Author: Matt McAlister

Transportation v communication: the fight for control of the new frontiers

I’m starting to wonder if virtual reality is merely an anecdotal episode in a much larger story about who controls how things get from one place to another.

Technology has revolutionised media many times over the years, but as these new things force us to think differently about our experiences in time and space, the real beneficiaries of the next revolution might not be obvious until you look backwards first.

In the early-20th century, reproducing pianos nearly became big business. These were incredible machines that, built into a piano, could play back a pianist’s performance from a punched roll of paper, as if they were in the room with you.

The Aeolian Company’s Duo-Art, for example, was so good that they were used in concert pianos. Orchestras around the world could perform as if Rachmaninov or Gershwin were virtually playing the Steinway right there on stage with them.

Of course, piano manufacturers were threatened by the on-demand concert machine in your home. They decided to embrace the upstarts, though it was more of a squeeze in reality, a time-tested strategy often used today, requiring exclusivity contracts for use of a known brand and proven sales and distribution channel.

And then the US financial markets crashed in 1929. Excess inventory became a serious problem. With no distribution channel or a legal position to stand on, the reproducing pianos quickly became footnotes in media tech history.

Virtual reality, drones and 3D printing may all merge into something that reintroduces those ideas from 100 years ago by bringing distant times and places into our real life experiences again. In fact, there’s a new company called Magic Leap that is working on some really interesting technologies they call “mixed reality”.

While some revolutionary things will come out of all these efforts I suspect there are other bigger forces that will eat these things up for breakfast.

Remember that phonographs nearly died in the 1920s and ’30s as radios took off. While the technology kept chugging along, radios and radio shows found their way into every home at an incredible rate. Shows were live. They were free. And the sound quality was comparatively good .

Record companies kept evolving their technologies and the way they handled artists in parallel with the radio revolution. They soon became fuel for it, creating a massive commercial axis of power in combination with radio about 20 years later in the 1950s.

But the format of the music and the commercial model for selling it never stays around for long. Vinyl sales peaked in the late 1970s and were replaced by tapes, which were replaced by CDs, which were replaced by downloads and so on.


The media in which words, images and ideas are expressed get to us wrapped in temporary technologies. They seem to come and go at faster and faster rates.

However, the delivery channels and the distribution technologies underpinning them have a much longer lifespan, longer than the media formats, longer than the devices at either end of the channel. They get embedded into the way things work, enabling people to communicate in addition to sending packaged experiences across them.

Facebook is more than aware of the importance of being the technology underpinning communication, it increasingly drives their strategy.

The company’s WhatsApp acquisition sits squarely in this context. And their efforts to provide connectivity via their Internet.org initiative (which is not a separate nonprofit despite the domain) is precisely the kind of move that will ensure a deep and longterm position in people’s lives over time.

Mark Zuckerberg said Internet.org’s aim is to “to deliver the internet to everyone”. They would be in a pretty powerful position if they could replace telecom carriers and run all that activity through pipes owned and controlled by Facebook.

But they also know that people’s experiences are important to them. They are so important that the format of the experience will often drive the channel decision. Cable television, for example, probably wouldn’t have happened without MTV and CNN.

And that is the context of Facebook’s Oculus acquisition. If the VR platforms succeed and ride off the back of a communications channel that Facebook doesn’t control, then it will be in trouble.

Facebook’s Instant Articles serves that purpose, too. Facebook doesn’t control activity on publishers’ websites. But if publishers all use Instant Articles or the Facebook Live video news aggregation service, then people might not leave Facebook to get the news anymore.

Of course, Google isn’t sitting idle. They participated in the massive $827m series C investment in Magic Leap earlier this year, and will know what kind of communications channel is going to benefit from the existence of its new experiences.

Now, looking forward, it’s conceivable Facebook missed the mark entirely with their VR investments.

The reality distortion that will really shake up everything we understand isn’t virtual at all. It’s probably very real. It’s probably how we get around, and Google and Apple may be a few steps ahead of Facebook on that front.

As future modes of transport will travel from point A to point B with efficiencies we can barely fathom at present, virtual reality may just become a temporary historical footnote in the story of transportation.

So, is there a communications technology versus transportation technology battle going on?

Technology revolutions often have little to do with technology. It’s the lawyers and lobbyists and political campaigning folks that will set the agenda. And they are simply fighting over who controls what gets distributed.

The Master Switch by Tim Wu

Tim Wu argues in his fascinating book, The Master Switch: the Rise and Fall of Information Empires, that successful ecosystems eventually become controlled by vertically integrated forces reinforced by government policy.

We can see it happening in plain view.

As of the date of publication, the 63 open positions in Facebook’s communications team, half are public policy roles, 7 of them are related to connectivity.

And Uber is recruiting policy experts from Google such as Niki Christoff, a former campaign staffer for John McCain.

Nobody can predict where this will all go, but it would be a good bet that by the time we get to some truly blended reality where time and space are just dials on some dashboard the people in power will be those who control distribution. Those who provide the experiences may be influential, but the technologies underpinning the way experiences are delivered will still be calling the shots.

Originally published at www.theguardian.com on May 24, 2016.

The Internet is becoming writer-friendly again

Image by Francesco Pozzi

I’ve started writing again. It’s something I’ve wanted to do more for a long time, but there was something about the distribution methods available that I found wrong or weak or something. It was hard to put my finger on it.

All I knew was that I enjoyed writing in a journal-like bloggy form. It was personal and rambling, a way of getting my thoughts down so I could see them and refine them. Putting your words out there for others to read is a great forcing function to polish your thinking regardless of one’s skill as a writer.

The best platform for the kind of writing I enjoyed doing in the past was my blog on my personal domain. Writing there was useful to me, but it became useless to others as social platforms took over.

Medium here has solved a lot of the problems that arose when the old way of publishing started to lose its luster. They’ve cracked the code to some of the reader engagement issues independent blogging had. And the size of its readership is palpable as a writer, making it less like shouting into a void.

Facebook is improving the way it handles longer form publishing, perhaps learning from some of the nice things that Google+ did.

I’m publishing via The Guardian as the first port of call at the moment. It’s hugely helpful having an editor to chuck ideas back at you before you publish. And with a clear editorial focus I have the constraints I need to produce something more useful than the work I was doing for my own benefit.

Of course, having a community of editors collectively working with you would be awesome. That’s something we’ll make possible with Publish.org (plug: signup for updates from the Publish.org team here).

As a former active blogger I do hope and can easily imagine a day when independent loosely connected writers form powerful communities and publishing networks. It won’t look the way it did, of course. But I think it would be a good thing to have federated publishing models where people have total control of what they publish, where they publish it, and how they make money, if any.

The Creative Commons licensing model is brilliant and can be used to create contracts between writers that make the business of working independently but also collectively totally possible and potentially very fruitful.

Meantime, I’m very pleased that there are more platforms recognizing that quality writing, photography and video matters to people. I hope I can contribute to that through an article here and there and via Publish.org in the future.

The tech elite ignores inequality at its peril

Image by by Bluerasberry

Google’s new self-driving prototype car will sit at the head of “the long tail” curve if it’s a hit while services such as Uber and AirBnB sweep up the other end.

Several years ago when media companies were still working out what the “long tail” meant to them, Clay Shirky shared a key nuance that made the whole picture clearer for me. He told me that the middle of a power law curve is the most dangerous place to be because you are irrelevant there. He was right.

Photo by O’Reilly Conferences

I was reminded of this while attending O’Reilly Media’s Next:Economy event in San Francisco, where people talked about artificial intelligence, platforms, networks and ecosystems creating and destroying labour markets.

In today’s world, artificial intelligence such as that seen in Google’s self-driving cars is at one end of that power law curve of services, ie the top of the curve, and marketplaces such as Uber and AirBnB are sweeping up the other end — the long tail of services.

If the lessons of the now-famous 2004 Wired article by Chris Anderson about the long tail prove relevant then companies serving the middle market are going to suffer. According to Shirky’s “middle power law problem” the stuff that happens in between artificial intelligence and niche human-powered labour will become irrelevant.

Image by Keith Hopper

Middle management will be replaced by the long tail of tasks performed by a vastly more efficient labour market.

A lot of the discussion at the event was focused on workers — their needs, rights and future prospects. Sebastian Thrun of Udacity even suggested that higher education degrees in social sciences were a waste of time because the new economy puts a premium on skills.

But there was a baked in assumption among many speakers that these big changes were already happening, and that it was just a matter of time before we were all deploying services or being deployed in service of something or somebody.

Interesting questions start to emerge, such as will we still need to own a car if one can appear in front of us ready to take us where we want to go at any given moment for a reasonable price?

Of course, people need to model the computing that sits at the top of the curve, and that will become a lucrative area of work. In fact, Facebook is hiring AI trainers now. Alex Lebrun said this was a huge area of growth. “We will need more and more trainers because the more you know the more you know you don’t know. There will always be new domains to learn about.”

Many speakers at the event acknowledged that the gap between the people at the top and those at the bottom was only increasing — this is an alarming trend.

Self-proclaimed “zillionaire” and early Amazon investor Nick Hanauer of Seattle-based Second Avenue Partners expressed great concern for the stability of society. He said: “You must match tech innovation with civic innovation. Uber is fantastic, but we have to find a way to accommodate that innovation in society.”

He used the fight to increase the minimum wage as an example of the types of battles that will lead to more dramatic social problems, perhaps revolutions. “Trickle down economics is a way to bully people into not exercising their rights,” he said. “The threat becomes: ‘If you force us to pay our workers fairly we will fire them.’”

In a letter to his fellow plutocrats in Politico, Hanauer wrote:

“The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th century France. Before the revolution.

And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last. If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us.”

I find it difficult to imagine inequality reversing from its current trajectory without something dramatic happening. Perhaps this is a place where the middle may play an important role over time, though fighting against irrelevance seems like a losing battle too.

I did notice an apologetic tone among many of the speakers at the event. There seemed to be an awareness that the change was both beyond anyone’s control and that it was heading straight for many innocent people who were unwittingly in its way.

If there is still time to assert some cultural values into the technological framework of this next wave of change then hopefully people will consider infusing their automated marketplaces with more humanity.

Photo by Joi Ito

In his 2003 essay, Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, Shirky wrote:

“Given the ubiquity of power law distributions, asking whether there is inequality in the weblog world (or indeed almost any social system) is the wrong question, since the answer will always be yes. The question to ask is, ‘Is the inequality fair?’”

If the entire world becomes a unified workforce on these new platforms then the people shaping these platforms should heed the warnings from the likes of Hanauer, or they will regret admitting that he was right when billions of pitchforks are aimed at them.

As Zeynep Ton described in one of the closing talks of the day, providing a decent living for your workforce or pursuing “human-centred operations strategies” creates stronger long-term profits. Her research may provide some answers that solve everyone’s needs and avert angry mob mentality that otherwise seems inevitable.

Join Publish.org, a new UK nonprofit supporting journalism in the world.

Originally published at www.theguardian.com on November 24, 2015.

The deceitful promise of freedom

There’s a very powerful essay by Hossein Derakhshan on Medium about the Internet wasteland. It’s particularly poignant coming from someone who spent several years in jail as a result of his activities online:

“I can’t close my eyes to what’s happening: A loss of intellectual power and diversity, and on the great potentials it could have for our troubled time. In the past, the web was powerful and serious enough to land me in jail. Today it feels like little more than entertainment.“

Anyone deeply engaged in the days of blogging will relate to these views.

That was an exciting time that seemed capable of capturing the utopia the Internet appeared to offer. If only it hit mainstream before the social networks got their claws in.

Of course, sometimes I wonder if our memories deceive us and that the people’s struggle to break free of control was never any more attainable during the blogging days than it is today.

Perhaps the fight is eternal, an innate anthropological prison humans find themselves trapped within, sometimes both emotionally and physically.

I’m not that fatalistic, really. There have been many battles won on our behalf before our time that have made our lives much better than our predecessors’. And there will be other great victories won by the people in the future.

Unfortunately, in the case of blogging, I agree with Hossein that freedom got outflanked before that revolution had legs to stand on. Annoyingly, we’re all complicit and every time we ‘like’ and ‘retweet’ we’re pumping more collective fuel into the centralized machines that defeated it.

Being a parent is a fantastic education. Watching my kids take toys apart to see how they work only to discover they can’t put them back together is a sharp reminder of how our brains work.

Computers, networks, phones, and social networks weren’t invented by people who wanted to control the world. They were invented by intensely curious and ambitious people who wanted to take apart ‘the system’.

They took great pride in their David vs Goliath stories, never more brazenly than the historic Apple Big Brother ad.

But after dismantling the status quo many of these folks have spent the rest of their careers putting the pieces of their foe back together again in their own image.

Instead of defending the freedom they espoused in obtaining their position of power they focused all their power on securing their future for themselves, constructing impenetrable walls against the threat of a younger and hungrier version of themselves attacking.

The promise of freedom from tyranny is a great marketing strategy for a startup. That message resonates deeply within our psyche because it is a universal sentiment.

But sometimes it’s a lie.

We need startups to invent better ways of doing things. We need people to lead the never-ending fight for our freedoms. We all need to be more honest about when those two things are in conflict.

Who is in charge of the global economy – us or them?

I’ve always looked up to independent-minded people who can strike a balance between operating within ‘the system’ and changing it through their work, particularly when that work is in the public interest.

Vivienne Westwood is such a person.

I met her recently to discuss working together, and she didn’t disappoint. She began the meeting describing a world view that concerns her, one that should concern all of us. And we considered ways to use people-supported journalism to improve public dialog about it.

The world view that concerns her is the way global power is getting rewired. She’s going to edit the next issue of Contributoria to focus on this.
Vivienne Westwood edition of Contributoria

It’s about international trade agreements and corporate law. It’s about the democratic process within and between countries. It’s about human rights and the environment. And it’s about those who we normally depend on to keep power in check but either can’t do it, won’t do it or fail to do it well.

It’s a big topic with lots of nuance that I don’t understand, yet, but it is easy to see the erosion of democracy when international trade deals result in agreements that disregard laws and policies won through hard-fought democratic processes.

Democratic principles can be interpreted in different ways, but at minimum people should have a voice in the decisions made on their behalf. And they need a role in choosing who is making those decisions.

Everyone, including profit-motivated groups, have a right to question the law. But democracy is pretty good at making sure we know what we’re gaining and losing if we decide to change the law.

Is democracy really at risk here?

I dunno. I find it hard to believe we would let it get to that.

But then again I had no idea that ISDS existed until very recently.

ISDS is an “instrument” of international law. It’s a method or standard for enforcing trade deals, enabling companies to sue governments for lost profits. It means public policy can’t conflict with what’s been decided in the deal. ISDS ensures that the law is subservient to the trade agreement.

In one of the pamphlets (pdf) championing ISDS in the UK they say proudly, “ISDS gives UK companies access to independent tribunals and to possible compensation when they are treated unfairly by [partner countries]. It also deters [partners] from acting unfairly in the first place.”

In other words, “Don’t worry about international laws. We’ve got your back. And if any government gives you trouble, we’ll help you to sue the pants off them. They won’t bother you again.”

It’s being used more like a weapon than an “instrument”.

To be fair, an international court may in fact fuel growth if companies have some assurances that they can fight back if they’ve been treated unfairly somewhere. But only big corporates with deep pockets are going to benefit, and they will likely only use that system against smaller countries with weaker legal systems who might threaten their business model, perhaps for good reason.

An excellent piece in The New Yorker explains how ISDS is designed to undermine sovereignty.

“I.S.D.S. was originally meant to protect investors against seizure of their assets by foreign governments. Now I.S.D.S. lawsuits go after things like cancelled licenses, unapproved permits, and unwelcome regulations.”

The context becomes clear when you look at what Philip Morris did when Australia passed plain packaging legislation on cigarettes there. Philip Morris sued Australia because they claimed the new plain packaging law affected their profits.

Even more bizarrely, they didn’t have the right trade deal in place to sue Australia directly. They essentially invested in operations in Australia in order to use a different trade deal in Hong Kong that then made it possible to sue Australia.

And somehow Philip Morris seemed to think they were the victims:

“The forced removal of [Philip Morris] brands and trademarks by the Australian Government is a clear violation of the terms of the bilateral investment treaty between Australia and Hong Kong, and we believe we have a very strong case for actual damages that may amount to billions of Australian dollars.”

Most democratic societies have a system of checks and balances to prevent corruption and too much power concentrated in one area. These international trade agreements are creating cross-border super-systems that are too opaque with fantastic opportunities for corruption and concentrated power.

We are unable to vote for or against what’s being decided on our behalf by unelected people in far away places. They are making their own rules about some pretty important stuff – the environment, labor laws, culture, etc.

The game needs to be exposed so we can deal with it. The good news is that it is becoming clearer to see with deals like the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership or TTIP (“tee-tip”) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP.

However we only know the details now because documents have been leaked, not because the information was made public.

Even our own elected leaders are unable to get involved in the details.

In a Politico report US officials behind TPP said that we can “expect the real horse-trading to begin now that Obama has signed “fast-track” legislation requiring Congress to pass or reject TPP without amendments.” 

Occupy-ers, if you were ever unsure of how you could bring your fighting spirit to something tangible, now is your moment.

The fight against TTIP and TPP is a symbolic move we can all make together to say, “Hang on, how is this decision getting made? Who is signing up to it and with what authority? Who is going to benefit and how? What happens if we don’t like it? Who will monitor it and tell us all if it’s working or not?”

The fight against international trade deals is a line in the sand between the new global powers and the people. Whoever wins is going to have a massive leg up in whatever comes next.

Have no illusions about what’s at stake – these kinds of trade deals are marginalizing democracy. You have a right to know what your country is deciding on your behalf. Given the scale of these deals I think we have a right to know what other countries are deciding on our behalf, too.

If it all feels too technical or inaccessible, then just start asking around…see if you can find anyone who understands it. Better yet, see if you can find someone who has read these agreements.

When you come up empty you may come to the same conclusion I did which is that whatever this is all about it’s not being done for the good of the public.

Let’s get a good look at these deals. Let’s run the proposed terms through ‘the system’. Of course ‘the system’ needs to change. It always will. It’s made by humans. And maybe there are provisions in the deals that we should consider.

But as it stands today TTIP and TPP and their legal weapons like ISDS look very much like people in positions of power using their advantages to lock down even more of it.

That’s not independent-thinking. That’s not improving ‘the system’. That’s not working in the interest of the public.

That’s worth challenging.

There are lots of ways to get involved. One thing you can do is help Vivienne Westwood and Contributoria to fuel the public debate. https://www.contributoria.com/proposals

At minimum, use this amazing thing called the Internet to educate yourself. This stuff matters.

Letter from the editors — July 2015

The theme of the July 2015 issue seemed to fall into a ‘Movement & Migration’ kind of area, and designer Dean Vipond thought the idea of magnetic fields over the Mediterranean conveyed this push-pull dynamic well. It also results in what appears to be fingerprints which resonate with some of the articles that are talking about movement and migration in terms of identity.

Of the many things to sort out when we started Contributoria last year there was one question in particular we weren’t sure about. Would we see challenging reporting, or would writers play it safe?

We knew we could create the environment for people supporting journalism to work as a concept, but it was always going to be up to the writers and the community to bring the difficult topics, the unheard stories, and the hard-hitting investigative reporting that changes people’s minds and exposes wrongdoing.

These more difficult articles have been gaining traction, but it wasn’t until the latest issue here that the community went all-in and tackled some of the world’s biggest problems. And they did so with intelligence and style.

They told stories about refugees and immigrants, slave labor, homelessness, human rights abuses and organised crime. They surfaced stories you wouldn’t normally read in mainstream media about fascinating animal research, political history, and inspiring activists.

The community’s ambitious spirit and passionate coverage of subjects mainstream media fails to surface is what interests the many partners we’ve started working with recently.

We’ll need all the intelligence, style, spirit and passion we can find to meet the challenge posed by our latest partner — Vivienne Westwood.

The British fashion icon, environmentalist and activist is going to guest edit the September issue.

Vivienne Westwood wants writers to cover the dangerous game being played on behalf of the people and our planet by politicians, bankers, corporations and, yes, mainstream media.

As Greenpeace UK director John Sauven wrote via Vivienne Westwood’s Climate Revolution, “We seem to have accepted a simplistic and beguiling mantra: more growth, more profits, more stuff. And, with it, the consequences: more climate change, more chaos, more extinction, more inequality…

Climate change is not about diplomacy or energy or capital or economics. Climate change, like many other important issues, is about power. A new energy system means new power relations.

The Contribuoria community’s job now is to expose this new power dynamic for everyone to see clearly. We’ve posted some topic suggestions to help guide writers’ proposals.

We couldn’t be more proud to work with Vivienne Westwood on the September 2015 issue. After seeing how hard writers are working to cover such difficult stories as they did in the current issue we now know that Contributoria’s flavour of journalism supported by people can take on the biggest and most challenging stories of our time.

Originally published at www.contributoria.com.

The future is privileged information

There is an increasingly obvious pattern explaining how the Internet works at scale, and it seems like it could shed light on how future Internet activity will unfold.

The Activity-vs-Complexity Wave
Here’s how it works:

A new media model on the Internet enables exciting new ways for people to share information and to communicate. As the volume of activity increases the experience becomes more complex. The complexity growth curve eventually forces a change - it starts increasing at a faster rate than the growth of the activity itself.

A breaking point occurs. Participating becomes something people have to do in order to be part of the network, not something they want to do.

As a result, a new type of activity appears in response, something that solves the complexity problem and enables exciting new ways of connecting.

The cycle begins again.

activity-vs-complexity.002The cycle appears to happen via two distinct but parallel waves – information sharing and new ways of communicating evolve across a 5-year wave, while new hardware, operating systems and dominant network protocols evolve on a slower 10-year wave.

Ultimately, there are three run away champions. One that dominates the space via advertising, one that dominates through transactions, and one that owns the key hardware and operating system that people use to participate. They all achieve this position by establishing business models that benefit from the current pattern, optimized to leverage the characteristics of the new activity.

Five years ago when I was looking at this stuff the pattern indicated that by this year, 2015, social activity was going to become overwhelming and a breakthrough would appear in response to it.

Hello private messaging!

WhatsApp, Snapchat etc are a direct response to the overwhelming amount of activity happening on the big social platforms. Private messaging solves today’s complexity problem.

If the pattern is going to answer questions about the future then it needs to answer some other things like, “Who benefits from a world where people value privilege over sharing? How do you make money if people value exclusivity? What kinds of financial resources are going to accelerate growth in a market shaped like this?”

Private ad exchanges, members-only programs, privileged access services, private transactions and cybercurrencies will all flourish in this environment. Inequality will become a commercial virtue.

However, a large-scale network that values privilege is going to create serious long term problems if we fail to at least acknowledge the implications of it.

Inequality breeds resentment and power struggles. The Internet’s amazing democratic capabilities will become even more politicized. Divergent agendas will wage legal, economic and cultural battles with increasing sophistication and with more at stake.

But perhaps we can keep an eye on what to expect further down the line in order to maintain perspective on these short term shifts.

What comes after the current wave? What happens in 2020?

If the pattern continues then the volume of this new activity will become overwhelming which will trigger a response. We’ll hit a ceiling when the amount of exclusive activity becomes unmanageable.

A great outcome would be a reinvestment in the open Internet, but, if history serves us, then the incumbents will be deeply established and too strong to overcome. A total rejection of the network is more likely than a return to its roots.

A less dramatic outcome would be about alternative protocols on alternative networks. Technologies enabling Internet-of-Things are obvious candidates for the new hardware wave. If that’s happening then it’s easy to imagine physical gestures becoming the dominant way we experience the network.

Who benefits? How will people make money? These are big question for another time.

Can we zoom out on this model? Is there a meta pattern in the pattern?

Maybe there’s a 20-year wave where complexity across all network activity increases to unbearable levels. If that is actually what happens then it’s reasonable to expect a transportation revolution.

When remote communication becomes overwhelmingly complex then we will want better ways to get places and to be with people. This might be forced on us all by external events such as climate change, so it seems likely to happen at some point, anyhow.

Maybe this pattern offers some clarity on what circumstances will get us there and when.

You can’t take any of this too seriously, obviously.

The pattern lacks rigor. There’s no data behind it. It doesn’t take into account external events that shape rates of change. And the time frame we’re looking at is too small to draw meaningful conclusions.

It’s merely a working hypothesis.

However, if Bill Gross is right about the importance of timing then maybe this pattern is worth applying to whatever you are working on.

If privilege is what matters then you need to have a position on it.

Are you building trust as a core activity of your work? Do you make your customers feel privileged? Does activity increase in value to your customers the more exclusive it becomes?

You don’t have to do those things as a pureplay like messaging apps or dating services or private trading networks to be relevant. But you can be sure that those issues will matter more and more over the next 3 to 5 years.

Equally, who is keeping privilege in check? Who becomes more powerful in a privileged world, and who is ensuring they are using that power fairly?

Who is going to worry about all this on behalf of the rest of us who get caught up in it?

The nuances of privacy in this new world are going to make it harder than ever to keep power in check and to challenge authority.

We’re going to need clever journalism now more than ever before.

What does it take to get on the wave?

If you’re reading blog posts like this about current trends then you’ve probably missed the leading edge of the current wave already. Rather than ride this one you may get thrown by it, and going against it may get really difficult. You might be forced to shift your agenda in ways that contradict your latest 5-year plan.

It’s certainly not too late to try to get on it.

Being open to partnering with people who are closer to the leading edge than you are can be a good way to navigate unfavorable conditions even if they challenge the very core of why you exist. An external mirror is very useful when facing existential crises.

Also, I don’t know if “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” works in a world built on coopetition. But it’s a good idea to know who Facebook worries about.

The good news is that you can be sure that there will be another chance to get your timing right.

When there’s too much privileged, private and exclusive activity the network will become too complex again. And everything will change because of it. That’s one thing we can all count on.

Get up early, paddle out to the waves you want to catch, and try a few to warm up. Stand up when the right one comes along and ride it for all it’s worth.

Sustainable journalism beyond the limits of our understanding

“When will micropayment technologies be good enough to buy articles?”

This was a question posed at a journalism event recently.

I was really surprised to hear it.

I wasn’t sure whether to list the many technologies and examples of places where it has been tried and failed over the last 15+ years at news orgs large and small or to respond to the business model implied by the question.

It’s easy to understand why people still believe sustainable journalism can be achieved through traditional commercial trade like this – reader gives publisher money, publisher gives reader articles. It sounds very sensible because it used to work just fine this way.

New thinking will eventually clear out the old thinking, but in many cases we also need to unlearn what we think we understand.

There’s a great example of this by SmarterEveryDay who demonstrated a brilliant experiment in cognitive dissonance. He unlearned how to ride a bike (h/t @albertwenger).

It turns out that the reason riding a bike feels easy once we’ve learned is because our brains ruthlessly protect our understanding of how to do it. We tend to lock down hard-earned knowledge and keep it that way, though children’s brains are very willing to adjust to changes in conditions.

Paywalls, micropayments, paid news apps, etc. are all industrial production-style business models translated for the Internet. They make sense given what we thought we knew, and, as a result, a lot of people are certain they will work.

Just like TV is much more than radio with pictures and how a web site is much more than a magazine on a computer, the business models enabling sustainable journalism can’t be translated from the technological predecessor.

A generation of entrepreneurs is going to wipe away those ideas and reinvent network-native business models for sustainable journalism that have a lot less friction and benefit many more constituents.

While some of those models are already proven and many more are still playing out I do think there is a bigger challenge for future visionaries to take on:

What models for sustainable journalism operate beyond the limits of the medium through which the journalism materializes?

It’s probably the wrong question, come to think of it. I’ve got my own biases that need to be recalibrated, too.

Regardless, a change in thinking is required in the hivemind that believes the answer is a digital version of past successes, and I suspect it’s going to be much harder than learning how to ride a backwards bike.

The Internet’s precarious state of openness

The state of the open Internet and the role of journalism in the world is more precarious than I understood just a few months ago. It’s easy to focus on your day-to-day agenda and forget to look up sometimes.

This view crystalized for me while attending UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day event in Latvia, a country with relatively fresh memories of living without free speech.

In addition to the concerns shared at journalism conferences there are troubling events happening in small closed countries [1] and big open ones [2] demonstrating very clearly that we are not protecting some things that should be looked after better.

Serious consequences are becoming apparent. Future generations will wonder what we were thinking.

The good news is that there are solutions and there’s still time.

Let’s be clear about what’s wrong, first:

1) Authority in all its forms has been flattened irrevocably except when it’s not

Now that we have the Internet in our pockets and can shout to the world whenever we want there is no power or unfair advantage that will go unchallenged…

Mapping Media Freedom in Europe…except when authoritative figures and institutions fight back unfairly and even violently to keep us from challenging them.

Some countries have no qualms about killing access to the Internet or parts of it to keep people quiet, something very difficult to imagine for people who have never been offline before.

2) The Internet doesn’t belong to us, and we don’t seem to mind.

Whether using choke points, back doors, or traffic sniffers, states and commercial orgs are listening to conversations. They can turn off, intercept and interject whenever, wherever they want. They watch people and listen to people even when we’re not using our phones.

There’s no such thing as a private conversation anymore, but we’re not doing much to un-invite them.

It’s as if we’ve entered the New Restoration and decided we don’t want to self-govern afterall.

3) Structural weaknesses are corroding the effects of independent journalism.

The business models enabling sustainable journalism aren’t dire, but meaningful funding without strings attached is trickier than ever. Policies that once protected free speech are being used to protect people from being offended. Some are being amended to increase control of the media. The tools of the trade leave journalists and their sources exposed. And the more modern structures of the journalism trade aren’t mature enough yet to replace the more traditional tactics that got us here.[3][4] The transition is happening, but it’s not a smooth one.

All these things create serious trust issues, the founding principle shaping our belief in journalism as a health check on democratic principles.

Of course, not everyone values the role of journalism and regulators in the world equally, some not at all. That’s fine. But those of us who do value the role it plays must fight harder for it as others turn away from it.

What can we do about these issues?

Frameworks and ecosystems are supportive structures and fuel for solutions, whereas rules and policing tend to incite conflict and battles. What does this picture look like through a constructive lens as opposed to a combative one?

1) Technology.

Pragmatically, none of the solutions will mean anything without a physical manifestation of independence. If we can’t say things in private then everything else is a non-starter. There actually is a silver bullet to the technical challenge in front of us – cryptography.

Encryption is the sticky glue holding the envelopes closed on all of our correspondence. It should be embraced wholeheartedly by anyone and everyone who cares about democratic principles in the world whether you have something to hide or not.

EFF offers surveillance self-defense tools and how-to’s. It’s a great place to start.

Equally, we should all be better about supporting and embracing open standards on the Internet.

Before Facebook and Twitter we had a distributed messaging standard owned by nobody that made possible a global content network for sharing stuff that people could choose to follow. Tons of interesting, useful and entertaining sources were publishing in real-time through it. It was called RSS.

The new “social” platforms came along and treated openness and sharing as a core activity rather than as a tiny button deep in the ‘About Us’ pages of the web site as publishers did with RSS. Now those platforms dominate content sharing on the Internet.

If you don’t want to learn about open standards (they can feel like nonsense sometimes, so nobody would blame you for being annoyed by them) then maybe consider them like a tax we all need to pay in order to maintain an open Internet.

2) Ownership.

Why isn’t the Internet a public good? This network we inhabit doesn’t have to be controlled by either nation states or corporations.

That ideal may be aiming too high, for now, but there are things we can do to level the playing field.

Primarily, we can be much more distributed in the way we publish – the things we say, where we say them and the commercial activity around those conversations. There is plenty of room for a lot of people to make a lot of money producing important information and art at a global scale without having to own all the inputs and outputs for it.

Things like crowdfunding, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, open licenses, net neutrality and media pluralism policies can all be very effective means of distributing control of the Internet and journalism in the world.

3) Culture.

Now that “hate speech” and “free speech” are being used as weapons of war we need to re-think what we wanted those terms to do for us in the first place. They are losing their meaning, and people are getting hurt.

We don’t like everything we can see and hear now that we’re all connected, but even so, the Internet should not be used as a weapon.

More urgently, people are being punished for speaking out.

Bloggers and journalists are being jailed and killed, and the perpetrators carry on with impunity. This is the greatest weapon authority has in its arsenal today, and in many places it is becoming very effective in applying it.

Impunity breeds very dangerous conditions that easily snowball into fear. Exposing it relentlessly, as Joshua Oppenheimer did with ‘The Act of Killing‘, is the first step. For that, we need professional journalists who can operate safely.

Some of the solutions above are more mature than others. But we mustn’t lose sight of the opportunity and what we’re trying to achieve.

The enemy here is not the government or capitalism or God. It’s not social media, either.

There is no enemy.

In our ongoing pursuit of independence as individuals, communities and countries we tend to seek power through tools – tools that are physical, religious, economic, political or a combination.

The trade off where we authorize power to act on our behalf in exchange for reaching beyond our individual capabilities creates room for our darker nature as humans to exert itself.

A little too much of that has crept into the Internet.

While I prefer to avoid seeing the world as a series of boxes and battle lines, there are many who are playing a zero-sum game on the Internet and doing a lot of damage in the process.

We’ve created this situation. And we can fix it.

I choose to believe that Bruce Schneier is right when he says,

“We have reached “peak indifference to surveillance.” From now on, this issue is going to matter more and more, and policymakers around the world need to start paying attention.”

But let’s not kid ourselves. It won’t fix itself. History is proving the opposite to be true – things will get worse if we fail to actively support policies of openness.

Google’s deal with publishers is good for journalism

Google announced a new partnership with several publishers today. The company will create a €150M fund to support innovation in journalism and product development in Europe. It’s called The Digital News Initiative.

The company launched a $5M fund with similar goals in 2010 through a partnership with the Knight Foundation in the US and later with the International Press Institute in Europe.

I’m a huge fan of this idea. Contributoria (an open journalism network) and Swarmize (a data journalism platform) wouldn’t exist today without it.

It’s certainly easy to be cynical about a company like Google funding new development with partners in a market that they often battle…

https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/592962089750167552

And it could easily feel like a diversion from what really matters…

But I think it’s great news all the same.

This kind of opportunity helps organizations not only to think differently, it helps them to actually act on those ideas.

Innovation around the edges of your business is critical, and many publishers are learning from places like the Guardian and NYT how to do that more effectively. But unless you have a way of taking on much larger systemic issues, reinventing your own core activities and supporting failures which will happen now and again as part of the process you may find yourself changing only incrementally and watching the world go by without you.

You will ultimately be managing decline instead of focusing on producing great journalism.

This is not good for publishers large and small. It’s not good for publishing as a market. It’s not good for wider society.

And, as Google and even Facebook are aware, a healthy publishing market is good for business on the Internet.

I’m always a fan of finding ways to create opportunity in the face of adversity. Given the challenges journalism is up against in the world investing in new ideas is going to do a lot more for the trade than costly and destructive legal battles.