Technology
The 3D-Printed Affordable Housing of the Future Will Be Recyclable
When you imagine a 3D-printed home, you probably picture a boxy concrete structure. As 3D printing’s popularity has grown in the construction industry — thanks to its efficiency when it comes to time, energy and cost — carbon-intensive concrete has become the go-to building material.
But a project in Maine has set its sights on something different: a neighborhood of 600-square-foot, 3D-printed, bio-based houses crafted from materials like wood fibers and bioresins. The aim: a complex of 100-percent recyclable buildings that will provide homes to those experiencing houselessness.
In late 2022, an initiative between the University of Maine and local nonprofit Penquis unveiled its prototype — BioHome3D, the first 100-percent recyclable house. Now, the pioneering project is working toward completing its first livable housing complex. It will be fully bio-based, meaning all materials will be derived from living organisms such as plants and other renewable agricultural, marine and forestry materials.
Once the pilot project is completed and the team reaches full commercial capacity, the team will be able to print a home in as little as two days. Courtesy of the University of Maine ASCC
As the materials are all 100-percent recyclable, so become the buildings. The materials are also all renewable. And thanks to its natural composition, the home acts as a carbon sink, sequestering 46 tons of carbon dioxide per 600-square-foot unit.
The materials for this project will mainly come from wood left over by local mills. “The wood fiber material that’s used in the mix is essentially waste wood here in Maine,” says Jason Bird, director of housing development for Penquis. Bird is referring to what’s known as wood residuals: materials that, he explains, “pulp mills or other sawmills either landfill, discard or set off to the side and rot.”
Courtesy of University of Maine ASCC
Houses like BioHome3D could be built anywhere in the world that bio-based materials are available.
According to the University of Maine, the state’s sawmills produce nearly one million tons of wood residuals every year. Since each 600-square-foot unit requires approximately 10 tons of wood residuals, 100,000 housing units could theoretically be produced every year using just sawmill residuals.
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The University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center received $3.3 million in funding for this project last year, and its collaboration with Penquis has set out to build a ready-to-live neighborhood with nine 3D-printed homes for people experiencing houselessness. As the team undergoes the final regulatory hurdles, Bird anticipates that houses could be ready to live in as early as this spring.
“The wood fiber material that’s used in the mix is essentially waste wood here in Maine,” says Jason Bird. Courtesy of the University of Maine ASCC
Once this pilot project is completed and the team at the University of Maine reaches full commercial capacity, Bird says the team will be able to print a home in as little as two days.
“That would include the shell of the house — the roof, walls, floors system,” Bird explains. “Long-term [infrastructure projects] could include cabinets, countertops, bath fixtures. And what gets me so excited about this project is that the technology isn’t just solving a local problem, it could be replicated around the world.”
Dr. Habib Dagher, executive director of the Advanced Structures and Composites Center, confirms that the technology is intended to be widely replicated.
“The goal of this research is to create a system for constructing homes that alleviates strains on the supply chain and addresses labor shortages, while providing economical and sustainable housing,” says Dr. Dagher. “This technology can be used anywhere in the world that has access to bio-based raw materials. We are focused on scaling up production technology to drive down costs and increase availability.”
And after enduring a year of extreme weather in Maine, with sensors reporting temperatures ranging from 1 degree to 105 degrees Fahrenheit, BioHome3D met all sustainability, strength, and durability requirements for US building codes, as well as the design requirements of the International Code Council code.
“Doing this project in a place like Maine, which has some of the most extreme temperatures in the continental US, is vital because it can prove that this material can endure huge temperature swings,” says Sarah Goehrke, founder of Additive Integrity, a consulting service that focuses on the examination and sustainable acceleration of industrial 3D printing. “The fact that BioHome3D survived for a year is very important proof going forward.”
Courtesy of the University of Maine ASCC
The BioHome3D prototype was printed on the world's largest 3D polymer printer at the University of Maine's Advanced Structures and Composites Center.
Initial printing speeds of 20 pounds per hour have since ramped up to nearly 500 pounds per hour, significantly reducing construction costs. This efficiency, combined with local materials, makes the process more sustainable and resilient to global supply chain disruptions.
The project is a timely response to an already pressing and worsening global housing crisis. UN-Habitat predicts that by 2030, three billion people will require improved housing. And with traditional construction contributing a staggering 27 percent of global greenhouse emissions, less-polluting alternatives will need to rise to the occasion. In Maine, the need is clear: the state is already experiencing a shortage of 20,000 affordable housing units.
“What’s more innovative about this project [than other 3D housing initiatives] is both that it’s bio-based, and that it’s geared fully toward addressing the housing crisis,” says Goerhke.
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3D-printed houses produce significantly less waste than conventional construction, as builders are able to print exactly the amount of material they need for a given project, and minimal space is needed for storage materials. And with the ability to store all materials in the same space, the energy otherwise required to transport materials between sites is eradicated.
One forecast projects that the global 3D construction market will soar by 91 percent from 2021 to 2028.
“Building many smaller structures in a short amount of time is what the housing crisis needs to address unhoused people and help to create larger communities quite quickly,” says Goerhke.
The post The 3D-Printed Affordable Housing of the Future Will Be Recyclable appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
The Quickest Revolution: An Insider’s Guide to Sweeping Technological Change, and Its Largest Threats – review
In The Quickest Revolution, Jacopo Pantaleoni examines modern technological progress and the history of computing. Bringing to bear his background as a visualisation software designer and a philosophical lens, Pantaleoni illuminates the threats that technological advancements like AI, the Metaverse, and Deepfakes pose to society, writes Hermano Luz Rodrigues.
The Quickest Revolution: An Insider’s Guide to Sweeping Technological Change, and Its Largest Threats. Jacopo Pantaleoni. Mimesis International. 2023.
Find this book: 
“This changes everything” is perhaps the most hackneyed phrase found in YouTube videos when the topic happens to be new technologies. Such videos typically feature enthusiastic presenters describing the marvellous potentials of a soon-to-come technology, and a comment section that shares the same optimism. These videos proliferate daily, receiving hundreds of thousands of views. Regardless of whether we take them at face value or with extreme scepticism, their abundance illustrates the craze for technological progress, and more importantly, that a critical view of this attention is wanting.
Pantaleoni uses theories such as Moore’s Law, which explains an exponential growth phenomenon, and inputs from his career and personal experiences, to frame the history of, and the philosophical ideas driving, technological change.
In The Quickest Revolution, Jacopo Pantaleoni aims to fill this gap by supplying the reader with a critical, yet personal, analysis of modern technological progress and its impact on society. Coming from a background in computer science and visualisation software development, Pantaleoni uses theories such as Moore’s Law, which explains an exponential growth phenomenon, and inputs from his career and personal experiences, to frame the history of, and the philosophical ideas driving, technological change.
The first few chapters of the book are devoted to a survey of the defining moments of pre-modern scientific advancements in the Western world. The chapters include breakthroughs from historical figures such as Copernicus, Galileo and Bacon. The author then fast-forwards to the 20th century to briefly introduce the achievements of the godfathers of computer science like Alan Turing. The descriptions of these events foreshadow the book’s main focus on contemporary technological development and its concerns. In the latter, Pantaleoni approaches many tech-related keywords trending today from a philosophical perspective: AI, Metaverse, Deepfakes, and Simulation, among others.
what distinguishes Pantaleoni’s approach is the fact that he analyses these themes with a gaze that stems from the fields of realistic visualisation and simulation.
While such at-issue discourses on contemporary technology may be plentiful among enthusiasts (eg, podcasts like Lex Fridman), what distinguishes Pantaleoni’s approach is the fact that he analyses these themes with a gaze that stems from the fields of realistic visualisation and simulation. This distinction is not to be taken lightly. Throughout the book, there are surprising overlaps between these specific fields and society’s perception and interest in technology. For example, the author notes how films such as The Matrix, which used technology to simulate and depict “another reality that did look real”, offer proof of “how deeply computer graphics has been affecting our culture” (185). In fact, he argues that not only did sci-fi and CGI-laden media foment interest in stories about simulated worlds, but the technological achievements of such productions heavily contributed to society’s adoration and pursuit of advancements in realistic visualisations and simulations.
Pantaleoni acknowledges that society’s pursuit of a realistic-simulated future is replete with potential benefits, such as reduction of operation costs, accessibility through remote work, and engagement by telepresence. But, he notes that it may bring forth undesirable consequences
Pantaleoni acknowledges that society’s pursuit of a realistic-simulated future is replete with potential benefits, such as reduction of operation costs, accessibility through remote work, and engagement by telepresence. But, he notes that it may bring forth undesirable consequences to the physical world. For him, such aspirations implicitly denote a belief that “advances in photorealistic rendering, networking, and artificial intelligence will provide us the tools to build a better version of reality” (244). He cautions that this reality exodus neglects existing problems, and poses the question: “If we are failing to set things straight in the real world, what chances do we have to fair better, or ‘do it right’ in a hypothetical Metaverse?”(244).
The book makes the case that there are signs that the hitherto inexorable drive for progress in these technologies is leading to devastating effects. As practical examples, the author cites the impacts these technologies have had on political elections, the economy, and collective identity, among others. The book also underscores how physical and virtual/simulated have become increasingly intertwined through technology. Sherry Turkle observed this phenomenon many years prior in her presentation Artificial Intelligence at 50: “When Animal Kingdom opened in Orlando, populated by ‘real’, that is, biological animals, its first visitors complained that these animals were not as ‘realistic’ as the animatronics creatures in Disneyworld”. That is, while the animatronics featured “typical” characteristics, the real animals were perceived as static in comparison.
In a similar fashion, Pantaleoni recognises the capacity of contemporary technologies to shift perceptions and recoil in society as proxies. He writes that the overwhelming majority of Deepfakes, for example, either create pornographic or troubling scenes using celebrities. Furthermore, he notes that Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots are capable of impersonating a human being and that AI is automating both physical and mental human labour.
Whatever risks these new technologies seem to embody, however, are often brushed off by enthusiasts. This rather careless stance might be due to what Pantaleoni describes as a “blind” faith in technological progress, a belief akin to a “new and widely spread religion” (242). At its core, this techie religion is based on the imperative that technological growth is not to be questioned or impeded, for it makes “promises of a better reality” (243).
While previous technologies were essentially engineered by humans, society is transitioning towards new technologies that are increasingly autonomous and uncontrollable
Two arguments regarding the implications of this “religion” may be extracted from the book. The first argument is that for the zealots, it doesn’t matter how things progress (the means), as long as they continue to do so (produce results). While previous technologies were essentially engineered by humans, society is transitioning towards new technologies that are increasingly autonomous and uncontrollable, because these new technologies produce results that are “far much better than any handcrafted algorithm a human could make”(126).
Similar to the deceiving Mechanical Turk of the 18th century, many of today’s black-box technologies are very convincing in providing an illusion of their capabilities, while little is known about their under-the-hood properties or actual affordances.
The second argument is that what is perceived as progress may actually be a sort of artifice. Similar to the deceiving Mechanical Turk of the 18th century, many of today’s black-box technologies are very convincing in providing an illusion of their capabilities, while little is known about their under-the-hood properties or actual affordances. This concealment of properties and their seductive realism lure techno enthusiasts because of their desire to believe in them. Pantaleoni reminds us, however, that image-generative AI models, for instance, “know nothing about physics laws and accurate simulations” (141). Instead, it achieves extreme realism by feeding millions of training examples (141).
Throughout the book, Pantaleoni engages the reader in the challenges of technological development, through a distinct and compelling gaze – that of his specialisation in realistic visualisation software. Moreover, he does so in the tone of a passionate advocate of technology and a worried critic. There are a variety of contemporary “revolution” topics and discussions, such as the ethics behind the implementation of new technologies or its impact on the economy, and depending on each reader’s preferences and interests, some will resonate more than others. However, readers are likely to find the historical accounts narrated in the first few chapters disjointed from the book’s focus. These accounts are broad and familiar, with much of its content being assumed knowledge for most readers. Nevertheless, Pantaleoni offers notable contributions to the field with his shrewd observations anchored by his vast experience. In a field saturated with either theorists or quacks, it is especially commendable to read a book from the perspective of a practitioner.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.
Image Credit: Bruce Rolff on Shutterstock.
Erik Prince Claims His Vaporware Super-Phone Could Have Thwarted October 7 Hamas Attack
Notorious Blackwater founder and perennial mercenary entrepreneur Erik Prince has a new business venture: a cellphone company whose marketing rests atop a pile of muddled and absurd claims of immunity to surveillance. On a recent episode of his podcast, Prince claimed that his special phone’s purported privacy safeguards could have prevented many of the casualties from Hamas’s October 7 attack.
The inaugural episode of “Off Leash with Erik Prince,” the podcast he co-hosts with former Trump campaign adviser Mark Serrano, focused largely on the Hamas massacre and various intelligence failures of the Israeli military. Toward the end of the November 2 episode, following a brief advertisement for Prince’s new phone company, Unplugged, Serrano asked how Hamas had leveraged technology to plan the attack. “I think that when the post-op of this disaster is done, I think the main source of intel for Hamas was cellphone data,” Serrano claimed, without evidence. “How does Gaza access that data? I mean, Hamas?”
Prince answered that location coordinates, commonly leaked from phones via advertising data, were surely crucial to Hamas’s ability to locate Israel Defense Forces installations and kibbutzim.
Serrano, apparently sensing an opportunity to promote Prince’s $949 “double encrypted” phone, continued: “If all of Israel had Unplugged [phones] on October 7, what would that have done to Hamas’s strategy?”
Prince didn’t miss a beat. “I will almost guarantee that whether it’s the people living on kibbutzes, but especially the 19, 20, 21-year-old kids that are serving in the IDF, if they’re not on duty, they’re on their phones and on social media, and that cellphone data was tracked and collected and used for targeting by Hamas,” he said. “This phone, Unplugged, prevents that from happening.”
Unplugged’s product documentation is light on details, privacy researcher Zach Edwards told The Intercept, and the features the company touts can be replicated on most phones just by tinkering with settings. Both Android devices and iPhones, Edwards pointed out, allow users to deactivate their advertising IDs. It’s unclear what makes Unplugged any different, let alone a tool that could have thwarted the Hamas attack. “Folks should wait for proof before accepting those claims,” Edwards said.
“Simply Not True”
This isn’t the first time Prince has used an act of violence as a business opportunity. Following the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School, Prince constructed a mock school building called R U Ready High School where police could pay to train for future shootings. In 2017, he pitched the Trump White House on a plan, modeled after the British East India Company, to privatize the American war in Afghanistan with mercenaries.
With Unplugged, Prince’s main claim seems to be that, unlike most phones, his company’s devices don’t have advertising IDs: unique codes generated by every Android and iOS phone that marketers use to surveil consumer habits, including location. Unplugged claims its phones use a customized version of Android that strips out these IDs. But the notion that Prince’s phone, which is still unavailable for purchase more than a year after it was announced, could have saved lives on October 7 was contradicted by mobile phone security experts, who told The Intercept that just about every aspect of the claim is false, speculative, or too vague to verify.
“That is simply not true and that is not how mobile geolocation works,” said Allan Liska, an intelligence analyst at the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. While Prince is correct that the absence of an advertising ID would diminish to some degree the amount of personal data leaked by a phone, it by no means cuts it off entirely. So long as a device is connected to cellular towers — generally considered a key feature for cellphones — it’s susceptible to tracking. “Mobile geolocation is based on tower data triangulation and there is no level of operating system security that that can bypass that,” Liska added.
Unplugged CEO Ryan Paterson told The Intercept that Prince’s statement about how his phone could have minimized Israeli deaths on October 7 “has much to do with the amount of data that the majority of cell phones in the world today create about the users of the device, their locations, patterns of life and behaviors,” citing a 2022 Electronic Frontier Foundation report on how mobile advertising data fuels police surveillance. Indeed, smartphone advertising has created an immeasurably vast global ecosystem of intimate personal data, unregulated and easily bought and sold, that can facilitate state surveillance without judicial oversight.
“Unplugged’s UP Phone has an operating system that does not contain a [mobile advertising ID] that can be passed [on], does not have any Google Mobile Services, and has a built-in firewall that blocks applications from sending any tracker information from the device, and delivering advertisements to the phone,” Paterson added in an email. “Taking these data sources away from the Hamas planners could have seriously disrupted and limited their operations effectiveness.”
Unplugged did not respond to a request for more detailed information about its privacy and security measures.
Neither Erik Prince nor an attorney who represents him responded to questions from The Intercept.
Articles of Faith
“While it’s true that anyone could theoretically find aggregate data on populated areas and possibly more specific data on an individual using mobile advertiser identifiers, it is completely unclear if Hamas used this and the ‘could have’ in the last sentence is doing a lot of work,” William Budington, a security researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who regularly scrutinizes Android systems, wrote in an email to The Intercept. “If Hamas was getting access to location information through cell tower triangulation methods (say their targets were connecting to cell towers within Gaza that they had access to), then [Prince’s] phone would be as vulnerable to this as any iOS or Android device.”
The idea of nixing advertising IDs is by no means a privacy silver bullet. “When he is talking about advertising IDs, that is separate from location data,” Budington noted. If a phone’s user gives an app permission to access that phone’s location, there’s little to nothing Prince can do to keep that data private. “Do some apps get location data as well as an advertising ID? Yes. But his claim that Hamas had access to this information, and it was pervasively used in the attack to establish patterns of movement, is far-fetched and extremely speculative,” Budington wrote.
Liska, who previously worked in information security within the U.S. intelligence community, agreed. “I also find the claim that Hamas was purchasing advertising/location data to be a bit preposterous as well,” he said. “Not that they couldn’t do it (I am not familiar with Israeli privacy laws) but that they would have enough intelligence to know who to target with the purchase.”
Hamas’s assault displayed a stunningly sophisticated understanding of the Israeli state security apparatus, but there’s been no evidence that this included the use of commercially obtained mobile phone data.
While it’s possible that Unplugged phones block all apps from requesting location tracking permission in the first place, this would break any location-based features in the phone, rendering something as basic as a mapping app useless. But even this hypothetical is impossible to verify, because the phone has yet to leave Prince’s imagination and reach any actual customers, and its customized version of Android, dubbed “LibertOS,” has never been examined by any third parties.
While Unplugged has released a one-page security audit, conducted by PwC Digital Technology, it applied only to the company’s website and an app it offers, not the phone, making its security and privacy claims largely articles of faith.
The post Erik Prince Claims His Vaporware Super-Phone Could Have Thwarted October 7 Hamas Attack appeared first on The Intercept.
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In Video From Gaza, Former CEO of Pegasus Spyware Firm Announces Millions for New Venture
It was an unusual place for a tech company to announce a successful $33 million round of venture capital fundraising. But, on November 7, former NSO Group CEO Shalev Hulio and two colleagues stood in the Gaza Strip, stared into a laptop’s built-in webcam, and did exactly that.
“We are here on the Gaza border,” said Hulio, the Israeli entrepreneur, on a little-noted YouTube video released by his new start-up, Dream Security. Hulio, a reservist who had been called up for duty, appeared in the video with a gun slung over his shoulder.
“It’s very emotional,” he said. “After all of us being here, some of us reserves, some of us helping the government in many other ways, I think that doing it here is a great message to the high-tech community and the people of Israel.”
Hulio, who stepped down from his role at NSO in August 2022, was sending a clear signal: He was back.
After a rocky few years, marred by revelations about the role of NSO’s spyware in human rights abuses and the company’s blacklisting by the U.S. government, Hulio and his team were using the moment — timed exactly one month after Hamas’s attack — to announce lofty ambitions for their new cybersecurity firm, Dream Security.
“Israeli high-tech is not only here to stay, but will grow better out of this,” said Michael Eisenberg, an Israeli American venture capitalist and Dream co-founder, in the promo video. “It’s going to deliver on time, wherever it’s needed, to whatever country or whatever company it’s needed at.”
Their new project is another cybersecurity company. Instead of phone hacking, though, Dream — an acronym for “Detect, Respond, and Management” — offers cyber protection for so-called critical infrastructure, such as energy installations.
Dream Security builds on the successful team NSO put together, with talent brought on board from the embattled spyware firm. At least a dozen of NSO’s top officials and staffers, along with an early investor in both NSO and Dream, followed Hulio to Dream since its founding last year.
Lawyers for Dream Security who responded to The Intercept’s request for comment said the companies were distinct entities. “The only connection between the two entities is Mr. Hulio and a small portion of talented employees who previously worked at NSO Group,” said Thomas Clare, a lawyer for Dream, in a letter. Liron Bruck, a spokesperson for NSO Group, told The Intercept, “The two companies are not involved in any way.”
“It’s worrying. It seems like a new way to whitewash NSO’s image and past record.”
Now, with so many NSO people gathered under a new banner, critics are concerned that their old firm’s scandals will be forgotten.
“It’s worrying,” said Natalia Krapiva, tech-legal counsel at Access Now, a digital rights advocacy group. “It seems like a new way to whitewash NSO’s image and past record.”
At the same time, NSO Group is also using Israel’s war effort to try and revamp its own reputation. After Pegasus, NSO’s phone hacking software, was exposed for its role in human rights abuses and the firm was blacklisted in the U.S., the company suffered years of financial troubles. In the new year, it seemed to be bouncing back, with Israeli media reporting on its expansion and reorganization.
Clare, Dream’s lawyer, stressed that Hulio was no longer affiliated with NSO. “Currently, Mr. Hulio holds no interest in NSO Group—not as an officer, employee, or stockholder,” Clare wrote to The Intercept. “Since Dream Security’s foundation in late 2022, he has exclusively led the company.”
With Hulio at its helm, Dream boasts an eclectic and influential leadership team with connections to various far-right figures in Israel, Europe, and the U.S. — and an ambitious plan to leverage their ties to dominate the cybersecurity sector.
A view of the entrance of the Israeli cyber company NSO Group branch in the Arava Desert on Nov. 11, 2021, in Sapir, Israel.
Photo: Amir Levy/Getty Images
New Mission, Same Executives
Hulio has said that, with Dream, he moved from the “attack side to defense” — focusing on defending infrastructure, including gas and oil installations. A jargon-laden blurb for the company brags that it delivers surveillance to detect threats and an unspecified “power to respond fast.”
“Dream Security’s product is a defensive cybersecurity solution to protect critical infrastructure and state-level assets,” Clare said. “Dream Security is not involved in the creation, marketing, or sale of any spyware or other malware product.”
Clare said that Dream’s mission is “to enable decision-makers to act promptly and efficiently against any actual and potential cyber threats, such as malware attacks committed by states, terrorist organizations, and hacker groups, among others.”
Kathryn Humphrey, another Dream lawyer and an associate at Clare’s firm, said in one of a series of emails, “Dream Security is not involved with offensive cyber, nor does it have an intention of becoming involved with offensive cyber. Dream Security is developing the world’s best AI-based defensive cyber security platform, and that is its only mission.”
The Intercept found that 13 former NSO staffers now work at Dream Security — about a fifth of the new company.
The mission may be new, but Dream is staffed in part by NSO veterans. A recent report from the Israeli business press said Dream has 70 employees, 60 of them in Israel. The Intercept found that 13 former NSO staffers now work at Dream Security — about a fifth of the new company.
“Dream Security recruited the best talent to achieve its goal of becoming the globally leading AI-based cyber security company,” said Humphrey in a letter to The Intercept. “A small minority is top talent from NSO Group, including executives and other employees.”
In addition to Hulio himself, former top NSO officials permeate the upper echelons of Dream. From the heads of sales to human resources to their legal departments, at least seven former executives from NSO now hold positions at Dream in the same jobs. Five additional Dream employees — from security researchers to software engineers and marketing designers — formerly worked at NSO.
Dream’s lawyers told The Intercept that the “only overlap” between the companies were Hulio and former NSO employees, but other people tie NSO history and Dream’s present together. In one case, it was familial: Gil Dolev, one of Dream’s founders, is the brother of Shiri Dolev, who, according to NSO spokesperson Bruck, was NSO Group’s president until last year. (Shiri Dolev did not respond to a request for comment.)
The two companies also share at least one investor. Eddy Shalev, the first investor in NSO, told The Intercept he had put money into Dream. “I was an early investor in NSO,” Shalev said. “I am no longer involved with NSO. I did invest in Dream Security.”
Asked about Shalev’s investments in Dream and NSO, Humphrey said, “While Eddy Shalev is a valued investor, he is not a major investor—his investment is roughly 1% of the overall amount invested in Dream Security.”
Former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz arrives at court on the first day of his trial in Vienna on Oct. 18, 2023. Kurz is charged with making false statements to a parliamentary inquiry into alleged corruption in his first government.
Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/AP
Austria’s Mini-Trump
From its inception, Dream Security’s strategy was based around an in-house connection to the international right. Former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, dubbed “Austria’s mini-Trump,” is a Dream co-founder.
The former chancellor was forced to step down from the Austrian government in October 2021, facing corruption allegations and he remains on trial for related charges.
Along the way, Kurz had made powerful friends. He reportedly has relationships with top officials around Europe and the U.S., including right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán, and Jared Kushner, former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former top adviser. Last year, Kurz joined Kushner on the honorary advisory council to the Abraham Accords Peace Institute, a group set up to foster normalization between Israel and Gulf monarchies like the United Arab Emirates — the very authoritarians that used NSO’s Pegasus software to crack down on dissidents.
For all his connections to powerful politicians, experts said Kurz was never purely an ideologue. “Kurz is really a political professional,” said Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik, a professor of Austrian politics at the University of Vienna. “He never struck anybody as extremely convicted of anything. I think his personal career and business were always the number one priority.”
“Kurz is really a political professional. … I think his personal career and business were always the number one priority.”
Once Kurz was out of government, he pivoted to the world of tech investment. He first met the cyber-spying titan Peter Thiel in 2017 and landed a job at one of the far-right billionaire’s firms, Thiel Capital, in 2021. Thiel, one of the largest donors to right-wing causes in the U.S., is deeply involved in the world of spy tech: His company Palantir, which allows for the sorting and exploitation of masses of data, helped empower and expand the U.S. government’s international spy machine.
When Dream’s creation was announced, Kurz’s connections to Thiel — and therefore Palantir — raised alarms. In the European Parliament, lawmakers in the Committee of Inquiry to investigate the use of Pegasus and equivalent surveillance spyware took note.
“The cooperation between Kurz and Hulio constitutes an indirect but alarming connection between the spyware industry and Peter Thiel and his firm Palantir,” said a committee report earlier this year. (Thiel is not involved with NSO or Dream, a person familiar with his business told The Intercept.)
In November, nearly 80 percent of the European Parliament voted to condemn the European Commission for not doing enough to tackle spyware abuse, including NSO’s Pegasus software, across member states.
Questions have cropped up about whether Dream will, like NSO before it, sell powerful cybersecurity tools to authoritarian governments who might use them for nefarious purposes.
Asked by the Israeli business publication Globes about where Dream would sell its wares, Kurz said, “This is a company that was founded in Israel and is currently looking to the European market.”
According to Globes, Kurz was brought on to open doors to European governments. Dream has said that its customers already include the cybersecurity authority of one major European country, though it has declined to say which.
Over time, Europe has become a strong market for commercial cybersecurity firms. Sophie in ’t Veld, a European parliamentarian from the Netherlands who led the charge on the Pegasus committee resolution, told The Intercept, “Europe is paradise for this kind of business.”
The Israeli Right
Dream’s right-wing network is nowhere more concentrated than in Israel itself. Venture capitalist Dovi Frances, a major Republican donor who led Dream’s recent $33 million fundraising round, is close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And Lior Atar, head of cyber security at the Israeli Ministry of Energy for six years, was directly plucked from his government role to join Dream earlier this year.
Dream officials’ entanglement with the Israeli right also extends to grassroots right-wing movements. Two investors and Hulio are involved in a ground-level organization considered to be Israel’s largest militia, HaShomer HaChadash, or “the new guardians.” A Zionist education nonprofit established in 2007, HaShomer HaChadash says it safeguards Israel’s agricultural lands, largely along the Gaza border.
“I look forward to building Dream, against all odds, to become the world’s largest cybersecurity company. Mark my word: It fucking will be.”
Eisenberg, the Dream co-founder, chairs HaShomer HaChadash’s board. Hulio became a HaShomer HaChadash board member in May 2017 — a month before NSO Group was put up for sale for $1 billion — and has donated nearly $100,000 to the group. (Neither Dream nor HaShomer HaChadash responded to questions about whether Hulio remains on the board.) Another Dream investor, Noam Lanir, has also been vocal about his own contributions to the organization, according to Haaretz.
HaShomer HaChadash has a budget of approximately $33 million in 2022, of which over $5 million came from the government, according to documents filed with the Israeli Corporations Authority. The group is staffed in part by volunteers as well as active-duty personnel detailed from the Israeli military.
“They seem like a mainstream organization,” said Ran Cohen, chair of the Democratic Bloc, which monitors anti-democratic incitement in Israel. “But in reality, the origins of their agenda is rooted in the right wing. They have also been active in illegal outposts in the West Bank.”
For Dream, HaShomer HaChadash is but one node of its prolific links to the right at home and abroad. With those connections and the business chops that brought the world NSO Group, Dream — as the name itself suggests — has large ambitions. “I look forward to building Dream, against all odds, to become the world’s largest cybersecurity company,” Frances, the VC, said from the U.S. in the YouTube video announcing the successful fundraising drive. “Mark my word: It fucking will be.”
The post In Video From Gaza, Former CEO of Pegasus Spyware Firm Announces Millions for New Venture appeared first on The Intercept.
Language and the Rise of the Algorithm – review
In Language and the Rise of the Algorithm, Jeffrey Binder weaves together the past five centuries of mathematics, computer science and linguistic thought to examine the development of algorithmic thinking. According to Juan M. del Nido, Binder’s nuanced interdisciplinary work illuminates attempts to maintain and bridge the boundary between technical knowledge and everyday language.
Language and the Rise of the Algorithm. Jeffrey Binder. The University of Chicago Press. 2023
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Arguably, the history of what we now call algorithmic thinking is also the history of the consolidation of algebra, mathematics, calculus and formal logic as tools for composing, enunciating, and thinking about abstractions such as “some flowers are red”. But in less obvious ways, Language and the Rise of the Algorithm shows, it is also the history of trying to compute with, and often in spite of, language, to convey a meaningful proposition about the world. In other words, it is the history of ensuring that “red” actually means red – that we are all clear on who sets what red means (for example, experts through definition or ordinary people through usage) and agree on it – and of whether agreeing about these things is what matters when we use language.
The history of what we now call algorithmic thinking […]is also the history of trying to compute with, and often in spite of, language, to convey a meaningful proposition about the world.
Harking back to the 1500s, the first of the book’s five chapters examines attempts to use symbols to free writing from words at a time when vernaculars where plentiful, grammars unstable and literacy rates low. Algebra was not then considered part of mathematics proper but its rules, expressed in spoken language, were used for practical purposes like calculating taxes and inheritance. From myriad writing experiments emerged algebraic symbols: uncertain and indeterminate, they enabled computational reasoning about unknown values, a revolution that peaked when Viète first used letters in equations in 1591 (33-36).
Algebra was not [In the 1500s] considered part of mathematics proper but its rules, expressed in spoken language, were used for practical purposes like calculating taxes and inheritance
Chapter Two explores Leibniz’s attempts to produce a philosophical language made of symbols and unburdened by words, such that morals, metaphysics, and experiences are all subject to calculation. This was not an exercise in spitting out numbers, but with the aim of demonstrating the reasoning behind every step of communication: a truth-producing machine (62-64). The messiness of communication struck back: how can one ensure that all terms and their nuances are understood in the same way by different people? Leibniz argued that knowledge was divinely installed in us, waiting to be unlocked by devices such as his, but Locke’s argument that knowledge comes from sensory experience and requires an agreement over what things mean won the day (79), paving the way towards an emphasis on concepts and form.
Leibniz argued that knowledge was divinely installed in us, waiting to be unlocked […] but Locke’s argument that knowledge comes from sensory experience and requires an agreement over what things mean won the day
Leibniz also sought to resolve political differences through that language. Chapter Three argues Condorcet shared this goal and the premise that vernaculars were a hindrance, but contrary to Leibniz, he believed universal ideas needed to be taught, not uncovered. Condillac’s and Stanhope’s experiments with other logical machines – actual, material devices designed to think in logical terms through objects – epitomised two tensions framing the century after the French Revolution: first, the matter of whether the people, and their vernacular culture, or the learned, and their enlightened culture, should govern shared meanings – that is to say, give meaning – and second, whether algebra should focus on philosophical and conceptual explanations or on formal definitions and rules (121).
The latter drive would prevail, and as Chapter Four shows, rigour came to emanate not from verbal definitions or clarity of meanings, but from axiomatic systems judged on consistency: meanings are irrelevant to the formal rules by which the system operates (148). Developing this consistency would not require the complete replacement of vernaculars Leibniz and Condorcet argued for: rather, symbolic forms would work alongside vernaculars to produce truth values, as with Boolean logic – the one powering search engines, for example. The fifth and last chapter, “Mass Produced Software Components”, rise of programming languages, in particular ALGOL, and the consolidation of regardless of specifics: intelligible, actionable results within a given amount of time (166).
Binder’s rigorous dissection of debates over language, philosophy, geometry, algebra, history and culture spanning 500 years integrates debates that most disciplines today, aside from some strands of media studies and Science and Technology Studies, tend to treat separately
This book is a tightly packed, erudite contribution to the growing concern in the Humanities with algorithms. Binder’s rigorous dissection of debates over language, philosophy, geometry, algebra, history and culture spanning 500 years integrates debates that most disciplines today, aside from some strands of media studies and Science and Technology Studies, tend to treat separately or with a poor sense of their inbuilt connections. A welcome result of this exercise is the historicisation of certain critiques of technological interventions in politics that, generally lacking this kind of integrated, long-range view, we tend to treat as novel and cutting-edge. For example, an 1818 obituary for Charles Mahon, third Earl of Stanhope and inventor of the Demonstrator, a “reasoning machine”, already claimed that technical solutions for other-than-technical problems such as his tend to replicate the biases of their creators (113), and often the very problems they intended to solve. This critique of technoidealism is now commonplace in the social sciences.
A second benefit of the author’s mode of writing is not explicit in the book but is arguably more consequential. From Bacon’s dismissal of words as “idols of the market” in 1623 (15) to PageRank algorithm’s developers’ goal to remove human judgement by mechanisation in the 1990s (200), the book traces attempts across the centuries to free reason and knowledge from language and rhetoric. In doing this, Language and the Rise of the Algorithm effectively serves as a highly persuasive history of the affects, ethics and aspirations of technocratic reason and rule. The book cuts across the histories of bureaucracy and expertise and the birth of governmentality to tell us how an abstraction in how we make meaning work emerged – an abstraction we are asked to trust in, and argue for, partly because it is the kind of abstraction it ended up being.
The book traces attempts across the centuries to free reason and knowledge from language and rhetoric
This is a rich and nuanced book, at times encyclopaedic in scope, and except for a slight jump in complexity and some jargon in the fifth and last chapter, it will be accessible to readers lacking prior knowledge of algorithms, mathematics or language philosophy. It will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences and humanities, from philosophy and history to sociology and anthropology, as well as readers in political science, government studies and economics for the reasons listed above. It could work as course material for very advanced students.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.
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OpenAI Quietly Deletes Ban on Using ChatGPT for “Military and Warfare”
OpenAI this week quietly deleted language expressly prohibiting the use of its technology for military purposes from its usage policy, which seeks to dictate how powerful and immensely popular tools like ChatGPT can be used.
Up until January 10, OpenAI’s “usage policies” page included a ban on “activity that has high risk of physical harm, including,” specifically, “weapons development” and “military and warfare.” That plainly worded prohibition against military applications would seemingly rule out any official, and extremely lucrative, use by the Department of Defense or any other state military. The new policy retains an injunction not to “use our service to harm yourself or others” and gives “develop or use weapons” as an example, but the blanket ban on “military and warfare” use has vanished.
The unannounced redaction is part of a major rewrite of the policy page, which the company said was intended to make the document “clearer” and “more readable,” and which includes many other substantial language and formatting changes.
“We aimed to create a set of universal principles that are both easy to remember and apply, especially as our tools are now globally used by everyday users who can now also build GPTs,” OpenAI spokesperson Niko Felix said in an email to The Intercept. “A principle like ‘Don’t harm others’ is broad yet easily grasped and relevant in numerous contexts. Additionally, we specifically cited weapons and injury to others as clear examples.”
Felix declined to say whether the vaguer “harm” ban encompassed all military use, writing, “Any use of our technology, including by the military, to ‘[develop] or [use] weapons, [injure] others or [destroy] property, or [engage] in unauthorized activities that violate the security of any service or system,’ is disallowed.”
In a subsequent email, Felix added that OpenAI wanted to pursue certain “national security use cases that align with our mission,” citing a plan to create “cybersecurity tools” with DARPA, and that “the goal with our policy update is to provide clarity and the ability to have these discussions.”
“OpenAI is well aware of the risk and harms that may arise due to the use of their technology and services in military applications,” said Heidy Khlaaf, engineering director at the cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits and an expert on machine learning and autonomous systems safety, citing a 2022 paper she co-authored with OpenAI researchers that specifically flagged the risk of military use. Khlaaf added that the new policy seems to emphasize legality over safety. “There is a distinct difference between the two policies, as the former clearly outlines that weapons development, and military and warfare is disallowed, while the latter emphasizes flexibility and compliance with the law,” she said. “Developing weapons, and carrying out activities related to military and warfare is lawful to various extents. The potential implications for AI safety are significant. Given the well-known instances of bias and hallucination present within Large Language Models (LLMs), and their overall lack of accuracy, their use within military warfare can only lead to imprecise and biased operations that are likely to exacerbate harm and civilian casualties.”
The real-world consequences of the policy are unclear. Last year, The Intercept reported that OpenAI was unwilling to say whether it would enforce its own clear “military and warfare” ban in the face of increasing interest from the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community.
“Given the use of AI systems in the targeting of civilians in Gaza, it’s a notable moment to make the decision to remove the words ‘military and warfare’ from OpenAI’s permissible use policy,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute and a former AI policy analyst at the Federal Trade Commission. “The language that is in the policy remains vague and raises questions about how OpenAI intends to approach enforcement.”
While nothing OpenAI offers today could plausibly be used to directly kill someone, militarily or otherwise — ChatGPT can’t maneuver a drone or fire a missile — any military is in the business of killing, or at least maintaining the capacity to kill. There are any number of killing-adjacent tasks that a LLM like ChatGPT could augment, like writing code or processing procurement orders. A review of custom ChatGPT-powered bots offered by OpenAI suggests U.S. military personnel are already using the technology to expedite paperwork. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which directly aids U.S. combat efforts, has openly speculated about using ChatGPT to aid its human analysts. Even if OpenAI tools were deployed by portions of a military force for purposes that aren’t directly violent, they would still be aiding an institution whose main purpose is lethality.
Experts who reviewed the policy changes at The Intercept’s request said OpenAI appears to be silently weakening its stance against doing business with militaries. “I could imagine that the shift away from ‘military and warfare’ to ‘weapons’ leaves open a space for OpenAI to support operational infrastructures as long as the application doesn’t directly involve weapons development narrowly defined,” said Lucy Suchman, professor emerita of anthropology of science and technology at Lancaster University. “Of course, I think the idea that you can contribute to warfighting platforms while claiming not to be involved in the development or use of weapons would be disingenuous, removing the weapon from the sociotechnical system – including command and control infrastructures – of which it’s part.” Suchman, a scholar of artificial intelligence since the 1970s and member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, added, “It seems plausible that the new policy document evades the question of military contracting and warfighting operations by focusing specifically on weapons.”
Suchman and Myers West both pointed to OpenAI’s close partnership with Microsoft, a major defense contractor, which has invested $13 billion in the LLM maker to date and resells the company’s software tools.
The changes come as militaries around the world are eager to incorporate machine learning techniques to gain an advantage; the Pentagon is still tentatively exploring how it might use ChatGPT or other large-language models, a type of software tool that can rapidly and dextrously generate sophisticated text outputs. LLMs are trained on giant volumes of books, articles, and other web data in order to approximate human responses to user prompts. Though the outputs of an LLM like ChatGPT are often extremely convincing, they are optimized for coherence rather than a firm grasp on reality and often suffer from so-called hallucinations that make accuracy and factuality a problem. Still, the ability of LLMs to quickly ingest text and rapidly output analysis — or at least the simulacrum of analysis — makes them a natural fit for the data-laden Defense Department.
While some within U.S. military leadership have expressed concern about the tendency of LLMs to insert glaring factual errors or other distortions, as well as security risks that might come with using ChatGPT to analyze classified or otherwise sensitive data, the Pentagon remains generally eager to adopt artificial intelligence tools. In a November address, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks stated that AI is “a key part of the comprehensive, warfighter-centric approach to innovation that Secretary [Lloyd] Austin and I have been driving from Day 1,” though she cautioned that most current offerings “aren’t yet technically mature enough to comply with our ethical AI principles.”
Last year, Kimberly Sablon, the Pentagon’s principal director for trusted AI and autonomy, told a conference in Hawaii that “[t]here’s a lot of good there in terms of how we can utilize large-language models like [ChatGPT] to disrupt critical functions across the department.”
Update: January 16, 2024
This article has been updated to include a statement from OpenAI about the use of its technology for military purposes that was received after publication.
The post OpenAI Quietly Deletes Ban on Using ChatGPT for “Military and Warfare” appeared first on The Intercept.
Random Walk: Memoir of an Itinerant – review
In Random Walk: Memoir of an Itinerant, economist Richard Dale reflects on his life and career, tracking his intellectual shift from a believer in free-market economics to a proponent of more stringent regulation. An accessible and engaging read, Dale’s autobiography shares significant insights for those interested in the complexities of financial markets, writes Nicholas Barr.
Random Walk: Memoir of an Itinerant. Richard Dale. Tricorn Books. 2023.
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Richard Dale’s autobiography raises an interesting conundrum. He describes jobs in financial markets and academia (many, often multiple), homes (I lost count), properties contemplated (uncountable), academic disciplines explored (economics, law, finance), books authored (nine, including law and finance, and in retirement history and fiction).
The conundrum is whether the story is the “random walk” of the book’s title or something more deliberate. An early chapter describes Dale’s undergraduate days at LSE. Then, as now, LSE was about analytical training, aiming to give students broad, flexible skills applicable to problem solving in whichever areas they ended up. At the time, unlike now, there was relatively little teaching support – in some courses students were given a book list, ie, a list of books, in which they were encouraged to forage to complement lectures.
Dale used the resulting analytical self-sufficiency [from his undergraduate degree at LSE] to qualify as a barrister via self-study, posing the question of whether his account is less random than an early example of a portfolio career.
Dale used the resulting analytical self-sufficiency to qualify as a barrister via self-study, posing the question of whether his account is less random than an early example of a portfolio career. His early career was in financial markets, including working for the Moscow Narodny Bank, Cripps Warburg, and Rothschild’s, a combination of hard work and high living. Partly for health reasons, the second part was primarily academic, initially at the University of Kent, later at the University of Southampton. And threading throughout were entrepreneurial activities such as establishing the International Currency Review, setting up a credit rating service sponsored by the Financial Times, and suggesting and then editing the FT Financial Regulation Report – a life of career success and latterly of financial comfort.
That said, Dale is open about the role of luck (on which see Robert Frank’s excellent book). He describes a childhood heavily financially constrained, but as the book makes clear, the family had solid social capital, so his early life was eased by advice from family contacts and financial help from relatives for school fees (like his father, he went to Marlborough College). Luck also included legendary teachers at LSE, notably the economist Richard Lipsey and political philosopher Michael Oakeshott. As it turned out, a further piece of luck was the departure of his sponsor at Kent University just after Dale arrived, leaving him with an unstructured two years of funding, which he used to write his first well-received book (a reminder of the famous golfer Gary Player’s dictum that “he harder you work, the luckier you get”). Also lucky was the new appointment at Kent University of the eminent lawyer, Rosalyn Higgins, who supported Dale’s attempt to start an academic career, and sponsored him for a two-year Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. A third view of Dale’s journey, therefore, is as a rolling stone (Mick Jagger was one of his fellow students).
Given my own work on the role of markets – when they work well, and when they don’t – I was particularly interested in Dale’s intellectual journey. In his words,
“Since LSE days I had always had a great admiration for Milton Friedman and the free-market economics of the Chicago School. However, over the years I became increasingly sceptical about the periodic boom-bust cycles of financial markets and the propensity of both equity and credit markets to succumb to bouts of euphoria and panic… I experienced for myself as a fund manager the mad boom-bust years of 1973/76 and I observed the absurd stock market valuations of dot.com and technology companies in the late 1990s which was followed by a spectacular collapse” (200).
That change of view, based on practical experience, was supported by academic research on market failures – imperfect information, behaviour different from narrow economic rationality, search frictions (eg, the fact that it takes time to find a new job) and incomplete contracts – recognised by multiple Nobel prizes this century. Thus, over time Dale moved from a view based on what economists call a rational expectations model, to the more recent emphasis on behavioural finance.
A further reinforcement of Dale’s views is the distinction between risk (where the likelihood of different outcomes is well known, eg, the probability of breaking a leg during a skiing holiday) and uncertainty (where there is a clear risk but little knowledge of its likelihood, eg, future rates of inflation) or whether, when and how artificial intelligence will be beneficial or harmful.
A further reinforcement of Dale’s views is the distinction between risk (where the likelihood of different outcomes is well known, eg, the probability of breaking a leg during a skiing holiday) and uncertainty (where there is a clear risk but little knowledge of its likelihood, eg, future rates of inflation) or whether, when and how artificial intelligence will be beneficial or harmful. It is a fundamental error to conflate risk and uncertainty when analysing financial markets.
Dale became convinced of the need for more stringent regulation, and was prescient in predicting the 2008 financial and economic crisis.
Thus, Dale became convinced of the need for more stringent regulation, and was prescient in predicting the 2008 financial and economic crisis. In doing so, as one of very few experts to sound a warning, he faced considerable – at times personal – pushback, both from finance academics and from practitioners.
During his academic career, Dale straddled the worlds of scholarship and practice. He established a successful MSc in International Banking and Financial Studies at Southampton. In parallel was policy work, including talks at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, testifying before US Congressional Committees, membership of the European Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee, specialist adviser to the Treasury and Civil Service Committee, and writing books and policy papers (on the last – to my great envy – he developed an ability to write fast with no need for drafts, a skill he shared with his LSE mentor Alan Day who was his tutor and subsequently supported some of his policy activities).
Which brings the story to the third part of Dale’s career, so-called retirement, giving him freedom to pursue a long-standing interest in history, writing a series of books, including on Walter Raleigh, those writings being sufficiently acclaimed to bring him election to a Fellowship of the Royal Historical Society.
Running through the career narrative is Dale’s personal life: a pre-university spell on a kibbutz, influenced by his father, a man with strong socialist views (which made for interesting subsequent conversations with a son working in finance); a long first marriage with children, including “too many jobs [and] too many house moves” and a long, happy second marriage in which he had, “only one employer … and owned only one house (plus a share in another)” (246). He had a very active social life, including meeting friends abroad, sometimes for shared holidays, often with lifelong friends from his student days and early career.
So, a career straddling economics, law and finance, retirement as historian with considerable holiday travel, and a full personal and social life – what, if anything, might be missing?
So, a career straddling economics, law and finance, retirement as historian with considerable holiday travel, and a full personal and social life – what, if anything, might be missing? Some readers might wish to see more context around external events. Dale recounts childhood memories of the 1952 Great London Fog and 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, but makes little mention of other events relevant to the economy and financial markets such as the collapse of the communist economic system in the USSR and Central and Eastern Europe and the highly consequential Deng Xiaoping economic reforms in the 1970s that underpinned the economic rise of China.
Also relevant are the dramatic changes in technology. Around the time Dale was an undergraduate, LSE installed a new machine; it was called a photocopier. Staff were sent on training courses on how to use and maintain it; students were not allowed anywhere near it. The timeline from there to Facetime (or listening to Test Match Special on a transatlantic flight) is also directly relevant to the operation of financial markets, for example the possibility of high-speed trading.
An engaging and non-technical read, accessible to anyone with an interest in financial markets.
All in all, this is an engaging and non-technical read, accessible to anyone with an interest in financial markets. For me, the core message of the book, which comes through loud and clear, is that financial market regulation matters big time. With complex products, sellers are often better-informed than buyers, creating space for misselling (think 19th century snake-oil salesmen). Precisely for that reason, products like pharmaceutical drugs are heavily regulated. With analogous complexities, the case for regulating financial products is equally compelling.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.
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Own This! How Platform Co-operatives Help Workers Build a Democratic Internet – review
In Own This! How Platform Co-operatives Help Workers Build a Democratic Internet, Trebor Scholz presents platform co-operativism as a fairer, more sustainable alternative to the extractive capitalist model digital work. While he acknowledges the challenges of building a movement to compete with platform capitalism, Scholz persuasively argues that embracing diverse forms of co-operativism can create a more democratic digital future, writes Lola Brittain.
Own This! How Platform Co-operatives Help Workers Build a Democratic Internet. Trebor Scholz. Verso. 2023.
In the past few years, the new forms of work ushered in by the hyper-extractive business model of “platform capitalism”, have come under increased scrutiny. This has generated interest in paths of contestation and potential alternatives. One such alternative is platform co-operativism. Fusing the co-operative ownership structure, most commonly associated with the Rochdale pioneers of 1840s England, with the technology of digital platforms, platform co-ops promise to deliver a fairer and more sustainable form of digital work.
Fusing the co-operative ownership structure, most commonly associated with the Rochdale pioneers of 1840s England, with the technology of digital platforms, platform co-ops promise to deliver a fairer and more sustainable form of digital work.
The fusion was first proposed in concrete terms by Trebor Scholz in 2014. Since then, Scholz has done much to conceptualise and popularise the practice as the head of the Platform Cooperative Consortium; a digital space dedicated to supporting the establishment, growth, and conversion of platform co-ops.
Own This! How Platform Co-operatives Help Workers Build a Democratic Internet is his latest contribution. The book offers a panoramic overview of platform co-operativism and a vision for what its future might entail, drawing on case studies from Cape Town to Manhattan. It claims that platform co-ops are not a “figment of utopian imagination” but a reality that are already transforming the digital economy and that, with the right help, support and ecosystem, they can achieve a significant impact at a global scale.
The book offers a panoramic overview of platform co-operativism and a vision for what its future might entail, drawing on case studies from Cape Town to Manhattan
The book begins with an analysis of the issues faced by platform workers that will now be familiar to many: meagre wages, extreme risk, excessive surveillance, and management via algorithm. For Scholz, this is a consequence of the lack of workplace democracy that is attributable to the concentration of ownership within the hands of a few. This is not a new issue, of course, but it has been taken to the extreme by major technology corporations in the past two decades.
The solution to abject exploitation, according to Scholz, is for workers to collectively leverage platform technologies to forge democratically owned and governed businesses.
The solution to abject exploitation, according to Scholz, is for workers to collectively leverage platform technologies to forge democratically owned and governed businesses. Through analyses of many thriving real-world examples, such as Up&Go (an umbrella domestic work co-operative) and the Drivers Co-operative (a ride-hailing co-operative), he demonstrates that worker-ownership offers more equitable value distribution, higher pay, increased algorithmic transparency and security, a greater sense of dignity and improved wellbeing.
The potential of platform co-operativism to deliver improved outcomes for workers is contrasted to alternative attempts to elicit change, specifically by “compelling” major technology corporations to do better. He argues that several of the largest players have actively sought to prevent pro-worker legislation and that they are unwilling to democratise the workplace or improve conditions.
This is of course true in some cases. But there are examples where platform companies have been forced and/or persuaded to alter their practices, through direct worker action, community pressure and action-research. Scholz discusses prospects for worker action in chapter five. Here, he argues that even “successful strikes” do not necessarily generate workplace power and control and that, in turn, unions should embrace co-operativism as an alternative mode of platform worker organisation.
This is a pertinent suggestion, especially considering the recent ruling by the UK Supreme Court that Deliveroo workers cannot be recognised as employees or represented by trade unions in collective bargaining. But, of course, starting a co-operative is not possible for all, and Scholz acknowledges that platform co-operatives should not be expected to out-compete the major platform companies. To that extent, change – as he has noted elsewhere – will require a combination of strategies.
Starting a co-operative is not possible for all, and Scholz acknowledges that platform co-operatives should not be expected to out-compete the major platform companies. To that extent, change […] will require a combination of strategies.
The book is not solely focused on platform worker co-operatives, though. Conceptualising platform co-operativism as the Swiss army knife of organisational models, Scholz touches on an array of different forms, from producer co-ops to multi-stakeholder co-ops and data co-ops. This is all to say, that platform co-operatives are far from a “homogenous force”; they come in a variety of shapes and sizes and produce a variety of benefits, not simply for workers but for communities and consumers too.
Chapter three, in which Scholz tackles the perceived challenges of size (or, indeed scalability), is particularly interesting. Here, he confronts both a critique of platform co-operativism and an ongoing debate within the movement. The critique is that platform co-operatives are unlikely to scale. The debate is whether they should even attempt to; is scale simply growth in new clothes? He claims not, arguing that co-operative scaling is about securing “the best possible overall outcome/return”. This can be achieved by scaling “up” via the expansion of the size of the operation; but also “out” through the replication of a model in different geographic location; and “deep” by nurturing the existing organisation to create added value for stakeholders. This nuanced three-dimensional framework is an appreciated intervention in debate that often tends to focus, narrowly, on size alone.
More generally, it speaks to his broader strategy for the growth of the platform co-operative movement, which can be summarised, simply, as pragmatism. He is clear, at several points within the book, that his intention is to expand the movement and attract as many “allies” as possible. This means creating ample space for different approaches and experiments. It also means rejecting ideological fixity. In chapter seven – a letter set in the year 2035, written in the tradition of social speculative fiction – he rejects James Muldoon’s association of platform co-operativism with socialism, arguing that the movement must remain a “big tent” under which many political philosophies can exist.
Not only does Own This! advocate for a collective appropriation of platforms themselves; it also seeks to wrestle ownership of the imaginaries surrounding the development of the platform economy out of the hands of major corporations.
Thus, while he is pragmatic in his approach, his vision is incredibly ambitious in scope. He imagines a near-future, twelve years from now, in which an international network of co-operatives, containing socialists, anarchists, disgruntled VC (Venture Capitalist) bros and everything in-between, is thriving. In Scholz’s vision, this network is being actively promoted and supported by 80 governments around the world, as a pivotal pillar of the response to climate change and poverty elimination. In this respect, not only does Own This! advocate for a collective appropriation of platforms themselves; it also seeks to wrestle ownership of the imaginaries surrounding the development of the platform economy out of the hands of major corporations.
Is the network that Scholz envisions possible? There are certainly many green shoots. But, as an “unfinished story of co-operative principles in the digital economy,” the book shows that there are many questions that the movement is yet to confront. This includes the ways in which regulation could be designed to support platforms co-operatives, and how democratic governance can be managed and maintained if platform co-operatives do scale.
Overall, though, the book is a critical documentation of an evolving and genuinely impactful movement. Weaving multiple real-world examples through analyses of key topics – not simply scale and union relations, but also value and prospects for data democratisation – it succeeds in vividly bringing the concept to life, whilst identifying paths for future research. As such, it will no doubt serve as a call to action for those interested in constructing an alternative digital future.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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Drones From Company That “Strongly Opposes” Military Use Marketed With Bombs Attached
A forthcoming drone made by Autel, a Chinese electronics manufacturer and drone-maker, is being marketed using images of the unmanned aerial vehicle carrying a payload of what appears to be explosive shells. The images were discovered just two months after the company condemned the military use of its flying robots.
Two separate online retail preorder listings for the $52,000 Autel Titan drone, with a cargo capacity of 22 pounds and an hour of flight time, advertised a surprising feature: the ability to carry (and presumably fire) weapons.
In response to concerns from China-hawk lawmakers in the U.S. over Autel’s alleged connections to the Chinese government and its “potentially supporting Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine,” according to a congressional inquiry into the firm, Autel issued a public statement disowning battlefield use of its drones: “Autel Robotics strongly opposes the use of drone products for military purposes or any other activities that infringe upon human rights.” A month later, it issued a second, similarly worded denial: “Autel Robotics is solely dedicated to the development and production of civilian drones. Our products are explicitly designed for civilian use and are not intended for military purposes.”
Hi @AutelRobotics, I'm not a PR professional but if you claim to "strongly opposes the use of drone products for military purposes or any other activities that infringe upon human rights" maybe don't showcase your drones with FUCKING GRENADES attached to them. cheers. pic.twitter.com/bYGsKx3snM
— Konrad Iturbe (@konrad_it) January 4, 2024
It was surprising, then, when Spanish engineer and drone enthusiast Konrad Iturbe discovered a listing for the Titan drone armed to the teeth on OBDPRICE.com, an authorized reseller of Autel products. While most of the product images are anodyne promotional photos showing the drone from various angles, including carrying a generic cargo container, three show a very different payload: what appears to be a cluster of four explosive shells tucked underneath, a configuration similar to those seen in bomb-dropping drones deployed in Ukraine and elsewhere. Samuel Bendett, an analyst with the Center for Naval Analyses, told The Intercept that the shells resembled mortar rounds. Arms analyst Patrick Senft said the ordnance shown might actually be toy replicas, as they “don’t resemble any munitions I’ve seen deployed by UAV.”
Contacted by email, an OBDPRICE representative who identified themselves only as “Alex” told The Intercept: “The drone products we sell cannot be used for military purposes.” When asked why the site was then depicting the drone product in question carrying camouflage-patterned explosive shells, they wrote: “You may have misunderstood, those are some lighting devices that help our users illuminate themselves at night.” The site has not responded to further queries, but shortly after being contacted by The Intercept, the mortar-carrying images were deleted.
A “heavy lift” drone made by Autel, a Chinese electronics manufacturers listed for resale on eBay on Jan. 5, 2023, showing Autel’s renderings of the drone carrying a payload of camouflage-clad explosives.
Screenshot: The Intercept
Iturbe also identified a separate listing from an Autel storefront on eBay using the very same three images of an armed Titan drone. When asked about the images and whether the drone is compatible with other weapons systems, the account replied via eBay message: “The bombs shown in the listing for this drone is just for display. Pls note that Titan comes with a standard load of 4 kilograms and a maximum load up to 10 kilograms.”
The images bear a striking resemblance to ordnance-carrying drones that have been widely used during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where their low cost and sophisticated cameras make them ideal for both reconnaissance and improvised bombing runs. Autel’s drones in particular have proven popular on both sides of the conflict: A March 2023 New York Times report found that “nearly 70 Chinese exporters sold 26 distinct brands of Chinese drones to Russia since the invasion. The second-largest brand sold was Autel, a Chinese drone maker with subsidiaries in the United States, Germany and Italy.” A December 2022 report from the Washington Post, meanwhile, cited Autel’s EVO II model drone as particularly popular among volunteer efforts to source drones for the Ukrainian war effort.
Last summer, researchers who’ve closely followed the use of drones in the Russia–Ukraine war documented an effort by two Russian nationals, self-chronicled via Telegram, to obtain Chinese drones for the country’s ongoing war in Ukraine. Their visit to Shenzhen resulted in a meeting at an Autel facility and the procurement, the individuals claimed, of military-purpose drones.
Autel’s American subsidiary in Washington State did not respond to a request for comment.
Correction: January 8, 2024
An earlier version of this story included an incorrect location for Autel’s U.S. subsidiary.
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