the road beyond covid

By | December 17, 2020
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Boundary stone, Eyam. Such stones marked the edge of the village. During the 1665 bubonic plague, coins were left in vinegar in exchange for food and goods from outside the village, which had instituted its own cordon sanitaire to contain the plague

I’ve tried to avoid predictions this year for obvious reasons, but I think we’re seeing signs of impending dawn on the new era. I won’t call it Post-Covid, because that’s supposing too much, but definitely there are the signs of a new infrastructure being built that will allow us to return to something like our previous existence. But I think there are still parts of it that we haven’t thought through.

For our society to function we need people to be able to move around relatively freely. It doesn’t matter if it’s a businessman flying off to check out a subcontractor, food being trucked from Porto-Novo to Niamey, or me meeting one of my clients in the CBD. The modern world doesn’t function without movement. Covid has made that hard because it highlights the contradiction between our lifestyle and our biology, which appears to be geared to small, self-contained groups — villages, or tribes, if you will — which may move around but do not come into contact with other groups. The first recorded pestilence, for example, is believed to have been when the Philistines usurped the Arc of the Covenant and moved it from place to place in about 1190 BC. Disease broke out in each place — probably bacillary dysentery. Blaming the Arc, the Philistines returned it to the Israelites, possibly preventing the latters’ extinction. But as Jonathan Cossar writes: “It is an early example of the spread of infection from the interaction of ancient peoples in their pursuit of territorial expansion… Thus history can be regarded as an account of man’s traveling exploits and the ensuing consequences.”1 Where people remained relatively isolated, and did not travel, scourges sometimes spared them: The Black Death, for example, sometimes skipped sparsely populated rural areas entirely, while cities and towns might lose as much as 50-60% of their populations.2

While early plagues tended to follow armies, later ones followed explorers and colonizers — Columbus bringing smallpox to the Americas, yellow fever imported by (immune) African slaves decimating the Spanish colonists, British soldiers visiting cholera on East Asia, the Middle East and Russia. And thereafter it has been largely trade, with international travel merely accelerating the vector. As Cossar, writing in 1994, predicted: “The potential for the emergence of a ‘new’ antigenic subtype of type A influenza remains, and with China but a jet flight away via the staging stop of Hong Kong, a fresh epidemic strain can be imported to New York in 16 hours or to London in 14 hours. Thus the forgotten history of 70 years ago may come to life at any time, thanks to ‘jet age’ travel.” When he wrote that there were 435 million international tourist visits a year, according to the World Tourism Organisation. By 2018 that number had more than tripled.

So the vision of an emergence from Covid-19 is one within an international system where we are able to demonstrate we have taken a vaccine recognised by both departure and arrival authorities. Where we can show that we’ve been tested by an approved lab several days before departure, and probably shortly before boarding. Once again, the labs will need to have been recognised by both sets of authorities. That this won’t have a seriously chilling effect on travel seems hard to argue. I was never a huge fan of airports, but this will make the process increasingly burdensome. Yes, you might be able to flash an app at an official to demonstrate you’re good to go, but the chances of everyone on a flight being able to do that quickly and to the satisfaction of officials seems unlikely. For one thing, the procedure of confirmation is highly unlikely to be the same in each location. Even in the long term we’ve not adjusted well to the security theatre performance, not least because the requirements and procedures differ widely from place to place. I still shiver from the ticking off I got from a Heathrow security person for failing to do something or other that I’d never had to do elsewhere.

This is where initiatives like CommonPass, by The Commons Project, kick in. The project, which is already running in several travel corridors and will announce more later today (Thursday), gives travellers a “secure and verifiable way to document their health status as they travel and cross borders.” It takes the form of an app that includes unique IDs and a ‘trusted’ record of a valid PCR test or vaccination. Thomas Crampton, an old friend who heads marketing for the NGO, describes it as a “common trust network across international borders,” a digital way of sharing medical information safely, via a platform that anyone can plug into and build their own services on top of. He pointed to the hundreds of thousands of sea farers who have been stranded on their ships for months, unable to return home. (Thomas says they’re about to announce something specifically for these crews.)

This is good, make no mistake. There needs to be a trusted third party building this out, and with the heft to win over governments, airlines, medical institutions and labs. And there’s no talk of blockchain, which is probably a good thing.

But my gaze is on the longer term. What happens after what happens next?

The rise of a ‘health passport’ will have impacts on society that may outlive the pandemic. Thomas talked of there one day being no need for such medical documentation, but I’m not sure. At least, I’m not sure we’ll see them not required anywhere, meaning that we’ll probably need them (indeed the Yellow Card, nearly 100 years old, is still required in some places.) Just as we still have to play security theatre at airports, so we’ll still be required to show that we’re COVID-free, long after it has ceased to be a feature of our lives.

Yellow Fever Vaccination Certificate issued by the Government of Tanzania, photo from Wikipedia under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

More broadly, we may have to consider more deeply travel itself. Do we need to travel as much as we do (or rather, did)? For one thing, it’s likely to be a lot more expensive, and for there to be fewer options. So the ‘necessity’ of travel may be something that managers, and civil servants will scrutinise closely. Applying for visas will become more cumbersome, and officials will be cautious in issuing them. A weekend in Saigon may just not be worth the hassle.

But there’s another aspect to this, beyond international travel. At what point does travel of any kind become something undesirable? When South Korean researchers dug into why one person in Jeonju, a city which hadn’t had a coronavirus case in 2 months, had become infected. Turned out it was from someone who was in the same floor of a restaurant for about 5 minutes — on opposite sides of the room. The flow of two overhead air-conditioning units carried the virus 20 feet through the air.

While the research and reconstruction behind this is impressive, to me the key factor was that the infected person was from another city — Daejon, an hour’s drive away (she had not informed contact tracers she’d made the trip.) Just as China took the radical step of sealing off Wuhan back in January, it seems the lesson to draw from the Korean research is not only that our idea of what constitutes ‘close contact’ wrong, but the key to ridding ourselves of the pandemic may be to isolate communities, not just by country or state border, but at smaller levels, both to keep infection out, and also to keep the spread within. The idea of a village requiring more proof of being virus-free than the next is not unthinkable.

Yes, this is being done in some places, of course, and lockdowns have already become localised. But beyond lockdown, when vaccines are widely adopted, the question will arise, not of ‘easing lockdown’, but of permitting travel. Right now that has been something that is left somewhat vague, because there’s nothing that anyone can do beyond taking a test to prove they’re virus-free and showing that they’re not subject to lockdown. But what happens when a vaccine is available? If you’re going to prevent someone from international travel if they haven’t taken a vaccine, why is that same rule not applicable to any kind of travel — across country, even across town, or even between buildings?

One interviewee for a consulting project I recently led, an experienced professional in the human logistics field, told me that the biggest long-term trend to emerge from Covid will be “the influence of government, on business and individuals.” He sees a growing share of government in industry, the economy and as a customer. Subsidies, and a growing regulatory rule in health, will be with us for a long time, and the speed with which it has happened in his field was “mind-boggling”, he said.

It’s hard to argue with that. When I asked Thomas of The Commons Project why it was not the WHO or IATA that was developing a solution, he said that his organisation would be happy to work with anyone, and was keen to forge partnerships. That may be true, but inevitably however agnostic the platform, the process will inevitably be one dominated and run by bureaucrats. It is a necessary, even welcome, step by governments, but one which will not be abandoned easily. It will be extremely hard to declare an end to Covid, because pandemics don’t just end. They come in waves, as we’ve found to our cost, and the end will only come when the last country declares itself Covid-free.

In the meantime a layer of authentication, however efficient, will have been added to travel. It is hard not to imagine that this layer will not become an ID of sorts: why should I risk the citizens of this town/village/building by letting you in if you can’t produce this document? Right now it’s a QR code but in the future it could be digital signal (RFID, BLE etc) that turnstiles on public transport, or in office blocks, look for before allowing the holder through. In some ways the more efficient and less frictionless the technology, the more likely it will be adopted beyond the confines of its originally intended use.

I may well be wrong. It may well be that economic priorities and sheer exhaustion (and incompetence) lead to these measures gradually being dropped. But I do think that the concept of travel, and mobility, will change, possibly radically. We have largely been focusing on the changes wrought by ‘working from home’, or as some prefer it, ‘working from anywhere’. But that is part of a much larger question about ‘movement’. We may simply find that movement is too hard, too costly, too inconvenient, that those of us who move are discriminated against, so much so we alter our habits. This will have a profound effect because for so long we’ve taken travel and mobility for granted, failing to understand its profound impact. That notion of mobility goes back a long way. The introduction of the affordable bicycle in England in the late 19th century allowed young rural men and women to venture beyond the village boundary and marry elsewhere. Before 1887, 77% of marriages took place between people from the same parish. Between 1907 and 1916 this had dropped to 41%. (The safe and cheap Rover ‘safety bicycle’ was introduced in 1885 3.)

2-wheeled velocipede for ladies, model “Svea”, courtesy Picryl under a Creative Commons license

We may not exactly return to that world, but the depth of the bureaucratic response to Covid is probably the single greatest reverse that the march towards frictionless mobility has encountered. Even war tends to cause mobility — fleeing refugees, moving armies and their logistical trains — indeed the Spanish flu was closely entwined with the First World War.

The counterpoint to this is the extraordinary resilience of supply chains — we have faced little of the shortages that usually accompany such global shocks. But all that shows is two things: that the movement of goods doesn’t require that many people, and those that are involved are considered both vital and, I suspect, expendable (this WSJ piece from South Korea tells the story of the impact on delivery workers, attention prompted by the death of 15 of them since the pandemic began, mostly through overwork.) In essence, we’re outsourcing mobility to others so that we can stay home and live a life of sorts, and dream of escaping at some point to a beach somewhere.

I don’t really know what will happen, of course. Perhaps we’ll be lucky and the vaccines will be so well distributed and so widely administered that the regulatory landscape governing travel won’t have deep enough roots to survive beyond the pandemic. But at the very least we should probably start thinking about what it means to move around, and move around safely, and what constitutes our freedom to roam, and what constitutes responsibility. And what we allow our governments, in our name, to impose upon us. In short, what kind of life we want to live when the virus runs out of road.

  1. “Influence of Travel and Disease: An Historical Perspective”, Jonathan H. Cossar ↩
  2. “Brief History of Pandemics (Pandemics Throughout History)”, Damir Huremović ↩
  3. PJ Perry, 1969, a finding confirmed by geneticist Steve Jones. See also ‘Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales 1700-1950’ By K. D. M. Snell ↩

are the devices we use sexist?

By | December 9, 2020
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Are women physically suffering more than men when it comes to computing?

Does the tech industry not only favour men but also design itself around them?

And if that’s true, is the COVID-driven trend of working from home exacerbating the problem, leaving a legacy of back and neck pain for women around the world?

Heavy questions, so let me start at the beginning. I’ve long noticed how stock photos of women and devices tend towards (or perhaps I should say the websites and company brochures that use stock photos tend towards) those of women+laptop or tablet in poses away from a desk. I offer a selection throughout this piece and on the blog. My study is not scientific, but it’s been enough to annoy me: why are women and computers represented differently than men and computers? Why is a woman and her computing device more often than not shown in a less workstation-like pose than a man and his? And then I looked around, and saw that there might be some truth behind the sexist cliche. Women, my unscientific survey found, tend to not only sit at desks, but seem more likely than men to also sit on cushions, on the floor, on an easy chair, suspended from the ceiling (maybe not.) So could there be some truth in it?

And if so, what does that mean?

So I looked for some academic research on this. I couldn’t find a lot, but what I did worried me.

There’s a paper last year from Iran’s Qom University by Hamidreza Heidari, Ahmad Soltanzadeh, Elham Asemabadi1, Hoda Rahimifard and Abolfazl Mohammadbeigi that sampled 150 people, male and female, and categorised their computing postures using a laptop into 16, from squatting on the floor to sitting up in bed. It found some key differences between how men and women sat. Women were more likely to use a cushion when sitting on the floor (cushion under laptop or chest.) The paper doesn’t reach any conclusions on this (and I’ve yet to hear back from the authors) but my reading of the data is — while the sample size is a little too small to make any big pronouncements — that there are many different ways that people sit with their laptop, both by men and women, and that the differences between gender are pronounced enough to be worthy of note.

Another tentative conclusion one might draw from the data is that women tend to spend less time in certain positions than men. Sitting crosslegged on the floor with your back to the wall, for example, was extremely popular for both genders (maybe they don’t have desks at Qom), but females spent much less time in that position: less than an hour. The same was true for sitting with a pillow behind your back and laptop resting on slightly bent knees. This was frequently adopted by women, but only for less than an hour a day. It’s a stretch to assert this from the Qom study, but it does seem plausible that many women prefer to use their devices in different poses, and shift those positions, and locations, more frequently.

But here’s the worrying part. The final, tentative, conclusion that might be drawn from the study is this: The two out of three postures which the paper deemed least suitable, health-wise, were much more likely to be adopted by females. Women, it seems, are using their laptops in poses that are likely to result in musculoskeletal disorders.

And we don’t need to rely on the Iranian study for that. According to Szu-Ping Lee, Associate Professor of the Department of Physical Therapy at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who with colleagues published a paper on gender and posture when it comes to tablet use in 2018, “in general, women are more likely to develop neck pain” from tablet use. She pointed me to a study in Sweden published in 2012 which concluded that short-duration bothersome neck pain, or BNP, was much more prevalent among women than men across all age-groups, and slightly more prevalent for long-term BNP. The paper concluded, clearly enough: “Women are more likely than men to have and to develop BNP, and less likely to recover from such pain.” (See the chart below.)

Now that study was done in the mid- to late 2000s (i.e. before tablets), and doesn’t mention the source of such pain. Why are women more likely to experience neck problems? This is explored by Szu-Ping’s paper, which says that when it comes to tablet usage “gender differences in anthropometry and biomechanics may explain the disparity in neck and shoulder musculoskeletal symptoms.” (Anthropometry is the study of measurements and proportions of the human body; biomechanics is the study of how our body parts — muscles, bones, tendons, ligaments — work together to produce movement.) Szu-Ping and her colleagues write that in the workplace, “women assume neck flexion more often”. Their source for that is a 2010 study of Swedes which found that there was a clear link between women under “iso-strain” — high strain and low work-related social support — and neck and shoulder symptoms. Meanwhile “no associations were found between iso-strain model and symptoms among males.” In other words, men and women under similar work and social strain had quite different experiences when it came to muscle problems. If you’re a woman, “working with neck and/or body bent forward, arms above shoulders, and precision work tasks were predictors of musculoskeletal symptoms.”

Now that study wasn’t focused on computers and other devices. But another one did, examining computer mouse tasks and reported that “female computer operators who are shorter and narrow-shouldered exhibited more extreme postures.” Another study found that when typing, women have “significantly higher normalized keyboard forces than men and they tend to have higher muscle activities, and less neutral shoulder postures.” If you’re shorter things are even worse for typing and posture. And the study looks at tablets as well, and says things don’t get better: it found that more than 40% of subjects used one more for more than three hours a day and concluded: “The female gender’s generally lower muscle strength and smaller body size may predispose them to neck and shoulder symptoms during such use.” Szu-Ping’s study concluded that being a woman was an important risk when using a tablet: “Female gender, existing neck and shoulder symptoms, and sitting without back support during tablet use were shown as the most important risk factors.”

This is pretty damning stuff. It seems clear that our devices are not well designed for the female body, and they are causing all sorts of physical ailments that may well not be properly understood outside the realm of a few academic studies. I’m frankly gobsmacked that not more is made of this. As Szu-Ping and co point out in their paper students are especially badly hit by this. Students were much more likely to experience neck and shoulder symptoms (73.4%) using a tablet than university faculty and staff (52–64.9%). Unsurprising, given that “students in the U.S. typically do not have a permanent workstation and are constantly moving between classes. It may be more common for the students to use their tablet computers in compromised postures such as placing them in the lap while sitting without back support.”

In short, we’re busy handing out these devices to workers and students and thinking that ‘work from anywhere’ is a great idea, without regard to the consequences.

But how does this fit with the idea that women and men might use these devices differently, in terms of posture, location and lengths of time? Szu-Ping found this an interesting question, but pointed out that this might be a chicken and egg situation: “Is it that women ‘need’ to move about more to get comfortable due to their relatively weaker muscles and other anatomical disadvantages, or is it that they tend to use more compromised postures which lead to their neck pain?” she wrote in an email. “The answer to your question is currently unknown.”

That’s probably as far as we can take it, though I’m sure I’ll get some thoughts from readers about their own experiences, and whether more varied work postures are really a gender thing or not, and if so whether it’s down to discomfort or not. I spoke to one manager of a co-working space who said that females do tend to move around the various desks, bean bags and nooks in the office during the day, which he had put down to the vagaries of the air-conditioning.

Whatever the truth is, it’s clear that women are getting a raw deal when it comes to the way we design our workstations, our workspaces and our devices. I can only imagine that this is being further aggravated by COVID, where millions are being forced to work from a bed, a chair, a kitchen table or the floor. But perhaps the reality is different: that those of us frustrated by limited ergonomic options at work are building workplaces that suit us better at home, and won’t consider going back. I would like to think that, but I’m not holding my breath.

the bureaucratic threat to big tech

By | December 9, 2020
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Image from page 156 of “Book of martyrs, or, A history of the lives, sufferings, and triumphant deaths of the primitive as well as Protestant martyrs” Source

Sometimes it’s helpful to remove the technology layer in technology companies and trends and try to see what’s really going on. We talk a lot about platforms and disintermediation but what every company — and increasingly every institution — is trying to do is remove, or automate, unwanted bureaucracy. But is this every going to really work?

Let’s walk our way through it.

The history of bureaucracy is a surprising one. Its modern origins can be found in The Inquisition, set up in the early 13th century to hunt down dissent and enforce Papal control. It developed a system of record-keeping and -discovery that became the model for government, and later business, and is still in use today. It’s not that kings and queens didn’t have their own bureaucracies; it’s that they weren’t efficient in managing, and retrieving useful information from, the mountain of documents created.

Together with the new coherence of canon law there came a revolution in record-keeping as Church chancery clerks developed the art of paperwork—composing in the same legible script, making copies of documents, depositing them in archives, and inventing techniques for retrieving information that had been written down and stored away. They were creating a rudimentary form of something so fundamental to life today—bureaucracy—that we rarely give it a moment’s thought.

(Murphy, Cullen. God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (p. 41). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.)

And here lies a key oddity. The Vatican set up this extraordinary bureaucracy to manage a vast international system of repression, creating along the way a codified legal system to enforce uniformity of punishment and justification. They recorded everything, including the price of ropes, wood, branches, straw, and executioner’s fees for each burning at the stake. We may not feel the same way from the outside, but bureaucracy and the pursuit of efficiency are intimately tied together. And no goal is too shabby that it cannot benefit from from efficiency and/or automation: the Nazis used IBM punch-cards to better manage the Holocaust, the U.S. under Robert McNamara used computers to win the war in Vietnam, Stalin’s Soviet Union relied on a bureaucracy to run the gulags (so thoroughly, “the increase in the Gulag bureaucracy appeared to outrun the number of prisoners” (Paul Gregory, An Introduction to the Economics of the Gulag) in part because it was a major source of labour to the rest of the economy.

Hamlet security ratings, Vietnam, Nov 30 1970 Source

These may sound like horror shows from history, but similar principles are being applied today. It can be seen in the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ policy towards immigrants, which relied on government bureaucracy becoming more uncaring and more, well, bureaucratic (what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls the ‘the rightward tilting of the bureaucratic field’, see Crawford, Joe; Leahy, Sharon; McKee, Kim, More Than a Hostile Environment: exploring the impact of the Right to Rent part of the Immigration Act 2016, PDF). And don’t get me started on the DHS. Bureaucracies are there to be used, and it seems they excel at dehumanising the task, however many distraught humans are involved.

So a bureaucracy’s passion is to make things more efficient. And companies long ago adopted this model. Indeed, British rule of India was, until 1858, conducted by the East India Company with its own army, bureaucracy and courts (and laws). (see The English East India Company and the Modern Corporation: Legacies, Lessons, and Limitations by Philip J. Stern. PDF)

Technology — from the Inquisition’s cross-references and keywords in the margin to IBM’SystemJ360 for running the Hamlet Evaluation System — has always been the efficiency-obsessed bureaucracy’s handmaiden. Apple is in part the world’s most successful company because of its efficient supply chains. Google updated the Inquisition’s boxed synopses and indexes into a search engine, which has made it tolerably rich. Facebook’s algorithms have focused efficiency on maximising the value from our screen addiction. Amazon’s customer obsession has ensured that we never quite satiate our buying fix. Microsoft may not have quite found its own niche, but it’s trying: its 365 product allows managers to evaluate employees for productivity by monitoring how much they collaborate on documents, participate in group chats and email colleagues.

Indeed, this is perhaps the most obvious connection between The Inquisition and modern-day tech: It doesn’t make processes more efficient as much as codifying and entrenching them: eventually everything ends up looking like a nail. The Inquisition spun out of control in part because of its bureaucracy, which as it standardised procedures, so it standardised what being a heretic was, widening the definition until it became a self-fulfilling dynamic. (Cullen Murphy points to the same trend in the McCarthy Red Scare of the 1950s, and life post 9/11 where just learning Arabic is considered worthy of suspicion.)

Here we enter the world of algorithms, which are modern efficiency’s hammer. Microsoft’s 365 productivity scores show both how problematic the world of measuring something is, and also how companies and institutions would love to measure their most expensive factor of production. The irony, of course, is that the components of a bureaucracy are innately hostile to the notion of measuring themselves. It’s a rare manager who fires himself in the cause of efficiency. Bureaucracy’s first and foremost goal is to preserve themselves. Take it from the Mother of all Bureaucracies: The Inquisition lasted, more or less, 700 years (1231-1908). One might wonder whether Microsoft uses its productivity scores on its own employees?

The obvious solution to this is to have two different structures: a bureaucracy within the institution, for ‘managing’ the company, and another, less prized and largely out-sourced machine for doing the awkward parts. Apple is probably best at this. There are few Apple employees who actually make Apple products. Those who do are scattered around the world, and subject to the whims of their ultimate master: a few hours before I wrote this Reuters’ Yimou Lee reported that Foxconn, Apple’s long-time main supplier, is moving some iPad and MacBook assembly to Vietnam from China at the request of Apple Inc, as the U.S. firm diversifies production to minimise the impact of a Sino-U.S. trade war. No mention is made of the employees affected, the layoffs involved, but that’s because none of them are part of the 137,000-strong Apple bureaucracy.

Amazon (1.2 million employees) has also done wonders in this space. In fact, it has its own internal police to patrol threats to itself. According to documents leaked to Vice, Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center, “the company’s security division tasked with protecting Amazon employees, vendors, and assets at Amazon facilities around the world”, in the words of Lauren Kaori Gurley, obsessively monitors its workers’ involvement in union-organising activities. In the somewhat Orwellian language that red tape tends to create, an Amazon spokesperson described the goal to “highlight potential risks/hazards that may impact Amazon operations, in order to meet customer expectation.” No mention is made of the actual workers themselves.

Unsurprising, then, that Gurley reports today (Friday Nov 27, 2020) Amazon warehouse workers and social and environmental justice activists around the world would be staging coordinated protests, strikes, and actions to demand the online retailer respect workers’ rights to participate in union activity, stop circumventing tax laws, and commit to higher environmental standards, according to the event’s organizers. (In their defence, Amazon has given workers a one-time bonus.)

It would be wise, then, to ring-fence the two structures. Indeed. these tech behemoths have largely outsourced what they can, and everyone else is following suit. Amazon outsourced customer service for its Ring internet-connected camera product to a French-owned company in the Philippines, where workers ended up having to sleep on the floor because of a local lockdown, according to an April story by the FT’s Dave Lee (paywall). Amazon said it was urgently investigating it, but whatever they did wasn’t enough to change the minds of workers, who seven months on joined Friday’s protest, albeit virtually. (It’s a strange world where a company which sells automated remote surveillance outsources to another firm in another country the process of helping customers set up and run this service, while its own internal police watch on and try to snuff out dissent. Maybe ‘strange’ isn’t the word. Inquisitorial, perhaps?)

Facebook (56,653 employees), meanwhile outsources most of the stuff it doesn’t like to do, according to Charlotte Jee of the Technology Review:

The overwhelming majority of the 15,000 people who spend all day deciding what can and can’t be on Facebook don’t even work for Facebook. The whole function of content moderation is farmed out to third-party vendors, who employ temporary workers on precarious contracts at over 20 sites worldwide.

This is not pleasant business, but it makes bureaucratic sense. Working for Facebook, Google, Apple and the like are considered high-status jobs, something to get excited about (though some tell me the excitement doesn’t always last; it would be a mistake to think that the free lunches, sleep-pods and logos don’t hide the usual bureaucratic realities). Why would you mess that up by bringing inhouse the messy grunt work of moderating, customer service and actually building products?

Which brings us to automation. In a perfect world all this would be automated, and possibly production lines for iPhones and Rings will be entirely robotic. Customer service and moderating have proved harder. Where they can Facebook has tried to outsource this to the content creators, but the U.S. election has dashed any lingering hopes that algorithms would be enough to manage the rest.

And this is where I believe the tech behemoths’ unseen Achilles Heel lies. Bureaucracies tend to protect themselves, not just in terms of providing work, but in terms of ensuring that the work is, if not pleasant, then at least not unpleasant. Most of the guards patrolling the gulags were prisoners themselves; the executioners of the Inquisition were hired hands. The Nazis were forever refining the mode of murdering concentration camp inmates so their own hands weren’t sullied. Companies like Siemens helped out (they built the electrical infrastructure for camps, while Bosch installed plumbing and water, according to author Karen Bartlett), while a company called Topf & Sons built highly efficient “eight-muffle ovens” operated by prisoners themselves, and was working on an entirely self-contained oven system where incineration would be fuelled by heated corpses when the war ended.

I’m of course not conflating Facebook and any other tech behemoth with the Third Reich and the Final Solution. But there’s an inevitable tendency of large bureaucracies to assign the unsightly work to others, while preserving itself. And this is where I think these companies will encounter problems. Because ultimately, as governments scrutinise big tech more carefully, they will demand more of them, which will challenge the paradigm of efficiency that these companies have pursued.

Amazon is feeling the heat as its owner becomes ever richer. Facebook is feeling the heat as understanding of its impact on democracy and public belief grows. Google too is feeling the heat for Youtube and the way it redirects traffic back to itself. Apple may get to keep its outsourced production of devices, but as it moves more into services, so will it find that outsourcing doesn’t work so well.

In the end big institutions are essentially bureaucracies that protect their own. Technology helps but only so much. Ultimately there is a contradiction there between the notions of platforms and disintermediation. You cannot have both. Tech disruptors big and small think they can remove intermediaries but they only do that by building a competing platform. It may be simpler and better than what exists, but it merely moves the intermediary layer, it doesn’t remove it entirely. And so while every startup dreams of becoming a platform, they will find like all the tech behemoths that the platform ends up becoming a bureaucracy of its own. It may be a fabulously lucrative one, but that merely disguises it. Behind it lie the same inertia, self-justification and passion for efficiency coupled with self-preservation.

the hypernormalisation of america

By | December 9, 2020
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People didn’t need to believe Trump, they just needed him to confirm that their decision to believe in nothing was right. A conspiracy theory isn’t about believing something — it’s about believing that what is in front of you is not the truth, not the reality. So a conspiracy theory is a bamboo scaffolding flexible enough to frame anything you like, so long as it fits your core suspicion that the world is not as it seems. Trump’s embrace of the Birther lie — one that 3/4 of Republicans, and ⅓ of Americans believe is true — enabled him, and therefore them — to reject Obama’s presidency as a fraud. As Anne Applebaum put it:

That third of Americans went on to become Trump’s base. Over four years, they continued to applaud him, no matter what he did, not because they necessarily believed everything he said, but often because they didn’t believe anything at all. If everything is a scam, who cares if the president is a serial liar? If all American politicians are corrupt, then so what if the president is too? If everyone has always broken the rules, then why can’t he do that too?

This is not dissimilar to the analysis presented by Adam Curtis in “HyperNormalisation“, which merits watching a few times. The title is taken from that grim fairyland of the Soviet Union:

The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. But everybody had to play along and pretend that it WAS real because no-one could imagine any alternative. One Soviet writer called it “hypernormalisation”. You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it. The fakeness was hypernormal.

But Curtis realised it applied to a lot more than a decaying communist empire. Hypernormalisation had evolved to embrace Putin’s Russia, where opposing sides in the battle were being funded and directed by the same hand, and even Trump’s America. Curtis’ genius is to chart this path and see the common thread: leaders who could sell any version of reality they wanted. The situation now is in some ways the natural conclusion of his analysis — the documentary appeared in 2016, before Trump’s victory. Here’s how Curtis effectively concluded his screed:

But underneath the liberal disdain, both Donald Trump in America, and Vladislav Surkov in Russia, had realised the same thing – that the version of reality that politics presented was no longer believable, that the stories politicians told their people about the world had stopped making sense. And in the face of that, you could play with reality, constantly shifting and changing, and in the process, further undermine and weaken the old forms of power.

We have been constantly frustrated by Trump’s asserting lies as truth, by his accusing the other of crimes he has (instead) committed himself. This is a playbook as old as authoritarianism itself, but in the Information Age, we had hoped would be one that would be harder and harder to use. But a surplus of information is the same as a deficit; it is as hard to find needle in a haystack as it is in an empty field. Trump’s instinctive genius has been to pull out the rug of legitimacy from the presidency, and by exposing the holder of it as a fraud, cheapen it enough to turn the votes that fill it into junk as well. As Anne Applebaum says, he was throwing shade on fertile ground. The institutions had already ceased to matter for many Americans.

So Trump played with reality, and will continue to do so, because that is the hallmark of demagogues; charismatic leaders wrap themselves in the trappings of office, but those trappings, and those offices, are largely fictional affairs. More important for him, and all instinctive autocrats, is to ridicule all institutions — including those outside government, like the media — so there is no credible alternative. Part of the trick is to create momentum — or the illusion of it — by always shifting gear, always throwing sand in the eyes of opponents, to turn politicians, civil servants, generals into lickspittles, and — his own twist on it — to turn it into a reality show, where we’re always ‘waiting to see what will happen’. There is no finale, only more addictive dramatic tension.

We still don’t quite understand this. We still imagine there is some rational level upon which all this operates — Trump, his followers, Russia, Johnson, populism — and that that is where we fight our battles, with well-honed reason and rules-based politicking. But as Curtis has pointed out, the version of reality that conventional politics presented is no longer believable. This is not cynicism at work here, it’s the algorithm. As Curtis describes:

The liberals were outraged by Trump. But they expressed their anger in cyberspace, so it had no effect – because the algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people who already agreed with them. Instead, ironically, their waves of angry messages and tweets benefitted the large corporations who ran the social media platforms. One online analyst put it simply, “Angry people click more.” It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world. Instead, it was becoming a fuel that was feeding the new systems of power and making them ever more powerful. But none of the liberals could possibly imagine that Donald Trump could ever win the nomination. It was just a giant pantomime.

This is old news now, and we are hoping that it will be addressed. After all Twitter and Facebook are being proactive about flagging and removing offensive content, even if it’s from the President of the United States, right? I can’t help thinking of horses and barn-doors and bolts. The issue is no longer trying to prevent misleading information from social media. Social media itself is, by definition, unfiltered information and so therefore misleading. If I watch a video on Youtube titled ‘Buffaloes Rescue Baby Elephant from Lions‘ am I sure what I’m seeing is that? Or Buffaloes Stop 2 Male Lions From Killing Another Lion? Is that really buffaloes protecting an elephant or a lion, or something else entirely? Just as likely, at least in the second case, is that the buffaloes want the lion for themselves. In the first case, it’s just as likely the buffaloes just want the lions out of there. But I have no way of knowing from the video, the caption or the comments. I’m no wiser at the end of it as I was at the start.

Social media, is by definition social, and so it’s unfortunately open ended, subject to discussion, trolling, misdirection and confusion. To extend what Curtis says, all this largely contextless ‘information’ merely feeds the new systems of power which rely on confusion, and a lack of respect — even contempt — for institutions.

When you believe your president should never have been elected president, then why should you have any respect for him, for the office, and for all the arms of government under his control? And now we are faced with the reverse image of this. Where Trump won the presidency by denigrating it as an institution and ridiculing all those who challenged him for it, so he will create a new fiction, as Applebaum explains:

Even if Trump is forced to make a grudging concession speech, even if Biden is sworn in as president on January 20, even if the Trump family is forced to pack its Louis Vuitton suitcases and flee to Mar-a-Lago, it is in Trump’s interest, and a part of the Republican Party’s interest, to maintain the fiction that the election was stolen. That’s because the same base, the base that distrusts American democracy, could still be extremely useful to Trump, as well as to the Republican Party, in years to come.

Trump, and those who may see political or financial profit, will plough this furrow for as long as they can. But there’s a worse outcome, and one that seems to be playing out as I write this. It’s one highlighted by Barton Gellman, and it’s entirely consistent with Adam Curtis’ portrayal of a world where nothing is as it seems.

The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.

Now I’m not here to write a political screed. I’m here to focus on the technological aspects of this. All narratives which try to define the reality in front of us were, before the era of social media, largely in the hands of those with power — political, financial, or otherwise. By power, I mean the establishment. Most of the media is free — I know, I worked for it — but it has always hewed along the same grain as the establishment it reports on, and which it holds to account. The standards it adheres to, the rules it checks for abuses of, are agreed upon. When Woodstein took on Nixon, they were accusing him of breaking very specific laws and norms, ones that (nearly) everyone agreed on.

These did change over time, as Curtis shows, and sometimes the reality, the norms, seemed to crack, as if The Matrix was buckling. We can see them clearly in the rear-view mirror: the demonisation of regimes (and their rehabilitation, or the reverse): Gaddafi, Saddam, Noriega. And before them the Soviet Union, whose sudden collapse surprised everyone. As Curtis put it:

Reality became less and less of an important factor in American politics. It wasn’t what was real that was driving anything or the facts driving anything. It was how you could turn those facts or twist those facts or even make up the facts to make your opponent look bad. So, perception management became a device and the facts could be twisted. Anything could be anything. It becomes how can you manipulate the American people? And, in the process, reality becomes what? Reality becomes simply something to play with to achieve that end. Reality is not important in this context.

But now this warped reality is coming home. No longer is it about “over There”, it’s about Here. Trump, Giuliani, Barr, and now McConnell are all feeding a narrative that takes us into new territory: Americans are being persuaded to believe there was no clear outcome to the election. That is essentially doing away with democracy, replacing that flimsy but long-adhered to scaffold with another: the reality that not only does your vote not matter, but the count doesn’t matter either.

And the tools being used to forge that new uncertainty are largely online.

Steve Bannon’s call for Anthony Fauci to be beheaded was on Facebook for 10 hours. Only when journalists quizzed Facebook did it take down a group calling for members to ready their weapons should Trump lost his bid to stay in power. According to Reuters

Such rhetoric was not uncommon in the run-up to the election in Facebook Groups, a key booster of engagement for the world’s biggest social network, but it did not always get the same treatment.

A survey of U.S.-based Facebook Groups between September and October conducted by digital intelligence firm CounterAction at the request of Reuters found rhetoric with violent overtones in thousands of politically oriented public groups with millions of members.

Even Fox (admittedly for its own reasons) cut away from a White House press conference alleging voter fraud without any substantiation, while Facebook ran it unmediated. After being prompted Facebook added a closable label to it.

I’ve said it before: eventually social media must become media, in that it will have to police itself and content on it in the same way a media organisation does. But that day may be too late. Social media has been shown to be a clear and present danger to democracy. It is easily manipulated — by professionals like Putin, and demagogues like Trump — and can quickly subsume us. It’s not because it radicalises, although it can do that, but because it can breed a sort of existential despair, in which disinformation, misdirection and the hypernormalisation of ambiguity, uncertainty, and alternative facts.

COVID’s other long shadow

By | October 21, 2020
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The Nettox. ( Photo courtesy of Irfan Budi Satria)

It will take some time for the true toll of the coronavirus pandemic to be known, but for me one of the most invidious, and unnecessary, costs will be for the generation of kids uneducated and lost to screen addiction. Nowhere is it more visible than in Indonesia.

Take the daughter of a friend: let’s call her Aneesa (not her real name), a 12-year old who will shortly be shipped off to an Islamic boarding school, or pesantren, where she will spend three years memorising the Koran. This is because her state school has been shut since the end of March, and she has been left by her parents and teacher to study online, which mostly means alone. The teacher will send instructions by WhatsApp of what to read and students will send in their assignment the same way. Which means the students will effectively have a phone by their side from 7 am to 2 pm, without interruption or supervision.

Under such conditions it’s unsurprising she had become addicted to games, Youtube and social media; even her three year-old cousin has access to a phone and is similarly addicted. Although I don’t think the solution, to pack her off to a pesantren, was necessarily the right one, you can understand the frustration — and the lack of resources — that led to it.

Cellphone addiction is nothing new in Indonesia. A study published last year1 by researchers at the University of North Sumatra found that three quarters of boys and girls in Aneesa’s age-group were addicted to their smartphones. A study (PDF) by researchers at Padjadjaran University in Bandung2 the same year found that 26% of students they studied had “mental, emotional disorders with smartphone addiction.” They found a clear correlation between smartphone addiction and mental and emotional problems of early adolescents.

This is depressing, but unsurprising. COVID aggravates the problem in particularly pernicious ways. On the one hand children are being pushed towards their gadgets to study remotely. But it’s those same gadgets that they are being drawn to. So the school-work doesn’t relieve them of their addiction, it just reminds them of it, and is an obstacle to be overcome.

The other problem is time. At what point does playing with a gadget become an addiction? A study (PDF) by different researchers at the University of North Sumatra in 2019 of elementary school students3 found “a significant relationship between the respondent’s mental emotionality on the number of hours of gadget usage in a week.” It concluded that children should play with gadgets less than 40 minutes a day, less than three times per day and between 1 and 3 days a week. It found that 28% of the kids studied registered on the mental emotional scale as abnormal, and 36% were borderline.

The problem with lockdown is that time is no longer a scarce resource. And with parents harried and distracted, under-resourced or -motivated teachers either phoning it in or not phoning in at all, kids have easily scaled the walls of any constraint on screen time. A study (PDF) by Chinese researchers in Changsha4 found a doubling in the frequency of using electronic devices recreationally among children and adolescents during COVID. (More than half of those considered addictive users were on their devices more than six hours a day.) (You can see the table here.)

This is a whirlwind that will reap away a generation of kids and adolescents. My friend Aneesa will miss a vital three years of education, but truth be told she wasn’t getting much anyway. None of this is her fault. The lack of government effort to ensure children’s education is not too damaged by COVID is in part to blame. But not all.

For we have helped create this beast. The addiction to these devices, like cigarettes, is not an unfortunate byproduct of their success. It is the reason for their success. Every game, every Facebook tweak, every Youtube video suggestion and autoplay on-by- default setting, all feed addiction. Each is an ingredient in the nicotine of the reason for these gadgets.

We need to take a long hard look at who and what is responsible for this, and who and what we should be cheering. Indonesia has long been an early adopter of technology and has one of the highest smartphone usage rates in the world. Back in 2014 it topped a survey (PDF) of device usage in 30 countries compiled by Millward Brown AdReaction, with Indonesians spending an average 3 hours a day on their phone, and a total 9 hours across TV, tablet, smartphone computer.

The thing is this addiction is seen as a good thing, commercially. Mobile commerce has really taken off in Indonesia, and addiction has fed this. See this headline for an “Indonesia Investments” newsletter: Indonesians’ Addiction to Smartphones Allows for Rapid Development of the Digital Economy.

No real effort has been made to wean kids off this addiction: a worthy effort by a team of Indonesian students got some press in late 2019, but the inventor behind Nettox, Irfan Budi Satria, told me “the invention itself was a product developed for a student competition, and early on it was never really our intention to commercialize it.” An initiative by the government of Bandung, a city southeast of Jakarta, handed out chicks to seventh-graders in December in the hope of building their character and diverting their attention from the screen. It was, inevitably, called chickenisation, and its fate is not known.

Addiction is good. For some (screenshot)

So frankly no one comes out looking good from this, and no one gets off the hook: Even device manufacturers. We have been encouraged to fetishise our gadgets, and to upgrade them as much as we can. Because we tend to hand back, pass on, or shove in a drawer our previous devices, we don’t quite realise what kind of footprint this covetousness leaves, and how much it costs us. I’ve not bought a new Apple device in years, but still I have a cupboard full of discarded cables, plugs and adapters:

Apple debris. Each plug and cable costs about $20, each adaptor up to $100. (author photo)

This is a vicious cycle of addictive devices, designed for lust and obsolescence, addictive services which push new content, nudge us into interaction, dangle rewards ahead of us, from which even the smartest and most mature of us are defenceless. And then give it to a three-year old, an eight-year old, a 12-year old. It was never going to be a fair fight.

I would like to see some justice. My confession is that I’ve been remiss in thinking that the more internet there was, the better off everyone would be. I remember CD-ROMs of Wikipedia being delivered to remote villages, of SMS being the poor businesswoman’s email lifeline. Now I see a device that is casting an addictive glow over the face of a generation of schoolchildren, from Jakarta to Djibouti.

Someone somewhere should hang their head in shame.

  1. Arthy CC, Effendy E, Amin MM, Loebis B, Camellia V, Husada MS. Indonesian Version of Addiction Rating Scale of Smartphone Usage Adapted from Smartphone Addiction Scale-Short Version (SAS-SV) In Junior High School. Open Access Maced J Med Sci. 2019 Oct 15; 7(19):3235-3239. https://doi.org/10.3889/oamjms.2019.691 ↩
  2. Influence of Adolescents’ Smartphone Addiction on Mental and Emotional Development in West Java, Indonesia, March 2019, Majalah Kedokteran Bandung 51(1):46-52 ↩
  3. Wahyuni AS, Siahaan FB, Arfa M, Alona I, Nerdy N. The Relationship between the Duration of Playing Gadget and Mental Emotional State of Elementary School Students. Open Access Maced J Med Sci. 2019 Jan 15; ↩
  4. Dong H, Yang F, Lu X and Hao W (2020) Internet Addiction and Related Psychological Factors Among Children and Adolescents in China During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Epidemic. Front. Psychiatry 11:00751. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2020.00751 ↩