Categories
Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity

Facebook as the only means of discovery for small businesses

A couple of weeks ago we explored a counterpoint to the narrative that Facebook is being disingenuous by protesting Apple’s increased privacy controls in iOS 14. In summary, that the internet has evolved to a point where Facebook ads are an important, affordable means of discovery for small businesses.

A few days ago one of the co-founders of the Morning Brew newsletter reiterated that:

Morning Brew is one of my favourite newsletters and one of most popular ones, with over two and a half million subscribers and having recently been sold to Business Insider for dozens of millions of dollars. If they owe their scale to Facebook ads, then they are the poster child for the success of this ad platform.

Now. This site’s spoken often of wresting back control from Facebook’s pervasive, opaque tracking; I also think Apple’s right in its endeavour to protect people from such tracking by default.

My position on this has little to do with Facebook’s pirported hypocrisy or culpability. I think it’s a collective failure that there are no scalable alternatives for discovery on the Internet other than Google and Facebook (and Instagram and maybe soon Whatsapp), both roughly twenty-year-old companies.

Categories
Privacy and Anonymity Wellness when Always-On

Privacy and agency

From the abstract of a paper from eight years ago:

Privacy shelters dynamic, emergent subjectivity from the efforts of commercial and government actors to render individuals and communities fixed, transparent, and predictable. It protects the situated practices of boundary management through which self-definition and the capacity for self-reflection develop… [a] society that values innovation ignores privacy at its peril, for privacy also shelters the processes of play and experimentation from which innovation emerges.

– What Privacy Is For, Harvard Law Review

The need for agency over one’s privacy is something we examine on a regular basis on this site. What about privacy from the state? This is less clear. For instance, avoiding being surveilled by pervasive security cameras in a city is a lot more difficult than being surveilled on the Internet. Covering one’s movements in the real world from a state that has access to your phone’s cell tower connections is less practical than covering one’s movements on the Internet from one’s ISP.

One of the books I read this year was Why Nations Fail. The authors describe how governments across the world and across time evolve either inclusive or extractive political – and economic – institutions, and that these are what determine whether a nation’s development is sustainable. States have a predilection to extractive institutions because the process of making them inclusive leads to what the authors call creative destruction – certainly not an original term – in which established powers lose influence at the expense of others. Surveillance, especially in this age of digital information flows, is uniquely extractive and uniquely consolidates powers in the hands of the entities doing the surveilling. Hence the extreme reaction to, say, the revelations by Snowden.

I bring this up to make the point that it is unrealistic in the short to intermediate term to expect any voluntary curtailment of surveillance by governments – neither the country nor the form of government matters. Governments inexorably find themselves controlling the “processes of play and experimentation from which innovation emerges” that the paper abstract refers to, and thereby controlling privacy. Similarly, they are incentivized not to roll back data collection by internet companies, but to regulate them in a way that gives the government access to collected data, usually ostensibly justified under national security or its synonyms.

I have no position personally on how much privacy is “good” – the implied absoluteness betrays its naivete. I do hold strongly that you should know and have control over how much privacy you give up. This knowledge is important because of what the paper says; the only safe way to explore boundaries internal and external to you is privately. This knowledge is necessary because privacy typically slips away slowly and, as we have reasoned above, is hard to win back.

Categories
Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation The Dark Forest of the Internet

Gatekeeping and status-preening

The sociologist and writer Zeynep Tufekci on the reaction that one of her conjectures about the covid vaccine rollout received:

The third category of reaction, the most interesting from a public sphere point of view, was a version of “how dare I write about this”—given, obviously, that I am not an immunologist or a vaccine expert.

– Maybe Freedom is Having No Followers to Lose

She surmises about how the innate need for in-group and out-group identification is magnified first by social media and then further in uncertain times like this pandemic. But to me the most interesting part is at the end, which is also what the title of her post, is about when, on applying for an academic job, she heard back only either from the very top institutions or the bottom. Of the latter, she says

… the episode also gave me an appreciation for the ones with nothing to lose… They were in many ways the outsiders, but they didn’t have as many chips on their shoulders because they weren’t playing the game in the first place. They weren’t weighed down with the status-climbing because they didn’t have a chance. They were free. In many ways, the open nature of status-climbing efforts on social media has taken away some of that freedom and reconfigured it, and how to recognize its distorting effects is worth thinking about.

Categories
Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Life Design Making Money Online

Unlived lives and wormholes

This four thousand-plus word article in the New Yorker – about considering the alternate lives we could have lived if we’d made different choices – is a good longread as this year comes to a close.

This bit interested me:

The nature of work deepens the problem. “Unlike the agricultural and industrial societies that preceded it,” Miller writes, our “professional society” is “made up of specialized careers, ladders of achievement.” You make your choice, forgoing others: year by year, you “clamber up into your future,” thinking back on the ladders unclimbed.

This is by and large true. I had held for a while that I’d have a career in computer architecture and operating systems, either designing chips or OSes that ran on them. Instead I’ve ended up working with early stage startups across a bunch of fields including in finance. And while I’ve stayed in tech, it’s no longer practical to switch to my earlier, specialised tech career.

At the same time, the growth of no-code tools that bring fixed costs down, the proliferation of distribution channels to build your own audience, and several alternate means of financing (one, two) means that know-how and technical skills as barriers to entry are falling every day.

Five years ago the quote from the article would mostly hold; your career would be a journey down an eternally narrowing funnel. But today there are an increasing number of wormholes out of that funnel. Curiosity and passion are now at least as valuable as tech kn0w-how and access to capital.

Categories
Real-World Crypto

Crypto bank and crypto activity in India

Interesting:

Unicas will be providing banking services for both fiat and crypto assets. Services include savings accounts, crypto exchange, crypto loan and debit cards to spend crypto. Users may receive an instant loan digitally by depositing crypto assets in the Unicas wallet and requesting the equivalent value of INR on their card or bank account.

– UNICAS Crypto Bank Opens in India

Also interesting is that the bank is a joint venture between Cashaa of London and the United Multistate Credit Cooperative Society – certainly not a major Indian bank. This Mint article makes this important point:

Multistate Credit Cooperative Societies are regulated by the Central Registrar of Cooperative Societies rather than the RBI. No specific permission from the registrar is required for this

– Crypto platform makes banking entry in India with co-op credit society tie-up

It was the RBI that had forbidden banks in 2018 from providing any services to cryptocurrency exchanges, sending the crypto industry in India into suspended animation for two years before a Supreme Court judgement in March 2020 overturned it.

Also on Medianama:

… since neither the RBI nor the government has introduced new guidelines or restrictions on crypto investing, Indian banks have begun providing various services to domestic exchanges such as payment gateways, working capital loans and other facilities.

– Indian Crypto Currency Trading Volumes Grow 500% Since March

Categories
Uncategorized

Like a river returning to its source

“There is another lineage of sorts, and in a sense we all belong to it. We are connected to this lineage, whether we like it or not. I discovered it in the back room of a bookstore one summer afternoon. I had nothing to do that day, so I walked over to a used bookstore. Once inside, I went over to the religious, spiritual, and psychological section. There were stacks and stacks of books that had just arrived. Hundreds and hundreds of books, all on the subjects that I loved. I was a kid in a candy store.

As I piled up the books I wanted to buy, I noticed that the same name was written in black marker along the binding of each book. RON COHEN the writing said in BIG letters. I paused for a second and looked at the wall of books. It was a mountain! And all of them had the same name on them: Ron Cohen.

When I brought the books over to the counter, I asked the guy who Ron Cohen was. “Oh, him,” he said, “he’s dead. He was a religious “Studies teacher at Illinois State. He taught for forty years, and his family brought them in after he died.”

The rest of the day I thought about that. Here was a man who read all those books. Having lived a long life, he “brought all that knowledge into an understanding, and he must have conveyed that unique understanding in his teachings. Having come together in him, this understanding has now dispersed, like a river returning to its source, without a trace or track. All that was left was a pile of books—that I now own. And one day, someone else will own them.”

– Tying Rocks To Clouds : Meetings and conversations with wise and spiritual people, William Elliott, 1995

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Nick West/Unsplash)

Categories
Uncategorized

The not-often-talked-about risk of climate change to the financial system

This interview with a lecturer in finance at Harvard business school talks about the impact of climate change on the financial system, a linkage not often made – so far, at least. Specifically, the lecturer posits that insurers don’t yet accurately price the risk of extreme weather events due to climate change. Therefore, many properties are being built today in the USA in high-climate-risk zones that are under-insured for these climate events. That low insurance encourages property buying, causing property prices in these high risk areas to rise. People paying more for houses in such areas are at risk of financial ruin should they lose those houses without adequate insurance coverage.

What’s also notable is the parallels the lecturer draws to the financial instruments that causes the 2008 financial crisis, which was also linked to housing in the USA:

Homeowners buy their property/casualty and fire/flood insurance policies through brand-name companies, such as Allstate or Progressive. But these companies often don’t retain all of the exposure to pay for loss events. In particular, they don’t mind being exposed if say one house burns down – the other premiums collected cover that cost.

But if an entire county or part of a state gets hit hard by a hurricane, they can’t cover losses to all of those homes on their own. They often contract, in bulk, with another tier of insurers called reinsurance companies. These firms include giant but lesser-known companies like Swiss Re, Munich Re, and General Re. Those international firms attempt to spread their exposure across the globe and across many categories of peril like tornado, hurricane, earthquake, wind, and flood.

In addition to diversifying the risks, the reinsurers also can slice off some of the risk into insurance-linked securities — including weather derivatives sometimes known as “catastrophe bonds.” The probability of an event happening and the likely cost of the event are rated by several specialty companies then bought and sold by financial investors — who have zero knowledge of or interest in your particular home or city — who can be paid to accept financial exposure of a defined nature for a fixed period of time in the event that one of the named events occurs.

This means we have a situation where whoever is buying or selling the risk is multiple steps away from the actual property.

Categories
Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation The Dark Forest of the Internet

Independent publishers as the new distributors of controversial content

Major streaming video services have declined to bid on a new documentary about the Saudi Arabian government’s alleged killing of a dissident. Netflix, in particular, was eager to bid on and list Icarus, the director’s previous documentary about the Russian government’s pervasive athlete doping programme but, according to the New York Times, did not even reply to the director about this documentary.

The same market forces that make streaming services great US stocks to own – Netflix, Amazon, Disney among them – also make them less inclined to pursue anything outside of a certain risk-free definition of entertainment, since a broader market inevitably brings broader constraints on what is acceptable.

I see an important role for independent publishers with a direct relationship with their audience in distributing new material like this documentary, especially those that collect payments directly from their readers/subscribers as opposed to via sponsors.

Categories
Products and Design The Next Computer

An alternative future where we could Ship-of-Theseus our laptops

Today at someone’s place I came across a laptop that represented an alternative future: one where manufacturers didn’t relentlessly choose size and weight over extendability. Where a portable machine – just like an assembled desktop – could be upgraded over time instead of having to buy an entirely new one.

This is the Dell Inspiron 14R N4110 from 2011, which runs Windows 7 just fine.

In return for having to lug around over two kilos, you get a DVD read/write drive, three USB ports, two of them USB 3.0, an ethernet port, a VGA port, an HDMI port, an SD card slot, an eSATA port, and audio in and out – and a Kensington lock slot.

Plus, you get a removable battery, a user-accessible slot to pop RAM modules in and out to expand RAM (although only up to 8GB), the ability to replace not just the hard drive with an SSD, not just the display with a higher-resolution one, but also the processor itself!

In fact, Dell itself published a detailed manual [PDF] for laptop owners to access – in addition to the RAM, display, processor and battery – the optical drive, the keyboard, the wireless card, the bluetooth card, the motherboard, the speakers, camera, I/O board, AC adapter and even the coin-cell battery that the boards use to keep internal time. With all this, you could not just use the laptop for well over a decade, but keep it current over that time, simply by upgrading the components that became bottlenecks, or that wore out.

Granted, our laptops would be a lot thicker than the iPad Pro:

In this alternate future, Dell and its ilk would be component manufacturers more than laptop manufacturers – and it’d be a lot more exciting because we’d see a large variety in such components.

I imagine that in this future’s 2020, people forced to work from home who suddenly wanted a better webcam could buy an high-resolution one from Dell and plug it into their laptop’s display. Maybe there’d be a choice of lenses. Instead, our only choices are to either buy an external webcam, becoming one more accessory and cable to carry, or buy a whole new laptop. In that universe, as things improved in the coming years and people began working from a variety of remote places instead of returning to offices, they’d buy larger batteries from Dell – all for the same laptop.

Today we have laptops that are ever-lighter, with some improvement in battery life than in 2011, when the Dell in question was first manufactured. But we have lost nearly all repairability and upgradability. With minimal ports, we have lost a lot of extensibility, unless we buy even more adapters and dongles and cables. We’re turning our computers into appliances and, like appliances, replacing them instead of repairing them – because we can’t.

Categories
Decentralisation and Neutrality Making Money Online The Dark Forest of the Internet

A potential new pillar of an independent internet

The messaging service Telegram intends to make money next year onwards, after being funded by its founder’s fortune. The announcement also makes its principles clear(in bold below):

All the features that are currently free will stay free.
We will add some new features for business teams or power users. Some of these features will require more resources and will be paid for by these premium users. Regular users will be able to keep enjoying Telegram – for free, forever.
All parts of Telegram devoted to messaging will remain ad-free. We think that displaying ads in private 1-to-1 chats or group chats is a bad idea. Communication between people should be free of advertising of any sort.
We will fix [monetisation with intrusive ads in the absence of alternatives] by introducing our own Ad Platform for public one-to-many channels – one that is user-friendly, respects privacy and allows us to cover the costs of servers and traffic.

The goal of monetisation seems to be to cover running costs as Telegram approaches half a billion users, not to create another Big Tech company. The post mentions sustainability and independence as explicit goals:

Telegram is here to stay for a long time… [monetisation] will allow us to keep innovating and keep growing for decades to come… we will remain independent and stay true to our values, redefining how a tech company should operate

The best-case outcome for Telegram is becoming a pillar of the independent internet like Mozilla, Wikipedia, the Tor project, Automattic, GNU, among others.

Making money from your customers, your users is how you avoid being dependent on the largesse of one person or entity. Mozilla has not yet managed to crack it; I hope Telegram does.