Reykjavík Grapevine - 19.07.2013, Síða 12

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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