Work

I'm still working on a discovery for Democracy Club. It's been really interesting to think about democracy data with a set of constraints. It is another one of those fields where you can spend your life trying to describe reality with data and the end point is that your abstraction of reality is then pored over by people trying to map it with their abstraction of reality.

There's also the problem of what we could clumsily call "data user needs". You end up in a bit of a circle. When you're doing specific product work, you can talk about user needs in this nice focused way, like a hose pipe. You've got water, you're using it to water this plant, good job. Data is more like digging a canal. Are you making it for transport or water supply? Yes. What will people do with it? Dunno. So you start thinking about that. Usefully, there are some good frameworks for discussing the implications of what you do in terms of political impact, "ethics" and all that, but what about when you're building infrastructure. To mix metaphors, a road can be how an army marches through your city, how amazon squeezes out local business or how you do a bike ride and it is phenomenally hard to design for one while prohibiting the others.

Democracy data has the ability to be useful for people wanting to bring about a participatory mechanism. It can also be a harassment at scale API. Obscurity isn't security, but it's harder to build arsehole software without the infrastructure.

Thinking

I've been thinking a lot about social network collapse. This year has been weird obviously, but for the most part I've spoken to the people I normally see in person or in the pub over DMs or in Slack or occasionally on a video call. But I haven't really met anyone new. Usually I do, some conference or other I'll get chatting to someone and find that we really have loads to chat about. That is a lot harder to do entirely over the internet. Plus I've been feeling really distant from the network I've been in for years. No shared experiences this year except the miasma. People getting senior and having less time for shitposting. Personally feeling so tired and exhausted with the task of arguing for good government when the fundamentals are being quickly eroded. Talking about "Open Data" or "Open Government" relies on so many precepts of ministerial intent being true that aren't really true any more.

I had a medium flounce off twitter a while back and it's made me feel way more withdrawn and almost more apocalyptic. What happens when twitter disappears. Because surely it is a when not an if. And while I keep pruning back (I want to fix discrimination and injustice when I see it, but I can't fix an altercation in another country and constantly looking at other people's (justified) anger is no good for me).

https://twitter.com/blangry/status/1317905334112034818?s=20

I don't want to get all superforecasty but how does this change? An information system that treats all information as equal would need a phenomenal cultural counterweight to then privilege "truth". It would probably also need massive and problematic deference. What to do with the wish to make the world a bit better when it feels like that's not the point anymore.

Reading

I'm starting off on "The Seductions of Quantification" because I sometimes struggle to put into words the point I was making above about how quant is a reality abstraction. And I was on a local gov meeting recently where they started talking about doughnut economics but it turned out what they meant was making KPIs for everything rather than understanding the problems. I want to be able to say useful words in meetings where I can go "if you don't understand what you are measuring then creating a performance metric for it will still not help you" but in some sort of slam dunk way that actually resonates with people who have been told about quant and "data" as the gold standard of policy.

Music

https://open.spotify.com/album/1EcofIiXZZUXJNkx50c6cy?si=AxgYbbqMQHqRiyOv80LRgQ

All old-skool jungle at the moment.

Life

Had a cold this week, so baby got a cold, so sleep went to shit. Which doesn't help the cold.

I applied for a job I really wanted last week. I'm not sure how to deal with it if I don't get it or if I do. But, I feel like I'm getting really good at rewriting my CV now, especially as I used to treat it as a monolithic blob of a thing.