regs to riches

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#23

RLY resetting oversight + parking lots

Vass Bednar
Oct 8, 2020
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This is a newsletter about regulatory hacking featuring (mostly) Canadian startups.
Every week, I contextualize a Canadian startup in the legislative landscape.
Because all start-ups need a policy strategy to succeed.

👔 company: reef technology 
🔦 spotlight: the REAL facebook oversight board 
📕 book: Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society 
🚀 space: Netflix's - The Final Flight 
📻 tune: wild time 

*Back to our regularly, semi-scheduled programming! 🔥
Twitter avatar for @Femalcopywriter
Female Copywriter @Femalcopywriter
Is she hard to work with or does she just know your ideas suck
1:05 PM ∙ Sep 25, 2020
2,799Likes363Retweets
Twitter avatar for @yingninggui
Yingning @yingninggui
tbh notion is bullet journaling for tech people
3:16 AM ∙ Oct 1, 2020
461Likes22Retweets
Twitter avatar for @samelaanderson
Sam | abolish the police @samelaanderson
Told my boyfriend I want to buy the 12 foot skeleton and he asked me where I would put it?? Like I am not an expert in jamming a mansion’s worth of stuff into a shoebox apartment??? Anyway the giant skeleton is waiting for him in his bed to teach him a lesson.
5:20 PM ∙ Oct 2, 2020

🐠 company: reef technology

Reef is neat. It is ostensibly a parking lot company, advertising as “the largest operator of mobility, logistics hubs, and neighbourhood kitchens in North America.” The firm animates public space in interesting ways, like: pop-up voting stations, COVID-testing stations, and making space for food trucks (among others). Because of the flexibility of the land’s use (they aren’t developing it per se, but they *are* sharing it in novel ways) the firm may operate in a space of relative regulatory ambiguity.

Twitter avatar for @reeftechnology
REEF @reeftechnology
REEF is paving the way by providing solutions for underutilized spaces. That's what makes us more than a lot.
Image
3:45 PM ∙ Oct 1, 2020
11Likes4Retweets

REEF’s platform has an important opportunity to derive lessons from Sidewalk Labs - much in the way that other technology platforms/companies [tried to] learn from UBER’s messy first-mover-ship when it comes to legitimately working with local communities to transform under-utilized urban spaces.


👀 “real” facebook oversight board

Did you catch the latest from The Citizens (?) - they are a collective of journalists, technologists, academics, filmmakers, academics, lawyers, advertising creatives and individuals from all walks of life.

They have carved out a novel accountability mechanism as a tongue-in-cheek agitator that replicates or mimics existing “boards” - except they seem to *actually* speak truth to power. Their initial activation is The Independent Sage (@IndependentSage), an independent group of scientists providing advice during the COVID crisis in the UK.

Twitter avatar for @IndependentSage
Independent SAGE @IndependentSage
Independent SAGE - live via Restream.io
pscp.tvIndependent SAGE @IndependentSageIndependent SAGE - live via Restream.io
12:32 PM ∙ Oct 2, 2020
253Likes195Retweets

As a major, epic troll of/to Facebook’s “Oversight Board,” they’ve assembled an alliance that is creating a new source of external, almost guerilla accountability.

Facebook dismissed the board as “longtime critics creating a new channel for existing criticisms.”

And yet, the RFOB got action ASAP - with Facebook announcing that it will ban ads that seek to delegitimize the US election as an early win. INTERESTING.

Never underestimate the power of a Zoom meeting with your brainiest friends.

See also - Rebels within: the Facebook staff openly challenging Zuckerberg.

🦉Facebook’s Oversight Board when they heard of Real Facebook Oversight Board 👇

Twitter avatar for @carolecadwalla
Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla
NEW: Facebook took legal action today to get Real Facebook Oversight Board shut down. It successfully succeeded in pressuring the ISP to remove the site from the web. Nice work, @nick_clegg! You must be #proud 👍
Twitter avatar for @carolecadwalla
Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla
Because nothing says ‘free speech’ quite as much as a multi-billion dollar corporation with a global monopoly getting its critics shut down & booted off the internet https://t.co/wwj8ctGZgP
10:38 PM ∙ Oct 7, 2020
656Likes442Retweets

📕 Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society

This year’s Massey Lecture asks whether and how we can negotiate our relationship(s) with the internet.

*My small beef is that “the internet” is used interchangeably with our devices (surveillance) which leads to some muddling. Deibert is at his very berry best when sharing anecdotes from the Citizen Lab’s work that illuminates the connections to security and geopolitics via our phones and digital devices. I also appreciated his descriptions of the physical infrastructure that powers the internet and implications for the environment. Overall, I found his lecture to be thoughtful and accessible.

More: it’s memoir-ish and puts a lot of critical digital regulation issues all in one place (data brokers, social media, facial recognition and data sharing, rare earth elements, Black Cube + more).

SPOILER: His key proposal is build a “reset” through the principle of restraint. Deibert seems to use “restraint” as a proxy for policy interventions (among other approaches) and I wish they were a little more concrete. I think it would have been just fine it the Massey Lecture pitched global and domestic policy proposals directly informed by the excellent work of the Citizen Lab. Modest, incremental interventions can be meaningful, too.

This newsletter draft is already too long for me to share my COOL notes from my e-reader, so I will just say: precision is leadership! Precision is provocative.


🚀 space: Netflix’s challenger mini-series

This four-part docu-series chronicles the buildup and aftermath of the devastating Space Shuttle Challenger disaster on Jan. 28, 1986. I found it to be fascinating and unsettling.

I’ve long known that the Challenger launch is used as a business school case study of a series of seemingly innocuous decisions going horribly wrong (“normalized deviance”). But is the failure *really* about decision making in a bureaucracy, or just arrogant cognitive dissonance and lack of accountability? You tell me, I’m no MBA.

The Challenger’s explosion comes down to the resilience of “O-Rings” (this is not a spoiler). The docu-series seeks to describe how this happened and make sense of why. Your stomach will churn and your teeth will grind (hello, again, mouthguard) as the devastating lack of accountability smacks you from the screen.

The Harvard Business Review has a Case Study - Group Process in the Challenger Launch Decision - with supplementary materials to help students of business appreciate key learnings from everything that led up to the launch. While we can point to government, technology, and procurement, it feels like it’s about *more* than just the mechanics of decision-making. Studying the Challenges is about the forces that discourage and extinguish dissent - in this case, government pressure from commitments and over-promising the public expectations.

It made me think a lot about how we speak up and out: who gets to do it, who doesn’t, who listens, and who absolves themselves. Because O-rings abound! Products STILL get shipped with built-in-bias, and bad contracts get signed - like that Hootsuite and ICE contract - that, my friends, is a mother fucking O-ring.

Twitter avatar for @samelaanderson
Sam | abolish the police @samelaanderson
Been debating talking about this publicly because I don’t want to get fired, but it seems like the cat’s already out of the bag so whatever: yesterday Hootsuite signed a three-year deal with ICE. Over 100 employees have been extremely vocal in their opposition to this deal
11:51 PM ∙ Sep 23, 2020
34,400Likes10,383Retweets

This Sam person (a furious inter-sectional feminist that worked at Hootsuite) also commented on the disincentives re: speaking out - namely, it’s a pandemic and the labour market feels extra precarious. And yet, she still went for it. She wrote the memo, and she shared it. What happened after that? Did the rocket launch?

Twitter avatar for @hootsuite
Hootsuite @hootsuite
A message from our CEO, Tom Keiser
Image
5:22 PM ∙ Sep 24, 2020
1,796Likes415Retweets

Sam got action. She also got canned.

Twitter avatar for @samelaanderson
Sam | abolish the police @samelaanderson
As of yesterday morning I am no longer employed by Hootsuite. I’m not sure what I can and can’t say about my departure, but I assume it’s fair to say (and also probably obvious) that it was not my decision to leave.
4:26 PM ∙ Oct 6, 2020
73Likes8Retweets

Yvonne Corder shouted out an O-ring in Call Center Call Out re: Planet Money and ProPublica’s investigation into the erosion of customer service contracting, risking retribution but deciding that it’s worth it. I salute her. 🖖🏼

Twitter avatar for @planetmoney
NPR's Planet Money @planetmoney
That person who answers your customer service calls? They’re probably being graded: Did the agent keep control of the call? plus 2.857143 points Did the agent express genuine interest in helping? plus 3.75 points. Forget a detail? minus 7.1429 points
podcasts.apple.com‎Planet Money: Call Center Call Out on Apple PodcastsWe visit life on the other side of your customer service call and get a glimpse into the troubling future of work in America. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
2:18 PM ∙ Oct 4, 2020
49Likes14Retweets

Recently the Coinbase CEO told people not to talk about O-rings (*discouraged employee activism and political discussions via a MEMO) and then offered them [severance] packages if this stance made them want to bounce. 😠

Twitter avatar for @WIRED
WIRED @WIRED
The CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase declared political discussions out of bounds—then gave employees a week to agree or leave.
wired.trib.alInside the Turmoil Over ‘Black Lives Matter’ at CoinbaseThe CEO of the cryptocurrency pioneer declared political discussions out of bounds—then gave employees a week to agree or leave.
4:48 PM ∙ Oct 5, 2020
54Likes21Retweets

Is the UK logging COVID in an Excel sheet an “O-ring”? You tell me. The point is:

💪 There are brittle O-rings lurking all over the place and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to call them out - but you SHOULD (*call things out + hold people accountable, not be a rocket scientist).


📻tune: weyes blood - wild time 🌼 🌺 🌷🌵

Look around
There's nothing left to keep
By the bottles that broke you
From the solace you seek
Didn't know you were one in a million
Stuck inside the wall
I'm wondering how we ever got here
With no fear, we'd fall

Taking hold of our eyes
Beauty, a machine that's broken
Running on a million people trying
Don't cry, it's a wild time to be alive



🤓Vass Bednar is a smart generalist working at the intersection of technology and public policy.

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