Memia 2021.01: Did I miss anything?😲// the sixth estate🏛️// the metaversal self👓// an avocado🥑chair💺// do you love💕me 🦿robot🦾?

Tech regulating government

Kia ora and best wishes for a successful new year!

Welcome back to the first Memia newsletter of 2021, once again drinking from the firehose of emerging tech, global change and trying to sensemake the future as it unfolds - all with a view from Aotearoa.

The most clicked link in the last issue (~12% of openers) was the deepfake video of famous historical faces nodding along to the music.

…And ICYMI, I finished up 2020 with a roundup of the year: Memia 2020 wrapup: Top 10 themes from a year of tumultuous change🌊💥🤯. Take a read if you haven’t already.

Did I miss anything?😲

Just back from a relaxing kiwi summer holiday camping by the beach in Abel Tasman / Tōtaranui National Park. Did I miss anything?

Ahem. News cycles and online media have been dominated in the last week by the attempted 6 Jan coup (is there another word?) in Washington DC and ongoing fallout.

11th Hour @11thHour

Day 1 vs. Day 1,448

January 6th 2021

191,689 Retweets548,773 Likes

The previously unimaginable happenings at the Capitol are being unpicked in doomscrolling detail online. Events continue to move quickly: *who knows* what could still happen in the next 7 days until Trump’s term ends or afterwards (at the time of writing, impeachment proceedings are in the works while the FBI is warning of further pro-Trump armed violence in the leadup to Biden’s inauguration on 20th Jan).

Predictably, there was some pointy schadenfreude from other parts of the world:

“What we saw in the US last night and today really showed … how brittle and weak western democracy is, and how weak its foundations are”

- Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani

“America no longer charts the course and so has lost all right to set it. And, even more so, to impose it on others.”

- Konstantin Kosachev, Russian Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee Chair

“We hope that the American people can enjoy peace, stability and security as soon as possible,”

- Hua Chunying, China Foreign Ministry spokeswoman (Miaow!)

(This coming as Chinese police carried out mass arrests of Hong Kong activists and lawyers, shutting down any remaining political opposition in the previously democratic city-state).

For me, the events in the US primarily raise bigger picture strategic questions for Aotearoa, including:

• Is Western democracy as a whole *actually* “brittle and weak”? (What are the alternatives? How could democratic systems substantially increase resilience to QAnon-type radicalisation of significant numbers of their population?)

• If the Capitol coup had succeeded and (…it may yet happen...) US civil instability ensued, how will China, Russia, Iran and others respond to fill an international security vacuum left behind? (Could Hong Kong be a test run for opportunistic expansionary initiatives into Taiwan… South East Asia…? even the wider Pacific region…?)

• While Aotearoa media foreign coverage is dominated by US domestic politics even more than usual (…is this just laziness / low budgets - or intentional editorial agenda setting to sell ads?) Likely we will continue to miss equally impactful international developments while all this is going on.

The sixth estate🏛️

Obviously the biggest “tech” story of the week has been the near-simultaneous decisions by Twitter, Facebook… and then a slew of other US tech companies to “deplatform” Trump, QAnon and shut down tens of thousands of other accounts.

Further down the stack, Amazon and Twilio shut down cloud services to Parler, the conservative-friendly social media network which had set itself up as as a “free speech” alternative to Twitter. Apple and Google also removed Parler from their app stores. (Not before hackers downloaded everything from the site first, allegedly including all users’ personal private ID info. Seems Parler’s technical team were not the sharpest knives in the cutlery drawer…)

Some informed commentary on the issues raised:

• Ben Thompson (Stratechery): Trump and Twitter

• Nuanced discussion thread facilitated by Exponential View’s Azeem Azhar: Social media policy conundrums

• Thread from Cory Doctorow:

  Cory Doctorow #BLM @doctorow

  As Parler disappears from the Android and Ios app stores and faces being kicked off of Amazon's (and other) clouds, people who worry about monopolized corporate control over speech are divided over What It Means. 1/

  

  January 9th 2021

  835 Retweets1,672 Likes

(Couple of more lighthearted moments too:)

Benjamin Bratton @bratton

Would be funny if he ends up on WeChat

January 10th 2021

8 Retweets116 Likes

Chris Jackson @ChrisCJackson

“Guess who can still tweet motherfuc-”

January 9th 2021

90,901 Retweets555,431 Likes

The deplatforming has brought into *even sharper* focus the evolving power dynamics in the countries in which these companies operate. One of core issues arising is a perceived threat to the sovereignty of national governments around the world:

balajis.com @balajis

This is all much bigger than US politics. It is a matter of national security for India, Israel, and every other country to maintain a sovereign communications channel for their leaders to reach their people directly. The world cannot be ruled by American corporations.

Rajeev Mantri @RMantri

By their conduct, Facebook and Twitter are doing more to light the fires of Digital Atmanirbhar Bharat than any policy paper could have. https://t.co/c24nl6Bmy2

January 9th 2021

2,823 Retweets8,089 Likes

(…What if Twitter shut down the President of a country with evidence of state-sanctioned human rights violations against minorities? Or, closer to home, Jacinda Ardern’s Facebook Live account for arbitrary “Community Standards violations”?)

Aotearoa Privacy Commissioner John Edwards calls stridently for regulation of social media platforms:

John Edwards @JCE_PC

The Twitter and Facebook bans are arbitrary, cynical, unprincipled and further evidence that regulation of social media platforms is urgently required. Much worse has been allowed, and is still present on both platforms than the precipitating posts.

January 9th 2021

49 Retweets239 Likes

But be careful what you wish for…

Regulators need to understand in detail the technical issues involved. For an accessible backgrounder, two discussions from MIT’s Emtech conference at the end of last year go into the technology and policy definition challenges of content moderation on the largest international platforms:

• Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer on combatting misinformation

• Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal on combatting misinformation

[Taken from MIT’s In Machines We Trust podcast series, highly recommended]

As the podcasts with the platform CTOs make very clear, content moderation is a fiendishly complex technical problem to solve and any solution would need to be automated with ML, software and near-real-time, granular policy iteration. Just check out Facebook’s Community Standards and the Twitter Rules - and imagine the technology+human brainpower required to accurately moderate >700 million tweets per day (yesterday), against a background arms race of constantly iterating AI-generated fake content. You may *want* to regulate it in future using static national legislation… but how would you actually write laws which could be technically implemented?

Perhaps local regulation might force some financial logic: Facebook’s revenues outside the US and EU are small in proportion. There is little commercial incentive to put large amounts of technical effort into moderating small countries’ content, with more idiosyncratic languages and cultures. Perhaps the US giants would decide to retrench, leaving room for smaller local players in each region…or just a hole where 2010s “social media” apps used to be. (…or WeChat!)

(And don’t wait around for decentralised social networks to scale any time soon either…)

Despite the seeming cataclysmic threat to traditional concepts of national sovereignty, personally I’m more positive than most other commentators about these developments. Yes, it’s now explicit that a small number of US corporate tech companies can be pushed to act as political “moderators of last resort” inside and potentially outside the US. But in the absence of any meaningful international regulatory framework for social media, it feels like they are doing this reluctantly to fill a gaping hole in antique governance systems not equipped to deal with the weaponisation of misinformation at scale.

Traditional political theory invokes the role of the “Fourth Estate”:

“the press and news media both in explicit capacity of advocacy and implicit ability to frame political issues. Though it is not formally recognized as a part of a political system, it wields significant indirect social influence.” (-Wikipedia)

More recently this has been complemented by the “Fifth Estate”:

“The Fifth Estate is a socio-cultural reference to groupings of outlier viewpoints in contemporary society, and is most associated with bloggers, journalists publishing in non-mainstream media outlets, and the social media” (-Wikipedia again)

Perhaps these international platforms, or what evolves out of them, could be considered as the “Sixth Estate”* in an evolving political order? In the absence of international governance on misinformation, the tech platforms are responding to events in real time as the world rapidly becomes more interconnected. This week, it was tech regulating government rather than government regulating tech.

*Consider further* that the tech platforms are arguably able to interpret and represent the views of their aggregate user base across borders more democratically and responsively than outdated 3-4 yearly national electoral cycles. (Perhaps in the not too distant future, might not globally minded younger citizens feel greater allegiance to the sovereignty of Google, Twitter (or even Facebook?!) than to archaic, low usability, distant, authoritarian, costly nation-state governments in their current instantiation? When can we all get our Twitter passports?)

In summary: this week the US tech companies were pushed reluctantly to reveal the explicit political power they now hold across all countries in which they operate. I suspect regulation of this power will need international scope and mandate and take years. Meanwhile, hopefully things settle down a bit over the Pacific, eh.🤞

Weak signals

Phew. And it’s still the first newsletter… OMG so much has happened in tech over the last few weeks too:

• Two tech / trend roundups worth reading:

  • Firstly, Eli Dourado at the Utah-based Center for Growth and Opportunity compiled a fantastic list of the technologies he is watching in the 2020s. On challenges with Total Factor Productivity (TFP), he writes:

    “one of my convictions is that scientific breakthroughs alone are not enough to drive an end to the Great Stagnation. TFP only budges when new technologies are adopted at scale, and generally this means products, not just science. Science lays critical groundwork for new technology, but after all the science is done, much work remains. Someone must shepherd the breakthrough to the product stage, where it can actually affect TFP. This means building businesses, surmounting regulatory obstacles, and scaling production.”

    Memia @memialabs

    Notes on technology in the 2020s - fantastic roundup from @elidourado Notes on technology in the 2020sWill we end the Great Stagnation? Here are the technologies I’m watching in the next decade.buff.ly

    December 31st 2020

    1 Like

  • Secondly, David Mattin who writes the New World Same Humans newsletter posted 5 Trends which will shape consumer behaviour in the decade ahead:

    • Public Goods

    • The Metaversal Self

    • New Work Flows

    • B2A (Business2Algorithm)

    • Sustainability as a Service

• …Speaking of the Metaverse👓:

  • Zoom wedding amid Covid: Bride in Philippines, groom in Wellington, celebrant in US.

  • People in lockdown around the world joined the Icelandic New Years Eve party in VR hosted by OZ, logging in using Snapchat avatars and experiencing virtual concerts from Sigur Ros, Kaleo and many other Icelandic bands. Watch the video below, pretty convincing argument that many live concerts will be heading into the metaverse soon and unlikely to come back out into reality after the pandemic subsides.

  • Two amazing advances in reconstructing the real world in VR:

    • NeRF in the Wild: Google researchers took tourist photo datasets and generated high quality 3D renderings of iconic tourist hotspots using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF).

    • And a demo 3D video from Japan stitched together entirely from photos.

• More significant leaps in Generative AI:

  • 🥑💺OpenAI has extended last year’s GPT-3 model with two new models that combine language processing with image recognition to give its AI a better understanding of everyday concepts. Here’s what it came up with when asked to imagine “an avocado armchair”:

    

  • Just riffing aloud about how this might be used in the real world. For example, for design ideas generation in construction:

    • “A 2-storey 3 bedroom house with a grey roof”

    • “A hospital for a city of 1,000,000 population”

    • “An iconic harbour bridge crossing with 8 lanes for traffic”

• Quantum internet getting nearer:

  • Chinese scientists built the world's first integrated quantum communication network, combining over 700 optical fibers on the ground with two ground-to-satellite links - achieving quantum key distribution (QKD) over a total distance of 4600 km and with 40X faster key generation rates. A significant step towards unhackable network comms.

    

• Cuddly robots?

  • Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot (see later) doesn’t have a tail. But the Qoobo “Tailed Cushion” does: (slightly disturbing…)

    

Mind expanding

• Start your year with Miguel F. Morales’ 7-part “no math” guide to modern quantum mechanics in ArsTechnica: it’s excellent.

Rollcall

Just before Xmas Josh Daniell, CEO of Akahu, a Kiwi fintech startup with investors including Westpac NZ, posted a crisp summary of the current state of Open Banking on these shores:

• Open banking in New Zealand - the lay of the land

In short: progress towards regulation of a CDR (“Consumer Data Right”) underpinning open banking is painfully slow… nonetheless:

“In 2021, we expect to see the first bank-led product which is specifically designed and built on top of consumer data portability infrastructure. Which is a convoluted way of saying that the product won’t care who you bank with.”

Given that the recently launched Stripe Treasury API pretty much enables a lightweight “API with banking licence” business model, combined with Open Banking regulation this could be quite disruptive for a sector that before Covid was making NZ$5.7Bn profit per year. (With CBDCs imminent, what exactly are banks *for* in the future, anyway?)

Watching this space.

Hidden gems

A couple of nuggets this week:

• Apparently, the Earth has been spinning faster lately… which means we may need a negative leap second!

  

• Do you love💕me 🦿robot🦾? No doubt you caught Boston Dynamics’ robots dancing at the end of last year (video below, it’s great): make sure you check out the background story of How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance as well.

🙏🙏🙏 Thanks to everyone who took time to get in touch with links and feedback over the summer break.

And thanks for reading! More next week…

Cheers / Ngā Mihi

Ben