Fake news is a product of the internet that is not transparent. Fake news can spread online because as users we have no idea where any of the content we see comes from.
Ramesh SrinivasanYou could kind of be free and expressive but you already knew when you joined the internet, you knew that you should not be a troll. You began to experience the internet through platforms that were themselves controlled by specific companies, technical instruments of those companies, like search and retrieval and ordering and classification.
Ramesh SrinivasanWhen 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.
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 SrinivasanThis 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."
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 Srinivasan