MSP [] MATTSPLAINED [] MSPx

In the wake of CES Las Vegas, MSP’s Father Time, Matt Armitage, looks back at some of his favourite gadgets of the ages.

MSP is in shameless Star Wars stealing-mode this week. Over the last decade, the forces of Silicon Valley seem to have transformed from information and data disruptors into Final Order-style monopolists. Are the 2020s set to become the battlefield for the Data Wars?

[] Show Notes []

This is a good start to a new decade, with you stealing notes from the Star Wars franchise.
Xmas holiday
Reading about runaway tech
Threat to our democracy, freedom.
Silicon Valley turning from liberator to demagogue,
On the back of it
Govts losing control.
Rampant surveillance capitalism.
So much doom and gloom.

They’re are all topics that you’ve spoken about at length on this show.
True.
Not knocking the truth of these pieces.
Or importance of understanding what’s in them.
Have to examine the Dark Side.

Is that where the Star Wars analogy comes in?
Kind of. It’s also a nice way to ease into 2020.
If you think of digital tech in the early noughties as being the first rush after the Empire fell.
Technology represented people power.
Bypass traditional news media. Post our own information.
Citizen journalism. The blossoming of freedom and independence movements.
Bypassing state controlled information systems.
Create information sharing networks.
At an individual level, celebrated the democratisation of data:
Be less isolated because somewhere online other people like us lurked.
Govts and city councils committing to open governance and sharing all kinds of data.
What we didn’t foresee was this flush of freedom turning into something like SW’s The First Order.

How do you think it happened?
We do a lot of these things to ourselves.
Spoken at length about how our freemium model has contributed to this system.
An active / passive choice many of us made to make our online experience cheaper.
These things happen by degree.
Google going from not being evil to bidding on US govt defence contracts.
Gradual.
And by interpretation: freedom meaning the freedom of companies to do as they choose.

So, that’s where we are? With Supreme Leader Snoke or a resurgent Emperor Palpatine?
Apologies to listeners who aren’t SW fans / followers.
One of the positive aspects of all those negative tech articles is realisation.
I’ve been banging on about unsustainable freemium models for years.
So have others. Talking about how we are willingly giving up our privacy.
Apart from a few people, majority of people thought we were scaremongering.
But people are scared. Tired. Mistrustful.

This week MSP returns with a time travel update, a vomiting asteroid, more brain implants, and ready-to-wear exoskeleton. With a twist of grime. Bud-a-bup-bup.

It’s no surprise when Matt takes an idea and stretches it until it’s so thin you could wrap it with a nanotube. We’ve had Ask Matt Anything. Ask Matt More Anything. And this week MSP has Ask Myself Anything.

The Future. It's all very well, but what will it mean to you, personally? We took your calls, WhatsApps and Tweets and let you put us on the spot, live on radio as we invited you to Ask Matt Anything. What did you ask?

Well, there were robots, AI, bribery and cosmic climate collapse. Oh, and time travel. Happy Thanksgiving!

Forget the disruptors and the innovators. It’s the maintainers who keep the world turning.

Show Notes:
https://www.citylab.com/design/2016/04/how-maintainers-not-innovators-make-the-world-turn/477468/
http://themaintainers.org

EPISODE EXCERPT

Disruption has been one of Matt’s favourite MSP topics this year. I’ve lost count of the number of times that he’s complained about the twin cults of disruption and innovation. So, today, we’re looking at the flip-sides of disruption and innovation: us. The people who maintain society.

Where does this idea of Maintainers come from?
II was recently reading something online…

At New scientist?
Ha. No. You’re wrong.
See, I do have more than one source of information.
It’s a site called City Lab, which is one of The Atlantic’s partner sites.
And it talks about the technologies and cultural movements that are shaping the cities of the future.
So they wrote an article about a group of academics who have started a website and a conference called The Maintainers. themaintainers.org.
And it’s something for the rest of us, the ones who live at the other end of the innovation and disruption curve.

The ones who do nothing?
Thank you for the provocative question.
But why do we have this idea that unless you’re a visionary you don’t do anything worthwhile?
So yeah, we talk about all the people who move fast and break stuff.
But the problem with that is that someone has to try and put that broken society back together again.
I don’t want to bang on an obvious drum, but when you go online you see how polarised people are.
How set in their ways.
Even the most innocuous comments are taken out of context and people experience the weight of these social media pile ons.
I’ve had one or two myself.

Is that because you’re seen as being outspokenly anti-child?
Weirdly no one seems to mind that so much.
Probably because they think everyone else’s kids are hellspawn.
And they’re right, with the exception of the exception of their own kids.
No, I’m not going to revisit those moments.
This idea of breaking stuff seems to have infected our consciousness way beyond

Are we heading back to the Faker’s Quo from a couple of weeks ago?
We’re not quite in the same area.
Although I suppose you could see these episodes as complementing each other.
So i’ll try and avoid talking about the status quo too much.
Coming back to the Maintainers. This is the 99.9% of people who aren’t engaged in messing things up.
We’re the people who are either working within those innovative and disruptive companies and trying to make the crazy ideas work.
And the rest of us who are doing things that aren’t classed as disruptive or innovative, but are essential for the functioning of society.

MSP is 100 episodes old!!! To celebrate, we look backwards and forwards to ask what the future holds. Join us as we dive back into some of the show’s lasting obsessions.