You’ll find one answer to that question in Gonzales, a city of just 9,000 people in the Salinas Valley, where local leaders spent 15 years seeking to connect all residents to the internet.

Right now, even California’s biggest and richest cities are struggling to provide the internet access necessary for their people to work or study from home. But Gonzales solved that problem a few months ago. Before the pandemic hit, the town offered broadband service, free of charge, to all its residents. The story behind its rare achievement—tiny Gonzales is the first Central Coast city to do this—offers all kinds of lessons about power, and how communities can beat the odds.

Gonzales’ leadership is not entirely a surprise. The town, populated by farmworkers and surrounded by fields, is one of our state’s smallest wonders. In a region notorious for high crime and child poverty, Gonzales boasts low crime and high graduation rates. And while other California cities chase sales taxes by developing big retail and tourist attractions, Gonzales focuses on nurturing a diverse industrial base that employs local residents. Its local leadership is well-known for novel partnerships that provide innovative health services and extensive supports for children, who make up nearly 40 percent of the town’s population.

But even for a creative and nimble city, securing broadband has been very challenging. Gonzales’ long path to universal broadband suggests that it will be difficult to turn the temporary internet measures of the pandemic—like short-term service discounts from providers—into long-term bridges over our digital divides.

Gonzales’ broadband quest is also a tale of a David taking on multiple Goliaths. In 2005, internet service in Gonzales was slow and unreliable, and municipal officials couldn’t get service providers to work with the town.

So the city joined the Central Coast Broadband Consortium, which includes governments and organizations that seek better internet access. Gonzales officials also started regularly visiting the state’s Public Utilities Commission in San Francisco to press their case for rural broadband, including a link between Santa Cruz and Soledad.

At some PUC meetings, Gonzales was the only city represented. But as a small town, it didn’t have much leverage—until officials discovered how to advance their case by filing legal protests against corporate mergers and acquisitions.

In 2015, when Charter Communications sought to merge with Time Warner in a $78 billion deal, Gonzales moved to block California from offering its approval of Charter’s acquisition of Time Warner and Bright House cable systems, on the grounds that the deal wouldn’t help small towns. City officials fought so hard that PUC officials urged Charter to negotiate. Ultimately Gonzales dropped its opposition after Charter upgraded the system serving the town, bumping Gonzales’ upload speeds from 1 Mbps to 60 Mbps, and its download speeds from 5 Mbps to 100 Mbps.

A tech backbone was in place, but access to the internet at home still remained a problem for poor families. On my frequent stops to Gonzales in recent years, I saw kids sitting outside McDonald’s, Starbucks or even City Hall, using the free WIFI to do their homework. In 2017, such scenes inspired the city to add a Broadband Strategy to its general plan, with a commitment to “Universal Broadband for All.”

Gonzales then requested proposals from internet service providers to provide universal broadband. Four such proposals were filed, but Gonzales rejected them all, citing slow speeds or holes in the commitment to universal access. Instead, the city began to negotiate individually with providers. The city found a willing partner in T-Mobile.

In Gonzales, Wi-Fi for all. Courtesy of Carmen Gil.

T-Mobile’s offerings were well-suited for Gonzales’ needs. The company has a program called EmpowerED to get students online. T-Mobile also has an unusually dense network of cellular towers in the area—which provide cell coverage to people driving through on the 101. T-Mobile also was willing to shift its model, which focuses on school districts, and work with the city government as well.

The T-Mobile/Gonzales partnership was approved by the city council last October. T-Mobile upgraded wireless internet infrastructure, and donated 2,000 Wi-Fi hotspots—one for every city household. The hotspots offer speeds four times those required by the Federal Communications Commission, and can support up to 12 different devices at once.

The city, not residents, pays monthly service charges, at a discounted rate of $12.50 monthly per household device. Partnership documents value T-Mobile’s donation at more than $504,000. The total annual cost to the Gonzales government is $300,000—paid for with general fund revenues and a special ½-cent sales tax approved back in 2014.

Hotspot distribution started in schools and low-income housing complexes. Anyone presenting proof of residency in Gonzales received them; so did households outside the city who attend Gonzales schools. Since COVID forced shutdowns, the city has offered drive-by service for equipment pickups.

Residents tell me the devices are already activated when you get them, so they are easy to use. And with education and other services now moving online, the hotspots have become indispensable for Gonzales’ many multi-generation families. Grandparents sing the hot spots’ praises, and some college students from Gonzales, now back home, say their city internet connections are better than their campus ones.

“They work really, really well, even with all the people suddenly online—Google Docs, Google Classroom, Zoom, are all working,” says Isabel Mendoza, 17, a Gonzales High senior and commissioner with the Gonzales Youth Council, a youth government with a role in city and school district decision-making. “Before, because we have five people in my house, and a number of electronics, the internet was really slow.”

René Mendez, the longtime city manager, has been fielding inquiries from towns around California asking for broadband advice, and nearby Greenfield is now moving forward with a similar program.

“I think this is doable across the state,” Mendez says, particularly if cities aggressively seek out internet providers and make deals that mix new broadband investment with cost-sharing. “Why can’t you provide broadband for the whole community, just like you do with sewer and water and streets?”

Of course, it should be much easier for poor towns and people to secure internet in California, which invented our tech world, than it was for Gonzales. But the city doesn’t dwell on past struggles—it’s moving forward. Gonzales’ deal with T-Mobile is for two years, but it’s renewable. City officials are planning a trip to T-Mobile headquarters, and plotting the next chapter of universal broadband. It starts with 5G.

The post One Small California Town’s 15-Year Fight for Universal Broadband appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Then, as now, local food was all the rage, evidenced in crowded farmers markets, whole-animal butcher classes, and field trips on foraging food. I thought local yarn sounded like a good idea, too. “Don’t these same people care about where their clothes came from?” I wondered. Yarn, after all, is the foundation of all fabric, spun to thin thread and then either woven or knit. “Aren’t synthetic fibers at least as bad as a factory-farmed hamburger? Why can I buy sheep’s milk cheese at the weekly farmers market on my street, but not a hat or sweater from the very same animal?” I began searching for answers.

I found many. Most U.S.-grown wool is exported raw, returning in garments labeled only with the country name of the last manufacturing step—as required by trade treaties. On top of that, most U.S. wool and textile weaving mills had closed by the early 1990s. Still another factor is a shortage of sheep shearers: the people most likely to raise sheep breeds that make interesting yarn have trouble finding a shearer, due to the smaller sizes of their flocks. This is because shearers typically make money on volume. At $3 a head, for example, a shearer needs to shear at least 100 sheep per day to make a decent living. And shearers themselves are a dying breed. As Gary Vorderbruggen, one of my shearing instructors, says, the first thing you do to get ready for shearing season is to “call your shearer and see if he’s still alive.”

In May 2013, I attended a beginning sheep shearing school at the University of California Hopland Research and Extension Center, where I got beaten up by sheep for five days straight. By day three, my lip was split, my body was purpled with hoof-shaped bruises, and I had trouble standing up to walk. By day five, I had a dim idea of what I was doing and could shear a few sheep per day.

Shearing is a highly skilled job, a full mind-body experience. Courtesy of Stephany Wilkes.

A classmate took me out on some shearing jobs with him, and though I still don’t know why shearing stuck, it did. Shearers blame “wooly worms” for it, because even we can’t explain why shearing is rather addictive. If nothing else, I knew I preferred an ornery, manure-laden, 250-pound, horned ram over my day job—which was, at the time, in tech—any day of the week.

Since then, I’ve spent much of every January through August in barns loud with the sound of electric shears, wool baling machines, bleating sheep, and sometimes a generator. Shearing is a highly skilled job, a full mind-body experience. To keep all involved injury-free, we must intensely focus on what we’re doing. If we get too caught up in our own worlds, we’ll seriously hurt ourselves and the sheep. I’m constantly watching where my hand is in relation to the shears, if I’ve pulled the sheep’s skin taut enough so I don’t cut it, if my feet are in the right place, and so on.

As I have slogged my way through each back-breaking job, I have learned that sheep shearing looks much the same today as it has for the past two centuries. It’s an American tradition—a highly skilled, journeying trade—that has always relied on crews of immigrant and American workers alike, some of whom descend from earlier generations of Native American, French, Basque, English, Portuguese, and Mexican shepherds.

The tradition of sheep shearing, and the way it survives today, are the result of humans creating wool-growing sheep. Wild sheep, like the American-native Bighorn, shed their wool as they grow it. But domesticated sheep have been bred over the course of 15,000 years to hold onto their wool. We created sheep to reliably grow our clothes in our backyards, year after year, until we were ready to harvest it. Today, wool must be sheared every 6 to 12 months for the good of the sheep.

Skilled shearers are in high demand. By my best estimates, there are currently 350 to 500 actively practicing American sheep shearers, a few dozen of whom are women—not nearly enough to cover 5.23 million head of sheep and lambs in the country. Reduced sheep numbers (down from tens of millions in individual states alone) mean that shearers need to be recruited from other countries on H2-A sheep shearing visas, and shearers like me have to travel farther. I’ve met more than one shearer in his or her 50s or 60s who says they used to hit their numbers for the year by shearing “across the street and down the road.”

The unrelenting physical demands of both shearing and the road life combine to make the shearing community a tightly knit, mutually supportive one. Every shearer is, automatically, each other’s “ride or die,” and it’s palpable. Besides, I enjoy equal pay for the first time: unlike my experience in tech, everyone on a crew is paid the same per-head rate. The only difference is how many sheep each of us shears.

How much does our present-day shearing community in the U.S. resemble that of the past? There is not much documentation, but one historical source is The Flock by writer Mary Austin, published in 1906. In it, she describes the crews and manner of shearing in California during the late 1800s, which feels similar in communal spirit and camaraderie to shearing days today. Austin writes, “each man chose to shear what pleased him … Under the social stimulus they turn out an astonishing number of well-clipped muttons.” Austin quotes a rancher who says that, as of the 1860s, “there were no laborers but” Native Americans, that “Round the half moon of the lower San Joaquin the Mexicans are almost the only shearers to be had,” and describes camps comprised of French, Basque, and American shearers. She describes shearers calling out their tallies and notes she heard once heard a man keep tally in three languages. That strikes me as quintessentially American.

Austin’s book also reflects the nature of sheep shearing today, which crosses a lot of international borders. Because sheep shearers are in high demand all over the world, some shearers come to the U.S. from cultures with their own long, expert traditions in sheep and wool: Peru, Mexico, Uruguay, Australia, and New Zealand. U.S. workers also travel to Australia, New Zealand, and Europe to shear as temporary workers themselves.

The design of the tools we use is another thing that hasn’t changed much in the course of a century. In a 1902 advertisement, a boy operates a similar set-up to the one I use. He cranks the motor, which—via gears and transmission—moves a cutter across a comb. Distance is another part of the craft that hasn’t changed. Sheep still travel great distances, and shearing crews travel even farther to tend to remote flocks—if not quite as far as Austin describes. Today, land in the U.S. is too divided between public and private entities to let flocks roam to the extent they once did. Austin describes a “shearing crew which has begun in the extreme southern end of the [San Joaquin] valley, passes north on the trail of vanishing snows as far as Montana, and picks up the fall shearings, rounding toward home.”

Still, between January 1 and August 30 each year, I typically put 10,000 miles on my car—and I’m lucky, because many of my small-flock jobs are close to home. Iowa-based shearer Alex Moser noted in January 2019 that he puts 45,000 miles on his truck each year, while Michigan-based shearer Tim Wright says he averages about 18,000 to 22,000 miles a year.

Today, pick-up trucks tow the shearing trailer instead of a horse team, but shearers travel and set up to shear much like they always have. After the day’s work is done, shearers may stay in a private camper, truck or tent, as ever. Less often, shearers may share one hotel room nearby. Even an inexpensive one can eat up 15 to 20 percent of a day’s wages, so a hotel room usually means buddying up.

Shearing the rams by painter Tom Roberts, 1890. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria, Felton Bequest Fund.

One thing that has changed is the way we actually shear the sheep. The shearing method we use today is called the Bowen—or New Zealand—method, a shearing dance designed to keep the fleece in one piece and achieve maximum speed and quality work, with a minimum of physical effort. It’s safe for the sheep and gets them out of the experience as quickly as possible. It was invented by brothers Ivan and Godfrey Bowen, and over the last few decades has become standard practice in the world of sheep shearing.

When we use the Bowen method, we put the sheep on its back and make three strokes with the shears down the belly. We cover teats and udders with the hand that isn’t holding the shearing handpiece, so we don’t nick them. Next, we go out the right leg, then back up the same leg. After this, we shear the sheep’s left leg, sinking our fists into the hip socket to straighten the leg out, and then shear the hip haunch (hock) all the way over to the spine.

Each and every movement is carefully choreographed between feet, hands, shears, and sheep. For example, as we shear the sheep’s head, we bend the ear over each eye, to protect the sheep’s eye socket and to see clearly around the ear. Later, to shear the neck, we’ll step forward with our right foot, put it between the sheep’s legs, and push our right knee into the sheep’s chest, which keeps it safely held while we do long strokes to shear the neck. After this, we make long sweeps of the shears down the sheep’s back and sides, which is the fun part; sustained, smooth, fast strokes. Finally, we pull the shears off, release the sheep, and gently pat its rump as a signal that it’s free to stand and go. The sheep pop up between our legs, facing the door, and run off to their flock and food.

Sheep have gotten much larger over the past hundred years, which makes shearing them much more physically demanding. As recently as the 1980s, a 170-pound ewe was considered a big sheep. Now, shearers regularly handle 250- to 300-pound sheep.

I hope I will have work for as long as I can hold my shears and a sheep. We need more natural fibers and sheep for different, complementary reasons: as natural, compostable fiber for the fashion industry, to replace plastic-shedding synthetic fabrics, and for soil health as well. As the climate changes and flooding and soil temperatures increase, we will depend more heavily on sheep and goats that can graze a wide variety of plants and efficiently turn that energy into both fiber and food.

We always need more shearers to join us. Shearers get injured, start families, reduce travel, and retire. I think it’s an underrated, rich, free life. I see the most beautiful parts of the country; I love the sheep and my shearing community; and no two jobs are ever alike.

The post The Joys of Shearing Ornery, 250-Pound Sheep appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

He knew that the venture capital companies would be ready to open the tap again after the economic slowdown. He also believed that Ooyala was ripe for a big expansion. But Silicon Valley was simply too expensive to try to hire a full staff there.

He was more than a little surprised when the colleague he had asked to assess options around the world came back with the suggestion of Mexico’s second largest city, Guadalajara. “I was originally a little hesitant,” admits Lepe, “given that my parents had left Mexico.”

In fact, Lepe’s parents had grown up in a small town not far from Guadalajara and had left the country before he was born to try their luck as farmworkers in the United States. Lepe remembered traveling back and forth to Mexico as a young child, before his parents finally settled down permanently in California, but he had never seen Mexico as a land of opportunity, much less a place to invest.

Even for most Mexicans, Guadalajara was familiar as the source of tequila and mariachi bands, not technology. Its image was stodgy and traditional, not cutting-edge.

His colleague insisted, though, telling him that Guadalajara had a strong talent pool of young programmers and engineers. Its technology ecosystem was not as mature as those of other cities around the world—including some of those in India and Vietnam—but it was developing quickly.

The tech rise of Guadalajara had taken decades to incubate. Starting in the 1960s and continuing through the 1980s, a number of foreign companies—including Kodak, Motorola, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Siemens—placed some of their manufacturing operations in Guadalajara. This was all about finding cheap labor for manufacturing, and Guadalajara developed a cluster of tech companies that made semi-conductors, printers, and photo equipment, among other basic components of the tech industry. “All the directors of the plants were American,” recalls Jaime Reyes, who joined HP’s Guadalajara operation in the 1980s.

By the 1990s, Reyes says, the management began to change, and he himself became HP’s first Mexican manager in 1994. By the end of the decade, most of the managers were Mexican, and there were Mexican engineers, programmers, and designers working at the plants, even though they still mostly specialized in basic tech manufacturing. Over this period, corporations worked closely with local universities to expand their tech-related courses, and the collaboration paid off by generating local talent. It looked like a highly successful model through which Guadalajara would eventually be able to move up the value chain.

Then it all came crashing down.

China’s entry into the World Trade Organization at the end of 2001 devastated Guadalajara’s tech industry. During the 2000s, many factory and engineering jobs moved to Asia, which suddenly boasted lower tariffs to go along with even lower wages than the ones in Guadalajara. The tech industry could have vanished.

But it didn’t. Instead of folding, Guadalajara reinvented itself as a major center for research and development, programming, design, and other high-skilled tech occupations, building on the foundation that had been laid years earlier. Reyes remembers the moment in the 2000s when HP’s Guadalajara operation produced the first printer designed entirely in the company’s Guadalajara offices. “We inverted the model to become the designers—and Taiwan the manufacturer,” he recalls.

Today Oracle, Intel, HP, and IBM all have major R&D and programming facilities in Guadalajara. Amazon also recently set up its own R&D facility there, and Continental Tires, a German company, produces around 20 patents a year from its local research facility. There is still some low-wage component manufacturing and assembly, but the city is now known primarily for its engineering talent and creativity.

Bismarck Lepe eventually came around to the idea that Guadalajara could be the right place to base most of Ooyala’s operations. While he was relocating to Guadalajara, he met Adal Lopez, a young, aspiring entrepreneur in the city, and he asked him to come work for him for a couple of years to lead Ooyala’s Mexican operations. Adal López really wanted to start his own company, but Lepe convinced him that it was worth his while to learn the ropes in a more established startup.

Lepe’s bet on Guadalajara—and López’s management—paid off. The company became immensely successful, and Lepe eventually sold it in 2014 to the Australian telecom giant Telstra for $410 million. The buy-out came about in large part because of the strength of Ooyala’s Guadalajara operations.

By the time of the sale, Adal López had already gone on to start his own company with support from Lepe and other Silicon Valley investors.

By 2015, Bismarck Lepe was back in Guadalajara with his latest startup, Wizeline, a business solutions company that specializes in integrating databases. Today Wizeline has 300 employees in Guadalajara with plans to expand to 1,200 by the end of the year. Meanwhile, the San Francisco head office remains lean with 25 to 30 staffers.

Lepe has become an evangelist for the benefits that Guadalajara offers for America’s tech industry. “You’re starting to get the second or third generation of technologists who have experience build[ing] scalable products,” he says. “And it’s not only the talented people that are there, but the ones we can attract to live there.” Wizeline now has employees from Egypt, France, Ecuador, Colombia, China, New Zealand, and, of course, the United States working at its Guadalajara offices. It’s easy to get them work visas, something that is becoming harder north of the border. And they love the quality of life in a city that is far cheaper than Silicon Valley but still has great cultural and recreational options.

Lepe is so convinced by Guadalajara that he started a nonprofit, Startup GDL, to promote the city as a tech hub to other Silicon Valley startups. Startup GDL currently has a long pipeline of U.S.-based small and medium-sized tech companies looking at putting part or all of their operations in Guadalajara.

But Guadalajara’s future may not lie only in attracting Silicon Valley companies but also in creating its own. Adal López, who ran Ooyala’s operations in Guadalajara, now runs Kueski, his own financial technology startup that provides small online loans—an alternative to both banks and loan sharks. In a country where banks cater mostly to the wealthy and the largest businesses, Kueski fills a niche left unserved by banks by providing fast loans to small businesspeople and the growing middle class. He has found a formula that may well work across many other emerging economies around the world that have similar problems with financial penetration.

Guadalajara is now full of small and medium-sized startups trying to emulate what Silicon Valley innovators once did to build an ecosystem of successful companies and venture capitalists. Among the most consolidated startups, in addition to López’s Kueski, are Sunu, which makes wristbands for the visually impaired, allowing them to gauge the distance of nearby objects, and Unima. Funded by both private investment and the Gates Foundation, Unima’s technology—designed to do medical testing in remote areas that lack doctors—may one day find its way not only into parts of Mexico, but also to Central America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

When you visit, Guadalajara still has the feel of an overgrown provincial town, where you can wander through cobblestone streets past colonial churches on a quiet weekend afternoon. The city—like all of Mexico—remains firmly anchored in its past, at the same time it’s starting to build a new vision of its future. Sometimes it feels conservative and traditional, and at other times, innovative and entrepreneurial, a quirky combination that highlights the underlying tensions as Mexico moves from an inward-looking country to one that is global and outward-focused. And the modern, dynamic economy built on technology innovation still co-exists with massive inequality, pervasive graft, and enduring poverty in many parts of the country—and in Guadalajara, too.

But things are changing. In perhaps one of the signs of the times, Guadalajara three years ago elected a former journalist as the city’s first independent mayor, defeating the traditional political parties along the way, as well as a 26-year-old independent congressman, who mounted his campaign largely through social media. On July 1 this year, if polls are right, the mayor will likely be elected as the state’s governor, and the congressman will become one of its senators, both signs of the willingness to try new paths in Guadalajara and its surrounding area.

Bismarck Lepe has no illusions that everything in Guadalajara is perfect. He knows that corruption and the lack of upward mobility, some of the issues that drove his family to leave, are still a major problem there and throughout Mexico. But Mexico offers more spaces where creativity and innovation can thrive, and he’s willing to bet on these, especially in Guadalajara. “This is definitely not my parents’ Mexico,” he says.

The post Guadalajara’s Transition From Tequila to High Tech appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A:
Test me all night, baby.

No, really. Sign me up to be the subject of A/B testing. I’d even be willing to sign a blanket consent form, right now, so that all of Silicon Valley’s biggest brains can test me for the purpose of improving the human future.

Everybody’s doing it. In fact, you’ve likely been A/B tested without your knowledge if you’ve ever used Google or Facebook.

With A/B testing, different users are given different variants of a website or an email or a purchasing button to test what small changes online make you more likely to click, or read, or buy, or spend more time in a particular online environment. (A/B typically suggests two variables but, in reality, we are in a multi-variable world.) If you’re reading this column online, you could be being A/B tested right now—it could be running in three different formats, with your reaction to each variable (different headlines, different layouts, maybe even different handsome photos of your columnist) being measured, recorded, and statistically analyzed.

The gold standard for California’s technology industry, A/B tests are also called bucket testing and split-run testing, and they neither can be detected or escaped. A/B tests are how we improve our designs, our interfaces, and even ourselves.

Conducted carefully and repeatedly, they allow for refinements to fit the needs of users and remove guess-work for those running sites and delivering more products.

This notion of tests is old—it’s often attributed to 1908 tests that were used to improve industrial processes at a Guinness brewery in Ireland. But Google has optimized its globe-dominating search business for such testing. Facebook is similarly devoted to A/B testing to continuously refine its site. On the other side is Snap, whose CEO Evan Spiegel doesn’t like to do such testing, preferring a more visceral approach. Is that why Snap is facing such challenges in keeping users?

A/B testing can feel more like a religion or a cult than a scientific procedure. It requires building unseen rituals into everything you put up online. But the disciplines of experimenting and testing help avoid the human preference for the status quo.

We should demand even more from A/B testing. The human race must redesign and improve all sorts of systems—energy, traffic, food and water supply, communications, and even governing systems —if we’re going to avoid self-inflicted disasters, from climate change to famines to wars. So why don’t we commit ourselves to a culture of continuous optimization in the real world, not just the virtual?

B:
I am not your test subject, baby.

And I have no desire to be Silicon Valley’s guinea pig. Oh, yes, I know the internet is full of fine print that lets me know that I’m being tested. But that doesn’t mean I’m being meaningfully asked for my consent. And I’m not really being compensated for all the data that’s being collected from experiments conducted on me.

My online time is now given over to companies experimenting upon me for the purpose of getting me to choose to see which variables will change my own behavior. In essence, I’m a dystopian lab rat forced to design the maze—and the reward—that will entrap me. Great.

And even the real world no longer provides an escape because the Internet of Things–with its web-connected air conditioning and appliances—tests me even when I’m relaxing in my own home, making a cup of coffee.

Facebook will tell you that all its services, provided to me free, are a form of compensation, but studies also tell me that spending more time on Facebook—which is the goal of many of their experiments—makes me less happy. Sadness is not a method of payment I accept.

Such testing has created an unacknowledged ethical crisis—and real public health concerns. The more we click, the more we’re being tested. And if experiments show the way to make us spend more time than is healthy for us in an online environment, or to spend more money than is good for our family’s finances, aren’t we being harmed by our own testimony? (Am I talking about my own behavior here, you ask? Can I plead the Fifth?)

In other fields, like medicine, society developed standards and review boards for governing the testing of human subjects. But these standards aren’t being applied to all the A/B testing to which we’re constantly subjected online.

There are questions here for our faltering democracy, too. California has hundreds of companies that will help an interest group or a politician test to determine the best ways to manipulate our emotions and online behavior for their purposes. Is such human testing a factor in the rise of polarization and fake information that is weakening our bonds to our fellow citizens?

If so, this world of testing needs real regulation—by the same authorities, and under the same laws, that allow for regulation of business practices in the name of protecting people from health and financial threats. One way to start might be to add regulation of A/B testing and other online experiments to the privacy regulations that some jurisdictions impose on tech companies.

And there are other, more prosaic problems. All these A/B tests can be wasteful, producing data that can become quickly outdated. That data creates its own gravity and a bias in favor of the status quo. That’s dangerous because the past doesn’t always predict the future, especially online.

A/B testing and multivariable varieties of it are also impersonal. Such testing doesn’t capture who the users are, and the needs of people can be as diverse and different as individuals themselves.

Of course, smart people in Silicon Valley know this, which is why they are moving beyond A/B testing to the realm of machine learning: a world of algorithms that learn about each individual user. The promise, as yet unrealized, is that the algorithms will continuously improve in giving each user customized products and answers.

Such machine learning blurs the line between human, interface, and machine. In testing their way into this future, California’s brightest brains are simultaneously hiding behind their screens and intruding into their fellow citizens’ lives and minds in a way that they would never dare in person.

Yes, their goal may improve the human experience in many fields. But constant testing and ever greater refinement can be deeply disrespectful to humans, our privacy, and our rights. Yes, we have the right to choose, A or B. But how much choice does continuous testing really leave us test subjects about the nature of our collective future?

The post Is A/B Product Testing Turning Us into Silicon Valley’s Lab Rats? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Back in 2005 and 2006, there was a series of scandals when U.S. tech firms colluded with internet censorship in China—Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google. In the most infamous case, Yahoo’s collaboration was said to have resulted in the imprisonment of a journalist, Shi Tao. China quickly became America’s Internet Enemy No. 1. Politicians threatened to create strong legislation to prevent American companies from helping foreign states spy on or censor their citizens. Instead, a self-regulatory model popped up, in which global tech firms in the U.S. and elsewhere pledged to protect internet freedom while—somehow—respecting other countries’ laws. Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, urged U.S. media companies to “take a proactive role in challenging foreign governments’ demands for censorship and surveillance.” The interests of American internet giants and of U.S. foreign policy had begun to intermingle.

When U.S. diplomats talk about the free and open internet—and they do, a lot—they mean an internet that is the same in every country, no matter who’s in power. No censorship and blocking, no keeping data local, no using the internet’s myriad technologies of surveillance and control to, well, spy on and control citizens. The opposite of a free and open internet is a series of national “intranets” that police content, intercept communications, and prop up failing states. But it’s hard to completely share America’s enthusiasm for the same internet everywhere, when that internet happens to be so utterly dominated by U.S. firms.

Along with its European and other allies, the U.S. sees the internet as an important vector for the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Although all U.N. member states nominally support human rights, the U.S. and its allies have overtly used “soft power” to press their case to open up more authoritarian countries. But the United States’ Internet Freedom agenda—which has existed since the early 2000s—comes packaged with America’s core values and economic interests. And while the internet spreads information and ideas and creates alternative communication platforms to government channels, it also makes it possible (and ever cheaper) for states to find, track, and record everyone and everything.

From 2010 to 2013 we experienced Peak Internet Optimism. In 2010, Hillary Clinton declared web freedom a key U.S. foreign policy objective. In speech after State Department speech, she argued that the internet must be allowed to—and also absolutely-no-question would—drive both political and economic liberalism around the world. And this wasn’t just rhetoric. The U.S. put serious money—$145 million to date—behind its global internet freedom agenda, supporting democracy activists in authoritarian regimes, including apparent allies like Bahrain, Egypt, and Vietnam. Remember all those breathless TV anchors extolling the Twitter revolutions and Facebook uprisings of the Arab Spring? How the internet was going to empower activists and citizen-journalists to fast-track creaking autocracies into youth-driven, market-friendly democracies? How the ideological battle of the 21st century was not between left and right but between open and closed societies?

We now know that social media was just a small part of a complicated situation that brought down or changed governments in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. (And also that few of these countries have yet to experience a happily ever after.) Although the State Department has toned down the clueless optimism and Silicon Valley-will-fix-politics message, it still preaches the virtues of the internet in allowing dissidents to communicate, organize, and, implicitly, overthrow nasty governments. That message has gone out loud and clear to America’s authoritarian rivals, and they don’t like what they hear.

Just as one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist, one country’s “soft power” is another’s weaponized values and existential threat. Because Americans see their values and interests as essentially benign, they completely miss how those abroad interpret what seem like harmless acts. (The Chinese and the Russians read Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, too, and they’re on to you.) Furthermore, much of the Chinese and Russian political class believe the West’s insistence on democracy and human rights is not merely distasteful and unnecessary, but a concerted way to weaken and destabilize them. As it is, Chinese Communist Party cadres are instructed by party bosses to be vigilant against “American efforts to overthrow the communist system through ‘peaceful evolution’—that is, the spread of Western ideas and culture.” Now imagine what the turbo-freedom of America’s global internet looks like to them.

Actually, you don’t have to imagine it. In 2011, two years after President Obama’s town hall meeting with future Chinese leaders in Shanghai, the state-run newspaper China People’s Daily editorialized about the United States’ deployment of shadow networks in authoritarian countries: “The US State Department has carefully framed its support of such projects as promoting free speech and human rights, but it is clear that the policy is aimed at destabilizing national governments.” It called Tor—software that helps people mask their location—“a weapon in a covert cyber war intended to maintain the US’ global dominance.”

As for Russia, its 2013 foreign policy doctrine complained about the “unlawful use of ‘soft power’ and human rights concepts to exert political pressure on sovereign states, interfere in their internal affairs, destabilize their political situation, manipulate public opinion, including under the pretext of financing cultural and human rights projects abroad.”

How could it all have gone so horribly wrong? Put aside, for a moment, the well-founded cynicism about Russia’s concern for human rights, and also the idea that U.S. ideals about the wider world are essentially benign or at least well-meaning. If you share neither U.S. interests nor its values, the American internet can indeed be a scary thing. I’m Irish and I’ve worked in internet policy since the late 1990s, including five years at ICANN. So I’m not exactly onside with President Putin when he describes the internet as a CIA project. But sometimes, when reading blithe U.S. statements about the internet, I find myself wondering, “Can’t you hear how you sound?”

Want to know how that feels? Let’s play the couples counseling game, “When you say …, I feel …”

When the U.S. says, “Breaking the internet into pieces gives you echo chambers instead of an innovative global marketplace of ideas,” China hears, “I don’t care about your fragile state, demographic time bomb, and ancient culture. I want you to be argumentative and disrespectful like me, so my companies can sell you more stuff.”

When the U.S. says, “We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas,” Russia hears “We want you to look and sound more like us, and if your crumbling petro-state succumbs to revolution as a result, so be it.”

When President Obama paraphrases the U.S. cybersecurity strategy at a town hall meeting in China as “the more freely information flows, the stronger societies become,” China thinks, “You’re a guest and that’s just rude.”

When the U.S. says, “We will work with partners in industry, academia, and NGOs to harness the power of connection technologies and apply them to our diplomatic goals,” Russia thinks, “We were so right to kick out those foreign NGOs.”

And when Hillary Clinton says, “A new information curtain is descending across much of the world. And beyond this partition, viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of our day,” you can imagine President Putin pausing as he manfully wrestles the Russian bear to ask, “She said what?”

And it’s not just the world’s other wannabe hegemons that Internet Freedom irritates.

When the U.S. says, “More government control is … disastrous for the internet as a whole, because it reduces the dynamism of the internet for everyone,” European countries may well think, “Making the global internet ‘dynamic’ enough for Google and Facebook’s business models is not exactly our No. 1 priority.” Now imagine your fundamental rights, like the right to privacy—hard and rightly won after state data abuses in World War II—are dismissed by your biggest ally as “a chokehold on the free flow of information, which stifles competition and disadvantages American entrepreneurs.”

Then there’s the fact that international internet governance debates are dominated by Americans. Under the guise of multistakeholderism, the huge U.S. delegation swaggers through meeting rooms and hallways, with dozens of corporate lawyers and business lobbyists and the occasional human rights activist. At U.N. meetings, the U.S. delegation is often bigger than the entire diplomatic staff of the poorest countries it deals with. What American diplomats see as effective advocacy appears to others as bull-headed arrogance and determination to make the world safe for Big Tech’s business model. The governments of developing countries are worried their shaky infrastructure can’t deal with spam or that the national telecoms company is losing money to YouTube and WhatsApp. But they just get a pat on the head and a lecture about globalization. No wonder they throw their votes China’s way and collude with technocrats who want to run the internet from behind closed government doors in Geneva.

Why does this matter? Because those of us working for a real free and open (and competitive and equal) internet are being undercut by all this guff about Freedom. In a post-Snowden world, not many of us think the U.S. wholeheartedly believes—let alone will live—its own ideals. The Russias and Chinas pretty much shrug their shoulders at the public exposure of well-understood U.S. hypocrisy. If they ran the internet, that’s precisely what they’d have done.

But the U.S. is losing legitimacy and influence on the global internet because it seems not to know or care how it appears to others in the middle ground—the governments that vote at the U.N., the countries making choices every day about what kind of internet they support.

Much of the bad feeling is inevitable and doesn’t really have an answer. The internet drives profound and very public change, and the people at the sharp end of change don’t have to like it, whether they’re the owner of a badly reviewed hotel or the secretary of the Communist Party of China. But when one country enjoys so much of the control and so many of the benefits, and the technology looks to many more like an ideology, you get blowback. It’s vital to understand why.

The post Why the U.S. Should Stop Lecturing the World About “Internet Values” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

San Jose is the 10th largest city in the United States, the third most populous in the state of California—and No. 1 in disrespect. With more than 1 million people, it’s Northern California’s biggest municipality—but it’s constantly outshined by those 850,000 San Franciscans to its north.

The famous City by the Bay is our state’s spoiled little brother. Not only does San Francisco attract most of the cool kids and the international publicity, but it also throws punches at its big brother city, 50 miles south, whenever it can.

This is an old fact of life in California. The original state constitution of 1849 made San Jose the state’s capital, but it took just 18 months for the legislature—dominated by San Franciscans who complained that San Jose’s hotels and booze weren’t up to standards—to move the capital to Vallejo.

And the hits keep coming.

For years, San Jose planned to build a baseball stadium next to the central transit depot Diridon Station for the Oakland A’s, who were eager to move to San Jose, which has more than twice the population of their hometown. But the San Francisco Giants convinced the Major League Baseball commissioner that they owned the San Jose market. Last fall, San Jose, after losing its legal challenge to this San Francisco baseball colonization, abandoned the stadium idea, and the A’s renewed their lease in Oakland.

San Francisco can’t even let San Jose victories go. Last month, when the California High-Speed Rail Authority announced a new plan to start construction of its bullet train with a Central-Valley-to-San Jose leg, San Francisco immediately objected. San Francisco transit officials, in comments on the plan, said that the first phase should come all the way north to San Francisco’s new Transbay Transit Center instead of stopping at Diridon. For now, the plan remains at San Jose, but it’s possible that the first phase could go to San Francisco—along with $2 billion in additional money.

But the most grievous injury is how San Francisco has stolen the technological zeitgeist from its southern neighbor. San Jose might call itself the “Capital of Silicon Valley,” but San Francisco is now home to the hottest tech properties—Uber, Airbnb, Twitter. And many firms still headquartered in San Jose and other peninsula cities like Palo Alto are opening up San Francisco offices. The venture capital picture is even more skewed in favor of San Francisco. In 2014, $11 billion in venture investments went to San Francisco firms, while just $1.1 billion went to San Jose companies.

San Francisco, never shy about playing dirty, has used generous public subsidies to attract some companies. But San Jose’s struggles are also of its own making. The young engineers and programmers who drive the Bay Area economy prefer urban living, but San Jose remains suburban and residential.

As a result, San Jose doesn’t have enough businesses to produce economic activity and taxes, leaving the city with budget problems and a famously understaffed police force. Last year, the Mercury News found that San Jose had the lowest ratio of jobs to residents of any big American city. San Jose boasts just 87 jobs for every 100 employed residents, compared to 110 jobs per 100 employed residents in Los Angeles, and 138 jobs per 100 employed residents in San Francisco. The city is trying to turn more residential land into commercial development—but such a transformation could take decades.

To be fair, San Jose is hardly the only place in California to have been disrupted by San Francisco imperialism. Hollywood has lost power and dollars as Bay Area Internet firms consume time once devoted to TV and movies. Taxi companies and hoteliers across the state are struggling under the force of San Francisco “sharing economy” companies. San Francisco’s obscene wealth has spilled over the city’s borders, raising housing prices to unaffordable levels and displacing longtime residents across Northern California.

And, since power follows money, San Francisco has all but taken over state politics. San Francisco’s Kamala Harris is the favorite to go to Washington and join former San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein in representing California in the U.S. Senate. Another former San Francisco mayor, Gavin Newsom, is off to the fastest start in the contest to succeed that son of San Francisco, Jerry Brown, as our governor.

San Jose’s predicament is thus a warning sign and a call to action. Unless California wants to watch San Francisco siphon off dollars, political power, and respect from the rest of the state, San Jose must be built up as a bulwark against San Francisco.

As a start, California should nudge foreign and out-of-state firms seeking Bay Area locations in the direction of San Jose. In the near term, the state must do everything it can to make sure Diridon Station becomes a signature California hub, with high-speed rail, every conceivable transportation connection, and attractions nearby to draw people. More long-term, the state should build a new, much-needed University of California campus in San Jose, the only one of the state’s top four cities without one.

To keep San Francisco at bay, we’ll need to find a way to San Jose.

The post California’s Last Stand Against San Francisco Imperialism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.