Bribes, Begs, and ActivityPub
Some things I’ve read recently:
How to ask for a bribe without asking for a bribe
Quotes:
“Give me something,” demands a woman X-raying bags at Enugu airport in Nigeria, conceding impressively little to anti-graft efforts. Others make small concessions to subtlety. “Can you help me?” asks an immigration officer in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital.
Others seem to have grown wary of making blunt demands amid the campaigns against graft. One approach is to talk about something other than money. Some officials, for example, like to keep citizens well abreast of their food and drink preferences. “I really want to drink a Nescafe,” declares an airport security guard six times as he frisks your correspondent in Burkina Faso. In Uganda traffic police find ways to mention their favourite soda. In South Africa such requests are so common that bribes for driving offences are known as “cold drink money”.
Those wishing for a little more deniability like to imply the drink might not be for them. In Kenya police sometimes ask for chai ya wazee (“tea for the elders”). In Nigeria police officers might suggest that they are simply trying to do their job by saying they need fuel for their patrol vehicle. All still expect cash.
Notes:
One of the strangest norms I grew accustomed to while living in Kolkata, India, was periodically being asked for bribes by cops—usually framed as a “fee” to “speed things along” (rather than having to haul me into the station for an unnamed (or fabricated) violation).
This is one of those systemic issues that, once it becomes common, is difficult to root out, as folks who achieve any power at all, over anyone at all, will assume it’s their right—and fundamental to their paycheck—to take such bribes. But it’s also toxic for public trust, and thus disallows a smoothly operating, non-leaky economy.
Positively BEGGING You
Quotes:
In our busted and corrupt political system, one dominated by endless dark money, the need for a grassroots counterweight is clear. In a practical sense, email fundraising must serve as an essential tool in building this political power, but over the last several years, a series of alienating, self-sabotaging practices have become normalized across the industry, threatening its viability in the long-term.
My career, in its various incarnations across the political space—including small PACs, large PACS, numerous campaigns, and non-electoral organizations—has given me some proximity to the hellscape that is digital fundraising. I’ve seen what digital tools can provide, the power that they can unleash against an opponent flush with corporate cash—and I’ve also seen how spam-like digital practices can jeopardize an entire campaign operation.
Notes:
It’s wild that this practice (of becoming brazen and manipulative on the internet in order to raise money for one’s political campaign) only goes back to 2004, when Howard Dean’s campaign innovated some email-oriented variations of the traditional, physical-mailer model.
It’s become pervasive enough in the years since to turn people off of candidates they would otherwise support, and has made highly contentious voting cycles (which might, lacking such desperation and economic thirstiness, actually be exciting) exhausting and sad and embarrassing for everyone.
Read the whole piece for examples that are educational, but also just really disappointing (for the state of our political process) in so many ways.
Can ActivityPub save the internet?
Quotes:
So what is ActivityPub? It’s a technology through which social networks can be made interoperable, connecting everything to a single social graph and content-sharing system. It’s an old standard based on even older ideas about a fundamentally different structure for social networking, one that’s much more like email or old-school web chat than any of the platforms we use now. It’s governed by open protocols, not closed platforms. It aims to give control back to users and to make sure that the social web is bigger than any single company.
Notes:
I’m cautiously interested in ActivityPub (and other such options—though AP seems to be the most developed of this interoperable-social platform category of protocols right now) and I think it would be interesting to be able to lash a bunch of different networks together, engaging with whichever ones I found value in (and shuffling creations and consumptions between them) and easily ignoring the others.
I also think it makes sense to give folks the ability to build a profile, reputation, relationships, etc, and to have all those things be portable rather than locked into (for instance) Facebook or Twitter or YouTube; if you want to move, you have to start over.
Allowing folks to have a persistent identity (or multiple persistent identities) across online spaces is compelling to me.
The specifics of this become tricky at a technical level and I have no idea how well it would work in terms of moderation, monetization, etc on scale (issues we face today might not be solved, or not solved well, and entire new problems would definitely be introduced). But I do tend to think we need something new, and putting more power in the hands of users (instead of platforms and advertisers) would be a nice change of pace.
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