Curated findings and actionable knowledge at the intersection of technology, innovation, and governance
“Museum of Failure is a collection of failed products and services from around the world. The majority of all innovation projects fail and the museum showcases these failures to provide visitors a fascinating learning experience. Every item provides unique insight into the risky business of innovation.
Innovation and progress require an acceptance of failure. The museum aims to stimulate productive discussion about failure and inspire us to take meaningful risks….(More)”.
Ben Brody at Protocol: “Congress has failed to regulate tech, so states and cities are stepping in with their own approaches to food delivery apps, AI regulation and, yes, privacy. Tech doesn’t like what it sees….
Andrew Rigie said it isn’t worth waiting around for tech regulation in Washington.
“New York City is a restaurant capital of the world,” Rigie told Protocol. “We need to lead on these issues.”
Rigie, executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, has pushed for New York City’s new laws on food delivery apps such as Uber Eats. His group supported measures to make permanent a cap on the service fees the apps charge to restaurants, ban the apps from listing eateries without permission and share customer information with restaurants that ask for it.
While Rigie’s official purview is dining in the Big Apple, his belief that the local government should lead on regulating tech companies in a way Washington hasn’t has become increasingly common.
“It wouldn’t be a surprise if lawmakers elsewhere seek to implement similar policies,” Rigie said. “Some of it could potentially come from the federal government, but New York City can’t wait for the federal government to maybe act.”
New York is not the only city to take action. While the Federal Trade Commission has faced calls to regulate third-party food delivery apps at a national level, San Francisco was first to pass a permanent fee cap for them in June.
Food apps are just a microcosm highlighting the patchworks of local-level regulation that are developing, or are already a fact of life, for tech. These regulatory patchworks occur when state and local governments move ahead of Congress to pass their own, often divergent, laws and rules. So far, states and municipalities are racing ahead of the feds on issues such as cybersecurity, municipal broadband, content moderation, gig work, the use of facial recognition, digital taxes, mobile app store fees and consumer rights to repair their own devices, among others.
Many in tech became familiar with the idea when the California Consumer Privacy Act passed in 2018, making it clear more states would follow suit, although the possibility has popped up throughout modern tech policy history on issues such as privacy requirements on ISPs, net neutrality and even cybersecurity breach notification.
Many patchworks reflect the stance of advocates, consumers and legislators that Washington has simply failed to do its job on tech. The resulting uncompromising or inconsistent approaches by local governments also has tech companies worried enough to push Congress to overrule states and establish one uniform U.S. standard.
“With a bit of a vacuum at the federal level, states are looking to step in, whether that’s on content moderation, whether that’s on speech on platforms, antitrust and anticompetitive conduct regulation, data privacy,” said April Doss, executive director of Georgetown University’s Institute for Technology Law and Policy. “It is the whole bundle of issues.”…(More)“
Book by Pablo J. Boczkowski: “The book examines the experience of living in a society that has more information available to the public than ever before. It focuses on the interpretations, emotions, and practices of dealing with this abundance in everyday life. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and survey research conducted in Argentina, the book inquiries into the role of cultural and structural factors that mediate between the availability of information and the actual consequences for individuals, media, politics, and society. Providing the first book-length account of the topic in the Global South, it concludes that the experience of information abundance is tied to an overall unsettling of society, a reconstitution of how we understand and perform our relationships with others, and a twin depreciation of facts and appreciation of fictions….(More)”.
Open Access Book edited by Hannes Werthner, Erich Prem, Edward A. Lee, and Carlo Ghezzi: “Digital Humanism is young; it has evolved from an unease about the consequences of a digitized world for human beings, into an internationally connected community that aims at developing concepts to provide a positive and constructive response. Following up on several successful workshops and a lecture series that bring together authorities of the various disciplines, this book is our latest contribution to the ongoing international discussions and developments. We have compiled a collection of 46 articles from experts with different disciplinary and institutional backgrounds, who provide their view on the interplay of human and machine.
Please note our open access publishing strategy for this book to enable widespread circulation and accessibility. This means that you can make use of the content freely, as long as you ensure appropriate referencing. At the same time, the book is also published in printed and online versions by Springer….(More)”.
Paper by Timothy J. Besley, Robin Burgess, Adnan Khan & Guo Xu: “In recent years, there has been increasing interest in whether and how bureaucratic effectiveness contributes to development. Just what makes for an effective bureaucracy and what are the building blocks of state capacity remain subject to debate. This paper reviews the arguments connecting contemporary research using administrative data and field experiments to wider discussions of the origins of state capacity. Most current research has been focused on understanding specific features of the environment in which bureaucrats operate. We connect this to discussions of bureaucratic systems, specifically the relationship to politics, citizens, firms and NGOs….(More)”.
Essay by Lidija Haas: “Manifesto is the form that eats and repeats itself. Always layered and paradoxical, it comes disguised as nakedness, directness, aggression. An artwork aspiring to be a speech act—like a threat, a promise, a joke, a spell, a dare. You can’t help but thrill to language that imagines it can get something done. You also can’t help noticing the similar demands and condemnations that ring out across the decades and the centuries—something will be swept away or conjured into being, and it must happen right this moment. While appearing to invent itself ex nihilo, the manifesto grabs whatever magpie trinkets it can find, including those that drew the eye in earlier manifestos. This is a form that asks readers to suspend their disbelief, and so like any piece of theater, it trades on its own vulnerability, invites our complicity, as if only the quality of our attention protects it from reality’s brutal puncture. A manifesto is a public declaration of intent, a laying out of the writer’s views (shared, it’s implied, by at least some vanguard “we”) on how things are and how they should be altered. Once the province of institutional authority, decrees from church or state, the manifesto later flowered as a mode of presumption and dissent. You assume the writer stands outside the halls of power (or else, occasionally, chooses to pose and speak from there). Today the US government, for example, does not issue manifestos, lest it sound both hectoring and weak. The manifesto is inherently quixotic—spoiling for a fight it’s unlikely to win, insisting on an outcome it lacks the authority to ensure.
Somewhere a manifesto is always being scrawled, but the ones that survive have usually proliferated at times of ferment and rebellion, like the pamphlets of the Diggers in seventeenth-century England, or the burst of exhortations that surrounded the French Revolution, including, most memorably, Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The manifesto is a creature of the Enlightenment: its logic depends on ideals of sovereign reason, social progress, a universal subject on whom equal rights should (must) be bestowed. Still unsurpassed as a model (for style, force, economy, ambition) is Marx and Engels’s 1848 Communist Manifesto, crammed with killer lines, which Marshall Berman called “the first great modernist work of art.” In its wake came the Futurists—“We wish to destroy museums, libraries, academies of any sort, and fight against moralism, feminism, and every kind of materialistic, self-serving cowardice”—and the great flood of manifestos by artists, activists, and other renegades in the decades after 1910, followed by another peak in the 1960s and ’70s.
After that point, fewer broke through the general noise, though those that have lasted cast a weird light back on what came before: Donna J. Haraway’s postmodern 1985 “A Cyborg Manifesto,” for instance, in refusing fantasies of wholeness, purity, full communication—“The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams . . . of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one”—presents the manifesto as a form that can speak from the corner of its mouth, that always says more and less than it appears to say, that teases and exaggerates, that usefully undermines itself. Haraway makes an explicit case for “serious play” and for irreconcilable contradictions, introducing her “effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. . . . More faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification.” By directly announcing its own tricksiness (an extra contradiction in itself), “A Cyborg Manifesto” seems both to critique its predecessors and to hint that even the most overweening of them were never quite designed to be read straight….(More)”.
Paper by Charles Tyler and Heather Gerken: “A classic constitutional parable teaches that our federal system of government allows the American states to function as “laboratories of democracy.” This tale has been passed down from generation to generation, often to justify constitutional protections for state autonomy from the federal government. But scholars have failed to explain how state governments manage to overcome numerous impediments to experimentation, including re-source scarcity, free-rider problems, and misaligned incentives.
This Article maintains that the laboratories account is missing a proper appreciation for the coordinated networks of third-party organizations (such as interest groups, activists, and funders) that often fuel policy innovation. These groups are the real laboratories of democracy today, as they perform the lion’s share of tasks necessary to enact new policies; they create incentives that motivate elected officials to support their preferred policies; and they mobilize the power of the federal government to change the land-scape against which state experimentation occurs. If our federal system of government seeks to encourage policy experimentation, this insight has several implications for legal doctrine. At a high level of generality, courts should endeavor to create ground rules for regulating competition between political networks, rather than continuing futile efforts to protect state autonomy. The Article concludes by sketching the outlines of this approach in several areas of legal doctrine, including federal preemption of state law, conditional spending, and the anti-commandeering principle….(More)”
Policy Brief by Muriel Poisson: “As part of its research project on ‘Open government (OG) in education: Learning from experience’, the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) has prepared five thematic briefs illustrating various forms of OG as applied to the education field: open government, open budgeting, open contracting, open policy-making and crowd-sourcing, and social auditing. This brief deals specifically with open policy-making and crowd-sourcing….(More)”.
Book by Caleb Scharf: “One of the most peculiar and possibly unique features of humans is the vast amount of information we carry outside our biological selves. But in our rush to build the infrastructure for the 20 quintillion bits we create every day, we’ve failed to ask exactly why we’re expending ever-increasing amounts of energy, resources, and human effort to maintain all this data.
Drawing on deep ideas and frontier thinking in evolutionary biology, computer science, information theory, and astrobiology, Caleb Scharf argues that information is, in a very real sense, alive. All the data we create—all of our emails, tweets, selfies, A.I.-generated text, and funny cat videos—amounts to an aggregate lifeform. It has goals and needs. It can control our behavior and influence our well-being. And it’s an organism that has evolved right alongside us.
This symbiotic relationship with information offers a startling new lens for looking at the world. Data isn’t just something we produce; it’s the reason we exist. This powerful idea has the potential to upend the way we think about our technology, our role as humans, and the fundamental nature of life.
The Ascent of Information offers a humbling vision of a universe built of and for information. Scharf explores how our relationship with data will affect our ongoing evolution as a species. Understanding this relationship will be crucial to preventing our data from becoming more of a burden than an asset, and to preserving the possibility of a human future….(More)”.
Essay by Emily Bell: “…But putting a stop to militarized fascist movements—and preventing another attack on a government building—will ultimately require more than content removal. Technology companies need to fundamentally recalibrate how they categorize, promote, and circulate everything under their banner, particularly news. They have to acknowledge their editorial responsibility.
The extraordinary power of tech platforms to decide what material is worth seeing—under the loosest possible definition of who counts as a “journalist”—has always been a source of tension with news publishers. These companies have now been put in the position of being held accountable for developing an information ecosystem based in fact. It’s unclear how much they are prepared to do, if they will ever really invest in pro-truth mechanisms on a global scale. But it is clear that, after the Capitol riot, there’s no going back to the way things used to be.
Between 2016 and 2020, Facebook, Twitter, and Google made dozens of announcements promising to increase the exposure of high-quality news and get rid of harmful misinformation. They claimed to be investing in content moderation and fact-checking; they assured us that they were creating helpful products like the Facebook News Tab. Yet the result of all these changes has been hard to examine, since the data is both scarce and incomplete. Gordon Crovitz—a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal and a cofounder of NewsGuard, which applies ratings to news sources based on their credibility—has been frustrated by the lack of transparency: “In Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter we have institutions that we know all give quality ratings to news sources in different ways,” he told me. “But if you are a news organization and you want to know how you are rated, you can ask them how these systems are constructed, and they won’t tell you.” Consider the mystery behind blue-check certification on Twitter, or the absurdly wide scope of the “Media/News” category on Facebook. “The issue comes down to a fundamental failure to understand the core concepts of journalism,” Crovitz said.
Still, researchers have managed to put together a general picture of how technology companies handle various news sources. According to Jennifer Grygiel, an assistant professor of communications at Syracuse University, “we know that there is a taxonomy within these companies, because we have seen them dial up and dial down the exposure of quality news outlets.” Internally, platforms rank journalists and outlets and make certain designations, which are then used to develop algorithms for personalized news recommendations and news products….(More)”