Weeknotes 4: Single Points of Failure
I have been thinking a lot this week about the idea of “Single Points of Failure”, an industrial / software term for a weakness within a system that can cause the whole thing to crash. Allowing there to be a single point of failure in anything important is, clearly, a bad idea. Yet it happens all the time. Think of the global outage of Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram last Oct caused by a mistake in the code on which that shaky edifice is built — an error that “had a cascading effect”.
I thought about this idea twice this week.
The first was in a regular conversation I have with Directors of other orgs who have a similar set of values to us but work in different fields. I love these chats, sharing everything from moral support to job descriptions.
In this conversation I heard about a deathly fear of getting ill — not fear of being ill, but fear that the organisation would collapse if a leader had to take time off. I have felt this fear many times in the 3+ years I am building this org — in almost every role I have had, actually, right back to when I was an intern. The weight of that fear can be crushing, impact our health, and in my case at least I can say that it impacted my thought process on having a family. It sucks and it is bullshit. And it seems to be built into an old fashioned set of ideas and expectations about triangular corporate structures.
I think this is why I have loved being a part of the People Vs Big Tech movement so much. It has been effective — with actual, tangible wins in the Digital Services Act — but it has worked in a highly non-hierarchical non-centralised way that has been a joy to be a part of. Now that — literally today! — it looks like the DSA will finally pass, we are about to commission someone to help us capture and share the story of how that has worked — also because I really want to know.
Going back to the Single Point of Failure, the second time the idea came into my head was when I was asked onto RTE’s “The Business” show to discuss Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter. The interview is online here, but my headline thought is how on earth did we end up building global systems for mediating discussion, politics, propaganda, commerce, etc. etc. on such shaky corporate governance ground that a billionaire can throw around the idea of overseeing it, just for fun? Since my last post Twitter announced that they were taking action on the Prisoner of War video issue that HRW and my team had raised with them, citing the Geneva Conventions for the first time in their work (I’m very proud of that one). But they had done that voluntarily, and based on the culture and leadership of the company, because tech companies have extremely limited liability. It all feels very fragile.
I don’t have a neat solution to all of this, but it certainly feels like we want to be pushing for more distributed power.
Things I found interesting this week:
- This fantastic piece of investigative journalism by Naomi O’Leary into MEPs being used as part of authoritarian propaganda machines — the first time in about a decade I have heard mention of Lexus Nexus, but what a brilliant use of that data
- Karen Hao’s eminently readable account of how “AI is creating a new colonial world order” in MIT’s Technology Review
- Donegal, in the North West of Ireland, where I got to spend the Easter weekend
