Murley Herrle-Fanning joins us to discuss NFTs, crypto art, and virtual real estate.

As per usual, the reporting on this technology driven phenomena is misleading at best, entirely wrong at worst. Although I’m not convinced that this is a technology story per se, but rather an investing, or scam story. In so far as the Art world is a combination of the two.

For example the figures cited in NFT stories. Those numbers are incorrect, as they are translations. In most cases these transactions are not in dollars, they are in tokens, or ether, as that’s the whole point. These are blockchain transactions, and the purchases are happening in crypto-currency, linking their value with the value of Bitcoin, or Ether.

This is relevant because of who would already have this currency, or who would be in a position to acquire it relatively easily.

The appeal of such financing is understandable, if you’re willing to trust in this technology that seeks to automate trust.

Unfortunately there are ample reasons for us to distrust it.

For starters, while the blockchain is designed to verify that items uploaded to the blockchain are indeed those items, that doesn’t prevent someone from uploading something they do not have the rights to upload.

Or what about the environmental impact? Or the cultural logic driving this entire process.

We discuss all of this and more.

This is the recording of a Metaviews salon we conducted in February 2021, with Vasiliki Bednar and Greg Majster. It was in response to a paper published that featured the following:

We are inspired by renewed calls to Defund the Police in the United States, which have reinvigorated vital debate regarding the funding of police departments, who is actually served by them, and what forms of historical injustice are perpetuated by current institutions of policing and incarceration. In the context of the abolitionist movement, to defund means to invite local and regional communities to decide how to redirect the disproportionate funds now invested in enforcement and imprisonment to support alternative, more holistic forms of well being and public safety infrastructure.

In the spirit of that movement, we adapt some of its key concepts to the domain of public/community information and communications (ICT) infrastructures, particularly those now dominated by Big Tech. Our proposal is grounded on a key premise: to redirect Big Tech ’s excessive revenue flow, we must transform the conditions and funding structures that enable it.

The aim is to free up resources to support a wide range of socially beneficial ends, not least community-based and community-oriented initiatives to develop digital infrastructures that better serve the public interest. While we are not calling for the demise of Big Tech, we are calling for radical reform. This includes abolition of the conditions that create and normalize Big Tech’s disproportionate reach over key ICT infrastructure, and their wide ranging negative consequences for society and the environment. We aim to retain — and expand — the many benefits that people currently derive from digital technologies, while better addressing their individual and collective needs.

You can read more here https://techotherwise.pubpub.org/defund-big-tech

Transparency is becoming an easy go to as a solution to almost any problem of the algorithmic era. Given the phrase “black box society” this is understandable, as so much of our world is opaque or secretive, that there is a natural desire for more access and scrutiny.

Yet in this rush to champion transparency, are we using a broad brush when greater nuance is necessary?

For example, personal privacy is essential, but what about corporate privacy or secrecy? Privacy for the individual and transparency for the corporation seems like a sensible balance. Unfortunately we currently have the opposite.

What about government however? Should we afford our governments and politicians similar nuance?

James G D’Angelo thinks so. He argues that the impact of transparency on politics has been disastrous. That much of the polarization and sensationalism of politics can be traced back to laws that force greater scrutiny of the minutiae of policy development and politicking.

A Metaviews salon from January 2021 on the topic of responsible innovation. What is it, and why should we be encouraging it? Led by Vasiliki Bednar, this salon looks at how the pandemic provides an opportunity for innovation.

Competition law is increasingly in the news as antitrust and regulatory actions come for Big Tech. In this salon from January 2021, we discuss competition law in general, and particularly in Canada. Robin Shaban from Vivic Research led this discussion.

Paris Marx is a writer, researcher, and host of the podcast “Tech Won’t Save Us”. We had him on the show to talk about the political economy of innovative technology policies.