re:publica 18 - Politics & Society

Takura Zhangazha, Anne Marie C. Befoune, Aisha Dabo

Political bloggers and online activists have gained increasing levels of attention by governments since their key role as information transmitters during the so called “Arab Spring”. In many parts of Africa, authorities can feel threatened by bloggers who are able to bypass the gatekeepers with their online avenues to free expression. Independent voices are regarded as threats and are monitored by state security networks. In this context, blogger networks can help to provide exchange, updates and common purpose.

The international blogger network #AfricaBlogging is an online platform featuring a plurality of voices and views supporting democratic culture and debate in Sub-Saharan Africa. Founded in 2015 in Johannesburg, its members believe that blogs play a major role in providing information and diversity of opinion in Africa. They are committed to encouraging open debate on matters that are at times not adequately covered by traditional media such as politics, economics, gender equality, health and social matters.

However, there is a growing trend for bloggers to be monetized ‘multiplicators’ and to become brands. Those who shun the native advertising and commercialization trends and feel their function in the information ecosystem is to offer critical analysis that fills the space between events and conventional media reporting, have to fight to remain independent and credible.

From cyber-activism campaigns that helped bring an end to the Jammeh regime in the Gambia to the political reality-check that bloggers have been able to offer more recently about Zimbabwe’s political development, members of the network are at the forefront of social and political change across Africa.

Join us in this session with three members of #AfricaBlogging to discuss the positioning of bloggers between activists and political analysts, how to remain independent and credible, and what it means to be a successful blogger in the post-truth world of social media and fake News.

Daniela Platsch, Walter Palmetshofer

This talk is an update on what happened in the last year in the international taxation sphere. We will also provide a quick overview of the international taxation system. The topics of our talk will be:

- Paradise Papers: After the famous #LuxLeaks and #PanamaPapers, the Paradise Papers were published in November 2017.  A set of 13.4 million confidential electronic documents relating to offshore investments 19 tax jurisdictions. We will provide a summary, show the biggest cases, and demonstrate how this is a structural problem.

- How many billions our favourite tech companies (Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft,...) evaded in taxes

- The European Commission and parliament's positions on the European “tax heaven issues.”  

- Structural issues and why this an endless story

We will explain what a Double Irish Sandwich is and why international corporations like Google only pay 2.4% taxes. And how your favourite tech companies (Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft,...) evaded billions in taxes. This tax-dodging costs the European Union more than $50 billion. Annually. We bring this number into perspective. And why you pay more.

And why this boring issue is one of the biggest questions of our time.

Won't be boring.

Julian Jaursch

Unser Talk gibt den Besucher*innen Informationsangebote an die Hand, mit denen sie auf verständliche, praxisnahe und spielerische Art ihre neuen EU-Datenschutzrechte kennenlernen und erfahren, wie sie diese Rechte auch einsetzen.

Das neue EU-Datenschutzrecht wird genau drei Wochen nach dem Vortrag wirksam und bringt bedeutende Neuerungen für Verbraucher*innen mit sich, beispielsweise ein verbessertes Auskunfts- und Löschungsrecht. Doch es gibt kaum passende Informationsangebote, die Verbraucher*innen darauf aufmerksam machen, welche neuen Rechte sie haben und wie sie diese umsetzen. Daher ist es wichtig, dass Verbraucher*innen, die in der digitalen Welt einkaufen, Fotos teilen, Kredite beantragen oder Partner*innen finden, über ihre Rechte aufgeklärt werden. Mehr noch: Sie müssen befähigt werden, diese Rechte auch wahrzunehmen und durchzusetzen.

Hier setzt der Vortrag an: Wir beleuchten die Bedeutung und Reichweite der neuen Datenschutzrechte, geben konkrete Beispiele für deren Anwendung im Alltag und präsentieren erstmals öffentlich einen kurzen Erklärfilm zur Datenschutzreform. Dieser ist Teil eines Informationsportals speziell für Verbraucher*innen, das auf der re:publica gelauncht wird.

Um die vielfältigen Lebenswelten der Verbraucher*innen abzubilden und maßgeschneiderte Themeneinstiege zu ermöglichen, schaffen bei „Deine Daten. Deine Rechte.“ ein Online-Lernspiel, animierte Erklärvideos und verständliche Texte Aufmerksamkeit für die neuen Datenschutzregeln. Doch es geht nicht nur um Awareness: Die Materialien und der Talk mit einer kurzen Film- und Spielvorstellung zielen darauf ab, die Menschen zu befähigen und zu ermuntern, ihre Rechte tatsächlich wahrzunehmen.

Der Digitale Gesellschaft e.V. hat die Materialien entwickelt, mit Förderung des Bundesministeriums der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz (BMJV).

Andreas Pawelke, Lejla Sadiku

Digital data offers manifold opportunities to development. It enables organizations and individuals to strengthen decision-making processes, improve service delivery and elicit meaningful citizen participation, among others. At the same time, it generates new forms of exclusion, new methods of surveillance and threatens individual privacy.

A recently published study is looking into the current state of data for development and emerging trends. For each of the six trends identified in the research, there are negative and positive potential scenarios as they unfold within the next years. For instance, more sources of data can make the development sector more agile, but may open opportunities for surveillance and threats to individual privacy. Artificial intelligence offers novel ways of tackling development problems, but in some cases, algorithms have proven to be biased, opaque and out of reach of scrutiny. While opening and sharing data between partners can serve the public good, this can also threaten citizen privacy due to the technical challenges of fully anonymising data.

In this session, we will present the key findings of the study, provide practical examples of how digital data is being used in development and engage the audience in a discussion on the potential negative and positive scenarios of increased reliance on data to achieve development impact.

supported by BMZ

Céline Keller

In my talk I will argue, based on the thoughts of the brilliant Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter, that it is not humanism we need to get over but the racism and duality of the self and the other on which western humanism has been build and various times been reinvented.

Traveling back in time, we will learn, how the value divide of heaven and earth of Christian medieval Europe and its structuring principle of body and spirit, has enabled first, the mighty power of the church, and was then remodeled, after Copernicus, into the superiority of the rational man over his irrational others, and finally with Darwin into the concept of the biologically (“naturally”) selected (white, male, straight, and rich) vs. the dysselected (nonwhite, female, queer, and poor). 

We then take a look at transhumanism with its proponents, like Steve Fuller and Elon Musk, who seem to just reinvent this never changing pattern of exclusion and oppression, casting many of us as subhumans to be left behind. 

How can we overcome this imaginary divide and opposition? 


Can we instead invent a humanism that includes us all? 

I will suggest that the pop culture zombies that keep haunting us might help. 

In a world of the 1% against the 99%, when, without showing any shame, cynical billionaires build fortifications to fight off future climate refugees, people that, very well, could be called the Undead. Dehumanized humans, stripped of their value and whom we are made to believe, we will need to fight. Why do we still identify with the privileged survivors, when watching tv shows like The Walking Dead? Today, those imagined surviving groups of arms carrying people, might be portrayed as diverse, but does that really make sense? And why, is it so incredibly hard to create and sustain solidarity, that is more than an empty lip-service? How come, we are so fascinated, instead of appalled, with those narratives of competition of us against them? Aren’t we all, like the zombies, the superfluous 99%?


In my talk, I will explore the dark side of humanism’s history and its cruel connection to de-humanization, racism and eugenics, and then link this history to the future proposed by transhumanism, and suggest, that identifying with the zombies instead of the cyborgs might help with imagining a new inclusive humanism, we urgently need. 

-------

Some of the papers the talk will be based on:



Sylvia Wynter: Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/ Power/Truth/Freedom Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument 
http://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/2432989/Wynter-2003-Unsettling-the-Coloniality-of-Being.pdf



Steve Fuller - We May Look Crazy to Them, But They Look Like Zombies to Us: Transhumanism as a Political Challange 
https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/fuller20150909

Dale

Knickerbocker - Why Zombies Matter:  The Undead as Critical Posthumanist 
https://digilib.phil.muni.cz/bitstream/handle/11222.digilib/135003/1_BohemicaLitteraria_18-2015-2_7.pdf?sequence=1

Steve Lambert, Andrew Hudson, Mushon Zer-Aviv, Maya Indira Ganesh

How can we use data analysis and AI, deterministic technological practices that are conservative by design, to build models for better futures? What can we learn from new genres in science fiction that break from dystopia and envision new, different and desirable futures? And how can activists and artists use Utopia as a tool in their political and creative practice?

Rajesh Laghari

Take a state of emergency calling for immediate and radical change. Add a local population whose roots are deeply anchored within the very soil that threatens it. Top with a corrupt political system whose only interest is immediate gain and grandiose. Cook the time of one deadly air pollution crisis. Here's Mexico City left without a choice, constrained to relocate part of its population on the hillsides in order to recover its original lakebed, long forgotten under a layer of concrete.

Developed as a cooperation between LabCDMX and N O R M A L S, the CDRMX relocation project prints new anti-seismic hillside districts and makes housing available for free to relocatees. But a financial compensation is needed, which takes shape as a unique form of local cryptocurrency-based universal income: La Renta. The project makes use of a dynamic ecosystem of accounts with different properties to incentivise participative economy, and introduces a novel way to collect taxes through self-devaluation.

Universal income is not just a necessity for post-work societies, Rajesh Laghari explains, it is an opportunity to reinvent economy as a whole. La Renta is a social experiment we strongly believe in, and even though everything is working fine so far we do expect to find weaknesses in the pilot project. We are closely monitoring the way locals appropriate the income, how they embrace its participative aspects, and which new behaviours emerge.

Renato Losio

When a user uploads a picture, posts on Facebook or searches on-line for the nearest events, location-based services are part of the equation. They present unexpected challenges to the developer who targets an international audience but wants to rely on location data to control new features. When a controversial decoding is in a disputed territory or a partially recognized state, the corner cases might become a support and PR nightmare: what are the safest patterns and how do the four big platforms (Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook) tackle issues related to geolocation?

35 participants

Eva Galperin, Maya Indira Ganesh

Over the last year the world has witnessed a series of security breaches that have compromised massive repositories for personal information: the Equifax hack that compromised the should-be-secret social security numbers of over 140 million Americans; a breach of India’s Aadhaar biometric ID database of  1.2 billion citizens; the hack of the South Korean ID database; the 2015 US Office of Personnel Management hack; the effects of WannaCry on the British National Health Service; of vulnerabilities in Estonia’s ID chip card. And there is no guarantee there won’t be more in the future.

The breaches and hacks of these databases tend to be discussed in terms of implications for personal privacy, and cybersecurity since data is viewed as a commodity to be bought and sold. Many of these databases are in fact public assets. How does the notion of ‘critical infrastructure’ scale beyond physical assets like bridges and roads or water supply systems? How do we rethink design, ownership, liability and security when large national databases are viewed as critical social and public infrastructure?

As a national ID number is used to access a variety of services, we seek to show how this layer of ‘social infrastructure’ creates challenges for a variety of industries, social and public systems. We will parse tensions - and competing interests - at different levels of the infrastructure stack. Panelists will map the technical, social and personal impacts of database compromise, and in doing so will look at the role of various stakeholders and response strategies, as well as address what governments and individuals can do to take preemptive security measures.  As these systems do not offer citizens a way to ‘opt-out’, discussion will discuss philosophical notions of privacy and security, and try to rethink ethics and accountability in these contexts. The panel will also  assess the new challenges these large hacks have for digital security trainings and infosec best practices at the individual and organizational level given the increasingly asymmetrical power dynamics between citizens, states, corporations, and large digital artifacts like databases

Jillian York

Twitter launched its verification program, a symbol of fame and recognition initially handed out to major celebrities—actors, pro athletes, journalists, and the like. Facebook and YouTube soon followed, and in doing so, created an ecosystem whereby American corporations decide who's "in" and who isn't, who matters and who doesn't. 

Today, verification comes with certain privileges—better features and a lower likelihood of being censored, for starters—but it is the creation of celebrity, the elevation of some at the expense of others by corporate actors that should concern us.

This talk will explore the new kingmakers and the impact of their creation of celebrity on society.