Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society: Audio Fishbowl

This book talk features Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a co-author of the recently published book Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil. The book explores how reframing some of the world's most challenging problems, particularly when it comes to technology, can create new opportunities and better outcomes for humans to not just survive but thrive in a world increasingly dominated by technology. Joining Viktor as discussants are Malavika Jayaram, the Executive Director of Digital Asia Hub, and Sabelo Mhlambi, founder of Bantucracy, who provide their own insights about the book.

The global information economy has provided freedom-enhancing affordances for previously marginalized groups, but has also enabled extractive practices in the form of digital imperialism, or as others term it, data colonialism. For so-called “periphery” countries such as those in sub-Saharan Africa, the information economy represents an opportunity to chase the long-elusive quest for industrialization, now dubbed “digital industrialization”, “digital development” or “data for development.” Despite the optimism represented in the digital development policy discourse, the limits and potentials of any kind of development are heavily constrained by background conditions rooted in past global power imbalances and a colonial legacy of non-contextual laws and institutions. This panel examines questions of unequal power in the global digital economy (through U.S corporations, China, and Brussels (i.e. dominance through legal rules), and the ways in which this manifests itself in developing countries in Africa.

Even before the storming of the US Capitol, mistrust in institutions like the press and the federal government was challenging the civic fabric of America. In Ethan Zuckerman's new book, "Mistrust", he explores the deep roots of this mistrustful moment and examines ways individuals can make social change whether or not they have faith in institutions. In conversation with legal scholar and human rights expert Martha Minow, the discussion considers how movements like Black Lives Matter and Me Too are forcing changes in institutions that may lead to rebuilding trust.

Governments around the world failed to contain COVID-19, with more than 3.2 million deaths and counting. Even before the pandemic, the United States was questioning its commitments to global health, its leadership role, and a system of progressive prices for medicines whereby the rich pay more to subsidize access for the poor. The pandemic is far from over: cases are surging today in India, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Poland, Ukraine. Now, with the unprecedented pace of effective vaccine development and a new Administration in Washington, the US is called upon to lead again.

Beth Cameron (US National Security Council) and Loyce Pace (US Department of Health and Human Services) discuss plans to restore US leadership for global health.

Can humanitarian actors play a more intentional role in designing just and equitable digital futures? Could we, in fact, design worlds that don't imagine some figures, particularly populations that we serve in the global south, to merely be passive beneficiaries and outside of the borders of expertise we seek? Instead of looking at digital governance in terms of control, weaving in feminist and decolonial approaches might help liberate our digital futures so that it is a space of safety and of humanity, and through this design new forms of digital humanism.

Anasuya Sengupta, Sabelo Mhlambi, Andrew Zolli, and Aarathi Krishnan discuss how humanitarian actors can play a more intentional role in designing just and equitable digital futures.

The past few years have highlighted the range of problems that social media seems to amplify: harassment, hate speech, hoaxes, violent extremism, and more. Through traditional governing and research spaces (i.e., governments, academia, NGOs, and corporations), the default response is a focus on content moderation. However, this talk by Sahar Massachi, with Kathy Pham as a respondent, explores what it might be like to think about social media as a city. In this model, how can we rethink our approaches to these issues besides hiring more police to react to the problem? The conversation explores the use of integrity design to more meaningfully consider the underlying structures and how to more holistically address them.

What would the Internet look like if it was designed by sex workers? Taking a sex worker lens to tech ethics envisions a radically different online space. Sex workers hold unique insights into the real world impacts of platform capitalism, carceral politics, digital surveillance, and sexual gentrification. Yet sex workers face significant structural barriers to inclusion in both tech and academic spaces. This panel elevates sex worker expertise and offers new ways for regulators, ethicists, policy-makers, and technologists to think about community standards, technologies of violence, data privacy, online safety, and virtual intimacies, and explores how we might code sex worker ethics into future design.

In the first pandemic of the datafied society, the disempowered were denied a voice in the heavily quantified mainstream narrative. Diego Cerna Aragón, Shyam Krishna, Silvia Masiero, Stefania Milan, Irene Poetranto, and Emiliano Treré invited participants to explore the pandemic from the perspective of communities and individuals at the margins in the Global South and beyond. It introduces the editorial project of the same title.

Learn more: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/covid-19-margins

Since the federal stimulus bill has been signed, one of our nation’s major goals is to safely and rapidly reopen schools using funds allocated to State Departments of Education. This session focuses on some of the more complicated response measures necessary to make schools COVID-safe environments as they reopen: improving indoor ventilation and air quality and rolling out screening testing for staff and students. Implementation experts discuss how to tackle these complex issues in this session, co-hosted by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School’s Program in Global Public Policy and Social Change, and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

We are still in the early days of the Internet, but there is a growing sense that it's creating more problems than it’s solving. This wasn’t always the case. There was a time when we shared an overriding optimism in the Internet's capacity to make the world a better place.

Creator platforms and social media platforms saw us migrate our social lives to the Internet. While allowing us to share and interact with people we never could have before, it also fragmented our experiences and relationships. There's an endless list of unintended consequences.

Today's platforms were inspired by the many that preceded them — but along the way, we started to go astray. How can we make sense of where we are today? What can we understand about the decisions that were made and the structures we had in place? And, most importantly, how can the builders of new platforms that also intend to "bring the world closer together", "give everyone the power to create" or "organize the world's information" do it better?

Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr, David Bohnett, founder of Geocities, and Nancy Baym, Sr. Principal Research Manager, Microsoft Research, reflect on the current state of creator platforms and social media as part of a long lineage and series of decisions that have made the Internet what it is today and discuss what today's builders should consider in the next iteration of the web. This conversation is moderated by BKC fellow Jad Esber.