Wednesday, October 3

 

 

The promised rain had not turned out as bad as promised, so I cycled to Puotila with my jacket hood up, and reached the metro still almost completely dry.

Theoretically the transport workers have decided to hold a 24 hour strike in protest at the government’s plans to make it easier for smaller companies to sack people. In practice the metro arrived as usual.

When I get to Sörnäinen the rain has become heavier, but I find shelter and the tram arrives more or less on time. I photograph some people walking in the rain, with the proper attitude of glumness swirling about their persons.

I will start my working day by reading through a set of articles I have stored in Pocket concerning the decentralised web, or DWeb as I might learn to call it. According to Techcrunch,

The original purpose of the web and internet, if you recall, was to build a common neutral network which everyone can participate in equally for the betterment of humanity. Fortunately, there is an emerging movement to bring the web back to this vision and it even involves some of the key figures from the birth of the web. It’s called the Decentralised Web or Web 3.0, and it describes an emerging trend to build services on the internet which do not depend on any single “central” organisation to function.

Tim Berniers-Lee has joined in by founding Solid, which will attempt to replace all the offers to “sign in with Facebook” with something decentralised (a Solidpod) and in the control of the user. I suspect that we will have to join in too, if this movement gathers the interest that it should.

After this I will turn my attention to Nobanet, and email people about the intended book, and the next meeting which we will hold in Zoom next week.

Oliver will then phone me to say that one of the Sunday Job’d workers has phoned him to say that they got paid half what they expected. I will check and, sure enough, the first shift got paid at normal rates despite the fact that I had set the rate to Sunday rates. I will email Sami to ask how we fix this. I will also send a message to the workers in the Treamer app, to tell them that I have noticed and started the process of fixing it.

By this point I will feel hungry. Liisa will send me a message cancelling our lunch time date at China Flavor. I will look round for other potential diners and find none. No sushi for this boy, today.

In the afternoon I will make an appointment to get a new residency permit card before Brexit hits the fan. This will involve searching the website and finding no clues as to how do this, and then talking with a chatbot whose response will be somewhat quirky but will nonetheless contain the clues that I need.

I will send out a reminder about next week’s Nobanet meeting and then, possibly, over-complicate it by asking people to mail me to tell me if they still want to join. I will immediately get a response telling me to remove the respondent’s name from the list and add someone I have never heard of.

So it goes.

I will watch an interview at Internet of Agreements with Ian Grigg, the inventor of triple-entry accounting and the Ricardian contract, both of which played a large part in the development of blockchain.

Finally I will read a paper Nathalie has asked me to referee. It will send me online to refresh my knowledge of actor-network theory. I thought Bruno Latour invented it. It will prove more complicated than that.

I will go home knowing more than when I arrived.