Sometimes we think it’s all overstated and a matter of opinion. Surely they can’t be so untrustworthy, otherwise they wouldn’t have a business?

Well, this article with link to the settlement describes what Facebook calls an “error” in calculating how much time viewers spent watching certain videos on Facebook. As a result of which, I’m told, all sorts of media outlets moved their videos from YouTube to Facebook, and then promptly imploded because the numbers of views was much lower than expected.

Between 150% and 900%. The error, of course, was in the “up” direction.

Read.

Is outlawing plastic straws enough to fix the climate? Probably not.

What about turning all cars electric? Investing in nuclear? A global hard stop on burning coal? That might be better, but is it good enough?

Everybody has ideas, and because almost none of us, myself included, really understand spaceship earth, we do not and cannot know just what impact our amateur proposals would actually have in the real world.

Fortunately, MIT created a simulator where you and me can try out various policy proposals, such as some that I just mentioned.

It’s sobering, and I’ll leave it at that. Try yourself.

Go to the simulator.

Personal data is becoming a thing in 2020. Not just startups, but also not-for-profit organiations have been popping up everywhere … by some count, there are now literally hundreds (!) that are involved in it somehow. It’s hard not to get lost.

To order my own thoughts, and for the purposes of some organizations that I’m involved in, I’ve been working on a 2x2 or 3x3-style matrix diagram that similar to what many startups are using to position themselves with potential investors.

Here is my currently best draft. Would love your feedback and ideas!

The first question is: if we can only pick two axes by which to classify organizations, which are the most important ones? I’ve picked:

• whether organizations are for-profit, or help building the commons. This is obviously a big difference. I’m also distinguishing between organizations working broadly across the space, or focused on a particular aspect of it.
• who is the primary customer of the organization? As personal data touches both individuals and businesses (or Me’s and B’s as we call it in Me2BA), organizations might focus on either, or both, and that has many practical differences just like B2B and B2C businesses are different. For this diagram, “customers” mean the entities that provide money to the organization, through membership fees, or who buy the product or services. (They may also have benefits for the other side, but that’s probably common for most of them so it’s not shown here.)

Now, let’s put some example organizations into the diagram and see how they fit.

• MyData has both business and individual members. It is a very broad umbrella organization, and so I am putting it stretching from B to Me, with a somewhat fuzzy border between general and specific focus. (One could have specific tendrils going out and up in the diagram, like the recent MyData Operators group.)
• The Sovrin Foundation, which runs the epynomous digital identity network, has only businesses as its members, so I put them on the left. It is focused on something much more specific than, say, MyData, and so it goes further up in the diagram.
• Customer Commons is an advocacy organization for (non-business) customers. It has a specific focus in mission and only focuses on consumers, thus it is in the middle on the right.
• The Me2B Alliance strives to improve the relationship between businesses and individuals, and – once its membership structure is fully defined – will have both business and individual members, so I put it in the middle.

Does this make sense?

Exactly 10 years ago, in January 2010, I started a new blog. In my first post, I said I wanted to explore:

What’s the next decade going to be like in technology?

So I started to publish at upon2020.com.

But that stated reason wasn’t the entire reason. At the time, I was quite uneasy about the state of technology. Uncomfortable where it seemed to be going. And where the world at large was going — a world 18 years after the end of history, supposedly. I could imagine so much potential for good things to happen, but somehow everybody’s motivations seemed to be focused on other objectives. Doing good for the many didn’t seem to factor into it much, all public declarations about not being evil, putting people back to work with a short dose of zero interest rates, connecting all the world’s people and the like notwithstanding.

I didn’t feel I could comprehensibly articulate my unease, so I didn’t talk about that. But setting up upon2020.com was a sign of bewilderment on my part. I was hoping that by writing about what was happening in the decade to 2020, I could make sense of it and be less bewildered.

Now, it’s 2020, and the good news is that my bewilderment has passed. (So it is time to retire the upon2020.com blog, and I will do that shortly.)

Unfortunately, the bewilderment from 10 years ago has given way to a clarity that shows many things I’d rather not see. Where do I start? Let’s just pick three:

• The political system is broken. In the US, in the UK, in many other places. Regardless of where you stand politically, when did you last time feel it is getting better, fairly and sustainably? Bipartisanship for the good of everybody will re-emerge just as soon as …? It’s hard to even imagine. The same is happening on an international level. This means our ability to decisively act is declining just as we have unprecedented global problems. Not a good combination.

• Technology is in a bad place. Just take the term “Silicon Valley”. It used to stand for amazing new inventions that are good for everybody. That would change the world into something much more awesome, one Comdex at a time. Now it means the unaccountable monopolies of a handful of trillion-dollar-class companies that screw you and me and most other people on the planet every day, 24 hours a day, in public and in our most private lives, by surveilling us, doing things behind our back we don’t know and wouldn’t approve, by extracting much of the economic surplus leaving an economic wasteland in many places, throwing terms of service at us that are abusive, and so forth. Opinion surveys now have mainstream majorities for opinions such as “risks of new technology outweigh the benefits”. What happened? How do we undo that? Can we?

• And the climate/environment. This past year, finally, the knowledge that the planet is in bad shape has arrived in mainstream discussion everywhere. However, much of the discussion so far is either in the earlier stages of grief (denial, bargaining), or fatally incompetent in the understanding of exponential functions, a.k.a positive feedback loops. There will be a second stage of reckoning when that becomes apparent. Just how do you eat if most insects are gone, for example?

(Yes, there are positive trends, too. But the suicide statistics tell us where the balance is to be found.)

So Hello World in 2020, all my unease in 2010 did not prepare me for you.

So what now?

Personally, I believe this is an All Hands On Deck situation. We have dug a hole, and need to stop what we’ve been doing, back up, and focus on getting ourselves out. We have overshot, and need to reverse back to what’s sustainable. We need to get out of our complacency, reject what is clearly not leading us into a desirable future, and work like hell to put stuff in place that will.

I think of it as a Reboot: just like what you do when your computer acts up and you’ve had it because you actually need to get stuff done.

So this what I want to do with this blog: write about stuff that we need to stop doing, and in particular, what we can do instead. Much will be from a technology point of view, because I’m a geek after all. But almost all the problems we have are an inertwringled mess of technological, economic, social/political, and now environmental challenges, and cannot be addressed effectively piece-meal. First rule of engineering: understand the whole system; you will need to eventually, anyway, otherwise you can’t get anything to work reliably. So it won’t be just tech.

Fortunately, many answers are actually known, just very unevenly distributed. I am hoping I can help surface them, and collaborate with many people to grow them, and nurture them, and make them the normal, good, fair, sustainable thing that everybody does instead. And focus on how we get ourselves reb00ted!

So Hello, World in 2020, let’s go!

Longer version:

But some of you may be interested in the longer history because all of what we do here sounds soooo deja vous:

I’m Johannes Ernst. I accidentally fell into this entire area because back in 2004, after an enterprise customer visit, driving home in the car and pondering the web app we had built for them, I realized that what it needed was people as a first-class entity in the system, not just “data”, so each user could tell other users about themselves at a URL in a place of their liking, “see” what each other user was doing in real-time, securely identify each other with that universal cross-side username (my personal LID URL), and send/receive rich data to/from them strongly authenticated and encrypted through GPG key pairs associated with every user. Public keys were distributed straight from their personal LID URLs. I thought of it as an “identity” system which is why I called it “Light-Weight Identity” (LID).

I didn’t have much time, and decided it should be possible to build such a light-weight identity system in an afternoon. Turned out to be a bit of a stretch, but not by much at least initially. LID V1 started with securely publishing communication endpoints (like phone numbers) and other profile data ACL-protected through public key-based auth (think HTTP Signatures with GPG keys), then we added web single-sign-on, authenticated and encrypted person-to-person (URL-to-URL) messaging with arbitrary payloads etc.

Needless to say, it was before its time. So when OpenID V0.9 showed up on the scene, I got together with Brad, and Dave from Livejournal, Drummond and others from XRI, set my sights a bit lower, agreed on a bunch of protocols and our collaborative project grew and became the OpenID movement. We were tremendously successful in signing up most of the large internet companies at the time — and in process lost the P2P symmetry and user-centricity of early OpenID. (Which is why I dropped out of the community for a while starting ca 2010).

A side effect was that for identifier metadata discovery web got XRD from XRI and Drummond, under the label “Yadis” (reused from before OpenID was OpenID). Which replaced my light-weight URL?lid=meta discovery and Brad’s openid.provider Link tag, with an XRDS file discoverable via 3 separate methods. Some people thought that was too complicated, and created Webfinger instead.

In the meantime, I created a Linux distro for self-hosting (https://ubos.net/), an “App Store” for server-side apps, been selling personal cloud servers with Nextcloud-preinstalled, some IoT stuff.