I am Frustrated !All Machines are Not Working — A discussion from my session at MozFest 2019
On Saturday 26th October, 2019 , I had an opportunity to facilitate a session in the decentralization space at the Mozilla Festival. My session was titled “I am frustrated all machines are not working”. As this is my fourth MozFest, I had a rough idea of the dynamics of the festival in terms of how sessions run, what is expected even more because this year I was part of the team that co-created the festival as it celebrated its 10th anniversary.
As people got into the mood of the festival after the official opening circle , I settled into the space where I was to hold my session — 6th floor of the Ravensbourne University building. Ten minutes in, I was joined by two women, Malwine and Alia. At this point I kicked off the discussion by asking them what has been their experience being frustrated by machine failures.
Anchoring my session on the theme of the festival “better machine decision making” while reflecting on decentralization, my goal for this session was to have people debrief about their experiences with massive system and machine breakdowns. In addition, this conversation aimed at guiding participants towards a sense of empowerment amidst the frustration of dealing with centralized systems that inevitably fail from time to time.
We had a fruitful 40 minute discussion between Malwine , Alia and Myself . From the discussion, Malwine , who is a self-identified artsy technologist, put a sketch note together (pictured above) with tonnes of information from our conversation. Allow me to digress a little bit about Malwine’s work — she sketches as people talk and what better way to capture information in a visual way while still actively participating in a conversation.
The key insights from the conversation were that :
- We need to always keep the conversation alive that technology can fail and as a result always think of having decentralized systems that don’t expose us to single point of failures.
- Most centralized systems offer us convenience and discussions around decentralization are always a balance between convenience and reliability and at this point we went into a protracted conversation of the use of platforms like WhatsApp for communication in Kenya and Egypt(Alia’s country of origin).
Alia, while giving examples of how in her community having back up for things like electricity or water shortage is normal noted that “ the concept of backup is intuitive to people but it hasn’t moved to technology and in a way it could be because of the abstractness of the internet.”
I nodded in agreement as I thought about my numerous water storage containers in my bathroom back home.
“When Facebook had outage issues , in Egypt people suddenly wondered how they will communicate because of the imagination that technology cannot fail , that it is somehow invincible.”
At this point I mentioned to them about my other inspiration to have this conversation was based on the recent outages experienced by Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — platforms that are owned by a single entity. Specifically in 2019, there has been major outages experienced on March 14th, April, August and September. The outages affected loading and uploading of photos, direct messaging among other features. I wondered what it meant for the increasing number of e-commerce businesses in Kenya that heavily depended on these platforms. I wondered about the possible losses that that outage could have resulted into.
Malwine , while holding her iPad and ‘magic pen’ , added that Instagram for the most part of what she has observed in Europe is used for advertisements for business, but it’s not very common as an e-commerce platform for small businesses . Indeed, even as the outages are reported I mentioned to them that I had noted after a quick search on the internet, there is a disproportionate focus on the outages affecting Europe, United States, Asia and South America — while Africa is visibly missing in the reports.
On a more empowering note, I also pointed to them that within this year I noticed that many of my contacts have been joining platforms such as Telegram and Signal, and in particular I took note of the Telegram ‘joins’ during the March 14th outage. This, I believe signalled(pun) that the need for alternative platforms( decentralized perhaps?) was beginning to be more apparent. In relation to that Alia also pointed out that within social circles people start using new platforms if their friends and family are using them. I thought about the power of peer influence in organizing towards decentralization and what information is needed to enhance awareness on decentralization.
We ended the session with a promise to share the sketch note and keep in touch to continue with this conversation(in the true MozFest spirit).
