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Aurialie Jublin

An Apology for the Internet - From the People Who Built It - 1 views

nymag.com/...m-the-people-who-built-it.html

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 27 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • There have always been outsiders who criticized the tech industry — even if their concerns have been drowned out by the oohs and aahs of consumers, investors, and journalists. But today, the most dire warnings are coming from the heart of Silicon Valley itself. The man who oversaw the creation of the original iPhone believes the device he helped build is too addictive. The inventor of the World Wide Web fears his creation is being “weaponized.” Even Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, has blasted social media as a dangerous form of psychological manipulation. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” he lamented recently.
  • To keep the internet free — while becoming richer, faster, than anyone in history — the technological elite needed something to attract billions of users to the ads they were selling. And that something, it turns out, was outrage. As Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in virtual reality, points out, anger is the emotion most effective at driving “engagement” — which also makes it, in a market for attention, the most profitable one. By creating a self-perpetuating loop of shock and recrimination, social media further polarized what had already seemed, during the Obama years, an impossibly and irredeemably polarized country.
  • The Architects (In order of appearance.) Jaron Lanier, virtual-reality pioneer. Founded first company to sell VR goggles; worked at Atari and Microsoft. Antonio García Martínez, ad-tech entrepreneur. Helped create Facebook’s ad machine. Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit. Filed major gender-discrimination lawsuit against VC firm Kleiner Perkins. Can Duruk, programmer and tech writer. Served as project lead at Uber. Kate Losse, Facebook employee No. 51. Served as Mark Zuckerberg’s speechwriter. Tristan Harris, product designer. Wrote internal Google presentation about addictive and unethical design. Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka, entrepreneur who founded influential message board Something Awful. Ethan Zuckerman, MIT media scholar. Invented the pop-up ad. Dan McComas, former product chief at Reddit. Founded community-based platform Imzy. Sandy Parakilas, product manager at Uber. Ran privacy compliance for Facebook apps. Guillaume Chaslot, AI researcher. Helped develop YouTube’s algorithmic recommendation system. Roger McNamee, VC investor. Introduced Mark Zuckerberg to Sheryl Sandberg. Richard Stallman, MIT programmer. Created legendary software GNU and Emacs.
  • ...45 more annotations...
  • How It Went Wrong, in 15 Steps Step 1 Start With Hippie Good Intentions …
  • I think two things are at the root of the present crisis. One was the idealistic view of the internet — the idea that this is the great place to share information and connect with like-minded people. The second part was the people who started these companies were very homogeneous. You had one set of experiences, one set of views, that drove all of the platforms on the internet. So the combination of this belief that the internet was a bright, positive place and the very similar people who all shared that view ended up creating platforms that were designed and oriented around free speech.
  • Step 2 … Then mix in capitalism on steroids. To transform the world, you first need to take it over. The planetary scale and power envisioned by Silicon Valley’s early hippies turned out to be as well suited for making money as they were for saving the world.
  • Step 3 The arrival of Wall Streeters didn’t help … Just as Facebook became the first overnight social-media success, the stock market crashed, sending money-minded investors westward toward the tech industry. Before long, a handful of companies had created a virtual monopoly on digital life.
  • Ethan Zuckerman: Over the last decade, the social-media platforms have been working to make the web almost irrelevant. Facebook would, in many ways, prefer that we didn’t have the internet. They’d prefer that we had Facebook.
  • Step 4 … And we paid a high price for keeping it free. To avoid charging for the internet — while becoming fabulously rich at the same time — Silicon Valley turned to digital advertising. But to sell ads that target individual users, you need to grow a big audience — and use advancing technology to gather reams of personal data that will enable you to reach them efficiently.
  • Harris: If you’re YouTube, you want people to register as many accounts as possible, uploading as many videos as possible, driving as many views to those videos as possible, so you can generate lots of activity that you can sell to advertisers. So whether or not the users are real human beings or Russian bots, whether or not the videos are real or conspiracy theories or disturbing content aimed at kids, you don’t really care. You’re just trying to drive engagement to the stuff and maximize all that activity. So everything stems from this engagement-based business model that incentivizes the most mindless things that harm the fabric of society.
  • Step 5 Everything was designed to be really, really addictive. The social-media giants became “attention merchants,” bent on hooking users no mater the consequences. “Engagement” was the euphemism for the metric, but in practice it evolved into an unprecedented machine for behavior modification.
  • Harris: That blue Facebook icon on your home screen is really good at creating unconscious habits that people have a hard time extinguishing. People don’t see the way that their minds are being manipulated by addiction. Facebook has become the largest civilization-scale mind-control machine that the world has ever seen.
  • Step 6 At first, it worked — almost too well. None of the companies hid their plans or lied about how their money was made. But as users became deeply enmeshed in the increasingly addictive web of surveillance, the leading digital platforms became wildly popular.
  • Pao: There’s this idea that, “Yes, they can use this information to manipulate other people, but I’m not gonna fall for that, so I’m protected from being manipulated.” Slowly, over time, you become addicted to the interactions, so it’s hard to opt out. And they just keep taking more and more of your time and pushing more and more fake news. It becomes easy just to go about your life and assume that things are being taken care of.
  • McNamee: If you go back to the early days of propaganda theory, Edward Bernays had a hypothesis that to implant an idea and make it universally acceptable, you needed to have the same message appearing in every medium all the time for a really long period of time. The notion was it could only be done by a government. Then Facebook came along, and it had this ability to personalize for every single user. Instead of being a broadcast model, it was now 2.2 billion individualized channels. It was the most effective product ever created to revolve around human emotions.
  • Step 7 No one from Silicon Valley was held accountable … No one in the government — or, for that matter, in the tech industry’s user base — seemed interested in bringing such a wealthy, dynamic sector to heel.
  • Step 8 … Even as social networks became dangerous and toxic. With companies scaling at unprecedented rates, user security took a backseat to growth and engagement. Resources went to selling ads, not protecting users from abuse.
  • Lanier: Every time there’s some movement like Black Lives Matter or #MeToo, you have this initial period where people feel like they’re on this magic-carpet ride. Social media is letting them reach people and organize faster than ever before. They’re thinking, Wow, Facebook and Twitter are these wonderful tools of democracy. But it turns out that the same data that creates a positive, constructive process like the Arab Spring can be used to irritate other groups. So every time you have a Black Lives Matter, social media responds by empowering neo-Nazis and racists in a way that hasn’t been seen in generations. The original good intention winds up empowering its opposite.
  • Chaslot: As an engineer at Google, I would see something weird and propose a solution to management. But just noticing the problem was hurting the business model. So they would say, “Okay, but is it really a problem?” They trust the structure. For instance, I saw this conspiracy theory that was spreading. It’s really large — I think the algorithm may have gone crazy. But I was told, “Don’t worry — we have the best people working on it. It should be fine.” Then they conclude that people are just stupid. They don’t want to believe that the problem might be due to the algorithm.
  • Parakilas: One time a developer who had access to Facebook’s data was accused of creating profiles of people without their consent, including children. But when we heard about it, we had no way of proving whether it had actually happened, because we had no visibility into the data once it left Facebook’s servers. So Facebook had policies against things like this, but it gave us no ability to see what developers were actually doing.
  • McComas: Ultimately the problem Reddit has is the same as Twitter: By focusing on growth and growth only, and ignoring the problems, they amassed a large set of cultural norms on their platforms that stem from harassment or abuse or bad behavior. They have worked themselves into a position where they’re completely defensive and they can just never catch up on the problem. I don’t see any way it’s going to improve. The best they can do is figure out how to hide the bad behavior from the average user.
  • Step 9 … And even as they invaded our privacy. The more features Facebook and other platforms added, the more data users willingly, if unwittingly, released to them and the data brokers who power digital advertising.
  • Richard Stallman: What is data privacy? That means that if a company collects data about you, it should somehow protect that data. But I don’t think that’s the issue. The problem is that these companies are collecting data about you, period. We shouldn’t let them do that. The data that is collected will be abused. That’s not an absolute certainty, but it’s a practical extreme likelihood, which is enough to make collection a problem.
  • Losse: I’m not surprised at what’s going on now with Cambridge Analytica and the scandal over the election. For long time, the accepted idea at Facebook was: Giving developers as much data as possible to make these products is good. But to think that, you also have to not think about the data implications for users. That’s just not your priority.
  • Step 10 Then came 2016. The election of Donald Trump and the triumph of Brexit, two campaigns powered in large part by social media, demonstrated to tech insiders that connecting the world — at least via an advertising-surveillance scheme — doesn’t necessarily lead to that hippie utopia.
  • Chaslot: I realized personally that things were going wrong in 2011, when I was working at Google. I was working on this YouTube recommendation algorithm, and I realized that the algorithm was always giving you the same type of content. For instance, if I give you a video of a cat and you watch it, the algorithm thinks, Oh, he must really like cats. That creates these feeder bubbles where people just see one type of information. But when I notified my managers at Google and proposed a solution that would give a user more control so he could get out of the feeder bubble, they realized that this type of algorithm would not be very beneficial for watch time. They didn’t want to push that, because the entire business model is based on watch time.
  • Step 11 Employees are starting to revolt. Tech-industry executives aren’t likely to bite the hand that feeds them. But maybe their employees — the ones who signed up for the mission as much as the money — can rise up and make a change.
  • Harris: There’s a massive demoralizing wave that is hitting Silicon Valley. It’s getting very hard for companies to attract and retain the best engineers and talent when they realize that the automated system they’ve built is causing havoc everywhere around the world. So if Facebook loses a big chunk of its workforce because people don’t want to be part of that perverse system anymore, that is a very powerful and very immediate lever to force them to change.
  • Duruk: I was at Uber when all the madness was happening there, and it did affect recruiting and hiring. I don’t think these companies are going to go down because they can’t attract the right talent. But there’s going to be a measurable impact. It has become less of a moral positive now — you go to Facebook to write some code and then you go home. They’re becoming just another company.
  • Step 12 To fix it, we’ll need a new business model … If the problem is in the way the Valley makes money, it’s going to have to make money a different way. Maybe by trying something radical and new — like charging users for goods and services.
  • Parakilas: They’re going to have to change their business model quite dramatically. They say they want to make time well spent the focus of their product, but they have no incentive to do that, nor have they created a metric by which they would measure that. But if Facebook charged a subscription instead of relying on advertising, then people would use it less and Facebook would still make money. It would be equally profitable and more beneficial to society. In fact, if you charged users a few dollars a month, you would equal the revenue Facebook gets from advertising. It’s not inconceivable that a large percentage of their user base would be willing to pay a few dollars a month.
  • Step 13 … And some tough regulation. Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress on April 10. Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images While we’re at it, where has the government been in all this? 
  • Stallman: We need a law. Fuck them — there’s no reason we should let them exist if the price is knowing everything about us. Let them disappear. They’re not important — our human rights are important. No company is so important that its existence justifies setting up a police state. And a police state is what we’re heading toward.
  • Duruk: The biggest existential problem for them would be regulation. Because it’s clear that nothing else will stop these companies from using their size and their technology to just keep growing. Without regulation, we’ll basically just be complaining constantly, and not much will change.
  • McNamee: Three things. First, there needs to be a law against bots and trolls impersonating other people. I’m not saying no bots. I’m just saying bots have to be really clearly marked. Second, there have to be strict age limits to protect children. And third, there has to be genuine liability for platforms when their algorithms fail. If Google can’t block the obviously phony story that the kids in Parkland were actors, they need to be held accountable.
  • Stallman: We need a law that requires every system to be designed in a way that achieves its basic goal with the least possible collection of data. Let’s say you want to ride in a car and pay for the ride. That doesn’t fundamentally require knowing who you are. So services which do that must be required by law to give you the option of paying cash, or using some other anonymous-payment system, without being identified. They should also have ways you can call for a ride without identifying yourself, without having to use a cell phone. Companies that won’t go along with this — well, they’re welcome to go out of business. Good riddance.
  • Step 14 Maybe nothing will change. The scariest possibility is that nothing can be done — that the behemoths of the new internet are too rich, too powerful, and too addictive for anyone to fix.
  • García: Look, I mean, advertising sucks, sure. But as the ad tech guys say, “We’re the people who pay for the internet.” It’s hard to imagine a different business model other than advertising for any consumer internet app that depends on network effects.
  • Step 15 … Unless, at the very least, some new people are in charge. If Silicon Valley’s problems are a result of bad decision-making, it might be time to look for better decision-makers. One place to start would be outside the homogeneous group currently in power.
  • Pao: I’ve urged Facebook to bring in people who are not part of a homogeneous majority to their executive team, to every product team, to every strategy discussion. The people who are there now clearly don’t understand the impact of their platforms and the nature of the problem. You need people who are living the problem to clarify the extent of it and help solve it.
  • Things That Ruined the Internet
  • Cookies (1994) The original surveillance tool of the internet. Developed by programmer Lou Montulli to eliminate the need for repeated log-ins, cookies also enabled third parties like Google to track users across the web. The risk of abuse was low, Montulli thought, because only a “large, publicly visible company” would have the capacity to make use of such data. The result: digital ads that follow you wherever you go online.
  • The Farmville vulnerability (2007)   When Facebook opened up its social network to third-party developers, enabling them to build apps that users could share with their friends, it inadvertently opened the door a bit too wide. By tapping into user accounts, developers could download a wealth of personal data — which is exactly what a political-consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica did to 87 million Americans.
  • Algorithmic sorting (2006) It’s how the internet serves up what it thinks you want — automated calculations based on dozens of hidden metrics. Facebook’s News Feed uses it every time you hit refresh, and so does YouTube. It’s highly addictive — and it keeps users walled off in their own personalized loops. “When social media is designed primarily for engagement,” tweets Guillaume Chaslot, the engineer who designed YouTube’s algorithm, “it is not surprising that it hurts democracy and free speech.”
  • The “like” button (2009) Initially known as the “awesome” button, the icon was designed to unleash a wave of positivity online. But its addictive properties became so troubling that one of its creators, Leah Pearlman, has since renounced it. “Do you know that episode of Black Mirror where everyone is obsessed with likes?” she told Vice last year. “I suddenly felt terrified of becoming those people — as well as thinking I’d created that environment for everyone else.”
  • Pull-to-refresh (2009) Developed by software developer Loren Brichter for an iPhone app, the simple gesture — scrolling downward at the top of a feed to fetch more data — has become an endless, involuntary tic. “Pull-to-refresh is addictive,” Brichter told The Guardian last year. “I regret the downsides.”
  • Pop-up ads (1996) While working at an early blogging platform, Ethan Zuckerman came up with the now-ubiquitous tool for separating ads from content that advertisers might find objectionable. “I really did not mean to break the internet,” he told the podcast Reply All. “I really did not mean to bring this horrible thing into people’s lives. I really am extremely sorry about this.”
  • The Silicon Valley dream was born of the counterculture. A generation of computer programmers and designers flocked to the Bay Area’s tech scene in the 1970s and ’80s, embracing new technology as a tool to transform the world for good.
  • Cécile Christodoulou on 27 Aug 18
     
    Internet en 15 étapes, de sa construction à aujourd'hui, regards et regrets de ceux qui l'ont construit... [...] "Things That Ruined the Internet" les cookies 1994 / la faille Farmville 2007 / le tri algorithmique 2006 / le "like" 2009 / le "pull to refresh" 2009 / les "pop-up ads" 1996 [...]
Aurialie Jublin

Gauthier Roussilhe | Guide de conversion numérique au low tech - 0 views

gauthierroussilhe.com/...convert-low-tech

lowtech low-tech web site sobriété

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 08 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • Aurialie Jublin on 08 Apr 19
     
    "En mars 2019 j'ai mis en ligne mon nouveau site web en suivant des principes de conception "low tech". Je me suis décidé à faire cela car, premièrement, j'ai été impressionné par la refonte de solar.lowtechmagazine.com. Leur site est devenu extrêmement léger grâce à une approche esthétique et technique sensée. De plus ils ont pensé au système énergétique : le serveur est alimenté par un panneau solaire et une batterie, ce qui veut dire que si la batterie est à plat et si le temps est mauvais alors le site n'est plus en ligne. Deuxièmement, depuis 2 ans je m'intéresse au concept d'Anthropocène, aux politiques de transition sociale et écologique et à l'impact du numérique sur les écosystèmes. Ces recherches et travaux de terrain m'ont permis de refonder complètement ma pratique et j'avais envie de développer un outil qui pourrait démontrer ce changement dans ma pratique de designer et inspirer d'autres personnes à faire de même."
Aurialie Jublin

Chartes et manifestes numérique et éthique - HackMD - 0 views

hackmd.io/SJsM1gflH

charte manifeste

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 08 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • En français Manifeste RESET - 2019 - FING Label territoire numérique inclusif-mars 2019 Orientations stratégiques cadrant le développement des projets numériques au Pôle Solidarité Citoyenneté Culture de Rennes métropole 1 Développer des services numériques nouveaux pour une accessibilité renforcée aux services publics 2 Lutter contre la fracture numérique (et l’intégrer dans le point numéro 1) 3 Impulser une culture collaborative (personnes morales, habitants, institutions, etc) 4 Faire place et donner à voir l’innovation et l’expérimentation 5 Accompagner en interne l’appropriation d’une culture du numérique dans la collectivité. Conception numérique responsable - Low tech - Green IT (eco-responsable) Charte territoire France connectée pour un numérique inclusif (décembre 2018 - Etat-Gironde) - il existerait un pdf en ligne :-) Déclaration de Montréal IA Responsable Charte sur l’usage de la donnée - Nantes métropole - juin 2019 Manifeste de la fabcity Manifeste pour une démocratie délibérative (civic tech-BlueNove) Projet de charte des smart cities (ADULLACT - juin 2019) Charte PrestaLibre pour les relations entre prestataires informatiques et collectivités (2018, Lorient et les Consometers). Charte de l’aidant numérique, ville de Paris Charte de l’aidant numérique, Grand Chambery CHARTE DE L’ACCOMPAGNEMENT NUMERIQUE DES RESEAUX LOCAUX D’INCLUSION NUMERIQUE, Stratégie Départementale d’Inclusion numérique des Pyrénées-Atlantique Kit et modèle de mandat de la CNIL pour les travailleurs sociaux Charte internationale des données ouvertes [Serment d’Hippocrate pour Data Scientist by Data For Good] Explications (https://www.hippocrate.tech/) Serment (https://framavox.org/g/Qtz0JHr9/dataforgood-serment) Charte qualité des données de Datatourisme Charte de l’IFLA sur Internet en bibliothèque Charte Biblib ABF (Association des bibliothécaire de France)
  • Aurialie Jublin on 08 Jul 19
     
    "L'objectif est de recenser des ressources de type "charte" ou "manifeste" permettant de cadrer éthiquement les développements de projets/plateformes/services/médiations outillés par du numérique, notamment sur des territoires. L'idée est de ne pas se focaliser sur la performance, la précision, le passage à l'échelle de nouveaux services ou de processus optimisés, mais de fabriquer des territoires souhaitables, à l'aide du numérique (le numérique peut servir à "ralentir" ou "déconnecter" des espaces-temps, par exemple. Il peut respecter des principes, utiliser des méthodes éco-responsables, des valeurs comme la démocratie, etc)."
Aurialie Jublin

[Sobriété] Pour un Web frugal ? - Framablog - 0 views

framablog.org/...pour-un-web-frugal

web sobriété

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 18 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • Aurialie Jublin on 18 Feb 19
     
    "Sites lourds, sites lents, pages web obèses qui exigent pour être consultées dans un délai raisonnable une carte graphique performante, un processeur rapide et autant que possible une connexion par fibre optique… tel est le quotidien de l'internaute ordinaire. Nul besoin de remonter aux débuts du Web pour comparer : c'est d'une année sur l'autre que la taille moyenne des pages web s'accroît désormais de façon significative. Quant à la consommation en énergie de notre vie en ligne, elle prend des proportions qui inquiètent à juste titre : des lointains datacenters aux hochets numériques dont nous aimons nous entourer, il y a de quoi  se poser des questions sur la nocivité environnementale de nos usages collectifs et individuels. Bien sûr, les solutions économes à l'échelle de chacun sont peut-être dérisoires au regard des gigantesques gaspillages d'un système consumériste insatiable et énergivore. Cependant nous vous invitons à prendre en considération l'expérience de l'équipe barcelonaise de Low-Tech Magazine dont nous avons traduit pour vous un article. Un peu comme l'association Framasoft l'avait fait en ouverture de la campagne dégooglisons… en se dégooglisant elle-même, les personnes de Low-tech Magazine ont fait de leur mieux pour appliquer à leur propre site les principes de frugalité qu'elles défendent : ce ne sont plus seulement les logiciels mais aussi les matériels qui ont fait l'objet d'une cure d'amaigrissement au régime solaire. En espérant que ça donnera des idées à tous les bidouilleurs…"
Aurialie Jublin

Des impacts énergétiques et sociaux de ces data-centers qu'on ne voit pas - M... - 0 views

maisouvaleweb.fr/x-de-data-centers-quon-ne-voit

énergie datacenter

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 22 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Côté consommation pour commencer, les études les plus pessimistes avancent que ceux-ci pourraient représenter jusqu’à 13% de l’électricité mondiale en 2030 (avec un secteur informatique qui consommerait jusqu’à 51% du total de la consommation électrique mondiale). Des chiffres qui ne font pas l’unanimité, The Shift Project prévoyant plutôt 25% pour le secteur informatique et 5% pour les data centers en 2025 (ces 5% équivaudraient tout de même à toute la consommation électrique actuelle du secteur numérique).
  • Même si l’on constate de nombreux efforts faits pour améliorer l’efficacité énergétique des infrastructures, par exemple du côté des « big tech », l’ADEME rapporte que les géants du numérique ne portent pas un véritable discours sur la « sobriété énergétique et numérique nécessaire pour rester sous la perspective d’une augmentation des températures planétaires de 1,5°.»
  • Le rapport insiste ensuite sur les déséquilibres qui résultent de certaines implantations dans les territoires. Première constatation : ces impacts sociaux sont très peu documentés. Bien souvent, les data centers arrivent sans dire leur nom, en périphérie des villes, aux Etats-Unis ou en France, à Saclay par exemple ou encore Plaine Commune. Cette furtivité des bâtiments rend d’autant plus difficile les contestations ou demandes de participation de la part des populations locales.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Ils sont considérés comme de simples entrepôts par les pouvoirs publics alors même que leur consommation électrique a des répercussions à l’échelle d’un territoire tout entier.
  • Autre phénomène important : les data centers attirent les data centers, pour des questions de mutualisation d’énergie et de réseaux de télécommunication. Bien souvent, les hiérarchies urbaines en place sont renforcées par ces mécanismes. Les élus eux, peinent à lutter contre des acteurs puissants qui imposent leurs conditions « dans une négociation asymétrique qui pousse certains territoires à sur-calibrer des infrastructures énergétiques, hydrauliques et viaires pour pouvoir accueillir quelques dizaines, ou centaines d’emploi si l’on inclut les phases de construction. »
  • Aujourd’hui, c’est plutôt pour installer des hangars logistiques et des fermes de serveurs qu’on artificialise les sols. Autre effet non négligeable qui mériterait sans doute une discussion plus ample avec les populations locales : l’étalement urbain.
  • Le rapport souligne ensuite les possibles synergies entre les infrastructures numériques et le territoire. La réutilisation de la chaleur générée par les data centers  est à ce titre un cas d’usage bien connu. A Bailly-Romainvilliers, par exemple, le data center de BNP Parisbas chauffe le centre nautique voisin. Celui de Céleste à Noisy-Champs, chauffe ses propres bureaux. D’autres systèmes très chauffants comme les chaudières numériques de Stimergy chauffent une partie de l’eau de la piscine de la Butte-aux-Cailles, dans le treizième arrondissement de Paris.
  • Cependant, ces exemples restent anecdotiques. Dans l’immense majorité des cas, la chaleur n’est pas récupérée. D’abord pour des questions de coût et de rentabilité économique : les promoteurs des data-centers attendent des rendements sur des périodes courtes incompatibles avec la contractualisation pour les réseaux de chaleur (des engagements qui coulent sur 25 à 30 ans
  • Il existe aussi un frein technique : il est préférable de prévoir ces éventuels contrats dès la construction du data center car le modifier a posteriori peut représenter des risques que les promoteurs ne sont pas prêts à prendre.
  • La cinquième partie du rapport, qui m’a particulièrement plu, fait la part belle aux initiatives citoyennes, associatives et publiques des « infrastructures numériques alternatives ». Du côté des fournisseurs d’accès, de nombreux acteurs associatifs comme franciliens.net ou Aquilenet dans le Sud-Ouest sont regroupés au sein de la Fédération FFDN. Ils viennent compléter l’offre des fournisseurs principaux (Bouygues, Free, Orange et SFR). Le grand atout de ces solutions est de miser sur le social, l’éducation et la démocratie : « Ils participent d’une gouvernance partagée du commun qu’est Internet en portant des valeurs de transparence, d’inclusion, de lien social, d’apprentissage technique, et d’incitation à la participation à la vie citoyenne. »
  • La socioanthropologue des techniques Laure Dobigny affirme que quand cette gestion inclut et implique, alors les consommateurs vont vers plus de sobriété : « la mise en place de systèmes techniques de plus petite échelle ont permis, en modifiant les usages, une réduction des consommations. » La question est ensuite de savoir comment passer d’une gestion commune de réseaux à une gestion commune de data-centers.
  • Le rapport présente un certain nombre de solutions, comme le cloud de pair-à-pair : « l’idée centrale sous-tendant ces dispositifs est que les fichiers et les contenus téléchargés par les utilisateurs dans le système sont stockés, totalement ou en partie, sur un nuage de stockage composé d’une partie des disques durs de chaque utilisateur, reliés entre eux en architecture P2P. » L’idée est plutôt simple : re-décentraliser internet, réduire le besoin de grands data-centers et atténuer l’impact spatial de ces infrastructures. Les limites de ces solutions sont nombreuses bien sûr : pertes de données, erreur, taille critique non atteinte… Il existe également des data centers « de proximité » comme les chatons (« Collectif d’Hébergeurs Alternatifs, Transparents, Ouverts, Neutres et Solidaires ») ou encore SCANI dans l’Yonne et Tetaneutral à Toulouse.
  • Pour terminer, le rapport dessine trois « mondes numériques possibles ». Le premier scénario parie sur l’extrême croissance et l’ultracentralisation numérique. Pour faire simple, c’est aujourd’hui mais en pire : tout est numérisé, plateformisé, big-daté et concentré dans les mains des GAFAMS ou d’autres acteurs similaires. La ville se conforme aux modèles numériques de la smart-city, la consommation de data explose. C’est la fuite en avant, la croyance qu’un monde infini existe. Côté C02, c’est la catastrophe, la température globale monte de 2,5° en 2050. Pics de chaleur dans les villes, problèmes sociaux, etc.
  • Le deuxième scénario est en demie teinte. On stabilise le système technique numérique en permettant la coexistence de deux mondes : celui des big tech et celui, plus centralisé, des infrastructures à plus petite échelle. L’Union Européenne taxe les « Net Goinfres », ce qui modifie les comportements : on échange moins de photos de chats et on tend à les stocker sur nos terminaux personnels plutôt que dans le cloud, idem pour la musique. Côté consommation, on parvient à réduire les émissions de CO2 du secteur de 5% par an entre 2025 et 2050, ce qui nous ramène au niveau de 2013.
  • Le dernier scénario propose une forme de décentralisation ultime du numérique qui signe plus ou moins la fin des data-centers tels que nous les connaissons. Internet devient plus local et dépendant des énergies renouvelables, ce qui ne permet plus d’assurer sa continuité. Le projet Greenstar au Canada suit ces principes et accepte les intermittences du réseau (follow the wind/follow the sun), de même, le blog du Low Tech Magazine s’arrête de fonctionner quand le vent ne souffle plus (le scénario nucléaire n’est pas vraiment envisagé car l’exercice prospectif est global). Ce scénario « effondrement » se base sur des infrastructures totalement low-tech (c’est-à-dire peu coûteuses en énergie) et permet assez ironiquement un « retour aux principes fondateurs d’internet (horizontal et distribué) ». Côté service, on se contente du local et l’international devient l’exception
  • L’ADEME invite également à soutenir les FAI indépendants et à créer un « service public du numérique et des data centers publics », notamment pour améliorer l’intégration spatiale des infrastructures. Les questions énergétiques font également l’objet de propositions : sobriété, récupération de chaleur, décentralisation.
  • Le chercheur Clément Marquet cité plus haut dans l’article me rappelle que ces différents rapports (Shift, ADEME) arrivent dans un moment particulier puisque le gouvernement a voté en octobre 2018 une loi visant à réduire la fiscalité énergétique pour attirer les gros data centers. Je le cite : « il y a une tension entre le projet de souveraineté numérique par les infrastructures (et des bénéfices économiques qui iraient avec bien sûr) et celui de réduction de la consommation énergétique. »
  • Aurialie Jublin on 22 Mar 19
     
    "L'ADEME, via le projet Enernum, vient de publier une étude approfondie sur les impacts à la fois énergétiques et sociétaux de l'installation et du déploiement des data centers, en France et ailleurs. Ce travail vient confirmer les conclusions du Think tank The Shift Project qui alertait déjà des coûts carbone importants de ces infrastructures qui soutiennent tous nos usages numériques. Par delà les chiffres, l'ADEME replace les data-centers dans leur contexte humain et géographique et interroge la gestion de ce type d'infrastructure sur le territoire."
Aurialie Jublin

[sobriété] Bientôt l'âge d'or des low-tech ? - 0 views

www.lesechos.fr/...e-dor-des-low-tech-2242125.php

sobriété lowtech

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  • Aurialie Jublin on 05 Feb 19
     
    Complexes, énergivores, consommatrices de ressources rares, les high-tech pourraient se voir concurrencées par des technologies plus sobres. Mais la transition prendra du temps.
Aurialie Jublin

LOW←TECH MAGAZINE - How to build a low-tech website - 0 views

solar.lowtechmagazine.com/...how-to-build-a-lowtech-website

low-tech lowtech énergie environnement

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  • Aurialie Jublin on 25 Sep 18
     
    "Our new blog is designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content."
Aurialie Jublin

Can Worker Co-ops Make the Tech Sector More Equitable? | The Nation - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...the-tech-sector-more-equitable

coopérative indépendant équité

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  • Fed up with this heartless model, some tech activists are developing online workplaces that operate as worker-driven communities. Daemo, a pilot program incubated at Stanford University’s Crowd Research Collective, is one such worker-driven crowd-labor platform. Since 2015, Daemo’s developers have been building on MTurk’s interface with a communications system aimed at allowing for more equitable “matching” between work requesters and digital taskers. As a non-hierarchical, nonprofit framework where workers control the operations, Daemo is designed for fairer working conditions, with a minimum wage of $10 an hour, which is a major improvement on MTurk’s precarious labor-outsourcing system.
  • Some former participants in Daemo’s project recently aired sharp criticism of the platform in response to a largely favorable article in Wired. In a collectively authored article on Medium, they argued that, in their practical experience with the platform, decision-making power rests with a “platform team” of researchers and leading developers. Though Daemo has established a Constitution that theoretically is open to amendments and revision based on workers’ input, critics say the day-to-day management remains tightly controlled by researchers.
  • “Whenever they talk about the decentralization, they talk about technical decentralization, like block-chain or decentralized platforms, but most of the time they overlook the governance level, which is more important,” Hashim says. “So it’s about who takes the positions, it’s about who has the right to access information. If you don’t have a well-informed society, you don’t have democracy.”
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  • Kristy Milland, an activist with the MTurk advocacy network We Are Dynamo, says she’s given up collaborating with Daemo because “There hasn’t been any deep, involved worker input…. It’s built by academics with the bias they bring to such a platform that they expect will provide them with free data to publish down the road. Just like Amazon built MTurk with their needs in mind, even if many of the roadblocks this caused may have been unintentional.”
  • The “platform cooperativism” concept, as articulated by technologist Trebor Scholz and other academics, is that worker control can be integrated by working with the democratic aspects of the online sphere: entrepreneurial horizontalism and a pluralistic culture of innovation. But with online workspaces proliferating at breakneck speed, it’s a race to see whether these more principled worker-led models will ever be able to compete for market share with the app-based workforce of MTurk. Similarly, small-scale cab-service cooperatives are emerging in the United States, but Uber and Lyft’s mega brands are displacing cabbies by the minute.
  • The problem with crowd labor isn’t that it’s big, or complex; it’s that workers can’t control their means of technological production. According to Joshua Danielson of the Bay Area start-up cooperative Loconomics, Daemo’s model “has the potential to provide an alternative to Amazon Turk,” if the platform combines a good product and good jobs for the producers. The key, he says via e-mail, is “creating a cooperative business model that can be self-sufficient and be able to attract clients. The latter is the more challenging one given the deep pockets of the current players. That said, it’s important to remember that workers are the product, not the platform, and they hold an immense amount of power if they can organize.”
  • The digital frontier offers endless room both for exploitation and for social transformation. But if workers can get ahead of corporations in harnessing the potential of open-source technology, they can disrupt the incumbent Silicon Valley oligarchs from below. So far, technology hasn’t emancipated labor nearly as rapidly as it has liberalized markets. Cooperative thinking can make technological power part of the solution, but only if it’s matched with people power.
  • Aurialie Jublin on 23 Jul 18
     
    "The crowdwork sector is dominated by low-paid gigs-can communally run companies make these jobs sustainable?"
Aurialie Jublin

Let's make private data into a public good - MIT Technology Review - 0 views

www.technologyreview.com/...rivate-data-into-a-public-good

data données personnelles valeur

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  • Why is this a problem? Well, maybe because these giants are making huge profits from technologies originally created with taxpayer money. Google’s algorithm was developed with funding from the National Science Foundation, and the internet came from DARPA funding. The same is true for touch-screen displays, GPS, and Siri. From this the tech giants have created de facto monopolies while evading the type of regulation that would rein in monopolies in any other industry. And their business model is built on taking advantage of the habits and private information of the taxpayers who funded the technologies in the first place.
  • Apologists like to portray the internet giants as forces for good. They praise the sharing economy in which digital platforms empower people via free access to everything from social networking to GPS navigation to health monitoring. But Google doesn’t give us anything for free. It’s really the other way around—we’re handing over to Google exactly what it needs. When you use Google’s services it might feel as if you’re getting something for nothing, but you’re not even the customer—you’re the product. The bulk of Google’s profits come from selling advertising space and users’ data to firms. Facebook’s and Google’s business models are built on the commodification of personal data, transforming our friendships, interests, beliefs, and preferences into sellable propositions.
  • And because of network effects, the new gig economy doesn’t spread the wealth so much as concentrate it even more in the hands of a few firms (see Rein in the Data Barons). Like the internal-combustion engine or the QWERTY keyboard, a company that establishes itself as the leader in a market achieves a dominance that becomes self-perpetuating almost automatically.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The low tax rates that technology companies are typically paying on these large rewards are also perverse, given that their success was built on technologies funded and developed by high-risk public investments: if anything, companies that owe their fortunes to taxpayer-funded investment should be repaying the taxpayer, not seeking tax breaks.
  • We should ask how the value of these companies has been created, how that value has been measured, and who benefits from it. If we go by national accounts, the contribution of internet platforms to national income (as measured, for example, by GDP) is represented by the advertisement-related services they sell. But does that make sense? It’s not clear that ads really contribute to the national product, let alone to social well-being—which should be the aim of economic activity. Measuring the value of a company like Google or Facebook by the number of ads it sells is consistent with standard neoclassical economics, which interprets any market-based transaction as signaling the production of some kind of output—in other words, no matter what the thing is, as long as a price is received, it must be valuable. But in the case of these internet companies, that’s misleading: if online giants contribute to social well-being, they do it through the services they provide to users, not through the accompanying advertisements.
  • This way we have of ascribing value to what the internet giants produce is completely confusing, and it’s generating a paradoxical result: their advertising activities are counted as a net contribution to national income, while the more valuable services they provide to users are not.
  • Let’s not forget that a large part of the technology and necessary data was created by all of us, and should thus belong to all of us. The underlying infrastructure that all these companies rely on was created collectively (via the tax dollars that built the internet), and it also feeds off network effects that are produced collectively. There is indeed no reason why the public’s data should not be owned by a public repository that sells the data to the tech giants, rather than vice versa. But the key issue here is not just sending a portion of the profits from data back to citizens but also allowing them to shape the digital economy in a way that satisfies public needs. Using big data and AI to improve the services provided by the welfare state—from health care to social housing—is just one example.
  • Only by thinking about digital platforms as collective creations can we construct a new model that offers something of real value, driven by public purpose. We’re never far from a media story that stirs up a debate about the need to regulate tech companies, which creates a sense that there’s a war between their interests and those of national governments. We need to move beyond this narrative. The digital economy must be subject to the needs of all sides; it’s a partnership of equals where regulators should have the confidence to be market shapers and value creators. 
  • Aurialie Jublin on 29 Aug 18
     
    "The internet giants depend on our data. A new relationship between us and them could deliver real value to society."
Aurialie Jublin

Uber's request to grant equity to its contractors feels like a trap | Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...-contractors-feels-like-a-trap

plateforme

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 25 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • The line between contractor and employee is not as blurry as it seems — it’s just often unenforced. A 2018 California State Superior Court ruling decreed that a company can only hire contractors if they “[perform] work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business.” That seems like a blow to contractor-dependent companies like Uber and Lyft: if they consider themselves essentially taxi companies, then their contract-worker drivers are certainly not “outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business,” much as Lyft and Uber brass would prefer to believe otherwise.
  • Yet little has changed in California since that Superior Court ruling: the gig-ification of the economy continues apace, particularly among Silicon Valley’s many startups. Many, self included, have called for contract-heavy companies Uber and Lyft to convert to worker cooperatives or for alternative worker cooperatives to form in their wake.
  • Now, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that some tech companies, namely AirBnb and Uber, want to grant shares to their contractors. Uber issued a comment to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which you can read here, asking them for permission. The reason for the SEC request is that it turns out giving equity to contractors is not quite legal yet.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The cynical view on the decision to offer equity to gig economy contractors is that it is, to paraphrase Rosa Luxemburg, akin to reformism over revolution — meaning, by enacting a minor policy reform in offering equity to contractors, companies like Uber and Airbnb don’t fundamentally solve the innate inequalities and exploitations that their business models generate. Rather, they merely stave off future upsets to their business model, particularly the looming prospect faced by Uber and Lyft that they might literally run out of potential drivers as the supply of interested workers decreases in a labor market with historically low unemployment.
  • The bottom line is, stock options for contractors might seem like a convenient short-term step to remunerating contract workers better, something that we’re all in favor of. But such an act doesn’t overcome the fundamental structural problems with contract labor, nor the small exploitations suffered by contract workers who have no guaranteed pay, benefits or job security. As such, it comes off as more of a recruiting and PR tactic than genuine Silicon Valley reform.
  • Aurialie Jublin on 25 Oct 18
     
    "Silicon Valley wants to give equity to contractors. Is this genuine income redistribution or a recruiting trick?"
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