If you create networks that allow people in their own local systems to have power and agency and sovereignty in their own systems. The idea that people could just know what's happening with their data. You could work with the platform, in communication with it, more than "I'm just like experiencing as a blind person in a black box".
Ramesh SrinivasanIf you create networks that allow people in their own local systems to have power and agency and sovereignty in their own systems. The idea that people could just know what's happening with their data. You could work with the platform, in communication with it, more than "I'm just like experiencing as a blind person in a black box".
Ramesh SrinivasanWe are getting close to the point where as every platform of tech that has any level of scale gets bought by either Google or Facebook or sometimes Microsoft. We are getting to the point where we see some oligopoly in terms of behavior online, and that it's really problematic because the oligopolies are completely non transparent, they are terrible in terms of labor and economic equality and they support systems of surveillance. It can create a world where we are all placed in bubbles, where the systems themselves can be manipulated by people who don't have our best interests in mind.
Ramesh SrinivasanI think the governments need to encourage internet companies and convince them that they can be extremely profitable without necessarily spiraling out of control. Without becoming monopolist.
Ramesh SrinivasanGoogle and Facebook extend internet access across the world, but the access is generally speaking to an internet that is focused on the advertisers to those sites.
Ramesh SrinivasanWe are at a moment that some of the Silicon Valley companies are feeling the pressure. These days the founder of Twitter apologized that his company promoted some of the things that elected Donald Trump. You don't see that much of these apologizing from Google. From Mark Zuckerberg you are hearing a little bit more of it, but he is a little more "Oh, well, this is what happens because the internet scaled up and everybody has fake news; oh, we are gonna build a better technology".
Ramesh SrinivasanThe point I'm trying to make is if these networks of communication technologies are owned, monetized, surveilled, and classified by those with power - very few people, mainly white men in Silicon Valley - then it is a global village build upon the ideas, visions, words, and protocols of the few. So it's not global - it's like Epcot center. It's like Disneyland: a small worldview of the larger world.
Ramesh Srinivasan