Misclassification in gig economies and diminished union density

Sat, 09 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Mark Erlich traces the history of misclassification in the construction sector in the United States, and how this erodes union density in the sector:

The fluidity of the workforce and minimal regulation of a decentralized industry have created an environment that encourages the purposeful mis- classification of employees as independent contractors—a business strategy that has led to a decline in union density and contributed to decreased standards in the industry over the past 50 years.

The experience of construction workers over the past half-century represents an alternative narrative. The rise of independent contracting did not provide increased flexibility and opportunity for trades workers. On the contrary, those workers who had once been treated as employees now face precarious conditions as independent contractors, though their daily work tasks are unchanged. Misclassification has been a conscious employer ploy to reduce the costs of labor and part of a broader scheme to eliminate the influence of unions as a central force in the construction industry. Construction workers who are compensated as independent contractors or paid in cash off-the-books are thus similar to ride-share and other gig workers in that all of them operate outside the safety net of the nation’s employment laws. The fate of these workers going forward will rest on their ability and willingness to organize for a collective voice and a commitment to apply and enforce a rigorous definition of employment status by federal, state, and local agencies.

Watch this forum, especially Winnie Byanyima comments from 6:20 onwards, as she shines the reality of gig work in Africa, spoiling the party, as it were, at the World Economic Forum.

Elections and Communication Blackouts -- U.S. Version

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Several United States companies have suspended the sitting President of the United States, Donald Trump, from their digital platforms. Twitter, his ‘personal newspaper where he gets to write his daily headlines’, was perhaps the most significant. This act illustrates the overwhelming power private companies have to shape social order, especially during time sensitive processes.

It reminds me of the power most presidents (or those of similar rank) around the world have during elections – shutting down the Internet via Internet service providers to maintain national seurity (almost always a cover for regime security). In a reversed role, the U.S. president has been shut out of the Internet supposedly to keep the rest of the country together.

How would this look like if these platforms shut down a sitting president in a country other than the U.S during a critical time like contested transfer of power or genocide? Uganda goes to the polls next week and I wonder how that would look like if Museveni was kicked-off digital platforms. He has shutdown Twitter and YouTube and Facebook before - and in some situations everything digital including mobile money. Museveni and many others across the world have deployed ‘just in time’ Internet blocking mostly under ‘national security’ justifications.

I think the fundamental question here is to what extent sovereignty will shape relationships between multinational companies and sovereign states. This should not just be understood from the ‘evil’ dictator v ‘good’ multinational platforms. History is littered with examples of U.S. companies that have conspired to overthrow sovereign governments, or working with cruel tyrants against civil society.

This is as good time as any for the global civil society to think how they will defend the public square that is actively being encroached by surveillance companies and authoritarian systems of government. One simple way out may be to balkanize and keep national boundaries alive in governing the Internet. Surprisingly, this knee-jerk thought is common in several countries. The lack of capacity to implement this thought is the main hinderance to actualizing it. China did it, and they seem to have effectively kept their control of the Internet in their country, effectivly dominating the puboic square, and keeping the economic extracts under their control, much to the chagrin of the United States and its global influence circles.

The other option could be to seek regulations that restrain these digital platforms from overstepping their functions in a healthy society. This keeps the existing global structure in place while giving an illusion of more say in what those digital platform companies do within said jurisdiction. This is the most common option so far, but also the most ineffective, as it takes resources away from thinking of alternatives by promising a better public square while limiting responsibility on keeping the networks up.

A third option for civil society may be to work on an interoperable system that overcomes balkanization while limiting centralization, both by private companies and states. While this sounds like a reasonable position, it has significant hurdles to civil society, when the actual work needed to run such platforms is investigated while placed against platforms that seem to be working almost all fine.

But if we are to have a socially adaptive public square, we cannot leave it to private companies in their walled digital gardens nor can we leave it to states to do as they wish to preserve their political settings. At some point, responsibility must be in creating decentralized public squares that overcome spliting or privatizing the global public square.

Some efforts have gone into this, like the ActivityPub protocol, that allows federation across different platforms – discussions on Lemmy, microblogging on Mastodon, video sharing and streaming on PeerTube – among many other new ideas. These options require time, human resources, and strategic thinking. If the global civil society really means it when they claim the Internet is broken, perhaps the events of this week in Washington D.C may offer a chance to start repairing the square instance by instance. Donating, self-hosting, speaking about alternatives, and actually using them as a act of resistance may help lay a better foundation for the future of the global public square.

This way, whether it is a president shutting down social media or it is social media shutting down the president, the public square would remain vibrant. It is not balkanization. It is common sense.

UCL makes formal public apology for its history and legacy of eugenics

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0500

University College London apologises for its role in promoting eugenics. This shows how changes in ideas may change the authoritative place of scientific knowledge.

UCL acknowledges with deep regret that it played a fundamental role in the development, propagation and legitimisation of eugenics. This dangerous ideology cemented the spurious idea that varieties of human life could be assigned different value. It provided justification for some of the most appalling crimes in human history: genocide, forced euthanasia, colonialism and other forms of mass murder and oppression based on racial and ableist hierarchy.

Facilitating knowledge systems that discriminate individuals based on whatever label the moment (de)values is as present today as Galton’s long century. Digital identification today may pass for simple databases facilitating social wlefare but they are also being used to re-categorize individuals based off their visible activities. I hope the University of Oxford and the Tony Blair Institute will not have to apologize 100 years later for facilitating digital identification projects without hindsight on what harms they may be causing by moving populations from necessary IDs to ubiquitous ones.

Saudi Arabia launches a citizen’s Digital ID

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0500

The Saudi Arabia gazette is reporting the launch of an electronic version of the national identity card of Saudi citizens.

The Ministry of Interior, represented by the Civil Status Department, launched the electronic version of the national identity card of Saudi citizens. The electronic ID under the name of “Digital ID” will be available through “Absher Individuals” service of the ministry’s Absher portal application on citizens’ smart phones, the Saudi Press Agency reported.

Muhammad Al-Jasser, spokesman of Civil Status, that the Digital ID will facilitate the process of verifying the identity of citizens, who are holders of it, in the event that they do not carry their original ID card.

“It will enable the beneficiaries to view the ID data electronically through the variable QR code of “Absher Individuals” application. The beneficiaries can download a copy of the Digital ID on the smart device to take advantage of it without the need to connect to the Internet,” he said.

Al-Jasser said that the Digital ID would be a turning point in developing the process of electronic transactions for individuals with the relevant sectors in the ministry’s “Absher Individuals.”

There does not seem to be mention whether non-citizens will use the same platform. Immigrants in Saudi, especially from the Greater Horn of Africa, face persistent tyranny from their employers. Their way to navigate the system is directly linked to possessing their physical identification documents, which are mostly retained by their employers. A digital ID may make life even harder if it is required for basic services like housing, health, and travel, if immigrants cannot enroll on to the platform like citizens. Fundamentally though, digital IDs are almost always meant to exclude and surveil. Their use should be minimized to the absloutely essential moments.

The covert penalty for paying in cash

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0500

In Distributional Effects of Payment Card Pricing and Merchant Cost Pass-through in the United States and Canada, Felt, Hayashi, Stavins, and Welte revisit the effects of non-differentiated check out prices regardless of payment option choosen, showing that relatively cheaper debit and cash payments subsidize relatively costly credit card transactions.

Using data from the United States and Canada, we quantify consumers’ net pecuniary cost of using cash, credit cards, and debit cards for purchases across income cohorts. The net cost includes fees paid to financial institutions, rewards received from credit or debit card issuers, and the merchant cost of accepting payments that is passed on to consumers as higher retail prices. Even though credit cards are more expensive for merchants to accept compared with other payment methods, merchants typically do not differentiate prices at checkout, but instead pass through their costs to all consumers. As a result, credit card transactions are cross-subsidized by cheaper debit and cash payments. Card rewards and consumer fees paid to financial institutions are additional sources of cross-subsidies. We find that consumers in the lowest-income cohort pay the highest net pecuniary cost as a percentage of transaction value, while consumers in the highest-income cohort pay the lowest. This result is robust under various scenarios and assumptions, suggesting payment card pricing and merchant cost pass-through have regressive distributional effects in the United States and Canada.

Punishing the cash option, which is already an unfair market logic, is also a tax on privacy, seeing that cash is one of the most powerful ways to evade everyday surveillance, the bread and butter of credit card companies.

'We promise you privacy', or how WhatsApp blue-ticked privacy

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0500

6 years ago, when WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook, its CEO, Jan Koum, committed to never introduce ads on the platform, with a rare sense of conviction:

Here’s what will change for you, our users: nothing.

WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently. You can continue to enjoy the service for a nominal fee. You can continue to use WhatsApp no matter where in the world you are, or what smartphone you’re using. And you can still count on absolutely no ads interrupting your communication. There would have been no partnership between our two companies if we had to compromise on the core principles that will always define our company, our vision and our product.

Today, WhatsApp posted newly planned Terms and Services, which among other things, makes it clear they are introducing ads in one way or the other:

Ways To Improve Our Services.

We analyze how you make use of WhatsApp, in order to improve our Services, including helping businesses who use WhatsApp measure the effectiveness and distribution of their services and messages. WhatsApp uses the information it has and also works with partners, service providers, and affiliated companies to do this.

While this has been known in the past, especially after the exit of Whatsapp co-founder Brian Acton in connection to monetizating the messanging app, the form of how that may look is getting clearer. It is worth noting that the $1 annual fee was never floated as a serious path to keep the popular messaging app running without the surveillance.

This is another concrete reminder to treat privacy promises rooted on norms as mere mirage. With financial domain being Facebook’s targeted frontier, we do not have the requisite social infrastructure to limit the coming harm to local economies.

These Dancers Make Disability Visible

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0500

These shows reimagine form and time, effectively opening up new ideas of dance.

“Rather than access being retroactive accommodation, we’re thinking about access from the very beginning,” Ms. Sheppard said. “When you invite someone to a show, you want them to experience it, not somebody else’s description of it. We aren’t there yet, but we’re working toward an equitable aesthetic experience.”

You can find more information on Descent here and On Display here.

Nigerian Digital Identity has an App

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0500

The Nigerian federal government has approved the development and release of a new National Identity Number (NIN) slip and mobile app to verify and authenticate identities on-the-go using smartphones.

The highly anticipated Web Service (MWS) Application, called the NIMC Mobile App, and the improved National Identification Number (NIN) Slip are now available for public use. The App provides a secure channel for all Nigerians and legal residents to easily verify and authenticate their identities on-the-go using smartphones. It also enables them to link the NIN to their phone numbers. The development of the App and other tools to support the National Identity Number (NIN) process align with the National Digital Economy Policy for a Digital Nigeria.

Nigerian digital identification route has been quite a mix-bag, and even if the end result is not yet known, one gets the feeling that the process itself has revealed how not to design and deploy an identification system.

Creative Architecturial Adaptation after the Chicago Fire of 1871

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0500

A brief insight into the architects who designed Chicago skyscrappers after the devastating 1871 fire. By looking up, unlike the traditional horizontal orientation, the limited ground area opened up available floor space.

Most of the buildings noted here combined the old masonry construction with newer techniques in fireproofing, grillage footings, and the use of iron-and-steel skeleton construction. In the 1890s and the twentieth century the skyscraper was more fully transformed into a steel skeleton on which the exterior walls were hung as a curtain to protect the interior rather than to support the weight of the building.

A coincidence of circumstances created the opportunity for a new urban architecture in Chicago that would be emulated across the nation. Several factors played important roles in this transformation. Certainly the Great Fire swept the ground clean. The need for office space in a physically circumscribed central district was the pressing problem. The economics of real estate and escalating land values required faster construction that also made possible new construction cheaper. The growth of the steel industry provided material and techniques. The creative intellectual vision of the founders of the Chicago School developed the skyscraper out of these needs and possibilities.

As our societies contend with the COVID fire that has razed down our hypothetical towns, new ideas on how to accommodate social demands are badly needed.

Bringing the State Back into the Disinformation Conversation

Tue, 04 Dec 2018 00:00:00 -0500

Contrary to theoretical promises of the Internet as a technology to diversity information sources, the lived experience of the majority of the population is anything but diverse. Despite the immense opportunities for variety that the technologies powering the Internet present, two thirds of individuals who consume news on the Internet rely on three main platforms; Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

This is not unique to the Internet, as the histories of print, radio, and television illustrate. From the many options that emerge after a major technological breakthrough, only a few last in the competition for limited audience. Complex mechanisms have conspired to select just a few of these platforms as the Internet-experience of our age, creating platform dependency. While they are aggregators of content from other publishers, their ‘gatekeeping’ role in shaping what people have access to has grown significantly, thanks to their business models of paid-for hierarchical placement of content, and their adjudication of source trustworthiness based on original language, source jurisdiction, among others attributes.

The dangers of centralised Internet gatekeeping have been all too apparent to critical observers, but it took the November 2016 elections in the United States of America to awaken popular attention. The tentative charge seems generally pointed to the disproportionate influence Internet platforms have, combined with their laissez faire attitude towards content manipulation. To that end, the proposed solution to dealing with disinformation in a centralised Internet is enhancing content moderation by platforms.

But if this disproportional centralisation is strong enough to significantly alter information flow in countries with historically strong institutional practices, platform dependency takes radically different forms in emerging democracies, presenting gaping vulnerabilities to democratic processes during and in-between elections. As a necessary step towards understanding disinformation in developing countries, the policy conversation has to expand from regulating the narrow profit-minded platforms, to include the role of the most important source of public information in these societies, the State.

The State, through its institutions, is involved in almost all aspects of public information cycles. Public decisions, establishment of social facts, and custody of consensus during uncertainty are core domains of State institutions. Elections, security and law enforcement, monetary policies, disease outbreaks, foreign policy developments, and population statistics are but some of the areas that involve the State at their every turn.

Government communication therefore becomes a core pillar of a reasonably efficient society. An institutionalised government communication process, provides for an informed citizenry while a poor one leads to vacuums and uncertainty. Uncertainly on public information, at least in principle, is more pronounced in developing countries than in established ones. As Internet usage and the popularity of social networks grew, government communication has increasingly moved from state-owned assets to digital accounts hosted on Internet platforms.

The United Kingdom created Government Digital Service, (GDS), as a continuation of its information office. It took up the online experience with institutional memory, expertise, and assets that come with a government office. US.GOV in the United States is also the official extension of Government Information and Services. This is the case with Canada, the EU, and refreshingly with Rwanda, among other countries. In contrast, most governments I have studied in the African region have very active Facebook pages, some Twitter accounts, yet these are not mirrored on their own websites. Social media platforms in this region are not necessarily amplifying government communication infrastructure. They are replacing it.

Platform Dependency Deeply Coded

Even while the platforms offer opportunities for innovative government communications, at times being the only window into government, they raise further problems. Some of these online accounts reporting on government developments are under personal control. It gets hard to separate the official from the personal. Archiving of such information is problematic, and freedom of information requests, for example, may never get to vital government information on virtue of being lost between personal and official accounts. On a technical level, securing such highly-prized distributed accounts gets more complicated.

After the current Ethiopian Prime Minister took over leadership in April 2018, Fitsum Arega, his close confidant, used his personal twitter account to communicate Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) developments in his role as the Chief of Staff. Journalists, diaspora communities, and diplomats hang on to his tweets, in large part due to limited timely official alternatives. After fighting numerous troll accounts, including flagging them for impersonating the Prime Minister, he had to apply to Twitter for verification. It took several weeks for the Chief of Staff of Ethiopia to be verified. It is important to note that Twitter does not have any office in Africa, and the whole process felt more like a begging instance. Despite all the setbacks, he proved to be a reliable source of information during the crucial transition period. In November 2018, Fitusm was transferred from the OPM. He has hypothetically left with his 50,000+ Twitter followers. Institutional memory, gone. The new press secretary and her team will start that complex digital journey afresh, albeit with occasional retweet boosts from the now verified Fitsum account.

This Ethiopian scenario is not an isolated case, as most governments in the African region struggle to manage communications on the Internet with a semi-broken or non-existent government digital infrastructure. Even in countries with a seemingly organized digital communication strategies in the region, they are more or less the president’s account- the person - broadcasting unit, funded from public pulse, with their partisanship evident during election periods. Rwanda, Kenya, Cameroon, and Burundi are spectacular cases.

It is easy to see why governments love Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The network effort ensures wider reach of their content, precisely because ‘people are on Facebook. Take it where they are’. It is also relatively cheaper resource-wise to use platforms because the overheads may just be data costs, a social media manager, and remembering the password(s). What’s not to love.

However, the resources supposedly saved from such a strategy are paid for dearly in its implications on content management. For starts, platforms are private entities whose rules or terms of use may be in contradiction with government strategies. Some companies have dedicated officials to handle government requests but it sounds ineffective to have to go through half dozen hops to communicate with your citizens. An example would be a government posting content on platforms that require membership. Streaming an official government event on FacebookLive may sound dirt easy, until you realise that your citizens have to signup for Facebook accounts else their experience is highly diminished compared to those logged in. Further, future content reliability depends on platform regulations and availability, most of whom operate closed and proprietary software, limiting transparent audit of what happens to the content. This results in government communication, a core pillar of democracy, being overly dependent on the rules of software developers and policy wonks in far off lands. But this need not be the case.

Publish on Own Systems, Syndicate Everywhere

There is a tried and successful way out to leverage platform reach without sacrificing government communication strategies. Publish on your sites, syndicate everywhere (POSSE). In case of contradictions, your domain is the correct version. Using free and open source platforms self-hosted in their jurisdictions, African states can take back their control of information cycles. A working example of such a system would be a citizen-focused website paired with a self-hosted Mastodon instance run and maintained by the government. All official communication is published on such a platform, linked to all departments, and secured as any other State infrastructure. This calls for proper staffing, healthy information and archival management, and most importantly, policy makers who understand government communication as a pillar of good governance. These are priorities a serious government would be willing to invest in to maintain a sense of communication sovereignty.

It may be reasonable to argue against this by claiming that even if government departments publish on their accessible platforms, the ‘average’ Internet user will not necessarily dig through all the text to verify information. However, it should not be lost on us that journalists, fact-checkers, researchers, and public interest technologists will have an easier time reporting or verifying, which in turn improves the general information hygiene in society.

Platforms may be the reality we live with for now, but they need not be our everything. As concerns around their disproportionate role in mass manipulation gets increased attention, we should not forget the main mover of public information. Without verifiable information, anything goes. This is the perfect ground for disinformation. It is time to bring the State back into the conversation.