Zag To The Zig #19 :: Streaming music is bad, streaming money is good & much more
So I’m finally doing it. Bye bye Facebook (in a few days - saying goodbyes take time). You were great, for a while. But even though I’ve ignored you for the last year, I noticed you still collect stuff about me that you think is ‘useful' to your advertisers. That feels wrong. And not really aligned with your mission ("Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”). I was hoping you would make a step, from social networks to network economies, but instead you thought up Libra. So it’s not me, it’s you.
Depending on who you believe, you make a few euros to a few 10s of euros per Facebook-user. I realise it’s not a linear process and me deleting my account won’t change the balance sheet directly. So instead I’ll look at ways to donate those 20, 30 euros to start-ups working on privacy research. All suggestions welcome.
In the Ethics Room
Vox had a few guidelines on how to increase your Facebook privacy and at least, minimize the Off-Facebook Activity monitor.
Another action I took a while ago is ditch the Chrome browser for Brave, not just for privacy features and the speed, but also because of the built-in vision to challenge the existing digital ad model. CEO Brendan Eich (who previously co-founded Mozzilla/Firefox) explains what problems they are trying to solve with Brave (and how) in this good podcast.
Can going digital be an ecologically-driven choice? This example from the music industry shows the complexity. While it’s easy to argue that the components to create vinyl records are not kind to our environment, streaming has possibly a bigger impact on greenhouse gas emissions. While the energy required to stream a song is understandably small, streaming has changed and increased our consumption of music.
Digital = better access = more streaming = more eco impact. The unintended consequences of digital.
In the Economy Room
At Davos, there was a lot talk of ledger-based central currencies aka national crypto-coins. The ‘old world’ made a toolkit. The tech world said, sure but you need to build it on (a private version of) Ethereum. Those documents - understandably - refer to control and optimisation of flows. Settling transactions of securities costs 50 billion per year, in the G7 alone, so there is indeed room for optimisation. And while the word ‘inclusion’ got mentioned quite a few times (obviously), there was surprisingly little talk about the potential of programmable money and open innovation.
In the Tech Basement
I’m just saying that because permissionless systems cook up stuff like Streaming Money. Sablier is a smart contract based app (using for instance the DAI stablecoin) that allows you to send or receive continuous streams of money. Think use cases like: your monthly salary made accessible per second, not per month. Think: freelancers being paid as they work on the (time-based) job, not having to wait 30/60 days *after* the work is finished (personal pet hate, I know). Think: different ways of valuing the exchange of attention.
But if anything, think: a different way of looking at optimisation and inclusion.
The battle for data control. The European Commission is funding a project to create a European data cloud to compete with Google, Amazon and other Alibabas.
Random ZTTZ
Nerd humour. Artist Simon Wecker put 99 smartphones running Google Maps in a trolley and walked around Berlin. And sure enough, the algorithm registered it as a traffic jam. #GoogleMapsHacks
🏁 End note: 1 thing I’ll be doing this week
I’m attending the Blockchain4Europe summit at the European Parliament - keen to feed the Chief Curiosity Office in me.