Stefaan Verhulst

Cathy Mulligan in the UN Chronicle: “…What can blockchain give us, then?

Blockchain’s 1,000 Thought Experiments

Blockchain is still new and will evolve many times before it can be fully integrated into society. We have seen similar trajectories before in the technology industry; examples include the Internet of things, mobile telephony and even the Internet itself. Every one of those technologies went through various iterations before it was fully integrated and used within society. Many technical, social and political obstacles had to be slowly but surely overcome.

It is often useful, therefore, to approach emerging technologies with some depth of thought—not by expecting them to act immediately as a fully functional solution but rather as a lens on the possible. Such an approach allows for a broader discussion, one in which we can challenge our preconceived notions. Blockchain has already illustrated the power of individuals connected via the Internet with sufficient computing power at their disposal. Far from merely tweeting, taking and sharing photos or videos, such people can also create an entirely new economic structure.

The power of blockchain thus lies not in the technology itself but rather in how it has reframed many discussions across various parts of our society and economy. Blockchain shows us that there are options, that we can organize society differently. It has launched 1,000 different thought experiments but the resulting solutions, which will be delivered a decade or two from now, may or may not be based on blockchain or cryptocurrencies. The discussions that started from this point, however, will have been important contributions to the progress that society makes around digital technologies and what they can mean for humankind. For these reasons, it is important that everyone, including the United Nations, engage with these technologies to understand and learn from them.

At its most basic level, blockchain speaks to a deep, human need, one of being able to trust other people, organizations and companies in a world where most of our interactions are mediated and stored digitally. It is arguable how well it captures that notion of trust, or whether any technology can ever actually replicate what a human being thinks, feels and acts like when they trust and are trusted. These concepts are deeply human, as are the power structures within which digital solutions are built. Blockchain is often discussed as removing intermediaries or creating democratic solutions to problems, but it may merely replace existing analogue power structures with digital ones, and cause decision-making within such contexts to become more brutally binary. ‘Truth’ on the blockchain does not leave room for interpretation, as today’s systems do.

Context is critical for the development of any technology, as is the political economy within which it exists. Those who have tried to use blockchain, however, have quickly realized something: it forces a new level of cooperation. It requires partnerships and deep discussions of what transparency and inclusion truly look like….

Perhaps one of the reasons that blockchain has received so much attention is because it speaks to something that many people across the world are feeling instinctively: that we can only create new solutions to some of the world’s oldest problems by working together and including everyone in the discussion. Blockchain appeals to many people as a viable solution precisely because it is about applying a counter-intuitive approach to problems; despite the often technology-deterministic manner in which it is discussed, it is important to listen to the underlying message. The call to inclusion, trust and multilateralism that blockchain attempts to address from a technical perspective is one that will continue for many decades to come and one to which we must find new ways to respond via Governments, civil society, academia, non-governmental organizations and international organizations such as the United Nations….(More)”.

The 2019 Edge New Year’s Essay by George Dyson: “All revolutions come to an end, whether they succeed or fail.

The digital revolution began when stored-program computers broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. Numbers that do things now rule the world. But who rules over the machines?

Once it was simple: programmers wrote the instructions that were supplied to the machines. Since the machines were controlled by these instructions, those who wrote the instructions controlled the machines.

Two things then happened. As computers proliferated, the humans providing instructions could no longer keep up with the insatiable appetite of the machines. Codes became self-replicating, and machines began supplying instructions to other machines. Vast fortunes were made by those who had a hand in this. A small number of people and companies who helped spawn self-replicating codes became some of the richest and most powerful individuals and organizations in the world.

Then something changed. There is now more code than ever, but it is increasingly difficult to find anyone who has their hands on the wheel. Individual agency is on the wane. Most of us, most of the time, are following instructions delivered to us by computers rather than the other way around. The digital revolution has come full circle and the next revolution, an analog revolution, has begun. None dare speak its name.

Childhood’s End was Arthur C. Clarke’s masterpiece, published in 1953, chronicling the arrival of benevolent Overlords who bring many of the same conveniences now delivered by the Keepers of the Internet to Earth. It does not end well…

The genius — sometimes deliberate, sometimes accidental — of the enterprises now on such a steep ascent is that they have found their way through the looking-glass and emerged as something else. Their models are no longer models. The search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge, it is human knowledge. What began as a mapping of human meaning now defines human meaning, and has begun to control, rather than simply catalog or index, human thought. No one is at the controls. If enough drivers subscribe to a real-time map, traffic is controlled, with no central model except the traffic itself. The successful social network is no longer a model of the social graph, it is the social graph. This is why it is a winner-take-all game. Governments, with an allegiance to antiquated models and control systems, are being left behind…(More)”.

Book edited by Oliver Hahn and Florian Stalph: “In the post-digital era, investigative journalism around the world faces a revolutionary shift in the way information is gathered and interpreted. Reporters in the field are confronted with data sources, new logics of information dissemination, and a flood of disinformation. Investigative journalists are working with programmers, designers and scientists to develop innovative tools and hands-on approaches that assist them in disclosing the misuse of power and uncovering injustice.

This volume provides an overview of the most sophisticated techniques of digital investigative journalism: data and computational journalism, which investigates stories hidden in numbers; immersive journalism, which digs into virtual reality; drone journalism, which conquers hitherto inaccessible territories; visual and interactive journalism, which reforms storytelling with images and audience perspectives; and digital forensics and visual analytics, which help to authenticate digital content and identify sources in order to detect manipulation. All these techniques are discussed against the backdrop of international political scenarios and globally networked societies….(More)”.

Book by John Wihbey: “While the public believes that journalism remains crucial for democracy, there is a general sense that the news media are performing this role poorly. In The Social Fact, John Wihbey makes the case that journalism can better serve democracy by focusing on ways of fostering social connection. Wihbey explores how the structure of news, information, and knowledge and their flow through society are changing, and he considers ways in which news media can demonstrate the highest possible societal value in the context of these changes.

Wihbey examines network science as well as the interplay between information and communications technologies (ICTs) and the structure of knowledge in society. He discusses the underlying patterns that characterize our increasingly networked world of information—with its viral phenomena and whiplash-inducing trends, its extremes and surprises. How can the traditional media world be reconciled with the world of social, peer-to-peer platforms, crowdsourcing, and user-generated content? Wihbey outlines a synthesis for news producers and advocates innovation in approach, form, and purpose. The Social Fact provides a valuable framework for doing audience-engaged media work of many kinds in our networked, hybrid media environment. It will be of interest to all those concerned about the future of news and public affairs….(More)”.

Paper by Gianluca Sgueo: “Together with robotics, artificial intelligence, biometrics and data, (serious-) games fall within the technological paradigm that is evolving the administration of public entities. The use of game-design elements beyond mere entertainment is not entirely a new approach to problem solving. Business actors have long-incorporated game-design elements – such as badges, points, levels, rankings, prize challenges, and virtual currencies – into their marketing and communications strategies. However this phenomenon has progressed dramatically in recent years, with the public sector at the forefront of experiments with ‘gamification’. To public regulators, the gamification of governance seems promising on three fronts. First, it encourages innovative, and cost-saving, approaches to regulatory challenges. Second, it presents an opportunity to nurture the trust of citizens, and thus enhance perceptions of legitimacy. Third, it creates new incentives to promote civic engagement and foster participation. What was once simplistically labelled as ‘play’ could become a primary form of interaction with public regulators. After all, who wouldn’t want to have an opportunity to impact on public choices, and do so in a non-boring, novel and dynamic, way?

The gamification of governance – claims this paper – shows great potential to foster civic engagement and encourage participation in policy-making. The data around the general publics’ response and perception to game-design incentives are encouraging. Yet – argues this paper – gamification is not without risks. Various challenges are posed by gamified policy-making, particularly with regards to security and inclusiveness (i.e. do gamified policies conform to recognized security and privacy standards? Are they sufficiently inclusive?). Additionally, concerns surround the quality of public’s response to gamified incentives (i.e. is gamification merely encouraging low-risk/low-cost engagement, or does it genuinely drive public participation, both online and offline?). Questions have also been raised about the longevity and duration of engagement – are game-design elements fostering long-term, durable, civic engagement, or do they merely encourage one-time, occasional, participation? This paper develops around five concepts that are key to understanding the link between gamification with civic engagement and public sector’s innovation. The first is “Reputation”, followed by “Automation” and “Structure”. The fourth and fifth consist of “Nudging” and “Crowdsourcing”, respectively. Alongside the analysis of these concepts, and their respective interplay, the paper provides an empirical account of efforts to ‘gamify’ public policies, at both national and supranational levels; it illustrates the outcomes that public regulators expect from efforts with gamification; and it considers the weaknesses, both practical and theoretical, related to the use of game-design elements to encourage participation….(More)”.

Introductory Chapter by Monique Mann, S. Kate Devitt and Angela Daly for the book on “Good Data”: “In recent years, there has been an exponential increase in the collection, aggregation and automated analysis of information by government and private actors. In response to this there has been significant critique regarding what could be termed ‘bad’ data practices in the globalised digital economy. These include the mass gathering of data about individuals, in opaque, unethical and at times illegal ways, and the increased use of that data in unaccountable and discriminatory forms of algorithmic decision-making.

This edited collection has emerged from our frustration and depression over the previous years of our academic and activist careers critiquing these dystopian ‘Bad Data’ practices. Rather, in this text on ‘Good Data’ we seek to move our work from critique to imagining and articulating a more optimistic vision of the datafied future. We see many previous considerations of Bad Data practices, including our own, as only providing critiques rather than engaging constructively with a new vision of how digital technologies and data can be used productively and justly to further social, economic, cultural and political goals. The objective of the Good Data project is to start a multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder conversation around promoting good and ethical data practices and initiatives, towards a fair and just digital economy and society. In doing so, we combine expertise from various disciplines and sectors, including law, criminology, justice, public health, data science, digital media, and philosophy. The contributors to this text also have expertise in areas such as renewable energy, sociology, social media, digital humanities, and political science. There are many fields of knowledge that need to come together to build the Good Data future. This project has also brought together academic, government and industry experts along with rights advocates and activists to examine and propose initiatives that seeks to promote and embed social justice, due process rights, autonomy, freedom from discrimination and environmental sustainability principles….(More)”.

Book edited by Amanda Wakaruk and Sam-chin Li: “Government information is not something that most people think about until they need it or see it in a headline. Indeed, even then librarians, journalists, and intellectually curious citizens will rarely recognize or identify that the statistics needed to complete a report, or the scandal-breaking evidence behind a politician’s resignation, was sourced from taxpayer-funded publications and documents. Fewer people will likely appreciate the fact that access to government information is a requirement of a democratic society.

Government Information in Canada introduces the average librarian, journalist, researcher, and intellectually curious citizen to the often complex, rarely obvious, and sometimes elusive foundational element of a liberal democracy: publicly accessible government information.

While our primary goal is to provide an overview of the state of access to Canadian government information in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we hope that this work will also encourage its readers to become more active in the government information community by contributing to government consultations and seeking out information that is produced by their governing bodies. ….

One of our goals is to document the state of government information in Canada at a point of transition. To help orient readers to today’s sub-discipline of librarianship, we offer four points that have been observed and learned over decades of working with government information in academic environments.

1. Access to government information is the foundation of a functioning democracy and underpins informed citizen engagement. Government information allows us to assess our governing bodies — access that is required for a democracy to function.
2. Government information has enduring value. The work of countless academics and other experts is disseminated via government information. Government publications and documents are used by academics and social commentators in all areas of intellectual output, resulting in the production of books, reports, speeches, and so forth, which have shaped our society and understanding of the world. For example, the book that introduced the public to the science of climate change, Silent Spring, was full of references to government information; furthermore, legal scholars, lawyers, and judges use legislative documents to interpret and apply the law; journalists use government documents to inform the electorate about their governing bodies. Government information is precarious and requires stewardship.
   
3. The strongest system of stewardship for government information is one that operates in partnership with, and at arm’s length of, author agencies. Most content is digital, but this does not mean that it is posted and openly available online. Furthermore, content made available online does not necessarily remain accessible to the public.
4. Government publications and documents are different from most books, journals, and content born on the Internet. Government information does not fit into the traditional dissemination channels developed and simplified through customer feedback and the pursuit of higher profits. The agencies that produce government information are motivated by different factors than those of traditional publishers…(More)”.

Paper by Heidi Li Feldman: “For too long, legal commentators have developed accounts of law, governments and civil society, and rights to access that society, from a national-federal perspective. As Americans increasingly live in cities, it is time for legal theorists to concentrate on municipalities as the locus of civil society. From an American national-federal perspective, government and law play primarily a remedial role with regard to civil society, stepping in only to resolve great inequities, usually by creating legally recognized civil rights and enforcing them. Civil society and civil rights, however, exceed this cramped national-federal window on it. Throughout the United States today, civil society is a multi-faceted arena for social coordination and social cooperation, for consonant and collective action of many different kinds. The only reason civil rights and the legal protection of them matters is because participation in civil society is makes it possible for individuals to engage in all manner of activities that are useful, enjoyable, and worthwhile. In other words, the significance of civil rights follows from the existence of a civil society worth participating in. To the extent that government can and does make civil society viable and valuable, it is an integral part of civil society. That feature gets lost in a remedial account of the relationship between government, law, and civil society. 

Perhaps the role of cities in civil society has been neglected by the legal academy because cities are not sovereigns. Sovereignty has often been the issue that provokes theoretical attention to government and its role in civil life. At the heart of the federal-national account of civil society and government is the potential threat the sovereign poses to other actors in civil society. But there is no necessary connection between concentrating on the nature and workings of sovereignty and considering the role for government and law in civil society. And when a government is not a sovereign, its ability to threaten is inherently constrained. That is what examining cities, non-sovereign governments embedded in a web of other governments, shows us. 

When we turn our attention to cities, a very different role for government and law emerges. Cities often exemplify how government and law can enable civil society and all those encompassed by it. They show how government can promote and amplify collective action, not only at the local level but even at the international one. In the United States today, governments can and do provide resources for consonant and collective action even in nongovernmental settings. Governments also coordinate and cooperate alongside fellow actors such as citizen activist groups, small and large businesses, labor unions, universities and colleges, and other nongovernmental organizations. This is particularly apparent at the local level. By delving into local government, we gain a distinctive perspective on the intersection of government and law, on one hand, and civil society, on the other — on what that intersection does, can, and should be like. This paper develops a first iteration of a locality centered account of civil society and the role for government and law within it. I examine a particular municipality, the City of Pittsburgh, to provide a concrete example from which to generate ideas and judgements about the terrain and content of this localist account….(More)”.

Rod McCullom at Scientific American: “About 115 people nationwide die every day from opioid overdoses, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A lack of timely, granular data exacerbates the crisis; one study showed opioid deaths were undercounted by as many as 70,000 between 1999 and 2015, making it difficult for governments to respond. But now Internet searches have emerged as a data source to predict overdose clusters in cities or even specific neighborhoods—information that could aid local interventions that save lives. 

The working hypothesis was that some people searching for information on heroin and other opioids might overdose in the near future. To test this, a researcher at the University of California Institute for Prediction Technology (UCIPT) and his colleagues developed several statistical models to forecast overdoses based on opioid-related keywords, metropolitan income inequality and total number of emergency room visits. They discovered regional differences (graphic) in where and how people searched for such information and found that more overdoses were associated with a greater number of searches per keyword. The best-fitting model, the researchers say, explained about 72 percent of the relation between the most popular search terms and heroin-related E.R. visits. The authors say their study, published in the September issue of Drug and Alcohol Dependence, is the first report of using Google searches in this way. 

To develop their models, the researchers obtained search data for 12 prescription and nonprescription opioids between 2005 and 2011 in nine U.S. metropolitan areas. They compared these with Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration records of heroin-related E.R. admissions during the same period. The models can be modified to predict overdoses of other opioids or narrow searches to specific zip codes, says lead study author Sean D. Young, a behavioral psychologist and UCIPT executive director. That could provide early warnings of overdose clusters and help to decide where to distribute the overdose reversal medication Naloxone….(More)”.

Paper by Michler, Jeffrey D., Masters, William A. and Josephson, Anna: “Conversations about ethics often appeal to those responsible for the ethical behavior, encouraging adoption of “better,” more ethical conduct. In this paper, we consider an alternative frame: a typology of ethical misconduct, focusing on who are the victims of various types of unethical behavior. The typology is constructed around 1) who may be harmed and 2) by what mechanism an individual or party is harmed. Building a typology helps to identify times in the life cycle of a research idea where differences exist between who is potentially harmed and who the existing ethical norms protect.

We discuss ethical practices including IRB approvals, which focuses almost entirely on risks to subjects; pre-analysis plans and conflict of interest disclosures, which encourage transparency so as to not mislead editors, reviewers, and readers; and self-plagiarism, which has become increasing common as authors slice their research ever more thinly, causing congestion in journals at the expense of others….(More)”.