I gave this presentation for the Atlantic Council and Accenture. From the Atlantic Council site:

On Wednesday, 17 June 2020, the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center and Accenture held the second episode of the jointly presented Data Salon Series, featuring a presentation from Mr. Davi Ottenheimer, Vice President of Trust and Digital Ethics at Inrupt, that prompted animated discussion among participants about the nature of privacy, consent, and responsibility. The event focused on how our understanding of privacy and its preservation affects our ability to temporarily compromise it in the interest of addressing crises. These issues are particularly relevant to the ongoing pandemic, and their intersections with other topics—integrating different cultural priorities and expectations of privacy, ensuring data is truly representative of a diverse population, and examining the nuanced relationships between privacy, knowledge, and power—are especially timely.

Check out their full write-up on my presentation as they kindly have posted the survey results, slides as well as this recording of the talk with Q&A

Information warfare in America has continued almost non-stop since the late 1700s when abolition of slavery began to expand around the world. There has been a concerted effort by white supremacists to erase the reality of who really did what, where and when.

One of the most dramatic expressions of this is the mythology of the “frontiersman” of America. I say mythology because, truth be told, there were very blurred groups in the 1800s who drove western expansion far more than only white men.

The harsh frontier was largely explored by those furthest from the mainstream culture (seeking new lives and smashing a glass ceiling such as entrepreneurial women, freed slaves, mixed-races, convicts). This should come as common sense, since you can imagine who would take the most risks when there was no guarantee of rewards.

“The Revenant” story is a good example of this, as the true story was a very diverse group of non-whites and outcasts. A wall-street banker bored with his job picked the story up and rewrote it as a very loaded white man against nature narrative, which unfortunately was widely read and turned into a disgusting movie full of disgusting falsehoods and degrading imagery (innocent white man has to battle against non-whites, animals, women… to survive and conquer).

I assure you white men in comfortable settings didn’t say they’d throw it all away just to expand and explore new spaces for the sake of it. Think about motivations and you can see white men would go when the odds were more in their favor, which in fact usually meant many other people doing the work for them — they didn’t play fair.

It didn’t always mean white men shirked hard work. One example of that is Ulysses S. Grant who has been portrayed as a failure in business, when in fact he was really a do-it-yourself hard-working independent man. He freed his only slave and faced challenges alone. And yet his image, especially as told by the losers of the Civil War, is being tarnished unfairly as someone who struggled.

Think hard about that fact that the best evidence of an American white man (a hero really) doing hard work himself to be a truly “made man” has been viciously and falsely characterized by historians as a failure. In other words the people lauding some for the “fail faster” culture should embrace Grant, and yet you see them distanced and aloof. There’s a subtle reason for this.

On the flip side the complex narratives of success have often been unfairly replaced with a deceptive binary one — successful white men were hardworking even when everyone else was their property/prize and did the actual work.

Confusing matters is the fact that evidence pops up of white men bifurcating from others in the records of westward migration. Those taking the Oregon trail, for example, are described as those who tended to be families who would abide by regulations (e.g. religion and law) settled in with local populations. Those headed to California in contrast were predominantly single white men who waged an all out war on people and nature.

Bifurcation like this tends to end up being an oversimplification that doesn’t quite fit (Oregon was site of mass atrocities and some parts of California became preserves). It does show however a simple good/bad framework of settlement does manifest from a grain of truth as it feeds into narratives told by the self-appointed “good” story-tellers.

Here’s another way of looking at that bifurcation. In one infamous case a white man brought his slaves with him to California to seek gold and when none was found he abandoned them there and went back to a southeastern state. His freed slaves then found gold on their own and… that white man sued them, claiming two Americans and their gold should be seen as his property.

So when people describe the California trail as “single white men”, which it definitely had a lot of, keep in mind they may be (even unintentionally) erasing several or many team members carrying a “single” person on their shoulders.

Really this problem is rooted even deeper in American history. Slavery was banned in the colonial time (prior to 1750) and yet some settlers saw their role in a revolutionary war to expand slavery. Americans saw England making noises about abolition, even banning it in the latest colonies, and aimed to fight and keep slavery going.

This is why abolition arrived in some American states by 1820s in-line with the rest of the world, and a spirit of hard work became foundational. Whereas in Mexico a flood of white men settled and complained bitterly that frontier life was too harsh for white people to survive without slaves.

When I say Mexico, I mean Texas, the area these white men immigrated into then violently seceded, calling itself a “lone star” because it aimed for a white supremacists nation, to keep oppression and slavery going even if it meant being the last slave state in the world.

It is no coincidence that the sole survivor from the white supremacists side of battle at the Alamo was a slave. Mexican forced liberated that black man and killed his oppressors. “Remember the Alamo” really means don’t forget the battle for slavery that was lost when white people were defeated and their slave was set free.

This is all a long pre-text to set the background properly before reading a new article in the FT by a Texas historian, called “Americans want to be free to be stupid”

Freedom comes with responsibility. Being stupid is irresponsible. Does being free to be stupid therefore violate the principles of freedom?

The FT article skips right over the crucial fact that Texas “exceptionalism” and “frontier” spirit meant slavery.

Again, Texas was Mexico until white immigrants came with slaves and said no white man could survive the harsh conditions without non-whites to do all the hard work for them. They usurped power and seceded from Mexico (and later from America) just to avoid hard work and keep slaves instead.

Being “free to be stupid” is thus a dog-whistle to slavery, which is not freedom at all. It really means doing harm to others in the most selfish way possible.

This article also erases the significant role of women in the frontier, as men not only looked up to them but treated them as superiors and often substituted them for judge (where none could be found) in disputes.

“Madonna of the Trail” is such a memorial just outside Custer’s base camp in Kansas (just one of twelve placed along National Road US40, the first interstate highway established by act of Congress in 1806 and expanded 1926).

Commissioned by the Daughters of the American Revolution, which had a well-deserved reputation for racism, every single statue is identical and unfortunately depicts only a white woman:

1. Springfield OH – July 4, 1928
2. Wheeling WV – July 7, 1928
3. Council Grove KS – Sept 7, 1928
4. Lexington, MO – Sept 17, 1928
5. Lamar, CO – Sept 24, 1928
6. Albuquerque, NM – Sept 27, 1928
7. Springerville, AZ – Sept 29, 1928
8. Vandalia, IL – Oct 26, 1928
9. Richmond IN – Oct 28, 1928
10. Beallsville, PA – Dec 8, 1928
11. Upland, CA – Feb 1, 1929
12. Bethesda, MD – April 19, 1929

It’s not expected to see history told by the FT in such a way that leaves out minorities and women. However it must be recognized more widely how this is continuation of information warfare methods in America that go all the way back to the late 1700s.

Some white men tend to claim to be doing hard work while erasing the fact that their privilege means the work is being done for them without real cost/responsibility.

Avoiding the true history of Texas and the role of women is precisely why this FT article is bunk. You can’t separate them. When “free to be stupid” means a privilege that translates direct to harms to others (e.g. human trafficking and slavery is stupid) that’s not real freedom, it’s oppression.

Calling stupid a freedom, when it means whites stupidly harming blacks, is the continuation of information warfare.

When I visited Lyft HQ when it first opened, they had a large mural timeline of their origin story that went something like this:

In 2006 Logan Green went to Zimbabwe and observed a system of crowd-sourced carpool networks. He came back to America and made a copy he called Zimride (Zimbabwe Ride).

I’ll never forget being in the office (for meetings) and having staff relate this mural story to me, because they said their founder vacationed in Africa after college and marveled at the “safety” of private drivers; white parents having a method of ride-sharing their kids to school (called the “lift system” in South Africa).

The Lyft staff didn’t say the exact word apartheid, of course, because they were blandly relating Rhodesian transportation history as if it were like any other system. It was based on white families driving their children to elitist schools, but that’s not how they framed it.

Anyway this Lyft story telling of their “safe” transport system origins from Africa raised alarms for me, given context of Zimbabwean history.

I also noticed the company seems to tell a very different story to the press, claiming their founder was just an admirer of taxis.

Zimride, in fact, is not a derivation of Zimmer’s name but a riff on Zimbabwe, where Green, now CEO, had observed the local propensity for ridesharing in minivan taxis.

This press brief makes no sense at all when you think about it even a little.

First, Lyft never attempted to work with taxis in America. From the start the company was billed as a whole alternative to taxis systems, so why would they say they liked African taxis?

More to the point who comes back from a vacation to an African country with the idea for a wealthy white person alternative to taxis in America? Does that really sound like observing Zimbabwean minivan taxis?

This kind of narrative disconnect between internal and external statements was highlighted in 2017 when Lyft eventually came around to launching a private “bus” service. I mean why didn’t they start with minivan taxis if that’s what they observed?

Anyway, eleven years late, their approach didn’t escape some predictable and obvious criticisms.

The Lyft Shuttle is pretty much a glorified city bus — with fewer poor people. The ride-sharing company’s much-hyped shuttle service seems designed to segregate transit customers by class.

A privilege bus.

Second, ride-sharing in minivan taxis (even pickups beds) has been a global phenomenon of efficient transport, not a concept unique to Zimbabwean culture. There must have been something unique to Zimbabwe being the origin story, aside from minivan taxis.

I’ve traveled all over the world in the minivan/microbus/kombi taxi and similar. From Poland to Indonesia, Zimbabwe to Philippines … you can find vehicles carrying 8-12 people running regular routes. When I was at EMC in 2012 I even worked with security systems to help make Pakistan’s “pink bus” safer (women only, with women guards riding and cameras) .

This is because a modern private micro bus naturally evolved by community-led transit planners to be an optimal solution on a development path towards achieving higher-volume buses or trains (a step on the way moving people further away from cars).

Lyft doesn’t fit that model, not at all. They started with cars where drivers were “safe” as if your friend or on your “side”, pandering openly to wealthy young white professionals and kids in school. That’s the apartheid white parents car-sharing story.

Again, a micro bus taxi service is not even close to what Lyft initially was planning, so the more likley Zimbabwean root is the Rhodesian/South African “lift system”.

After observing the micro bus taxis on predictable routes, CEO Green did the opposite and put passengers in the front seat of small cars on unrestricted paths. It sounds more like a trip to Zimbabwe left the founder thinking “how can I setup a service so white people like me can avoid crowded public transit such as the Zimbabwean taxi bus system”.

Anyway 2013 the founder decided to rename his original creation “Lyft”, the same as the apartheid “lift system” white parents used to shuttle their racist families and avoid the black taxis. The renaming meant a complete jettison of the Zimbabwe reference as the original name was sold to Enterprise.

The African root reference only lived on with that painted mural in the office, which I only happened to see because they invited me inside and told me a wild yet inconsistent story of appropriation. They’ve since moved their HQ and evidence of the mural is surely long gone.

You might be thinking the link to apartheid’s “lift system” is uncanny, yet insufficient on its own as just a coincidental name.

Let me now also poke here at the issue of a pink “carstache” wired to the front of original Lyft vehicles.

They were explained to me as highly distinguishable “safety” marketing for ride shares. It supposedly was meant to give riders obvious physical safety signaling. And yet anyone could buy one and celebrities promoted owning them.

A person who would dare to put a big pink thing on their car (remember the “pink bus” in 2012 Pakistan?) was advertised as someone who wouldn’t be physically dangerous to Lyft’s target population (white women).

…little-known fact: The bright pink color was inspired not only by the founders’ desire to seem friendly and bold, but also to make their branding a bit less masculine than competitors, and nod to their very welcome view toward female passengers and drivers, as well as emphasis on safety for women.

“Funny” big pink facial features when you meet your driver may instead read to some as two white guys’ doing some really insensitive appropriation of imagery in black culture. Look at the top lip in this iconic anti-black image:

And notice how even Uber tried to portray Lyft’s requirement that riders must fist-bump drivers.

What’s so weird about requiring Lyft riders to do a fist-bump?

…the pound is “a gesture of solidarity and comradeship… also used in a celebratory sense and sometimes as a nuanced greeting among intimates and/or those with a shared social history”. They trace that history in mainstream black culture to the Sixties, when African-American soldiers fighting in Vietnam used the dap… fists meet vertically, one above the other.

I wonder if Lyft had anyone black in executive management on board with the big pink mustache/lip and forced fist-bump concepts. I found their 2018 diversity report illuminating, given they were on a massive hiring spree doubling the size of the company and yet had 0% black staff in technical leadership.

Speaking of which, did you know a whopping “75% of white Americans have no friends of color at all.”

Even worse, as you might guess from a company started by a white college grad unwittingly claiming inspiration from apartheid who partnered with a Wall Street banker, Lyft has been widely implicated in systemic victimization of women.

A single SF driver repeatedly attacked women over five years before police managed to track him down. That’s just one of literally thousands of their unsafe ride-share cases highlighted by 20 women suing the company.

“Lyft has been aware of the staggering number of assaults and rapes that occur in their vehicles for years. They continue to conceal those numbers from the public and Lyft customers,” Bomberger said in a statement. “That is not a commitment to safety. It is a commitment to profits.”

Obviously Lyft has totally obliterated their origin story now. You won’t find them speaking of Africa or the white woman “safety” angle in the same way. They now downplay the big pink face features, quit the fist-bump, and strut about like ride-sharing was just something they invented while bored and traveling around California.

It may be important to revisit the whole origin story again, however, as researchers have been looking more deeply at the decision algorithms and continue to reveal racism in ride-sharing platforms.

…fares tended to be higher for drop-offs in Chicago neighborhoods with high non-white populations…an earlier report published in October 2016 by the National Bureau of Economic Research that found in the cities of Boston and Seattle male riders with African American names were 3 times more likely to have rides canceled and wait as much as 35% longer for rides.

I often give talks about the question of invention and I use the Roland-808 as an example, so I figure I should leave the reference here as well.

Its inventors would prefer you remember and cite them as a collaborative, not competitive, team and stop asking for a single name.