internet

When The Internet Eats Itself

~ Taran ~ 10 Comments

The recent news of Stack Overflow selling it’s content to OpenAI was something I expected. It was a matter of time. Users of Stack Overflow were surprised, which I am surprised by, and upset, which I’m not surprised by.

That seems to me a reasonable response. Who wouldn’t? Yet when we contribute to websites for free on the Internet and it’s not our website, it’s always a terrible bargain. You give of yourself for whatever reason – fame, prestige, or just sincerely enjoying helping, and it gets traded into cash by someone else.

But companies don’t want you to get wise. They want you to give them your content for free so that they can tie a bow around it and sell it. You might get a nice “Thank you!” email, or little awards of no value.

No Good Code Goes Unpunished.

The fallout has been disappointing. People have tried logging in and sabotaging their top answers. I spoke to one guy on Mastodon a few days ago and he got banned. It seems pretty obvious to me that they had already backed up the database where all the stuff was, and that they would be keeping an eye on stuff. Software developers should know that. There was also some confusion about the Creative Commons licensing the site uses versus the rights given to the owners of the website, which are mutually exclusive.

Is it slimy? You bet. It’s not new, and the companies training generative AI have been pretty slimy. The problem isn’t generative AI, it’s the way the companies decide to do business by eroding trust with the very market for their product while poisoning wells that they can no longer drink from. If you’re contributing answers for free that will be used to train AI to give the same answers for a subscription, you’re a silly person1.

These days, generative AI companies need to put filters on the front of their learning models to keep small children from getting sucked in.

Remember Huffington Post?

Huffington Post had this neat little algorithm for swapping around headlines til it found one that people liked, it gamed SEO, and it built itself into a powerhouse that almost no one remembers now. It was social, it was quirky, and it was fun. Volunteers put up lots of great content.

When Huffingpost sold for $315 million, the volunteers who provided the content for free and built the site up before it sold sued – and got nothing. Why? Because they had volunteered their work.

I knew a professional journalist who was building up her portfolio and added some real value – I met her at a conference in Chicago probably a few months before the sale, and I asked her why she was contributing to HuffPost for free. She said it was a good outlet to get some things out – and she was right. When it sold, she was angry. She felt betrayed, and rightfully so I think.

It seems people weren’t paying attention to that. I did2.

You live, you learn, and you don’t do it again. With firsthand and second hand experience, if I write on a website and I don’t get paid, it’s my website. Don’t trust anyone who says, “Contribute and good things will happen!”. Yeah, they might, but it’s unlikely it will happen for you.

If your content is good enough for a popular site, it’s good enough to get paid to be there. You in the LinkedIn section – pay attention.

Back To AI’s Intake Manifold.

I’ve written about companies with generative AI models scraping around looking for content, with contributed works to websites being a part of the training models. It’s their oil, it’s what keeps them burning through cash as they try to… replace the people whose content they use. In return, the Internet gets slop generated all over, and you’ll know the slop when you read it – it lacks soul and human connection, though it fakes it from time to time like the pornographic videos that make the inexperienced think that’s what sex is really like. Nope.

The question we should be asking is whether it’s worth putting anything on the Internet at this point, just to have it folded into a statistical algorithm that chews up our work and spits out something like it. Sure, there are copyright lawsuits happening. The argument of transformative works doesn’t really work that well in a sane mind when it comes to the exponentially higher amount of content used to create a generative AI at this point.

So what happens when less people contribute their own work? One thing is certain: the social aspect of the Internet will not thrive as well.

Social.

The Stack Overflow website was mainly an annoyance for me over the years, but I understand that many people had a thriving society of a sort there. It was largely a meritocracy, as open source, at least at it’s core. You’ll note that I’m writing of it in the past tense – I don’t think anyone with any bit of self-worth will contribute there anymore.

The annoyance aspect for me came from (1) Not finding solutions to the quirky problems that people hired me to solve3, and (2) Finding code fragments I tracked down to Stack Overflow poorly (if at all) adapted to the employer or client needs. I also had learned not to give away valuable things for free, so I didn’t get involved. Most, if not all, of the work I did required my silence on how things worked, and if you get on a site like StackOverflow – your keyboard might just get you in trouble. Yet the problem wasn’t the site itself, but those who borrowed code like it was a cup of sugar instead of a recipe.

Beyond we software engineers, developers, whatever they call themselves these days, there are a lot of websites with social interaction that are likely getting their content shoved into an AI learning model at some point. LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, annoyingly in the top search results, is ripe for being used that way.

LinkedIn doesn’t pay for content, yet if you manage to get popular, you can make money off of sponsored posts. “Hey, say something nice about our company, here’s $x”. That’s not really social, but it’s how ‘influencers’ make money these days: sponsored posts. When you get paid to write posts in that way, you might be selling your soul unless you keep a good moral compass, but when bills need to get paid, that moral compass sometimes goes out the window. I won’t say everyone is like that, I will say it’s a danger and why I don’t care much about ‘influencers’.

In my mind, anyone who is an influencer is trying to sell me something, or has an ego so large that Zaphod Beeblebrox would be insanely jealous.

Regardless, to get popular, you have to contribute content. Who owns LinkedIn? Microsoft. Who is Microsoft partnered with? OpenAI. The dots are there. Maybe they’re not connected. Maybe they are.

Other websites are out there that are building on user content. The odds are good that they have more money for lawyers than you do, that their content licensing and user agreement work for them and not you, and if someone wants to buy that content for any reason… you’ll find out what users on Stack Overflow found out.

All relationships are built on trust. All networks are built on trust. The Internet is built on trust.

The Internet is eating itself.

  1. I am being kind. ↩︎
  2. I volunteered some stuff to WorldChanging.com way back when with the understanding it would be Creative Commons licensed. I went back and forth with Alex and Jamais, as did a few other contributors, and because of that and some nastiness related to the Alert Retrieval Cache, I walked away from the site to find out from an editor that contacted me about their book that they wanted to use some of my work. Nope. I don’t trust futurists, and maybe you shouldn’t either. ↩︎
  3. I always seemed to be the software engineer that could make sense out of gobblygook code, rein it in, take it to water and convince it to drink. ↩︎

“Free Speech” And Social Media.

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

I’ve seen plenty of folks talking about ‘First Amendment’ and ‘Freedom of Speech’ in the context of TikTok, as I saw on Facebook, as I saw on…

All the way back to AOL. Strangely, I don’t remember the topic on BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems), mainly because everyone on those generally understood the way things are.

As a moderator on websites in the early days of the Internet right up to WSIS, I heard it again and again. “You can’t restrict my freedom of speech!”

Social media platforms are private companies and are not bound by the First Amendment. In fact, they have their own First Amendment rights. This means they can moderate the content people post on their websites without violating those users’ First Amendment rights. It also means that the government cannot tell social media sites how to moderate content. Many state laws to regulate how social media companies can moderate content have failed on First Amendment grounds.

Most sites also cannot, in most cases, be sued because of users’ posts due to Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act.

“Free Speech on Social Media: The Complete Guide“, Lata Nott, FreedomForum.

The link for the quote has a great article worth reading, because there are some kinds of speech that you can get in trouble for. No sense rewriting a good article.

So this idea about ‘free speech’ on any platform controlled by anyone other than yourself is incorrect. Wrong.

Once you don’t break the terms of service or laws in the country you’re in or the country where the platform is hosted (legally), you can say whatever you want. The principle of the freedom of speech is assumed by a lot of people because it’s in the interests of platforms to let people say whatever they want as long as it doesn’t impact their ability to do business – irritating other users, threatening them, etc.

Even your own website is subject to the terms and conditions of the host.

There’s a quote falsely attributed to Voltaire that people pass around, too: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” Powerful words, thoughtful words, unfortunately expressed by someone who is… well, known for the wrong things.

It doesn’t seem to apply that much on social media platforms anyway. I have routinely seen people on Twitter griping about Twitter, on Facebook griping about Facebook… the only social media platform I haven’t seen it on is LinkedIn, but I imagine someone probably did there too.

This idea seems to come up at regular intervals. It could be a generational thing. In a world where we talk about what should be taught in schools, this is one of them.

Government interference in these platforms moderation could be seen as a First Amendment issue. With TikTok, there’s likely going to be a showdown over freedom of speech in that context, but don’t confuse it with the user’s first amendment rights. It’s strange that they might do that, too, because where ByteDance (the owning company) is based, they couldn’t sue their government. China’s not known for freedom of speech. Ask Tibet.

The second you find yourself defending a platform you don’t control, take a breath and ask yourself if you can’t just do the thing somewhere else. You probably should.

The Fediverse isn’t too different, except you can find a server with rules that work for you to connect to it.

Internet Detritus.

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

Back in 1996 I was driving to work in the Clearwater, Florida area and saw a billboard to Brainbuzz.com, now viewable only through the Wayback Machine. I joined, and I ended up writing for them. Not around anymore.

They became CramSession.com, where I continued writing for them. I had roughly 100 articles I wrote for them about software engineering and C++ which are just… gone. Granted, that was over 2 decades ago, but it’s peculiar to live longer than all these companies that thrived during the Dot Com Bubble, which should be taught in high school now as a part of world history. It isn’t, of course, but it should.

Consciously, we distill good things and keep moving them forward, but sometimes because of copyright laws, things get orphaned in companies that closed their digital doors. Generations afterward, it’s hard to convey this lack of permanence to future generations because the capacity for things to last ‘forevah’ seems to be built into some social media, but it’s hidden away by algorithms which is effectively the same thing.

Sometimes bubbles of information get trapped in the walls of an imploded company. It could happen even to the present 800 lb gorillas on the Internet now. The future is one thing that nobody will tell you in their end of the year posts: It’s unpredictable. The world changes more and more rapidly and we forget how much gets left behind at times.

“When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver’s watch, that “wonderful kind of engine…a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal,” they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After all, “he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action in his life.” To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We’re all Gullivers now. Or are we Yahoos?”

Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, James Gleick, 2000.

What’s really funny about that quote is that Yahoo.com was more of a player in the search engine space back then. In fact, in 1998, Yahoo was the most popular search engine, and that it’s still around is actually a little impressive given all that happened after the DotCom Bubble popped. So the quote itself hasn’t aged that well which demonstrates the point I am making.

Nothing really lasts on the Internet, and even with the WayBack machine (thank you, Internet Archive!), much of what was is simply no longer, subject to what companies owned copyrights of the information, or a simple matter of what things have been kept around through what boils down to popularity.

And what’s popular isn’t always good. I submit to you any elected official you dislike to demonstrate that popularity is subjective – and on the Internet, popularity is largely about marketing and money spent toward that end. The Internet, as it stands, is the house that we built based on what made money.

That’s not particularly attractive.

In the end, it all sort of falls away. And coming generations will see it as well, some may have already begun seeing it.

Who decides what stays on the Internet? Why, we do of course, one click at a time.

Now imagine this fed into an artificial intelligence’s deep learning model. The machine learning would be taught only what has survived, not what has failed -and this could be seen as progress. I think largely it is, despite myself – but what important stuff do we leave behind?

We don’t know, because it ain’t there.

That Other Linguistic Bias…

~ Taran ~ 2 Comments

language barrier
Hands off my tags! Michael Gaida

 It seemed a bit strange to me to write about the bias in English when I have also been aware of the linguistic diversity of the Internet for some time. I didn’t shove that in because I was not up to date on the latest data regarding language and those connecting to the Internet. As luck would have it, I just found it here in the form of a spreadsheet, updated as of this month of this year. 
 
It shows promise. We went from 64% of humans connected to 67% in one year. More languages from the continent of Africa are represented. Information like this reveals an implicit bias that most people are not aware of – the invisible 33%. 
Our framing on the Internet tends to neglect them. We have a tendency to believe that everyone is connected. We’re not.

What’s more, that simple bit of information also demonstrates that training a large language model or an AI that leaves 33% of humanity out should give us pause. It won’t, but it should. 33% of humanity can’t access the Internet. Cultures and languages aren’t represented.
But technology waits for no one because tech companies wait for no one because they need us to keep buying technology.

The Babel Problem

~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

Babel TowerSome self-centric perspectives shared using social media creating a communication failure got me thinking more about information and how it affects us, as individuals, and how it affects humanity. It’s also something that I’ve been researching off and on, and one which has me working on a hobby software project related to it.

Information is everywhere. We’re all pattern recognition and information analysis experts in our own right. It’s a part of being human, as Stephen Pinker wrote about in the context of language, which is one of the  ways that we process and communicate information. There is the nature aspect, and there is the nurture aspect, which is often seen as a matter of which has more influence.

This is particularly interesting in this day and age for a variety of reasons, particularly when interacting using social media.

Language is the most obvious barrier, and translation algorithms are getting much better – but interpretation of translations leaves much to be desired at times. Another aspect is dialect, born of geography, which do not always translate well. There are some who will argue about cultural identity, but if cultural identity isolates, what use is that identity?

Another aspect is the ability of people to actually read and write to be understood.  While we may have a lot more literacy in the world than we did some decades ago, functional literacy is something different and is something that educational systems only measure within their own dialects. This leads to how people think, because people typically communicate as clearly as they think. And what affects how we think?

We get into world views – a factor of nurture, largely, and the ability to process the information of our world clearly. The most obvious aspect of these prejudices has to do with the color of skin of human beings – something that haunts us despite scientific evidence that there are no actual races. Other things are less obvious.

There are commonalities, as mentioned in a very thorough exploration by Pierre Levy in “The Semantic Sphere“, that weave commonality through concepts around the world despite language – but they can fail in that last mile of neurons, as people may have very different reactions to the same concepts.

When it comes to all of this, I live a very different life and look at things, at times, in very different ways than others. This has allowed me to sometimes solve problems that others could not solve.

Everyone looks at things differently, but commonly, people don’t look at things that differently when they read what everyone else reads, watch what everyone else watches, and thus think fairly closely to what other people think.

That, in turn, gives us the codification of problems in a way that is sometimes more popular than correct, and thus any solution may be solving the wrong problem. It’s a convoluted mess when you start thinking about it (and worse, trying to express it as I am here).

And that, really, is the core of this post. A thought of why the people who come up with appropriate solutions are typically the ones who can identify what the problems actually are… in a world of popularity.

 

Let It Marinate.

~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

downside www

One of the things that makes the rounds in the blogosphere as a ‘truth’ is that you have to blog every day.

In a niche, if you follow another ‘truth’.

This leads to all kinds of crap content. Really. People reblog other people’s blogs, trying to capitalize on something someone else wrote in the hope that they can write it in a more popular way so that their blog can get traffic so that…

Take a breath.

That’s the newspaper business model. That’s the 24 hour news business model. It’s driven by advertising, as many blogs are, and that incentive can actually cause a decrease in quality.

An example: I picked on sex toys in Trinidad and Tobago recently. The story the newspapers carried was rushed, was not well researched, and of course provocative. When Finance Minister Colm Imbert called it fake news the next week, I laughed – because, of course, he pointed out that there’s no definition of what a sex toy actually is. In the video interview, it was even said that a woman had her edible underwear seized by Trinidad and Tobago Customs. The joke from the peanut gallery was that it was a snack. My joke would have been that Customs didn’t know how to use edible underwear- you don’t seize it. 

As it turns out, a company named Websource had simply sent out a circular stating that imported sex toys could be confiscated, and were not permitted through their service. The government’s alleged ban was hearsay. Hearsay is heresy in factual reporting.

Waiting, sometimes, is the best thing to do. You don’t have to be the first to publish. You can simply aspire to getting it right before you publish.

So it is with any kind of writing, any kind of social media posting, any kind of sharing of information – even in person. You don’t have to fill what you perceive as voids with inaccurate or incomplete information.

You can wait.

More often than not, you should.

Write frequently, write well, and don’t focus on being first.

Focus on getting it right.

Where Communication Fails

~ Taran ~ 2 Comments

Communication is the keyIt amazes me how people make things more difficult through communication, enough so that sometimes I wonder if there is a special group of us that talks to ourselves for lack of anyone else receiving on the other end.

Exhibit A.

Last year, here in Trinidad and Tobago, someone asked me to be a reference on a visa application – which I willingly did because I know these people. I was at their house, filled out the form for their granddaughter and thought this was done other than a phone call. There was no signature, just the filling out of a name, address and phone number – as most references are.

Time passed – maybe a week. The grandfather calls me and tells me that they had filled out the old form and that they needed a new form filled out – and so, I told him it was a simple matter of copying the information over. He said that the new document needed a signature, which I was sure was not the case. He insisted, dropped by…

And lo! There was no signature necessary. It was as I expected, the form simply needing the same information that was on the old form, that anyone could have copied over. I showed him that, and he got upset with me. I filled it out anyway. We’re friends.

Why did he get upset? It took some time to unravel that. This 70-something year old man was upset because his granddaughter told him it needed my signature. She’s in her mid-20s, a product of an education system that apparently can’t distinguish between simply filling out a name and actually signing something.

It broke down to a functional literacy failure, something that I’ve found increasingly common.

Exhibit B

I was ordering a breakfast I normally order at a place I am a regular at, from a lady I normally order from and who is familiar with my order. The scene was tense for some reason as I walked in, having nothing to do with me. Yes, I asked, and she would have told me – which is why I value this relationship.

The sound of the AC was buzzing above the register, and the background noise of the busy place was at a high. I hear her say that there’s ‘No ham bacon’.

I’m puzzled by this. “Do you have ham?”

“No ham bacon”.

We go on like this for a few moments. She doesn’t speak up. I’m not understanding what she’s trying to tell me, and I know that she is trying to help me. After a while, it gets sorted out when she finally raises her voice a bit so I can hear over the background noise – when she spoke quietly, her voice was deeper and it merged with the underlying buzz.

She was saying there was no ham, only bacon.

But why couldn’t I hear her? Frankly, maybe I should get my hearing checked – I should get on that – but the other part of it was that she was upset and was making a conscious effort not to raise her voice because she was upset about other things.

This was a situational communication problem. Had we not known each other, it probably wouldn’t have ended with both of us laughing.

Exhibit C

I’d sold a piece of land to someone who was already on it – a simple solution (hack) to a silly problem caused by laws in Trinidad and Tobago – and a year had passed.

Out of the blue, I see this person is trying to contact me on Facebook messenger – by calling me (who does that?). So I message them back, and they message me that they were having trouble registering the deed. A year later.

Now, they had my phone number. After a year, this suddenly became an emergency – which is easy to judge someone on without knowing how their life is, but a year is a long time and I know that the deed registration had to have been done or I would have heard about it from the lawyer, who I do know, and who has done other transactions similarly.

Something wasn’t adding up, and it was already clear that this was a communication error.

I sent them my phone number – they should already have had it. Then they tell me that they don’t have my phone number. I respond that I just sent it. “Scroll up.”, I typed, even as I wanted to scream it.

11 messages and 5 phone calls later, they tell me that they’re at the tax office and can’t find the deed number. And this is where a lack of specialized knowledge created the core communication error – they were confusing the assessment number and deed number up, and finally, after repeating myself a few times, it sunk in. They blamed the government office for not telling them, but based on everything I had experienced with the person…

I was pretty sure that the person just wasn’t paying attention to what anyone had told them, written to them, or tattooed on their forehead. The whole situation showed over and over that they were not interested in finding out what they needed to know to solve their problem. They were happy just annoying people until someone held their hand and guided them to the right solution.

Maybe they were hugged too much as a child. I don’t know.

But this example shows not only a problem with understanding specialized things, but also the joys of dealing with people who do not listen well.

Exhibit D. 

In dealing with purchasing something, I ended up dealing with 3 separate entities who are allegedly working together: A lawyer, the seller, and the agent. During this process, I handed over documents required to the seller.

Their lawyer contacts me. They want me to come up and submit the very same documents to them. I explain that the seller has the documents, and the lawyer tells me that they can only receive those documents if I authorize the seller to release them.

The rub here is that the seller has their own lawyer that, by circumstance, I have to use. One would think that the documents that the seller had would be furnished to the lawyer. The lawyer explains that it’s to safeguard my privacy (nevermind all the photocopies of my IDs hanging around) – but it’s really a process failure.

In the course of a few hours, I get conflicting information from all 3 parties who were legitimately trying to help me around the process failure, which I ended up resolving by simplifying. I only need to deal with the lawyer. What she says is what we go with, in the hope that it all falls together properly.

So this was a conflicting communication error, caused by trying to work around a process failure. I have to wonder how many people get stuck in those loops.

So Many Problems.

This is just a sampling. All of these communication problems, at their core, are human problems. In an age when we can communicate so quickly all over the world – I remember a time when postcards were a big deal – we still don’t communicate well enough to make use of it.

We build things on communication. We build things on flawed communication. Technology is not waiting for us to get it right; it’s a wildfire of acceleration on all fronts.

Take a moment. Take a breath. Listen. Speak clearly. Know of what you speak of. Ask the right questions.

Communicate. The world actually does depend on it, and more specifically, your world depends on it.

The Age of Dune

~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

The-Spice-Must-Flow-PosterWe’re in a strange age of Dune, metaphorically. If you haven’t read the books or, for the reading impaired, the movie, you won’t get the metaphor – you should go do either immediately and not return to the internet until you have.

If you’ll recall, the book was about Spice – and how the spice must flow. Last century, it was a metaphor for oil, and this century, it’s a metaphor for information.

I bring this all up because of the Russian submarines making NATO nervous because they’re prowling near underwater cables. The conversations around this speculated on them eavesdropping – relatively tinfoil hat – when a real threat is the severing off those cables. Remember how Mua’dib rose to power? Who can destroy the Spice controls the Spice, and who controls the Spice is the real power.

Factor in the death of network neutrality, which has been long dead in other ways while people have been discussing the imminent rigor mortis while poking it with a stick. It’s not as if Facebook has been deleting accounts at the requests of the U.S. and Israeli governments.  It’s not as if any despot of any sort hasn’t at least tried to control the information flow. The trouble is that most people don’t understand information and don’t understand data beyond the definitions in dictionaries and antiquated textbooks.

Information flows. In a battlefield somewhere, a severed submarine cable can mean chaos on the ground somewhere. In a world where cables connect markets, severed cables mean being unable to get access to those markets. It means isolation.

The spice must flow, the information must flow. And those who seek to destroy information, from burning books to limiting access for people to information is about isolating, about controlling, and about power. How will it end?

I’ll be in my garden, monitoring the situation. You kids play nice.

Net Neutrality and Trinidad and Tobago

~ Taran ~ 2 Comments

Internet Innovation is The Goose That Laid the Golden EggThe global debate on Net Neutrality persists and the consequences are writ large for consumers everywhere.

Yet, there’s almost no interest in the Net Neutrality issues arising lately – I spent my time advocating for it to the uncaring masses who are more intent on other things that they believe are more important.

It is important though. Very important.

David Pogue of Scientific American has a great summarization of the net neutrality debate. I suppose the core of the problems happening over the heads of those in the world – not just the United States – is how the FCC classifies things in an antiquated system rather than create a new classification. The lines between being a provider of telecommunications and providing telecommunication services are said to be blurred, but the reality is that they no longer exist. The people who own the infrastructure are competing with those that don’t.

Businesses that do not own the infrastructure are at a disadvantage. They can be squeezed out by those who do own the infrastructure, effectively monopolizing user services. The end user – us, all of us – doesn’t get the variety that it would otherwise have when those that control the infrastructure can make sure that their services can run faster than their competitors. That’s the core of the issue for users.

The Local Context.

In Trinidad and Tobago and likely throughout the Caribbean, Digicel is cheering the repeal of what was called Network Neutrality (I could say it wasn’t for a variety of reasons). Their premise is actually quite real – they are rolling out infrastructure in the region at a cost, and shouldn’t they get their cost back? Of course they should, why would anyone invest in something that they don’t get paid back for? There is no digital philanthropy here, and Trinidad and Tobago’s National ICT Plans have always pushed broadband penetration, enough so that I’m surprised an over-exuberant feminist hasn’t accused the phrasing of misogyny.

Others in the local context of telecommunications have been relatively silent so far – perhaps wisely so – despite the fact that we’re connected to the U.S. pretty directly economically, through Internet connections, and through other things.

What it means, though, is that applications not owned by local providers – Digicel and bMobile mainly, since the most common data usage is through mobile phones, is that they could create competing applications to… for example… WhatsApp, and make WhatsApp undependable in the same twist. And of course, since these same providers have to report to the government by Law, will give away the encrypted anonymity that seems to only hide poor political commentary and bad pornography. Maybe there’s more to it than that, but I haven’t been added to the LOLCats group (please, don’t invite me).

It means local startup companies will have to get the blessings of those who own the infrastructure and maintain a relationship with them – practically at gunpoint.

Yet Digicel makes a valid point: Why invest in infrastructure if you don’t get paid for it?

The debate is much more nuanced than what is presented – arguably, by design. Show me a Member or Parliament, though, who has taken a stance on network neutrality. They don’t really care too much, and that National ICT plan doesn’t address it in any way. It makes us completely dependent on our own legislation, and our own legislation – despite some bold and debatable efforts by the present government – is not fast, is not as comprehensive as they might like to think, and is going to require more intellectual capital to debate and enforce than anyone seems interested in mustering.

We’re along for the ride in Trinidad and Tobago, hoping for a water taxi but instead getting a ferry to Tobago in a country that should be making strides toward progress… not stagnation. It should be making bold moves – debatable moves – that push the envelope for local talent to strike it’s colours boldly on an infrastructure being built rather than making a mockery of it by making it consumption only with no regard to using it for creating foreign exchange (we can talk about those banks another time, right?).

We could be using our infrastructure to leverage foreign exchange income, subsidizing it’s roll out while diversifying the economy. That’s not what we’re doing, and that’s why Network Neutrality is not even discussed outside of Digicel Press Releases.

So Many Pies.

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

pies-9People tend to categorize things by how many ‘hats’ one wears, or how many fingers you have in pies.

In a world of specialization, I have specialized in not being a specialist – which, unfortunately, confuses people. Asked recently what I do for a living, I was caught off guard. Should I speak of having made a living from Software Engineering? Should I go with writing? What about land management? Real estate? Connecting people who need to be connected outside of the cultural ruts that exist in Trinidad and Tobago? Agriculture? Photography? Even recently, someone got stuck on the fact that I had been in the military even though my service and reserve service ended around 2006 (I think).

So my response was, “I think for a living.” That’s consistent, but it brought more confusion. I wonder how other polymaths deal with this?

It wasn’t a solid answer to the person asking, and I was revisited again by the demons of a society that defines you by where you were born (doesn’t work for me), by where you live (pick a place, I may have been there), by what you do for a living (see above), who you’re related to, what ‘race‘ you are, what religion you are, etc.

I don’t fall into categories as much as people attempt to shove me into them. I suppose part of the problem is that I gave up on categories somewhere in my 20s. It started before then, because even then I didn’t really fit – but I was not yet tired of being uncomfortable in my explanations.

All of this came to mind as I renewed this domain, where I’m uncertain where to write what. My technically related writing with a more local (Trinidad and Tobago) twist ends up on TechNewsTT.com. My more personal writing goes on RealityFragments.com.

And I suppose now, everything else goes here – as I have done historically, as you might see had there not been losses of data over the decades of my owning this domain name.

A strange world you live in.