“In the case of EVs what is recorded isn’t public knowledge per se, but it is de facto sold as public-private information. Drivers may request to see the data collected about them through the data broker LexisNexis, which reveals how many trips were taken, “start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations”.”
Yes, and this idea of drivers requesting to see the data collected about them has been sold to people as the only conceivable path to “privacy”, or at least, as the best trade-off they can hope for in the realpolitik of how things are now. As you indicate, at some point this transaction came to be understood as the equivalent of not having to transact at all.
Well, Tim Berners-Lee thinks that this trade-off is broken. Who could argue with that high level statement? His revelatory insight into exactly what is broken about it is where his genius becomes so clear. His idea, which he's taken leave from W3C to develop https://www.inrupt.com/blog/one-small-step-for-the-web, is that to “fix” this situation, we should reshape the underlying language and conceptual model, and turn embodiment within what used to be the real world into a modality of constantly managing one’s “own” “data” in order to “interact” with the digital analogs of the real world.
No longer will data be a circumstantial outcome, produced by an interaction of the receding, hidden human, and the platform which, always a broken tool, strives through constant attempts at improving its allure, to capture what it can. Soon, humans will prepare themselves for consumption, inserting themselves into data "pods" which will serve as the mandatory keys for passing from state to state in the digitized world. Their ability to be effective in the world will depend upon the degree to which they are willing to contemplate and pre-author a version of themselves to be unhidden and displayed as the price of entry to any situation, and their skill at breaking themselves down into notes and features. https://avoidingthevoid.wordpress.com/dictionary-of-concepts-for-graham-harmans-object-oriented-philosophy-draft-work-in-progress/
Berners-Lee says that ““[o]wning your own data and really controlling your own commerce infrastructure is something that Web 3 will enable. It will be ultimately really transformational for users.”
Rent-seeking is always transformational for those caught in its gears.
“Berners-Lee hopes his platform will give control back to internet users.
“I think the public has been concerned about privacy — the fact that these platforms have a huge amount of data, and they abuse it,” he says. “But I think what they’re missing sometimes is the lack of empowerment. You need to get back to a situation where you have autonomy, you have control of all your data.””
The meal which co-creates the mise en place is empowered.
As you say, it is imperative to listen to, and learn to love, what the industry wants: ““That big data thing that I worked on in 2012–that ship sailed,” he says. “We don’t want all the data in the world because it’s a bunch of garbage. We want really good data and we want high performance through efficiency. We won’t have data centers that are the size of Sunnyvale anymore that just burn up all the energy. We want super high-efficiency compute.””
It is absolutely true that the collection and interpretation of reams of action traces is overwhelming to any data application team rising higher and higher on its magpie dragon pile of observations. The inference of meaning always hits a wall. How, then, do we get high quality data? Well, we convert people into data managers of the digital re-presentation of their own lives! Whatever they have done in the past, they shall now evaluate, process, and then bring to us for their next turn around the track. Users who do this will find themselves loved right back, because what an armful of roses they will bring:
“users can store any type of data they want, not just HTML pages. “Apps can write to the data store with any kind of data they can imagine. It doesn’t have to be a particular format,” [David Ottenheimer, VP of Berners-Lee’s startup Inrupt,] says. Whether it’s your poetry, the number of chairs you have in your home, your bank account info, or your healthcare record, it can all be stored, secured, and accessed via pods and the Solid protocol.
This approach brings obvious benefits to the individual, who is now empowered to manage his or her own data and grant companies’ access to it, if the deal is agreeable to them. It’s also a natural solution for managing consent, which is a necessity in the world of GDPR. Consent can be as granular as the user likes, and they can cancel the consent at any time, much like they can simply turn off a credit card being used to purchase a service.”
Yes, indeed. Any user should be very excited by this opportunity. In order to interact with the world, which will be a converted world whether one likes it or not into a digital layer, one “can” (and therefore everyone must) recreate themselves digitally, with all of their chairs and poetry, oh and merely incidentally their healthcare and financial selves as well, managed into “pods” which people spend their days granting in and yanking out of apps, in order to obtain what they used to obtain by walking privately down the street, while doing many other things with their hearts and minds that had no relationship whatsoever with preemptively contemplating the commercial use of the fact of their chairs, poetry, and etc. How archaically odd, though, that anyone would think their time was better spent in walking. So simple and efficient, natural even, to spend one’s time thinking about how other entities will want to use one’s data trail.
It’s really merely incidental that “this approach also brings benefits to companies, because using the W3C-sanctioned Solid protocol provide a way to decouple data, applications, and identities. Companies also are alleviated of the burden of having to store and maintain private and sensitive data in accordance with GDPR, HIPAA and other rules.”
It’s all about the user.
It can be about the user’s career path, too!
It’s very exciting to think of all the new architecture which will need to be built around this next turning of the ratchet on the digitization of the remnants of our selves! There will be so many opportunities for business development teams and for capital investment analysts.
Only some of the “[c]ompanies may be loathe to give up control of data.” Other companies will be very excited to provide the SaaS and B2B middle layers which will command and funnel users into adopting the pod way of life.
But look, see, once you’re fully inside your pods, you’ll be able to control your privacy model like no humans in the history of the world have ever been before.
-- edit just a couple of typos
-- edit several hours later: only after posting this comment did this Tim Berners-Lee "data pod" and the chip which you're talking about start to form a picture in my mind. They sure dance well together.
I could even imagine a market for smart devices that help one specifically update the chip. Bring it to the breakfast table with the morning coffee, wave the arm over it, spend some time updating one's chair roster, poetry authorship, and any changes in preferences for fabrics and colors. Create a separate profile for going to happy hour later today, because they don't seat just anyone in the good part of the bar, and don't forget to pre-plan everything else you do today--it's just part of good data hygiene.
Reading the paper or having a chat with one's loving partner is for old fogeys.
Some years ago, when I first read about Berners-Lee's desire to "save the internet from what it's become" I thought he was having a mea culpa moment. I'm not really sure about that any more. I'm curious to know what you think?
Solid response for sure. You hit on a number of issues that I didn't even bring up in the piece, but are worth the time. Tbh I'm still very skeptical of Web3, mostly because of the power of VC money behind certain projects that are less than transparent. In my opinion Web3 is already starting from the point where Web2 passed the point of no return and tried to couch it in very favorable language. I"m not yet sure that Web3 does what it claims to be doing, namely allowing people to own their data and identities and do what they want with them. On paper the idea of decentralization makes a lot of sense, Bitcoin for example seems to solve a lot of issues when it comes to digital currency, traceability, and things of that sort, but what I can see is that most other projects exist to amass data in a giant scale because data IS currency between interested parties who deal with each other on the back end. Web3 seems to be running on an endless ocean of microtransactions and fees. There is a world of difference in fees for say Ethereum transactions vs Fantom transactions, but in the ethical and ideological sense that makes very little difference. All interactions with data, with one's identity, for anything and for any reason, will in this scheme become monetized. I suppose there are positives here as it will, hopefully, reduce the number of identity thefts, but the caveat is that this will only occur in Web3. But don't underestimate the ingenuity of the criminal. One of the greatest pitfalls of tech is that creators have no way to know how actual users will use their products. I just saw a doc about the creation of the game Oregon Trail. I had no idea that as soon as the game went out, kids were able to hack indefinite funds by simply typing the - sign in front of the amount they wanted to spend on provisions. The creators simply didn't think of it and then had to change the code to make people stop doing that. I think as a metaphor for the greater digital world, this is what we're stuck with. Innonvation in this sense is just the 'unknown unknown', the thing we don't know that we don't know. In other words, the unintended consequence of every action. How many innovations were simply mistakes?
I also think, going back to the pods and getting people from one place to another, we're simply dealing with a sociological problem, imho. Since the creation of the internet there's been too much social capital built in places like YouTube, Twitter/X, Instagram and other social media. To get people to accept another form of online existence, their social capital would have to travel with them. This is why data is so crucial and lucrative for corporations and states. The built up social capital means there is an amount of certainty that people will simply move from one place to another without moving into completely different modes of existence. It's just too difficult and inconvenient to change your entire identity and that's why our corporate overlords continually harp on the idea of frictionlessness, throughput, higher and higher TPS, and blah blah. The fantasy of a dynamic, fast changing world is sustained by the rigid structure beneath where very little change actually occurs. In the end it's just different corporations passing the same data back and forth. One day it's Uber, the next day it's Instacart and Doordash. The horizon for companies and states today is to get as many users into their corralls and never allow them to leave, whether it's through rent seeking subsription models (basically debt) or surveillance.
I wonder how much of what Berners-Lee is now doing is some kind of atonement for his earlier 'sins' of creating a monster that escaped his control? You see this all the time with scientists, techno futurist types. Oppenheimer is such a great example of this personality type. Though I doubt that he was ever remorseful of what he did.
“In the case of EVs what is recorded isn’t public knowledge per se, but it is de facto sold as public-private information. Drivers may request to see the data collected about them through the data broker LexisNexis, which reveals how many trips were taken, “start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations”.”
Yes, and this idea of drivers requesting to see the data collected about them has been sold to people as the only conceivable path to “privacy”, or at least, as the best trade-off they can hope for in the realpolitik of how things are now. As you indicate, at some point this transaction came to be understood as the equivalent of not having to transact at all.
Well, Tim Berners-Lee thinks that this trade-off is broken. Who could argue with that high level statement? His revelatory insight into exactly what is broken about it is where his genius becomes so clear. His idea, which he's taken leave from W3C to develop https://www.inrupt.com/blog/one-small-step-for-the-web, is that to “fix” this situation, we should reshape the underlying language and conceptual model, and turn embodiment within what used to be the real world into a modality of constantly managing one’s “own” “data” in order to “interact” with the digital analogs of the real world.
No longer will data be a circumstantial outcome, produced by an interaction of the receding, hidden human, and the platform which, always a broken tool, strives through constant attempts at improving its allure, to capture what it can. Soon, humans will prepare themselves for consumption, inserting themselves into data "pods" which will serve as the mandatory keys for passing from state to state in the digitized world. Their ability to be effective in the world will depend upon the degree to which they are willing to contemplate and pre-author a version of themselves to be unhidden and displayed as the price of entry to any situation, and their skill at breaking themselves down into notes and features. https://avoidingthevoid.wordpress.com/dictionary-of-concepts-for-graham-harmans-object-oriented-philosophy-draft-work-in-progress/
Berners-Lee says that ““[o]wning your own data and really controlling your own commerce infrastructure is something that Web 3 will enable. It will be ultimately really transformational for users.”
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/16/tech/tim-berners-lee-inrupt-spc-intl/index.html
Rent-seeking is always transformational for those caught in its gears.
“Berners-Lee hopes his platform will give control back to internet users.
“I think the public has been concerned about privacy — the fact that these platforms have a huge amount of data, and they abuse it,” he says. “But I think what they’re missing sometimes is the lack of empowerment. You need to get back to a situation where you have autonomy, you have control of all your data.””
The meal which co-creates the mise en place is empowered.
As you say, it is imperative to listen to, and learn to love, what the industry wants: ““That big data thing that I worked on in 2012–that ship sailed,” he says. “We don’t want all the data in the world because it’s a bunch of garbage. We want really good data and we want high performance through efficiency. We won’t have data centers that are the size of Sunnyvale anymore that just burn up all the energy. We want super high-efficiency compute.””
https://www.datanami.com/2023/10/09/berners-lee-startup-seeks-disruption-of-the-current-web-2-0-big-data-paradigm/
It is absolutely true that the collection and interpretation of reams of action traces is overwhelming to any data application team rising higher and higher on its magpie dragon pile of observations. The inference of meaning always hits a wall. How, then, do we get high quality data? Well, we convert people into data managers of the digital re-presentation of their own lives! Whatever they have done in the past, they shall now evaluate, process, and then bring to us for their next turn around the track. Users who do this will find themselves loved right back, because what an armful of roses they will bring:
“users can store any type of data they want, not just HTML pages. “Apps can write to the data store with any kind of data they can imagine. It doesn’t have to be a particular format,” [David Ottenheimer, VP of Berners-Lee’s startup Inrupt,] says. Whether it’s your poetry, the number of chairs you have in your home, your bank account info, or your healthcare record, it can all be stored, secured, and accessed via pods and the Solid protocol.
This approach brings obvious benefits to the individual, who is now empowered to manage his or her own data and grant companies’ access to it, if the deal is agreeable to them. It’s also a natural solution for managing consent, which is a necessity in the world of GDPR. Consent can be as granular as the user likes, and they can cancel the consent at any time, much like they can simply turn off a credit card being used to purchase a service.”
Yes, indeed. Any user should be very excited by this opportunity. In order to interact with the world, which will be a converted world whether one likes it or not into a digital layer, one “can” (and therefore everyone must) recreate themselves digitally, with all of their chairs and poetry, oh and merely incidentally their healthcare and financial selves as well, managed into “pods” which people spend their days granting in and yanking out of apps, in order to obtain what they used to obtain by walking privately down the street, while doing many other things with their hearts and minds that had no relationship whatsoever with preemptively contemplating the commercial use of the fact of their chairs, poetry, and etc. How archaically odd, though, that anyone would think their time was better spent in walking. So simple and efficient, natural even, to spend one’s time thinking about how other entities will want to use one’s data trail.
It’s really merely incidental that “this approach also brings benefits to companies, because using the W3C-sanctioned Solid protocol provide a way to decouple data, applications, and identities. Companies also are alleviated of the burden of having to store and maintain private and sensitive data in accordance with GDPR, HIPAA and other rules.”
It’s all about the user.
It can be about the user’s career path, too!
It’s very exciting to think of all the new architecture which will need to be built around this next turning of the ratchet on the digitization of the remnants of our selves! There will be so many opportunities for business development teams and for capital investment analysts.
Only some of the “[c]ompanies may be loathe to give up control of data.” Other companies will be very excited to provide the SaaS and B2B middle layers which will command and funnel users into adopting the pod way of life.
But look, see, once you’re fully inside your pods, you’ll be able to control your privacy model like no humans in the history of the world have ever been before.
-- edit just a couple of typos
-- edit several hours later: only after posting this comment did this Tim Berners-Lee "data pod" and the chip which you're talking about start to form a picture in my mind. They sure dance well together.
I could even imagine a market for smart devices that help one specifically update the chip. Bring it to the breakfast table with the morning coffee, wave the arm over it, spend some time updating one's chair roster, poetry authorship, and any changes in preferences for fabrics and colors. Create a separate profile for going to happy hour later today, because they don't seat just anyone in the good part of the bar, and don't forget to pre-plan everything else you do today--it's just part of good data hygiene.
Reading the paper or having a chat with one's loving partner is for old fogeys.
Some years ago, when I first read about Berners-Lee's desire to "save the internet from what it's become" I thought he was having a mea culpa moment. I'm not really sure about that any more. I'm curious to know what you think?
Solid response for sure. You hit on a number of issues that I didn't even bring up in the piece, but are worth the time. Tbh I'm still very skeptical of Web3, mostly because of the power of VC money behind certain projects that are less than transparent. In my opinion Web3 is already starting from the point where Web2 passed the point of no return and tried to couch it in very favorable language. I"m not yet sure that Web3 does what it claims to be doing, namely allowing people to own their data and identities and do what they want with them. On paper the idea of decentralization makes a lot of sense, Bitcoin for example seems to solve a lot of issues when it comes to digital currency, traceability, and things of that sort, but what I can see is that most other projects exist to amass data in a giant scale because data IS currency between interested parties who deal with each other on the back end. Web3 seems to be running on an endless ocean of microtransactions and fees. There is a world of difference in fees for say Ethereum transactions vs Fantom transactions, but in the ethical and ideological sense that makes very little difference. All interactions with data, with one's identity, for anything and for any reason, will in this scheme become monetized. I suppose there are positives here as it will, hopefully, reduce the number of identity thefts, but the caveat is that this will only occur in Web3. But don't underestimate the ingenuity of the criminal. One of the greatest pitfalls of tech is that creators have no way to know how actual users will use their products. I just saw a doc about the creation of the game Oregon Trail. I had no idea that as soon as the game went out, kids were able to hack indefinite funds by simply typing the - sign in front of the amount they wanted to spend on provisions. The creators simply didn't think of it and then had to change the code to make people stop doing that. I think as a metaphor for the greater digital world, this is what we're stuck with. Innonvation in this sense is just the 'unknown unknown', the thing we don't know that we don't know. In other words, the unintended consequence of every action. How many innovations were simply mistakes?
I also think, going back to the pods and getting people from one place to another, we're simply dealing with a sociological problem, imho. Since the creation of the internet there's been too much social capital built in places like YouTube, Twitter/X, Instagram and other social media. To get people to accept another form of online existence, their social capital would have to travel with them. This is why data is so crucial and lucrative for corporations and states. The built up social capital means there is an amount of certainty that people will simply move from one place to another without moving into completely different modes of existence. It's just too difficult and inconvenient to change your entire identity and that's why our corporate overlords continually harp on the idea of frictionlessness, throughput, higher and higher TPS, and blah blah. The fantasy of a dynamic, fast changing world is sustained by the rigid structure beneath where very little change actually occurs. In the end it's just different corporations passing the same data back and forth. One day it's Uber, the next day it's Instacart and Doordash. The horizon for companies and states today is to get as many users into their corralls and never allow them to leave, whether it's through rent seeking subsription models (basically debt) or surveillance.
I wonder how much of what Berners-Lee is now doing is some kind of atonement for his earlier 'sins' of creating a monster that escaped his control? You see this all the time with scientists, techno futurist types. Oppenheimer is such a great example of this personality type. Though I doubt that he was ever remorseful of what he did.