Technology is nothing but an expression of human values. It's not neutral, it's not about efficiency, it's about people's values and their knowledge.

We 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".

When I was in graduate school at MIT I was trying to think about how to develop software and systems for farmers and villagers in India. In the process of doing that, I realized that my reference point was internal to the laboratory, rather than in the communities that I was wanting to serve. I realized that I could no longer assume what a good technology looks like from inside the laboratory; instead, I had to be in the world with people. Not just designing for them but with them.

I'm really interested not just in privacy for the individual but respect for the local communities. And I think we have a problem with both and whenever industries kind of become almost monopolistic they have to be challenged to be more responsible. We can challenge them in the press, in the courts and in regulation.

Marshall McLuhan prediction was some kind of electronic communication technology would emerge to instantaneously connect the world so much so that the whole globe would be like a village.

This is what engineers in Silicon Valley typically do. "Ok, well, of course there are some problems of our technology because it is so excellent and is so global so we are just gonna build a better one."

Technology is nothing but an expression of human values. It's not neutral, it's not about efficiency, it's about people's values and their knowledge.