Newsletter transfer 6 min read

Seeing without looking ⊗ A map in search of territory ⊗ Spoiling the last frontier

This week →{.caps} Seeing without looking ⊗ A map in search of territory ⊗ Spoiling the last frontier ⊗ AAs, co-ops, and DAOs

A year ago →{.caps} A favourite in issue No.157 was Capitalism is over, if you want it (How to make a pencil) by Aaron Benanav.

Seeing without looking

I wasn’t expecting to include another piece about Sidewalk Toronto, but M.R. Sauter kind of twisted my arm with this excellent one. They centered the article on that project but actually expand from there to dive into Susan Sontag’s 1977 book On Photography, mixing it in with surveillance, our feelings of photographs being “more authentic” than reality, the ubiquitization of photography, data systems, psychological impact of surveillance itself, and data collection.

Privacy is not simply concerned with being observed, or even being observed unawares. Privacy extends, as Warren and Brandeis famously described it, to the right “to be let alone,” to be free of untoward or illicit or improper influence. Further, for a community and civil society to function, it must maintain, in the Levinasian sense, the “response-ability” of all parties — that is, it must protect and preserve their ability to meaningfully respond to their own circumstances.

That quote basically encompasses their whole argument. However much one hides the cameras, anonymizes the data, destroys original images, and “respects your privacy,” it remains that our right to be “let alone” and our ability to respond is taken away when we are observed.

Surveillant big data regimes make the same inherent claim: a person reveals themselves through incidental, collectible, observable, crunchable actions. It is these data points, taken in aggregate, that should be considered as “pieces of reality,” not messy discursive encounters. […]
Data — and the images collected to generate that data — double reality in the same way. Moreover, the world of data doubles is preferred: easier to interact with, easier to access, easier to model and manipulate. […]
Sontag saw cameras as engines that produced an image-ecology that replaced reality. Now, big data systems and their sensing and analyzing apparatuses similarly produce their own reality to regulate and predict, one that lays stiflingly heavy on our own as well.{.highlight}

More →{.caps} This one about how BMW’s virtual factory uses AI to hone the assembly line was going in the Asides but it’s worth pulling alongside the piece above. Both relate to digital twins and show that when we focus only on the tech, things might look promising, but when we focus on the people around it, there are a lot of questions to be asked.

The simulation is part of BMW’s plan to use more artificial intelligence in manufacturing. Grüneisl says machine-learning algorithms can simulate robots performing complex maneuvers to find the most efficient process. Over time, BMW wants to use the simulation to have robots learn how to perform increasingly complex jobs.*

A map in search of territory

Haven’t linked to Evgeny Morozov recently, here he’s looking at the rhetoric around Web3, by way of obsessing a bit too much on Tim O’Reilly and Web 2.0. Beyond that though, his two central points are worth a read and keeping in mind going forward.

First, as the title implies, that Web3 right now is a map searching for a territory. A set of technologies and dreams that exists largely with no real problem to solve or need to fill, other than making money. Ok, that’s a slight exaggeration but it’s one difference with 2.0, the latter was a name slapped on to something happening, while Web3 seems to be a set of tools looking to make something happen.

Second, for all the dissing of 2.0 by the 3 folks, a lot of the VCs are the same and it’s important to keep in mind that they helped the hijacking of 2.0 ideals and turned it into surveillance capitalism. The current speachifying and investing is to keep software eating the world and pooping out cash for them.

This is why all the true Web3 believers have forgotten how to use present and past tenses, let alone modal verbs: every statement that they make about Web3 is not about what it is or what it might be.{.highlight} No, their every statement is – almost invariably so – about what it will be. The transition is inevitable; better stock up on the right tokens – or the fear of missing out will eat your soul. […]
If you ever listened to those inside the a16z universe sing praises to Web3, you would never know that Marc L. Andreessen sits on the board of Facebook (since 2008!) and he has coached its founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. If there are people to blame for how Web 2.0 has turned out, many of the a16z employees are surely high on the list. […]
Most of their paeans are deeply ahistorical; they just accept a very twisted definition of Web 2.0 and move on to make some points about the inevitability of DAOs or NFTs. They lack any engagement with the political economy of global capitalism or even a cursory analysis of the many social movements that are still contesting it.{.highlight}

Spoiling the last frontier

Excellent piece by Matthew King on the ongoing pollution of space. You should at the very least click through for his characterizations of Brandon, Bezos, and Musk. It’s basically quite a few stats and background story on space debris, mogul-ing of space, too many satellites, and the privatization of space exploration. Within the ‘topic-scape’ of Sentiers, I’d frame it as yet another example of the enclosure, over-exploitation, and spoliation of a commons that we should have and should now protect.

In the fast-devolving context of our second space race and worsening orbital debris densities, we’re now seeing the industry’s most shameless hucksters, who have already made a buck polluting the high skies, spin up new schemes to make another buck pretending to clean up their own mess. […]
[W]e have repeated the same mistakes in yet another domain, this one above our heads and arguably the last unravaged by human intervention. Has there ever been more unassailable proof that we have learned nothing?{.highlight} […]
By impatiently flooding the skies with their cold imitations of the universe, lusting tycoons like Musk and Bezos are accelerating their own defeat, creating a dense barrier of garbage between them and their boyhood dreams.

AAs, co-ops, and DAOs

My friend Simon might have preferred I wait for his complete essay but I’m linking anyway to his excellent Twitter thread because it’s already worth a read. He’s been exploring the history of the governance of Alcoholics Anonymous and how it could inform social contracts in DAOs. Good stuff! His conclusions so far also parallels, in my mind, Morozov’s above. I.e. that Web3 and DAOs are still too focused (sometimes exclusively) on the tools and not enough on needs, purpose, or mission.

He mentions this article a couple of times: What co-ops and DAOs can learn from each other and it’s definitely a great companion piece with some solid thinking. It reminded me of Jay’s Discord, DAOs and the Dweb : Three Areas to Explore in 2021 which I linked to in my own Thoughts on Web3.

Differences aside, there is a growing overlap in the idea spaces that DAOs and platform co-ops inhabit. Both forms seek to expand collective ownership and governance of digital infrastructure. Both have a culture that prioritizes collective control and the creation of shared goods. […]
At the end of the day, the best framework for an organization may not be a choice between a cooperative or DAO model, but a blend of both. Incorporating cooperative values into crypto networks could take the form of a traditional cooperative that bootstraps its network through on-chain tokenized contributions. Alternatively, a DAO could decide to adopt cooperative one-vote governance in some instances.

Asides

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