7CTOs, Inc.

As we’ve mentioned previously, we’re big fans of The Financial Times. Our favorite English language newspaper, and if you don’t subscribe, we recommend you do.

Conservative but not driven by its ideology -- “Without Fear or Favor,” is its slogan, and while we’ve seen them shirk from those loft ideals upon occasion, it’s usually right-on -- the six-days-a-week newspaper usually takes a cool-eyed view of any subject, filtered through a capitalist lens but not while wearing blinders.

Today’s edition has a thoughtful analysis of “The Bleeding Edge,” a new book by Bob Hughes, a British “activist academic” who used to teach electronic media at Oxford but “now spends his time researching and campaigning against inequality.”

The point of “The Bleeding Edge” is that not all technology is great for the progress of humankind, a point we try to thread throughout 7CTOs blog. Hughes says that technology rooted in capitalism is increasing inequality throughout society, while not making any demonstrable uptick in productivity.

Hughes cites the “productivity paradox,” one of the inconvenient truths of technological advancement. Despite all the new computer and mobile technology of the past 20 years, there has been no  increase in productivity. As technology changes, employees must constantly learn new ways to perform the same task over and over again, with no guarantee the jobs are getting done any faster.  

The FT rightly notes that Hughes’ book is a polemic and he doesn’t go out hunting companies and accomplishments that would undermine his central points. As the article notes, there are remote villages that have become connected yet independent by setting up their own broadband connections when commercial businesses found it uneconomic. The P2P alternatives undermining conventional internet. New kinds of mobile phones with interchangeable parts that don’t require a whole new phone every year or two (and maybe without earplugs!).

But as the article recognizes, these are still fringe businesses and endeavors, not the mainstream consumption-driven capitalist version of technology advancement.

Which is our ongoing appeal to Chief Technology Officers everywhere, whether a 7CTOs member or not. Make sure your technology matters. Help push humanity forward, not so much towards the shopping cart, be it virtual or really rolling. Because sooner or later, the wheels are coming off, and then we’ll really need the best technology has to offer in order to fix things.

Welcome back from the long 3-day weekend (we hope!). Couple stories worth knowing about today:

The first is a report from The New York Times Dealbook, which broke the news that G.E. is trying to acquire a pair of European 3-D printing technology companies, for $1.4 billion.

The story is interesting two ways -- one, it shows G.E. is doubling down on a technology-driven return to its industrial roots after more than a decade of pushing aggressively into the world of finance. G.E. announced last year that it would sell the majority of GE Capital, its finance arm and get back to the basics of making stuff.

Whether you think this has more to do with G.E. or the world of finance, is up to you. Maybe they know something, maybe they don’t.

But what G.E. does seem pretty sure of is that 3-D printing has only just gotten started. We agree, and think 3-D printing remains the dark horse on an inside track to further disrupting the old economy and economic models.

People have talked about how 3-D printers will revolutionize industry, but we feel 3-D printing is in about the same place mobile advertising was a few years ago -- people kept talking about it being the Next Big Thing every year, but it never quite got there….until suddenly it was everywhere. 3-D printing will be the same -- it’s still a fringe element in our everyday lives, but in five years we’ll all likely wonder what we did without it (while wondering what we’re going to do with all these widgets, parts, and industrial tools companies’ buildings, which will sit empty after 3-D printers drive them out of business).

The other news story that caught our eye was the latest development in the ongoing competition to lead and dominate the fledgling Driverless Cars market. Google announced today that its driverless car would sense police lights and sirens and automatically pull over to the side of the road. The Google patent describes a system that detects different light patterns so its autonomous cars won’t mistake other light sources (such as street lights) as sirens.

Not everybody sees it so benevolently, though, and different writers draw differentiating conclusions (the cops will be able to overtake your car; or maybe the car will help you avoid the cops), but nobody wrote a grabbier opening about it than The Inquirer:

“Driverless cars are slowly making their way towards us, not in a creepy way like slowly rolling towards you while you're lying prone in a car park on the ground, but they are heading at you.”

Hey….what are you doing here? It’s Labor Day. Doesn’t anybody remember what that means? It’s a day to honor hard-working Americans, and give them a day off right after Summer’s end, to slow the process of re-emerging back into the steady-work weak that (most of us, hopefully) got a break from during July and August.

Turns out Career Cast already wrote the column we were planning on writing today….history of Labor Day, with a reminder that even though we may be evolving from an industrial society to a digital one, it’s still good “ to unplug from email for a little while longer Monday, and plug into the grill instead.”

Interesting piece from InfoWorld about “dead technology”.....or maybe “zombie technology is the better term, because, as writer Jason Bock points out, “‘ancient’ technology has a tendency to stick around for a long time.”

Bock found that out the hard way when he was on vacation and needed some medical forms for his son’s summer at camp and the only way the doctor would accept them was via FAX.

FAX? Who uses FAX? Apparently a lot of people still do, even though it’s considered by many a “dead technology.” Bock then runs through a litany of “dead technologies” that actually aren’t at all -- COBOL is a classic. Who knew COBOL IDEs were still setting up vendor booths at conferences? Maybe a lot of you; I didn’t.

Bock’s core message is that “Technology doesn’t die; it just fades off into the long tail of obscurity [and] “fade time” can take years and years to happen. I’m not suggesting that everyone brushes up on COBOL, but that shiny new language that you’re coding in right now may end up feeling archaic in 5 to 10 years….”

This story isn’t about GMOs, even though the story we’re linking to is about GMOs. This story is about the word technology and what it means to people and the use of words in society.

We got a sardonic laugh out of this TV news story out of Texas on KBTX, in which Travis Miller,  the Associate Director of State Operations for Texas A&M Agrilife Extension tries to linguistically appropriate the word “technology” to make his case. Dig this quote:

“There’s probably four or five per cent of the anti-technology people, and it’s fine with me if they want to be anti-technology, but they’re trying to influence this vast middle section….Anti-technology people [are] saying you’re going to die if you eat this stuff.”

Three mentions of “anti-technology” in two paragraphs, sounds like Mr. Miller’s goal is to marry the idea of GMOs with technology because he thinks the word has been put on some kind of pedestal. As readers of this space well know, 7CTOs sees technology as a double-edged razor, cutting a way to change but also leaving some bloody in the wake of cultural conflicts that come with great change.

Unexpected and unexpectedly good piece in The New York Times today, profiling the economic and social theories of Vinod Khosla, Silicon Valley billionaire venture capitalist (and, the NYT suggests, wannabe celebrity), who is going “gung-ho on disruption and [is] an investor in start-ups that are building technology to take away people’s jobs.”

We love a couple of Khosla’s quotes in this piece:

 “If you’re doing anything disruptive, you’re disrupting somebody, and somebody’s getting hurt.”

“Revolutions are hard on people. People get killed. People get hurt.”

“It seems likely that the top 10 to 20 percent of any profession — be they computer programmers, civil engineers, musicians, athletes or artists — will continue to do well.”

“I worry a lot about how do you keep humans motivated to live.”

“Does capitalism need to be reinvented for modern technology? I’m absolutely convinced it does….Capitalism is interesting, because capitalism as a system is by permission of democracy, right?”

“Imagine 10 times as many people were unemployed today than are [because of robots and other further tech advancements].”

Some of it sounds like cliche, but they really aren’t cliches we’re hearing enough in the perpetually sunny world of PR-driven startup speak in too much of the media.

Khosla says a lot of the things we agree with, and even the ones we don’t agree with we think deserve discussion.

 The piece closes by suggesting in a roundabout way that as a disrupted workforce gets increasingly restless, the bread and circuses of distraction will likely escalate. 

It speaks of “a new social contract,” where an “undisrupted few assume new obligations to the disrupted many, in order to be freed to go back to their disruptive works.”

At least Khosla has the guts to say what this really is, and why: “To put it crudely, it’s bribing the population to be well-enough-off.  Otherwise, they’ll work for changing the system.”

Full disclosure: This smart, constructive LinkedIn piece was written by my former protege, so I’ve got a bias towards her viewpoints.

That said, Kristina Eastham was my protege precisely because I found her smarter, more perceptive and less narcissistic than anybody else of her age. if you give it a read, you’ll find this column embodies the best aspects of what we want from the Millennial generation: It’s critical, recognizes a problem, but instead of just complaining, offers a solution.

There was a good bit of controversy around the 2016 Olympics, but if there was one thing that pretty much everybody could agree on, it was that NBC’s coverage sucked bad. And since every corporate failure (ratings were down nearly 20% from London 2012) needs a scapegoat, the network has trained its bullseye on Millennials, who, in the words of NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke, “had been in a Facebook bubble or a Snapchat bubble” and didn’t even know the Olympics were taking place.

Beyond the scary obliviousness that anybody in a powerful corporate media role would think people on Facebook and Snapchat weren’t getting Olympics news, pictures and video relentless pushed at them, the general condescension that undergirds the comment is insulting. 

Fortunately, Kristina’s response is canny and constructive without being condescending, idealistic without being naive. It offers a new perspective and direction through social media, Twitter particularly, that keeps both profit and service at the front of its advice.

In short, the LinkedIn piece suggests content owners work with Twitter to provide pay-for-content media options, opening up an entirely fresh way to share and spread experiences -- whether the Olympics, Super Bowl, Oscars, or other highly coveted event.

It’s Women Equality Day, and that’s worth noting on 7CTOs because not enough of our members are women. That is most certainly not by design, and we hope this column will be a catalyst to help expand our ranks of female members.

Part of the problem, of course, is that men in the CTO role outnumber women at that level by a significant number -- so unbalanced that we couldn’t even find a concrete number for how much men dominate the tech exec suite. But a few other anecdotal comparisons show the discrepancy throughout the industry:

In 1984, 37% of all computer science graduates were women. In 2015 it was 18%

The female-centric retail site Etsy put a full-court press to hire as many female engineers as possible. The best they could do: two female engineers for every nine male ones.

While approximately 30% of tech companies are female, the number in management and other leadership roles is lower (22%), and tech leadership roles much lower than that (15%), according to c|net.

The female CTO is not completely non-existent, of course. The website Women 2.0 compiled a list of twelve noteworthy women in the top tech role. So they do exist. We’ll ironically note that the notoriously bro-centric GoDaddy’s CTO is a woman.

We’re no more fans of diversity for the sake of diversity than we are fans of technology for the sake of technology, but c’mon -- these numbers are ridiculous. We also decry the dumbed-down testosterone-fueled culture of too many tech cultures, especially on the startup scene that is decidedly unwelcoming for women.

As we’ve noted in this space previously and elsewhere, one of our least favorite things is technology simply for the sake of itself with no deeper or useful purpose.

If 7CTOs reason for being is the creation of better, wiser, more empathetic tech execs, it would follow that these type of people would, in turn, create better, more useful, more egalitarian products. Which also mean we would be opposed to the opposite: meaningless, flawed, stupid products.

For quite some time, “The Internet of Things” was the hot topic among the tech intelligensia, and in some ways it still is, but the general public doesn’t seem to be buying into the hype….and with good reason.

That’s why we got a big kick out of this article from TechDirt, probably our favorite snarky tech news site, about “The Internet of Broken Things” -- i.e., how stupid your home’s smart devices actually are, as “the security of connected products is absolutely nowhere to be found” and  “companies are introducing thousands of new attack vectors in every home and business network the world over.”

The story also introduced us to the Twitter account “The Internet of Sh!t,” which chronicles daily the latest worthless tech creation, or, as one retweeted missive stated, “Every problem being solved in tech right now is because some privileged [jerk] misses having his mom around to pick up after him.”

Obviously, we don’t agree with that (but we did LOL). But we do think that too much technology -- at least technology that gets clickbait coverage from the popular tech press -- is focused on self-satisfaction and not the greater good of humanity. Not to mention the oblivious (hopefully it’s oblivious, and not by design) attitude about their customers’ security, to the point where they’re not even trying.

So if a smart house isn’t actually smart and more like a naive, well-meaning idiot who opens up occupants to blackmail and extortion possibilities, well, chances are that smart house will be lobotomized quickly. The tech-savvy are fickle, as this recent study chronicling the severe drop in Wearables usage showcases.

We were sad to see NPR become the latest online news site to kill its comment section, joining such esteemed (and not-so-esteemed) news sources as Bloomberg, TIME, CNN, Vice, Vox, and numerous others.

All have cited the same reason, the one amplified on the cover of TIME magazine this week: Trolls are ruining the Internet. Mean-spirited cranks who go out of their way to insult other readers and commenters, change the subject and derail debate, and push the conversation down through the bottom of the barrel until the original subject matter is completely lost.

These complaints are not wrong, only the solution to it is. This is a classic case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and while it overtly solves a genuine problem it also covertly solves another problem the media doesn’t want to talk about.

We’ll hit the baby with the bathwater complaint first. For every lousy, hateful, disgusting comment I’ve read on the internet -- almost all of which I’ve quickly forgotten -- I can think of countless occasions where reader discourse has illuminated the original story, expanded upon it, clarified it or corrected it. I’ve read intelligent debate and genuinely hilarious rejoiners (R.I.P. Gawker) that improved my online experience. The loss of the public voice is a loss indeed.

Moreover, what this move by more and more publications covertly suggests is that they don’t like losing control of the terms of the conversation as they set them. The corporate media is keeper of the “Official Story,” and it doesn’t like it when people veer from the “Official Story.” THEY get to pick who comments on a story, and they don’t like it when a reader makes a few connections and points out bias of the writer or the writer’s sources.

But the biggest tell here that this is an over-reaction to an addressable problem is that software technology exists to better moderate comments than the current free-for-all. You can use key words to filter out and delete any comment that uses profanity, misogynistic, racist, anti-Semitic, and other offensive terms. You can have other readers flag commenters who waylay the conversation, then track the ISP (while leaving the user anonymous) to keep it from being resurrected under a different identity.

The current push is to move conversations to social media, most specifically Facebook and Twitter of course, but that’s some pretty weak replacement. The most immediate place for anyone to engage with a story and its writer is at the place the story happens: The website source. If you read an article, it makes the most sense to segue right into the comments.

Retreating and resorting to social media platforms brings all kinds of new problems. It’s very easy to shadowban people via Facebook verification (which I found out first-hand -- thanks, Huffington Post!) if you don’t like what they’ve got to say, whether offensive or not, you can shut their voice out forever, even if the account is verified as tied to a real person.

Twitter is more of an echo chamber for journalists and other media/marketing types mostly talking to themselves (which may be the only people other journalists want to hear from, come to think of it), and is half-deep with trolls and shills and bots anyway.

And that’s the capper. Social media is becoming at least a big a cesspool as any comments section, and it’s loaded with fake profiles and A.I. “voices” to boot. Twitter, in it’s IPO in 2013 said roughly 5% of its users were bots, and that number has surely only blossomed with the current contentious election.

WIth the Olympics ending yesterday, today seemed a good time to take a last-dash chance on finding subject matter relevant to the games. Apparently the Financial Times felt the same way.

An article in today’s FT makes a tenuous leap for the athletic metaphor by writing “Technology Triathletes Wanted” on today’s op-ed page. Amazingly (because the obviousness of the fact seems self-evident in today’s world) the central premise of the article is that every company or organization must have a technologist on staff.

The case is convincing, even if the metaphor is not. Columnist Anne-Marie Slaughter (ouch) opens with “It is time to celebrate a new breed of triathletes, who work in technology.” She then explains that this means talent that, over the course of their careers, spends time in the public, private and civic sectors.

We’ll beg off on trying to explain how work = athletics, since Ms. Slaughter never does, but fortunately she quickly drops the dumb metaphor to discuss how “solving public problems requires collaboration among government, business and civil society. Aspiring problem solvers need the culture and language of all three sectors and to develop a network of contacts in each.”

There’s no weirder technology-related story than whatever the hell is going on at CERN (the French acronym for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), Switzerland’s miles-wide underground sub-atomic particle collider which is ostensibly being used to discover how the universe formed.

There have been all kinds of maybe crazy conspiracy conversations about what CERN’s really doing — time travel? black hole creation? “Star Trek”-like transporter? — but nothing you could hang onto without being dismissed as a nutter until last week, when somebody posted a YouTube video of a mock human sacrifice ritual, complete with black robes and stabbed female victim dressed in white, on the central outdoor grounds at CERN, right in front to its huge statue of the Hindu god Shiva the Destroyer.

The video was quickly removed from YouTube, but people mirrored the video and the British tabloids started writing about it (though the American press has been dutifully silent, even though it would surely drive page views, like this column hopefully will), so YouTube began permitting people to post it again. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOqiorNCMFU

The video caused such a stir that a a spokesperson (never named in any account I’ve been able to find) has been forced to confirm the event actually did take place and was filmed on the CERN campus, but it was done as a joke by scientists and researchers at the facility without official knowledge or permission. It was just a group of super-intelligent people “taking their sense of humour too far,” CERN stated.

So taking the “joke” at face value and accepting CERN’s story, I still think it’s fair to ask….What the hell? Why are scientists replicating a human sacrifice on the grounds of one of science's most controversial and mysterious ongoing projects, in front of the Hindu god of destruction to boot? Who filmed this? Who are the participants? Who was the “victim”? What does this say about security at such a revolutionary scientific site?

We’ve always cast a cynical eye towards the job description “Futurist,” because the best definition we’ve ever heard of it came from our old friend (and Futurist!) Sean Carton, who said, “Basically, you just call yourself a ‘Futurist’ and most people will repeat it.”

That said, Forbes has an intriguing interview today with the Futurist Gerd Leonard, who’s got a new book called “Technology vs. Humanity,” which claims we’re at a critical point in history and pretty soon people are going to have to choose “whether they’re on team humanity...or not.”

Boy, you thought the 2016 presidential elections were high stakes!

Leonard says humanity is going to change more in the next 20 years than it has in the previous 300. That’s because “Technology is no longer just a tool we use to achieve something. Every single technological change is now impacting humanity much deeper than ever before because [it] will soon impact our own biology, primarily via the rise of genome editing and artificial intelligence.”

While it’s possible we may yet change our minds about this melding of man and machine, or “Transhumanism,” currently it sounds pretty creepy, like a cyborg version of the Nazi quest for a “Master Race.” And Leonard agrees with us -- as he says, “Technology is not WHAT we seek, but HOW we seek….we should embrace technology but not become it.”

Leonard also discusses a “post capitalist” world, where food, water and energy are in abundance, while robots and machines do most of the work. He suggests that GDP as a metric will be replaced by GNH (gross national happiness), as society makes a mass global pivot towards a Utopia where “exponential tech will make things exponential abundant.”

Before we get into this, let’s put one thing on the table: There is no political partisanship here. The writer of this piece currently plans to vote for neither of major party nominees, so there is no favoritism intended or implied, unless that favoritism is for the United States of America and free, fair and honest elections. Nothing more.

But we have been both interested and disturbed by the recent comments by the Republican nominee Donald Trump about the potential for a stolen or fixed election in November for two reasons:

1- All evidence suggests it’s possible

2- Because it certainly appears possible, it gives Trump -- who has put the not un-realistic scenario on the table -- the ability to stir huge chaos afterwards even if he loses fair and square.

As Josef Stalin once said, “Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." Or, to paraphrase for the digital world, “Those who control the electronic voting machines decide everything.”

Despite many key members of the establishment across the spectrum from the President to The New York Times to Fox News claiming the American voting system is trustworthy and safe, there are too many other people -- also from all over the political spectrum -- who say this is not the case at all. And since a lot of them are tech-savvy and, in a few cases, have proven it can be done, we think everybody should be at least a little worried.

For example -- if the well-known progressive publication Mother Jones writes that in several states where electronic voting machines leave no paper trail it will be impossible to prove Trump’s claims of fix wrong, well, then you’ve got at least contemplate whether this isn’t a point worth hearing.

Or when WIred writes that electronic voting is “a technological train wreck.” Or when the nation’s leading online political news site Politco publishes a huge expose that shows how one American computer hacker was able to game the system is seven minutes, literally calling it “child’s play.”  The Daily Beast says it would be “terrifyingly simple.”

We won’t go on and on with it, other than to share this Google search that provides a plethora of Cassandra-like warnings about how easy some machines are to rig.

Perhaps some of this is hyperbolic panic, much like the Y2K bug that ultimately proved a fly on the windshield of history. But the fact that there is no paper trail in a bunch of states that would prove a sore loser just that, is dangerous. Why ISN’T there a proper paper trail of votes, for recount and verification purposes? That alone should give everyone a moment’s pause

Nothing this election season has been normal, and we are concerned that the trend is  going to continue to election day and possibly past it. With the Supreme Court sitting at 4-4, the potential for chaos ratchets up even higher.

Good interview in GeekWire today with Candace Faber, Seattle’s first “Civic Technology Advocate, a position that includes “spreading the power of tech to underserved sectors of city government and community groups, and promoting open government.”

Faber’s only been on the job for nine months, and in the first portion of the interview she basically covers what she hopes to accomplish in the role, which more than anything sounds like making the government more transparent (hooray!).

She also talks about nurturing both the tech community and the community at large, making them aware of all the resources and tools available to simplify their lives and make living in Seattle a pleasure.

She says her vision is to make Seattle a center of technology for change, via combining the disparate resources, knowledge base, experience and passion from the social and philanthropy sectors and meld it with the tech community’s energy and new insights. Not just, she says, creating digital processes but new ways of tackling civic problems.

The interview also covers the upside and downside of hackathons, her favorite social media platforms, the dangers of Seattle’s escalating housing market prices pushing out diversity (see: San Francisco), and other topics.

We now return to the subject of “Sextech,” a delicate/clickbait subject which we were originally going to broach a few weeks ago when real-world horror intervened.

People, with Cindy Gallop, the author of this piece particularly, have been trying to make Sextech a “thing,” the way adtech is a “thing,” for years, without a whole lot of luck. At least in the mainstream. Under the covers, along Google searches, on the other hand, Sextech seems to be doing quite well, thank you very much.

Gallop’s a smart and savvy speaker and writer, one of advertising biz’s top female talents back in the day, and apparently great, fun company despite the schoolmarmish severity of the professional profile picture. You don’t want to pick a fight with her. So let’s just say that we think her heart is in the right place, but we’re not entirely sure that her conclusions about human sexuality and technology are the answer to the complex divergence between how much everybody digs sex and how many hangups they have over it.

The quintessential example of this is the website she’s created to combat the expanding tentacles on Internet porn, MakeLoveNotPorn.com (We can’t provide a live link from where I’m writing this becuase the site is blocked, which gives you a pretty good idea of its content). Gallop’s solution to pornography, which undeniably objectifies women (and, to a lesser extent, men) and has shown escalating levels of violence and degradation as people are numbed by what they’ve seen previously, is for EVERYBODY to upload videos of themselves having sex.

This strikes us as a trivialization and commodification of what should be, at its highest level of experience, a sacred act, and even at the other end of the spectrum, a private one. Perhaps this is a logical perspective from someone who prospered in advertising, where pretty much everything and everyone is for sale, but for the general public one would hope it would be the equivalent of sharing sessions with their psychiatrist just to show, hey, everybody’s got problems. Some things, some private and personal things should just remain our own.

We’re not even sure we agree with Gallop’s central premise, that “Society [has a] conflicted attitude toward sex – we all enjoy it but we don’t talk about it.” Again, this seems like an odd statement coming from someone who worked in the ad business, where nearly everything is sold through sex or fear.

Sex seems to permeate nearly every element of popular culture today, and the problem doesn’t seem so much to be people needing to talk about it more, but talking about more healthily. Too much talk about sex falls into the adolescent wink-nudge-cackle humor of “Family Feud” or “Two Broke Girls” or the latest Seth Rogen “comedy.”

So that’s the half we don’t agree with Gallop on. Where we do agree is that the cultural stigma around sex for much of the country -- the attraction/discomfort which instigates the goofy, lowest-common-denominator gag response in most of the media -- can be helped by Sextech.

Gallop points to a number of innovative ideas, which we won’t go into here, some of which we think are a positive step forward, others not so much so. But at least it’s trying.