8 Mighty Challenges for 2018
I started drafting this post during Chanukah 2014. Long ago, in a land far away, a rugged band of combatants fought Greek occupiers for their religious freedom, cultural identity, and civil liberties. A few seasons later, here are my eight picks for today’s struggles, worthy of the Maccabees, but for tomorrow’s children.
1. The Great Internet Access Buildout
Let’s get the next billion Internet users online quickly. Let’s assure everyone has access from childhood. How do we make that access meaningful in 2020 when 4K videos will be common and you can’t participate in work, school, or democracy without fast devices and faster, connectivity? #buildout
2. Fair Internet Plumbing
Phone companies, cable companies, and other telcos are ruining our Internet. They use their exquisite oligopoly powers to extort money from smaller companies. They block companies that might interfere with their profits. They pay fortunes to masterful D.C. lobbyists. They buy anti-competitive laws from state legislatures. They don’t invest in infrastructure anywhere near their financial capacity.
And it’s working. For them.
What will you do in 2018 to restore some power from the Internet carriers to the people, their governments, and everyone that uses the Internet? What will you do every year for the next decade to rebalance the power? #savetheinternet
3. Network Power Concentration
The one with the most active users wins.
Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, Tencent, Weibo, and a few others have hundreds of millions of active users. Some more than a billion. They’re winning a war for hearts and minds, and for control of user identity, data, and behavior.
These winners create barriers to entry for new entrants. They control speech within their networks. They punish smaller ecosystem players who displease them. They compete with governments for influence over public policy.
They also become indispensable. We depend on one company for navigating the web. We depend on four companies for nearly all mobile operating systems. Just a dozen companies connect three billion Internet users with messaging. A handful of companies for payments. One company for commerce and distribution.
The U.S. started its conversation about banks and other financial institutions being “too big to fail” without nationwide economic disruption. Let’s check if Big Internet needs similar measures to prevent the rise of corruptible power and catastrophic collapses. #toobigtofail
4. Transparent Political Money
It’s one thing for the top 0.1 percent to own so much of the world. It’s another for them to buy America’s political process. U.S. democracy depends on the idea of one-person-one-vote and money has damaged that.
I’d love to get money completely out of politics. And I want a Lamborghini for Chanukah. Meanwhile, I’ll settle for more transparency and better disclosure of political money contributions and spending.
I looked at money flowing into the 2014 Oakland, California, mayor’s race as part of an OpenOakland transparency project. A city with fewer than half a million residents and half as many voters spent more than two million dollars on advertising, field offices, staff, printing, mailing, billboards, and robocalls, and phone banks. The U.S. spends billions during presidential election years.
I did my bit with OpenCalifornia to build local campaign finance portals. What will you do to unveil electoral manipulation through money? #transparency
5. Employee Privacy
Your employer owns your digital life (digital self?) in the United States and many other countries. They may see anything you do with your phone, your computer, your fitbit, and all the data that passes through their network. With an employment agreement, the law strips away your personal privacy.
Would you like to have personal control over who sees what you do, even at work? As we strike up new compacts between gig economy workers, their organizations, and those who employ them, let’s again rebalance some power.
Can we use the shift to the gig economy to claw back control and #privacyatwork?
6. Surveillance of Public Spaces
A million English street cameras redefine what it means to walk or drive in public. The cams are owned, for the most part, by governments. Private networks of street and store cams are becoming a rival surveillance network. Nearly as available to police as government surveillance systems, these private networks will have more cameras pointing at public streets and in private buildings. Companies who mine social networks for fresh, local data are already selling their services to police.
Your governments’ use of open and passive surveillance makes your being in public the same as wearing an ankle monitor with paparazzi indexing your every move.
How do we keep a sidewalk stroll as free from surveillance as possible? #PrivacyInPublic
7. Robot Rights
Flying, swimming, crawling, walking, buried, and driving robots are becoming affordable personal goods. These robots have sensors that let them observe the world and controllers that let them change it.
For now, they are extensions of the people who buy them. When a remote control quadcopter takes pictures at your wedding, the owner is responsible.
This won’t always be the case.
The sharing economy will separate the owner and the operator. You’ll rent 20 minutes of UAV time from around the world. Jurisdiction, anyone?
Your robot will go where you won’t, can’t, don’t, haven’t. Does your robot have an obligation to clearly identify itself? To identify its users? To show where its data is going? On demand? To anyone?
Some people kill robots that invade their privacy, threaten their income, risk their safety, or offend their cultural norms. When is it alright to murder a drone? When it hovers over your private property? Comes within arm’s reach? Touches you? What if it’s a medical drone, delivering emergency medicine and the person it would have saved dies? How culpable are you for that human’s death?
Some of your robots will live inside your personal space. Think watch, fitbit, eyeware on your skin; pacemaker, insulin pump under your skin; smart orthotics, prosthetic limbs instead of body parts. What rights does someone who is with or near you have to data on those devices? Does your employer have rights? Your jailer? Your carpoolers? Your family?
Sensor packs will outlive the companies that make and own them, orphaned and continuing to operate in the world without legal standing or duty. Some weather stations will live decades past their official life.
Two generations from now, your flying robot will be smarter than all the computers on earth today combined. We need a roadmap to a civil society awash with smart, mobile, talkative things. #robotrights
8. Collective Power and Rights
We’re more powerful, more capable together. Let’s get better at that in 2018.
Let’s get better at local activism, to solve local problems. ☝️
Let’s get better at forming studios and guilds of free agents at work in the gig economy. As the future of work washes over us, let’s seek new ways to meet human needs together. What post-union structures and social behaviors will help us protect ourselves from workplace abuse? ✌
Let’s get better at rapid assembly, at organizing articulated flash mobs to respond to crises and opportunities. ✋
Little “d” democracy gives everyone a bit of political power and encourages engrouping to amplify that power in common cause. Political parties and campaigns are one way we do that. Labor unions are another. ✊ #collectivepower
We’re facing colossal disruptions over the next decades. Mass migrations from climate change, jobs displaced by technologies faster than we can replace them, interruptions to the food and water supply leading to famine and war, the end of Game of Thrones. My 8 Mighty Challenges for 2018 are fine places to start.
- #buildout the internet for the next billion people.
- #savetheinternet and make it fair.
- #toobigtofail for internet companies so power doesn’t concentrate.
- #transparency in political influence.
- #privacyatwork.
- #PrivacyInPublic so a walk in the park is surveillance free.
- #robotrights are the new pets’ rights.
- #collectivepower so we can tackle these challenges together.
Have a great 2018.
