Greg Lindsay's Blog

February 08, 2017  |  permalink

The Internet of Very Bad, No Good Things

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The Internet of Very Bad, No Good Things
FEBRUARY 13th, 2017
WORKSHOP: 1pm-5pm (invite-only)
PANEL: 6-8pm (open to public)
A/D/O: 29 Norman Ave., Brooklyn NY

Featuring:
Susan Cox-Smith, Principal, Changeist
Greg Lindsay, journalist

What do an army of Russian Twitter trolls, a hotel ransoming BitCoins to keycard-hijacking hackers, and a social media CEO pondering a run for the presidency in 2020 have in common? They all sit in the speculative sliver of a Venn diagram comprised of the Internet of Things, “surveillance capitalism” as practiced by the stacks, and governments unafraid to flex their muscles as far as “the cyber” is concerned.

Reflecting the A/D/O Design Academy’s theme of “Utopia vs. Dystopia,” this special event is divided into two parts. The afternoon is an invitation-only workshop led by Changeist principal Susan Cox-Smith, using the Thingclash framework for considering cross-impacts and implications of colliding technologies, systems, cultures and values around the Internet of Things. The evening is a public discussion moderated by journalist Greg Lindsay of the group’s darker scenarios, and the steps researchers, designers, technologists, strategists, policy makers and citizens can take to think more clearly, comprehensively and long-term about how we create a brighter future for all.

[Updated March 3, 2017: Susan Cox-Smith has recapped the event over at Medium:

Watching our participants work through the layers of various Thingclash workshops over the last year, we wanted to add some new levels of thinking for this iteration. In anticipation of this, we decided it might be time to introduce some (extra) chaos into their deliberations. Acknowledging the uncharted circumstances playing out in political settings around the world, we introduced “The State” card, as a final round of play. Delivered in a brown envelope, each team was advised that The State was dissatisfied in some way with their scenarios, and they were asked to fulfill an additional request, or describe how they might negotiate with this unknown external entity.

This new wrinkle led participants to imagine ways to shift or change their Things in new, and increasingly interesting ways. Among other things, the teams better recognized the implications of collecting and sharing user data without permissions, impacts on privacy, and the necessity of clear opt-in, or opt-out processes. Improving a Thing’s usefulness for People and Places was no longer just about UX, or fancier bells and whistles.

In the final round, the teams created fictional stories based on the critical realizations they had made about their scenarios, to share with the other participants. These stories were then presented at the public panel discussion later that evening, and this generated both interesting questions, and lively discussion, about how the IoT has so quickly become deeply embedded into our lives–despite huge gaps in security and accessibility, not to mention the common expectation that users must adapt their behaviors, so designers and developers can ignore the Thingclashes they sometimes create.

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Greg Lindsay is a generalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker. He is a non-resident senior fellow of the Arizona State University Threatcasting Lab, a non-resident senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, and a non-resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative. He was the founding chief communications officer of Climate Alpha and remains a senior advisor. Previously, he was an urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, where he explored the implications of AI and augmented reality at urban scale.

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