The Internet? It’s complicated!
In 1986 the local telco optically wired the city of Calgary, W Canada, for free, betting it would recoup its investment in business network traffic on its leased lines, which it did handsomely. Those were the days the Alberta government launched a number of data repositories like the Land Related Info System, and by the late eighties — that’s 30 years ago — all drivers licenses etc. were done electronically on said network, but from government offices.
Why? Because the internet didn’t exist as yet! Tim Berners Lee would have barely arrived at CERN and proposed the kernel of the World Wide Web. That didn’t stop us from from linking up on what was already called hypertext on pre-internet (left).
That put my then-hometown behind is a way, because when the internet did arrive, we went “meh! we’re all wired up already”. Note that the internet was slow coming: Netscape and Altavista ruled the web and search worlds for almost a decade until Google came along… and another decade went until Google Maps! These are lifetimes in IT-speak, but our penchant for instant gratification helps us forget: T h i s . D i d . S t a r t . S l o w l y . . .
Fast forward almost 30 years, and internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee “is not amused”. He said in the Guardian mid-last November:
“The system is failing. The way ad revenue works with clickbait is not fulfilling the goal of helping humanity promote truth and democracy. So I am concerned,” said Berners-Lee, who in March called for the regulation of online political advertising to prevent it from being used in “unethical ways”.
Since then, it has been revealed that Russian operatives bought micro-targeted political ads aimed at US voters on Facebook, Google and Twitter. Data analytics firms such as Cambridge Analytica, which builds personality profiles of millions of individuals so they can be manipulated through “behavioural micro-targeting”, have also been criticised for “weaponised AI propaganda”.
“We have these dark ads that target and manipulate me and then vanish because I can’t bookmark them. This is not democracy — this is putting who gets selected into the hands of the most manipulative companies out there,” said Berners-Lee.”
So you thought Cambridge Analytica was news? Think again: That was written three months ago — three months ago — that’s ages in news-speak!
So yes, the proverbial ‘sh*t did hit the fan’, when Wylie the architect behind CA hacking Facebook recently came out… and it makes for uneasy listening:
But even here, all is not what it seems. In the Liberal Democrat Voice “Martin Horwood writes…The real issue about Trump, Facebook’s ‘data breach’, why The Observer [that got the scoop] missed the point and Liberals should care”:
“The real risk in all this is in the use to which this kind of big data can now be put. Mass harvesting followed by sophisticated modelling can now put very particular and individual information to use in support of data user’s objectives. It’s not new in principle. […]
But it’s why the Lib Dem international policy working group I’ve been chairing is proposing we put both both human rights and technology at the forefront of future foreign policy.”
[Disclosure: I help run the back-office in London for Mouvement Democrate, the French counterparts of UK Liberal Democrats and Spanish Ciudadanos.]
And then there’s blockchain… AGI Geocom16 eighteen months ago gave an unexpected introduction to that matter via Dr Catherine Mulligan, who stated the following from my twitter report:
The internet is the exchange of information, and block-chain is the exchange of value.
She heralded that National Agency of Public Registry in the Republic of Georgia “can provide its citizens with a digital certificate of their assets, supported with cryptographical proof published to the Bitcoin Blockchain.”
This countered after a fashion, the general sour tenor bitcoin took, when it was initially linked to the Silk Road underground network that turned rogue.
Here is, regardless, its best intro by @BBCclick Spencer Kelly & Nick Kwek:
Let’s close with an example that really shows how the internet, with all its promise of openness and freedom, also has unexpected results: Mapping twitter reactions during an episode of Israel-Gaza conflict, the internet reinforced each group’s biases, rather than help build bridges among them.
Unintended consequences was covered in a previous Medium post on geodata and privacy: let me reiterate AGI chair Abi Page’s exhortation in geo space in particular, which applies here as well in the internet space in general:
Today, we have heard how the availability, consistency, and quality of geographic information is key. However, improvements to that data and the way it is used cannot come about easily without the influence and advocacy of people. We must come together and act now to influence that change…
