do that whether they identify as a technologist or an artist or a researcher, but it's tough work, that gets taken up by an individual in some cases, or they have to build that community around them to do that work. My dream would be that there is a way that those ideas are more ready to hand. And if not, there is a way that we can hand off ideas to each other at the right moment, when it's a good time. + +But also, the other part of it, which I think is super important too, is that it's not really one sided. I'm nervous that maybe I frame things in such a way where I'm like, oh, only the technologists have to learn from people who are really theoretical or people who are activists, I think that concretely having to grapple with why how things are built is so important to thinking about how to build them better. And so there's that putting into practice moment, which I think is a question for Data Together. If we're not doing the putting into practice in Data Together now, how do we support people as they take things back to their own place where they're putting it into practice. + +I feel like EDGI maybe has a good conduit because of the way that we've facilitated that group, but if the rest of the people coming into this space are maybe a little more distributed, for lack of a better term, like for me, for example, I'm not active in EDGI, I'm a happy alum, but I'm not actually doing that day to day project work. Thinking about how to connect it back into the stuff I do is maybe a question. Because I think that actually is a way to keep this feeling resonant, and/or having that important scheme realized more broadly. From 95baae0ee2ebfd019f5a1dfe613b535d1f1d580c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Kelsey Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2021 10:15:55 -0800 Subject: [PATCH 65/65] Update notes/semester_03_2020/6-polity-2020-11-03.md Co-authored-by: dcwalk --- notes/semester_03_2020/6-polity-2020-11-03.md | 3 +-- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/notes/semester_03_2020/6-polity-2020-11-03.md b/notes/semester_03_2020/6-polity-2020-11-03.md index 26ca5c1..5cbf861 100644 --- a/notes/semester_03_2020/6-polity-2020-11-03.md +++ b/notes/semester_03_2020/6-polity-2020-11-03.md @@ -60,7 +60,7 @@ That's the dream we had originally, so that'd be cool if we could say yes to it. But it's sort of strange because Rob, who been in a lot of these recent meetings, I'm not sure if you've had any crossover with him, Stefan, but he still very much cares about these principles and he's very active at EDGI still, he's one of few folks who's had this very consistent through line since Trump's election at EDGI where he does this exact type of data work. I've felt like this is a space where EDGI comes in with this very strong environmental data justice angle and holds space for other people to come in and bring their perspectives. So we have folks like you, Stefan, and Dawn, working on understanding collectivist spaces in, having these really strong experiences in community organizing. We have people coming in from citizen science backgrounds, we have people coming in, who maybe have no real background in justice issues or community organizing at all, who are building protocols. And they've maybe never had a time or space to think about, if I make this technical decision, how does that play out in terms of who's able to use it and how they're able to use it? And it's this really cool intersection, when it works, which I feel like it honestly often does. But to directly answer your question, I can't say that there's a lot of overlap with EDGI, because we don't do that anymore. It's just me, but I work for EDGI, and I'm still sort of holding that space at EDGI, too, when we have data conversations. I'm the technical one in the room, usually saying, hey, well, we should consider doing it this way. We should be present in these spaces. And I feel like a representative in a lot of the technical conferences outside of the EDGI sphere and say, Hey, I have a real use case for data decentralization, which isn't often the case in data decentralization nerd meetups. -**DAWN**: Which I still find so intensely interesting, a few years in, that this still is a maybe a really strong use case. So I think something like say the Starlink project, I don't know if you spoken to Jonathan Golden, he'd be a good person to invite to some sort of Data Together event. They are similarly thinking about needing to archive important witness testimony related to things that were recorded with the intent of being publicly available from now and into the future, thinking about these questions of trust and holding this sort of data, but it also has this resonance in so many important communities at very strong orientation towards justice, it's not the environmental justice angle, in the same way, it's more a human rights and witnessing emphasis, but it was very resonant, and they have a really strong use case. And they've done some testing and working with IPFS folks. And actually, Ben from Hypha, the worker's cooperative I'm a member of, also has worked with them. And they did a launch this year, so there are some of these use cases, but there aren't a huge amount of them. There's a lot of interesting apps that are being built, but there isn't totally these fully thickened, rich contexts where this is a space to think about the implications of this and how it's used and understand how we should think about building this out, individually. For what it's worth, I think there could be another season or another term, or maybe a reimagined version of it. +**DAWN**: Which I still find so intensely interesting, a few years in, that this still is a maybe a really strong use case. So I think something like say the Starling project, I don't know if you spoken to Jonathan Dotan, he'd be a good person to invite to some sort of Data Together event. They are similarly thinking about needing to archive important witness testimony related to things that were recorded with the intent of being publicly available from now and into the future, thinking about these questions of trust and holding this sort of data, but it also has this resonance in so many important communities at very strong orientation towards justice, it's not the environmental justice angle, in the same way, it's more a human rights and witnessing emphasis, but it was very resonant, and they have a really strong use case. And they've done some testing and working with IPFS folks. And actually, Ben from Hypha, the worker's cooperative I'm a member of, also has worked with them. And they did a launch this year, so there are some of these use cases, but there aren't a huge amount of them. There's a lot of interesting apps that are being built, but there isn't totally these fully thickened, rich contexts where this is a space to think about the implications of this and how it's used and understand how we should think about building this out, individually. For what it's worth, I think there could be another season or another term, or maybe a reimagined version of it. **STEFAN**: I'm gonna suggest a mild intervention in this moment here. If you'll allow me, I'd like to interrogate the two of you using Nine Whys, which is another helpful liberating structure. And maybe we can get to some bedrock material for why Data Together. I heard a lot of context there that was super helpful in understanding the overlap of these different spaces and also early intentions that were held by Dawn and then passed on to Kelsey. And I feel like getting at your guys's shared why would be really helpful for whoever watches this recording. And then we could also leap off of that, and into spiral journal to have a reflective closeout. Any objections to that proposal for the remainder of our meeting? @@ -121,4 +121,3 @@ I think people do that with technology, I think people do that whether they iden But also, the other part of it, which I think is super important too, is that it's not really one sided. I'm nervous that maybe I frame things in such a way where I'm like, oh, only the technologists have to learn from people who are really theoretical or people who are activists, I think that concretely having to grapple with why how things are built is so important to thinking about how to build them better. And so there's that putting into practice moment, which I think is a question for Data Together. If we're not doing the putting into practice in Data Together now, how do we support people as they take things back to their own place where they're putting it into practice. I feel like EDGI maybe has a good conduit because of the way that we've facilitated that group, but if the rest of the people coming into this space are maybe a little more distributed, for lack of a better term, like for me, for example, I'm not active in EDGI, I'm a happy alum, but I'm not actually doing that day to day project work. Thinking about how to connect it back into the stuff I do is maybe a question. Because I think that actually is a way to keep this feeling resonant, and/or having that important scheme realized more broadly. -