Reykjavík Grapevine - 19.07.2013, Blaðsíða 12

Reykjavík Grapevine - 19.07.2013, Blaðsíða 12
T EMPL A R A SUND 3 , 101 RE Y K JAV ÍK , T EL : 5711822, W W W.BERGSSON. IS CHECK OUT OUR NEW PLACE – BERGSSON DELÍ & DJÚS JUST AROUND THE CORNER OPEN FROM 7:00 BREAKFAST, LUNCH & DINNER Continued NEWS IN BRIEF JULY tion of guesthouses and hotels in downtown Reykjavík is disrupting to the general cycle of residents, not to mention has self-destructive effects for the tourism industry. “It’s not exciting if the city is just hotels and guest houses,” Sverrir says, stating the (seemingly) obvi- ous. If tourism is not a strong enough tie to the mainland, how about build- ing a 1,170 km long submarine ca- ble to carry electricity from Iceland to the UK? According to the Na- tional Energy Authority, Iceland's electricity output could be doubled, or even tripled, if Iceland is willing to exploit a few environmentally sensitive areas here and there. But before we dip into that buzzing hot pot of electrically charged profits, we need to realise the potential environmental impacts of such a project, warns Minister of Industry, Ragnheiður Elín Árnadóttir. We'll just consider the cancellation of Rauðasandur Festival due to "ex- treme weather" a wind-whipped warning. Luckily, the local school- house and pirate-themed bar were willing to open their doors to disap- pointed festivalgoers, effectively saving the day. The struggling public sector direc- tors and higher-ups have finally gotten that much needed pay raise following new public wage coun- selling. After the financial crash of 2008, the left-wing government passed laws stating that no public director or manager would receive pay that exceeds the Prime Minis- ter’s, leading to pay cuts for 42 pub- lic sector managers. In June, how- ever, the newly elected right-wing govern ment de cided that the high- er-ups should get a raise to keep up with today’s wage index and dated it back to August 2012. This lead to many of the managers getting a pay rise of 6-20%, but the CEO of the state's power company Lands- virkjun, one Hörður Arnarson, must come away from this a happy man. Hörður is now the highest paid pub- lic servant after a 21% pay increase, with a whopping 1.6 million ISK per month! Ay Caramba! (TGB) Over the last several years, there has been a lot of interest in marketing Iceland as a good place for storing data. The logic is simple—to operate a data centre you need three things: reliable energy, reliable con- nectivity and good jurisdiction. Iceland's energy supplies are notori- ously plentiful and largely renewable. The country's power grid is well planned and redundant in most places—only the Westfjords and Northeast cannot provide reliable 99.999% availability, otherwise known as ‘five nines’ in the data centre industry. In terms of connectivity, Iceland currently has three big fat fibre optic ca- bles linking it to the world. It could be a lot better, but it's really not bad. And then there's jurisdiction. The laws of the land determine how things function within it, which contributes to the overall appeal of the country for foreign invest- ment, living conditions, quality of life, and so on. While many countries openly compete with each other on these grounds, from consumerism-heavy ones like Scan- dinavia, with high taxes but high quality of living, to boutique banking havens like the Caymans and Tuvalu, there has yet to be a country in the world that has promoted global competitiveness on the basis of the best human rights, data protection and le- gal transparency. It is not believed that transparency or human rights are selling points. This hap- pens, despite the current trend of promot- ing ‘green energy’ and ‘corporate respon- sibility’ as a marketing strategy. But I can’t blame people for not understanding that. It just isn’t part of our general consensus nar- rative yet. The general consensus narrative currently says that human rights are nice but don’t impact business’s bottom line and therefore are relegated squarely to the hip- py segment of political discourse. Trans- parency, accountability, privacy: these are things for crazy activists and those with tinfoil hats. Right? It’s time to alter this narrative, me- thinks. The importance of information as a non-scarce, non-rival passive commodity to the global economy is growing so fast it’s making people’s heads spin. Govern- ments of the world are reacting against promoting more transparency and greater access to information, and instead are dis- cussing cyberwarfare strategy—I currently advise two governments on the subject (the cheap version of my advice: don’t do it!) The pressing need right now is some- where safe for users to store their data. Handing it off to cloud providers like Google, Amazon or Facebook is a very particular form of insanity: Users of these services need to understand where their data is, and be assured that their data won’t be in Indonesia an hour from now just be- cause it’s cheaper. People need to have sov- ereignty over their data. The same applies to companies and governments. When your government decides to use cloud services, they are potentially violat- ing the rights of the general public and certainly posing a major threat to national security. When companies decide it’s cheaper and easier to use Google Docs or Dropbox than to run their own collabora- tion servers, they’re relying on whichever data centre they’re talking to at that time to have five nines, otherwise their staff can’t get the job done, or worse: they might be breaking any number of data protection statutes and putting the state’s secrets at the mercy of the government in whichever country the data is in. Of course this stuff is complicated. It’s messy and it’s weird. We also don’t possess a language framework for having conversations about it. Our ability to talk about networks is limited by the fact that until about a hundred years ago, nobody had ever dreamt of one. The closest thing we had to a vocabulary for describing them was what we used to explain how your neighbour is related to your grandmother. So we need to sit down, as a civilization, discuss these issues, figure out what is to be done, and build a general consensus narrative around data. There should be pamphlets called ‘Your data and you!’ and movies where the protagonist is chasing privacy violations. There should be viral campaigns about transparency, rock ballads about account- ability, and above all, there should be more dialogue about how much this stuff mat- ters. In more ways than one, the problem is that political actors in Iceland are largely unwilling to confront these issues and treat them with the severity they deserve. That should change. Some things in the world are simple. For everything else, we have the Pirate Party. Smári McCarthy is an Icelandic/Irish innovator and information activist. The Data Narrative Comic: Lóa Hjálmtýsdóttir So much fun to have a Mompants comic in here! Thank you, Lóa! 12The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 10 — 2013
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