[SIDE CONVERSATIONS]
Hello, everyone.
Can you hear me OK?
Great to see you all.
Packed room.
Important topic.
Of course, the Swiss get nervous
because it's already past noon.
But everyone will
catch up, I'm sure.
Delighted to welcome you all
to this special group talk.
My name is Urs Gasser, I serve
as the executive director
of Berkman Klein Center.
And today, we're really pleased
to have Nick Couldry and Ulises
Mejias here, who will
talk about their new book.
And the book talk is
Colonized by Data--
the Costs of Connection.
It's promising to be a very
interesting discussion.
I have actually the
pleasure to read the book.
I'm that proud because
usually I'm running around
and don't read enough anymore.
And one of the good side
effects of moderating book talks
is actually you're
forced to read the book.
Otherwise, you
embarrass yourself
if you try to ask
questions later on.
Nick is a sociologist
of media and culture,
a professor at LSE.
He's also a faculty associate
of the Berkman Klein Center,
so we've had the
pleasure to work together
for a couple of years.
And I greatly benefited
from many insights
that I also now see
here in the book.
And Ulises is--
I think the first time
that you are visiting us,
is that correct?
Yes, I think so.
Particular warm welcome
to you on a sunny day
here in Cambridge.
You are a professor of
communications at the State
University of New York.
Is that correct?
Great.
And the co-author of the book.
So we will proceed
in three steps.
First, we'll have a
book talk by the authors
for about half an hour.
We'll then open up for some
comments by a few colleagues
from the Berkman
Klein Center who
will share quick reactions,
about two minutes, so one
thought, maybe one the
reaction to what we hear.
And then we will open
up for discussion.
I have lots of questions myself.
But I will save those,
I guess, because I'm
sure you will have many
coincident thoughts too.
Without further
ado, over to you.
I should say this is
webcasted and recorded,
so please keep that in mind
when you introduce yourself
and when you ask questions.
Thanks for being here.
Over to you.
Congratulations on a great book.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Well, thank you very much, Urs.
We're thrilled to
be here, obviously.
I'm particularly thrilled to
be here knowing so many of you
in the room, and also
having written and thought
a lot of my half
of the book right
here at the Berkman Center.
So it's a special
return, in a way.
What we're going to do, we're
going to obviously give you
a flavor of the vote,
which is outside if you're
interested in buying it.
There are many strands
to our argument.
We're going to try and condense
some of them in a half an hour.
But all of them really center
around a core question,
which is a very,
very simple question.
What is going on with data
across business and government,
society, human life,
all of our lives?
Something big is going on,
we know it, but what is it?
Is it, as many
people have argued,
a new phase of capitalism?
There are lots of options
there, new phases of capitalism,
most famously,
Shoshanna Zuboff's book
on surveillance
capitalism, which
inspired us in its early
form of an article,
continues to inspire us.
We have a lot of common ground.
There's a lot to those ideas.
However, we want to
ask in this book,
is something
potentially even larger
going on, if you
can imagine that?
Not just a stage of the
capitalism none of us
know how to get out of, but
something perhaps even bigger,
a new phase in the relations
between colonialism
and capitalism,
relations that of course,
to summarize a lot of history
in a sentence, go back 500 years
when we think about how
200 years of colonialism
were necessary for capitalism
even to get started.
That's the question
we ask, and we
give a hint there might be
something colonial going on
from this business cliche--
"Data is the new oil."
Front page of The Economist,
two or three years ago.
We all know that cliche.
We can deconstruct it.
It has a colonial air about it.
We know about oil.
Is it just a harmless
business metaphor,
or is it precisely, as
we argue in the book,
the ideological term that
is needed to cover over
a huge new appropriation
of resource
that parallels the original
colonialism, the resource
of human life itself?
And that colonial possibility
was hinted at in a scandal
that I don't need to say
anymore about to this audience,
the Cambridge Analytica
scandal 18 months ago.
Christopher Wiley, who opened--
spilled the beans, as
it were, 18 months ago,
a week or two into
the scandal was
asked about Cambridge
Analytica's nefarious plans
to expand their
operations into India.
He said on Twitter, "This
is what modern colonialism
looks like."
The question is, what
could that actually mean?
So a central part
of our argument
is that what we're facing is
really an emerging reality,
not just a metaphor.
The way we use the term
"data colonialism,"
it's not really metaphorical.
What we're facing is a genuinely
new phase of colonialism
which we call data colonialism
that in time will prepare
the ground for a new mode
of capitalist production,
as Nick mentioned, in
similar ways in which
the original historical
colonialism prepared the ground
for industrial capitalism.
And of course this, will
happen while coexisting
with historical colonialism
and it's neocolonial legacy.
I'll come back to
that in a little bit.
But we do want to
be very careful,
of course, when
we use this term,
because it is a sensitive term.
Are we in fact suggesting
that data colonialism
matches the violence,
matches the mayhem
of historical colonialism?
No.
But there are continuities
that should alarm us.
And that's what we're going
to be dealing with here.
So let me just give you a
basic definition of what
we mean by data colonialism.
We say it's an emerging
order for the appropriation
of human life so the data
can be continuously extracted
from it for profit.
And in order to make
sense of this definition,
we also need to distinguish
between colonialism
and coloniality, a
concept developed
by the Peruvian
sociologist Anibal Quijano.
So we could argue that
colonialism is over.
Yes, nations got
their independence.
There are no more
colonies per se.
But Quijano argued that
the legacy of colonialism
continues.
The heritage
continues, of course.
And that's what he called
the coloniality of power.
So if we think about economic
relations, racial relations
today, if we even
think about terrorism,
it's all shaped by the
heritage of colonialism.
So what we're arguing
is that while the modes
and the intensities, the scales,
and the contexts of colonialism
are different, the
function remains the same.
And that function
is to dispossess.
Now, why is this so persistent?
Why is it so hard to resist?
Part of the reason is because
there are some rationalities
which are a
continuation of old ones
that we've lived
with for a while.
So they're both new and old.
Some of those
rationalities include
economic rationalities--
so if you think about the
progression from cheap nature
to cheap labor to cheap data.
The way the colonizers
framed the world
as being made up of
natural resources that
could be appropriated, and then
human labor that could also
be appropriated and used
to exploit those resources.
Similarly, we're seeing now
a certain kind of framing
of data as some sort of
exhaust, as abundant,
and therefore as free.
There are technological
rationalities
as well, which basically tell
us that more data is better,
that smarter technology
is always best.
So if we think about the
uni-directional notion
of progress, we're being
told that this is progress.
This is for our own good.
This is making society better.
There are, of course,
legal rationalities,
the concept of terra nullius,
which basically means no man's
land, the idea that these
resources are just there
for the taking.
Colonizers can take
them, exploit them,
because they have the
infrastructure to do so.
And then there are
epistemological rationalities.
And to come back to
Quijano for a little bit,
he offered basically
a critique of
Western universal rationality
which obliterates difference.
And of course, we want
to instead require
the recovery of
alternative rationalities
which are based on
respect for difference.
Now, in our book,
we want to challenge
all of those rationalities.
You all will assume that.
And we can give
you more in the Q&A
if you want to know
how we do that.
But let's come clean.
We realize that
framing what's going on
with data in the global
North and the global South
everywhere today as a
new form of colonialism
is pretty provocative.
It's not a comfortable thing
if we're even half right.
It's provocative.
So we want to anticipate our
book's conclusion right here,
assuming you do have
doubts about this,
and summarize what for us are
the five main advantages we
get from this new framing
of what's going on.
Not just this is about
capitalism, which of course
it still is, but this is
about colonialism too.
The first advantage we've
already hinted at, which is it
gives us a totally
new timescale on which
to think about comparatively.
We go back, as we said, not
just the past four decades,
let alone the past
five years of Internet
of Things, a blip in history.
We go back the past 500 years
to find a resource appropriation
that is parallel to the scale
of what's going on today.
At one point, it was taking
all the world's gold,
silver, minerals, land,
bodies to mine it.
Now it's human life itself.
An epochal change.
But we also have to
project into the future,
because if it's
that large-scale,
then we can't predict
what the consequences are
going to be entirely.
We see some changes already.
But remember that
it was capitalism
that was the main
consequence of colonialism,
and that took two
centuries to emerge.
So let's not assume we know
exactly where this is going,
or where we'll end up, rather.
We can see the
direction of travel.
That's the timescale.
Then there's the question
of scope, which has changed.
Colonialism was a massive
transformation, the seizure
of everything on the planet.
And today, we talk mainly
about social media platforms
as if they are the
main thing going on.
They're not, we
argue in the book.
There are much broader and
more important things going on.
So for example, the
normalization of surveillance
in most workplaces,
particularly if you're paid less
and are more insecure in
your job, that's a big trend.
The gig economy-- exploiting
labor through totally new forms
that do not involve any form
of institutional trust--
Uber, Lyft.
These are radical changes.
Logistics.
30, 40 years of changing
the business model,
so tracking every moment
in space and time.
Sounds good.
You want your parcel
to arrive on time.
But at the same time,
tracking workers.
And of course, internal
corporate data.
IBM, normally regarded as
irrelevant to these changes,
pointed out in its annual
report a few years ago
they didn't care
about social media
because 80% of
the important data
was internal corporate data.
And of course, the
Internet of Things turns
what was just our life into
internal corporate data--
the smart fridge.
So this is expanding too.
But this complicated,
as we recognize,
there is an external and an
internal colonialism going on
here.
There are profound
global inequalities
which are rolling out between
data-supplying countries
and data-extracting countries.
But at the same
time, the extraction
is going on within the
colonizer societies too.
So that's a complex dynamic,
and we can unpack that more
if you want.
Two further things
are fundamental which
relate to the
long-term consequences
of this new perspective.
The first is this will only
happen, just as colonialism
only stabilized and took root,
through a new social order,
a new way of organizing
everything that fits together.
New forms of dependency.
New forms of
governance and rule.
All of it offered
as just convenient,
just what we have to do.
And finally, echoing the
point that Ulises just
made, the deeper trend
that really took us
to the end of the book to
see most clearly underlying
the idea of big data
as what must happen
is simply a continuation
of the West's claim
to know how things
should happen,
to have a special
claim on rationality
from a particular
point in the world.
And this is a relation
between power and knowledge
that de-colonial theorists
have been telling
us has been unfolding
throughout modernity,
throughout colonialism.
We don't see that
if we only listen
to the critics of capitalism.
Now, how is this
social order unpacking?
How is it happening?
It's happening through something
we call data relations, which
sounds a simple move,
but actually, it
involves quite a creative
use of Marx's social theory.
Orthodox Marxism
says that capitalism,
any big social order, is
only reproduced through labor
relations, transforming
the stuff of activity
into something that can be
exchanged on the labor market.
We want to be
creative with Marx.
Obviously, he
couldn't anticipate
what's happening right now.
That's absurd to
pretend he could.
But he did have a
radical theory of how
big-scale change happens,
and we need to pay attention
to what that was.
With the help of Moishe
Postone, who died last year,
who argues that underlying
labor relations is something
called commodification,
making things
into exchangeable commodities.
And even underlying that is
something even deeper, which
is abstraction--
abstraction from the
flow of human life
to something that
is exchangeable.
What is going on with
data but abstracting,
taking from the
flow of our life,
into something it's changeable?
This is the deep
core of Marx's work
that we can use on today to
understand how capitalism now
has two engines, labor
relations and data relations,
often put together if you're
working on the Amazon warehouse
floor.
Both fuse.
But they're different.
Ordinary life, if this is
true, becomes a direct factor
of capitalist production.
We can never be outside
the capitalist machine.
Or put it more brutally, human
life is annexed to capitalism,
through, of course, continuous
monitoring of everything we do.
We'll come back to the
implications for freedom
later on.
And they're profound.
So just to sum up in an image,
every time we click on an app,
or rather put an app on
our phone, join a platform,
or maybe get a new smart
device installed in our home--
and obviously, we
want it to work--
we have to accept the terms and
conditions of data extraction.
We enter, we re-enter the
spiral of data relations.
None of us in this room,
I suspect, know a way out.
Now, this raises a really
even more important
point, which is a
great-- a really
big difference from
historical colonialism, which,
again, might be troubling you.
In historical
colonialism, the resources
were grabbed on the basis
of no prior social relation.
There was no way of negotiating
seizing the gold or silver.
There are only two options--
violence and deception.
Both were used in rather large
amounts in early colonialism.
What's different now?
Well, the differences that we've
had two centuries of getting
used to social
relations which only
need to be tweaked a little
bit to have a profound impact
on the future of history.
And that is what's going on.
No violence necessary yet.
So who is behind this process?
In the book, we
wanted to come up
with some terms that allowed us
to collect all of the players.
And so we use a term of
Social Quantification Sector.
The SQS is basically
the industry sector
devoted to the development of
this infrastructure required
for extraction.
And yes, we wanted to talk
about the big players--
Google, Apple,
Facebook, and Amazon--
as well as their
Chinese counterparts--
Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi.
And what's interesting
about these big players
is that they're a combination
of monopoly and monopsony.
They're hybrids.
So of course, monopoly
means single seller.
Monopsony, also a
term from economics,
means a single buyer.
So we're all producers
of media these days.
We all generate videos
and tweets and so on.
But if you want that
video of your cat
doing something funny to
be seen by a large public,
where are you
going to upload it?
YouTube.
There are other options.
There are other platforms.
But if you really
wanted to be seen
by many people and your friends,
you would upload it to YouTube.
So this monopsony hybrids
acts as funnels, so to speak,
that are single points of
buying all of our content.
And of course, there are other
players of different sizes.
Just to give you an
idea of the broad scope,
of course, hardware
manufacturers,
all the manufacturers
of smart devices.
There are software
developers, platforms.
Data analytics.
Data brokerage companies.
The people who collect the data,
parse it in different ways,
and sell it to a third party.
So all of them we're calling
as the Social Quantification
Sector.
A bit of a change.
So in the book, we
spend a long time
talking about the coloniality
of data relations.
And so right now,
we only have time
to give you one
example of this kind
of trans-historical comparison
that we do in Chapter 3,
so I want to start
with this excerpt
from the Google Chrome
terms of service agreement.
So as you can see there,
this is a bit old.
It's been revised since then.
But it says that you give
Google a perpetual, irrevocable,
worldwide, royalty-free,
non-exclusive license
to reproduce, adapt,
modify, translate, publish,
publicly perform, publicly
display, and distribute
any content which you
submit, post, or display
on or through the services.
Pretty comprehensive.
This is the language
that none of us
reads, understand, cares about.
Most of us.
I shouldn't say "all
of us" in this room.
And then we just click Accept
and Install and move on.
Now we have that app working.
So I want to compare
this to another document
from the colonial
era at the time
of the Spanish conquistadors.
At that time, the
conquistadors would
arrive at a village in what
is known in Latin America
someplace in the
middle of the night
and would stand
outside of the village
and proceed to read
this document called
the requerimiento in Spanish
to a non-speaking Spanish
audience, of course.
Let me read you
a little excerpt.
"If you do not submit,
I certify to you
that with the help of
God we shall powerfully
enter into your country and
shall make war against you
in all ways and
manners that we can,
and shall subject
you to the yoke
and obedience of the church
and of their highnesses.
We shall take you and your
wives and your children
and shall make slaves
of them, and as such
shall sell and dispose of
them as their highnesses may
command.
And we shall take
away your goods
and shall do all the mischief
and damage that we can."
Spanish requerimiento, 1513.
Accept and install over there.
[LAUGHTER]
So that's just one
example of what
we gain from the colonial frame
and the historical comparisons
that it makes permissible, to
make new sense of what we are
all told we just have to
accept, what Kevin Kelly called
the inevitable.
But before we
conclude, I just want
to give you a flavor
of one other aspect
of the book, because there's
a philosophical dimension too.
In Chapter 5 of
the book, we ask--
this new form of resource
appropriation has,
as we've explained, the means
of constant surveilling,
or monitoring more
politely, of human subjects.
And the question is,
what are the implications
for human freedom,
assuming we still
care about that, which I think
in this room we certainly do.
Now, we're not interested
in a thin notion
of freedom, consumer freedom.
That's obviously rather
helped by having lots of apps
to choose from, lots of ways to
falling into the spiral of data
relations.
Great.
No, we're interested in
more substantive notions
of human freedom than that.
We need to go back to
philosophy to look at this.
And one source,
maybe surprisingly,
is George Hegel, his
philosophy of freedom
written 200 years ago.
He defined-- and we
could spend all afternoon
on us trying to understand
what lies behind this quote,
and I'm not a Hegel expert.
He defined freedom
as the freedom
to be with one's
self in the other.
The "in the other" is
his amazing discovery
that freedom for you
and me is relational.
It comes from the social
texture in which we live.
That's how it emerges.
But the key bit is
the bit he rushes
past to get to the
"in the other."
"To be with oneself."
He didn't think
that needed to be
defended except in the case
of a footnote of slaves
who'd lost this.
To be with oneself is basis
the possibility to know
that when I'm thinking,
did I do a good job,
am I happy with my life,
do I love this person, what
do I think about dying--
nothing else can come
between me and that thought,
no external system.
Yes, I'm in the
social, but no external
system that is not
part of my thinking.
That's an interesting idea.
But of course, Hegel
is very problematic.
He was responsible for
legitimizing colonialism
in the early 19th century.
So we need other sources
for this thought.
And we can find one from
an amazing source, which
is the Argentinean-Mexican
philosopher Enrique Dussel, who
in his Philosophy of Liberation,
which was developed precisely
to challenge the
philosophy of the West,
how does he define
the core of freedom?
It is the natural substantivity
of the person, which basically
is that material space, that
boundedness that we know
in the end is ours,
unless we're existing
under such profound
violence, when we know
it is that that is being
threatened by those imposing
violence on us.
So what are the
implications of this?
Well, we're saying-- and there's
a lot of evidence for this from
marketing documents
all over the place--
that if the goal of
marketing and business models
today is over time to
continuously track human beings
without limit, if
that is the goal,
then there is a real
possibility that we
will cease to have a hold on
the idea of being selves at all.
And if that's true,
surveillance, self-tracking--
which we do a lot
of it to ourselves--
the management of behavior
through the gathering of data,
all of this is leading
gradually to an erosion
of what we call in the book the
minimal integrity of the self
as a self.
Not the grand idea of the
autonomous grand subject who
could rule the universe, no.
The very basis of any
possible notion of freedom,
boundedness, that is what
is being interfered with.
That's what we think
we have to confront
and be concerned about.
I know we're almost out of
time, so just to wrap it up.
Sorry if things
are not in order.
But how do we resist this?
Firstly, we should
acknowledge that, yes, people,
corporations, and
governments are
having very different
stakes in this new order.
So one-track approaches
are not going to work.
Yes, we need to care
about regulation.
We need to care perhaps even
about individual choices,
about which platforms
to opt in or out of.
But by themselves, that's
not going to be enough.
We also know that individual
subjects are very differently
positioned precisely because the
earlier forms of racial, class,
and economic differences are
being reproduced through data
relations, perhaps even more
opaquely and effectively than
before.
We do need to reject the
universal rationality of data
collection, perhaps care more
about seamfulness, not so much
about seamlessness.
And lastly, we need to learn.
We need to learn from past
and present decolonization
struggles.
We need to learn
from the people who
have been doing
this for a long time
about reimagining
forms of collectivity,
about thinking of new ways of
appropriating technologies,
thinking of new ways of
imagining common knowledge
and solidarity.
And with that, I
think we will end
to give you time for questions.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much.
Wonderful presentation.
So we have now four respondents.
But to make it more
challenging for them,
I will actually not
just pass on the mic
but will ask questions
to the respondents
and hopefully get
quick reactions also
from the authors, if that's OK.
So the first
respondent is actually
[? Electra ?] [INAUDIBLE],,
an SJD student
here, and is also affiliated
with the Berkman Klein Center.
[? Electra, ?] I'm
sure you're totally
prepared for your
comments, but let
me ask a slightly different
question based on the work
that you're doing.
In your work, you have
looked very closely
at all sorts of power
asymmetries between individuals
and platforms and systems,
with a strong focus, actually,
also on the data economy
and the new world that
is described in the presentation
and those in the book.
Throughout your
research, you have also
looked quite carefully at
the different terminology
and concepts that are used
to some sort of describe
the problem or the challenge
that we are confronted with.
And here, obviously, in a very
thoughtful and careful way,
a new frame, a new
lens is introduced,
the idea of data colonialism.
And I was wondering, what's
your initial response?
How do you feel
about this analogy
or taking a previous
concept to the next level?
Does that resonate with you?
Do you see some
sort of difficulties
with that language
or that framing?
Yes.
Thank you, Urs,
for this question.
Yes, I think this
terminology is extremely
interesting and eye-opening
in lots of ways.
So I actually came
across it last year
when I started talking
to Nick about his work.
And it was really
a Eureka moment.
And I thought this
parallel is very salient
and uncovers a lot
of what is at stake
and helps us interpret
many of the phenomena
that we're observing
through a different lens.
One thing that actually I had a
question about for the authors
was whether this insistence
that it is not a metaphor
is fully persuasive.
And if it's not a
metaphor, what might it be?
It does not seem like we're
in the presence of what
we have been calling colonialism
in the world we live in today.
So maybe it's a
transposition, it's
a form of language that might
help us understand things.
But is it really
colonialism, or do we
need to coin a different word?
A lot of what I feel about
the phenomenon of data
is that it's a very sui
generis, very specific thing.
Shoshanna Zuboff says
it's unprecedented.
So I think somehow there is
something very unprecedented.
And using the parallel
is super illuminating,
but I wonder whether we
want to go further than that
and say it's a way
of understanding
a different phenomenon.
Thank you,
[? Electra. ?] I think
that's a great question
to elaborate on
for maybe a minute or two.
Yes.
You've really hit
the core there.
This is what we
have to get right
in doing a serious and
risky historical comparison.
This book is-- we're taking a
big risk with this argument,
but we feel we have to.
The way I'd answer it is that we
need to compare like with like.
So we're comparing the beginning
of this new colonialism
with the beginning of
the original colonialism.
We're not comparing the
beginning of this colonialism
with the end, 500 years
later, of the old colonialism.
So there must be
differences, which
means we must
abstract, if you pardon
the phrase, from those
differences to get to the core.
And that's why in
the book we say
the core of the
historic colonialism,
though this might be a
very contested point,
was not the violence or
the cultures of racism that
came to be the tools to
enforce the colonialism.
The core was the grabbing of
resource, taking everything
because it was just ours if
you happen to live in Europe.
That's the core.
And it's that that
we're saying is the--
therefore, it is
dislocating to say
this is like the colonialism.
No, it is not, and we
expect for those who say,
this just does not work for me.
But we have to be able
to go back to history
and take what we need from
it to understand the present.
And that's what we're doing.
Therefore, our reality
we're talking about
is not the metaphorical take.
We are looking at a
different, deep, if you like,
core reality.
And that's why we
stress that point.
I would just add to go back
to one of our main points.
I think what is
valuable is that we're
focusing not on the form or
the content of the definition
of colonialism but the
functional, that extractive
function, the dispossession.
And so, yes, it seemed to
us a missed opportunity
if we just call it a metaphor
to explain which is evocative.
And metaphors are great.
Nothing against metaphors.
But we wanted to be very
specific about the dynamics
that are unfolding.
Thank you.
So I was wondering whether
Primavera De Filippi, who
joins us from Europe, is
also a faculty associate here
at the Berkman Klein Center
and is doing a lot of work
more generally on governance,
what your reflections are
specifically on the
problem description still?
You're doing a lot of work
on blockchain technology,
distributed architectures,
how that shapes power
relationships, or
as you call it,
information relationships
or data relationships,
in the book.
And I was wondering
while reading the book--
what you describe
is very compelling.
But at the same time, is
there an alternative universe
where technology could be
used-- the same technology could
be used or similar technology
could be used to actually level
some of these power
asymmetries as a matter of DNA,
of how we connect the things
that you say are so costly?
And so I was wondering, how
do you think about that,
this alternative view
on technology that
is used to actually empower,
to actually circumvent
some of these big platforms?
What comes to mind when
you listen to this story
here, which is a
very different one?
Yeah.
So there is a lot
of developments
that are happening today,
whether it's with blockchain
technologies, whether it's just
like decentralized technology
or personal data
store and so forth.
And the idea being, can we
actually use the technology
in order to give more
power to the individuals,
to actually control,
trace, and somehow dictate
the way in which those data
can actually be used and spread
by those operators?
So there are
developments going on.
My fear or my preoccupation
with those solutions
is that they rely on
these basic premises
that individuals
giving the power of--
whether it is
consent or whether it
is leading to technical
propritizaiton of data
and so forth, is actually
going to solve the problem, as
opposed to actually
recognizing the fact
that if users
actually want to use
those services, to some
extent they will consent.
No one agrees with
those terms of services,
and yet they click on it because
they want to use the service.
And the apparent cost
of giving the data
is somehow overwhelming in
favor from the apparent benefit
of using the service.
And so to me, there is--
and if we go back to the
metaphor of what is data,
the new oil, data as
capital, data as labor,
and like all those questions
which really, to some extent,
make data into something
that is actually exploitable.
All those metaphors are towards
the exploitation of data.
And so to me, actually-- and
that's because of my background
of Creative Commons and all of
those questions, public domain,
copyright--
I'm actually very
interested, especially when
I hear about this colonization.
It reminds me a lot about the--
at the time in which
we were thinking
about the exploitation
of the public domain,
with people like
James [? Boles, ?]
that were actually using
the analogy of environment.
And how do we preserve
the public domain
is by actually giving them
a positive recognition
so that it's no longer
just seen as the negative
of intellectual property right.
And so to me, when I
actually hear those things,
I'm actually very
curious whether--
on the one hand, yes, of
course we can use technology
or we can just focus on giving
exclusionary rights to people
in order to give them power
on the use of the data.
But it seems to me that
there is actually--
one of the fundamental problems
of data colonization is that
actually, those operators
which are collecting the data,
eventually, whatever
is the [INAUDIBLE],,
you can pay user for using--
for collecting the
data. but yet, they're
going to collect this data,
accumulate, aggregate,
and create this
incredibly powerful data
set which enable them to then
build more value by training
the AI or whatever is it that
they are doing with this data.
So my question is,
can we actually look--
instead of looking at how do we
react against this colonization
from a negative
approach-- as in, like,
what is is it that we
cannot do with the data--
will it makes sense to actually
take a more positive approach,
as in, given the fact that
there is this colonization,
that there is this appropriation
and exploitation of data,
should there be some kind of
rights to actually access,
for other people
to access the value
that is generated
by those people that
appropriated the data?
And I think here we
can actually think
about data as
infrastructure, and looking
at anti-trust law, where we have
this concept of, for instance,
essential facilities,
where when there
is a particular resource that
becomes necessary in order
to create added value, in order
to create services on top,
or in order to train
AI and so forth.
Then shouldn't there be
some kind of obligation,
not necessarily
to share that data
and just spread personal
information around,
but actually to provide access
to this information that
has been the result
of colonization
so that other parties,
including the parties that
have been expropriated
of their data,
can actually benefit
from this expropriation
and can themselves have an
opportunity to build resources,
to build services
on top of that?
Thank you, Primavera.
May I ask, just to maybe
focus a little bit more
on still the problem
description--
I want to segue into
solutions as well in a minute.
But we heard a couple of things.
Well, there are alternative
architectures in there--
you also mention
them in the book--
that are more
decentralized, that try also
alternative business models.
So we discussed that.
We also heard people actually
may want to use-- many of us
want to use these services.
How do we deal with some
sort of these choices made
by all of us?
Briefly mentioned were
also legislative frameworks
and protections
that are in place.
Why is that not enough or
even part of the problem,
if I read your book correctly,
before we go to the solution
part, which I want to go later.
Well, you raised so many points.
And your work on blockchain
is very provocative
and I think is also
very disruptive
of certain conceptions
of blockchain.
So I see a lot in common between
the way we're working here.
There's so much to say.
First of all, we are not
saying data is bad, obviously.
I got here using my new
bus app on my phone.
The 77 bus is so irregular.
It's helpful to have a
collective pool of information
just where the damn thing is.
So I'm happy with that
as long as it's not
gathering other data
about me as I use it.
So there can be
good uses of data.
We can imagine cities
where information
needs to be used well.
We need to collect
information on the environment
and so on and so forth.
We're not against that.
We want there to be
collective use of that data
and so on and so forth.
The difficult bit, which
your work on blockchain
pushes us to confront,
is the infrastructure
and whether built into
the current infrastructure
we have, where data is
gathered by default,
it is used somewhere
else by default by those
we don't even know--
how are we going to disrupt
that default in infrastructure?
That is very, very different.
Certain alternative
proposals are great.
They exist.
But they are not enough
to challenge, as we said,
the whole social order through
which a different goal is
being achieved.
And that's what we need
to disrupt, the goal.
It's not neither yes nor
no, but there's more to say,
as it were.
Yeah.
I would just add--
I know we don't want to go
into solutions just yet,
but there's so much to unpack.
And I would just say
that I think to me,
sometimes I think of data as a
new kind of colonial language.
And colonized
subjects sometimes had
to use the colonizer's language
to describe their own position,
to think about their
own identities.
I think similarly, we can
find productive uses of data
so that we don't have
to abandon our apps that
help us get through the bus--
navigate the bus system.
So I think-- but
there's a similar way
in which we can appropriate.
Just like colonized subjects
appropriated the language,
we can also appropriate
some of these uses.
Great.
Before I turn it to
Sasha with a question,
I wanted to briefly follow up
with an own question I have
that I think nicely connects
with the discussion here.
I was wondering-- in the book,
you make a very compelling
argument that,
yes, some sort of--
it starts with data in
some sense, the argument,
but it goes far beyond data.
And Prima mentioned the
role of infrastructure.
And you also highlight the
role of infrastructure.
You go beyond infrastructure.
You say, well, the description
of what's happening here
has to do also with social
norms and social ordering.
It has to do, of course,
with economic incentives.
You point out that there
is an entire governance
system in place that supports
the current trajectory
that you're describing.
And so at some point,
I was wondering,
is this a fundamental
critique, not so much
of the world of data,
this brave new world,
but of society as such?
How do you draw the
boundaries in this book?
Is it really a story
about data, or is it
a story about where we're
headed as societies?
Well, that's again
a great question.
So you could say the
same about colonialism.
There were critiques of
colonialism around 1520, 1530,
1540 in the Spanish court.
And there are many
books about that.
And many people were very uneasy
about the grabbing of resource
and the killing of
bodies that could
have become Christian souls.
And there was a lot of debate.
But anyway,
nonetheless, in the end
it was resolved in
terms of justifying
what was going on because
a whole new society was
being built.
So colonialism was
both a grabbing
of resources and the creating of
a new type of colonial society,
which we now take for granted.
So in this short
presentation, we
couldn't touch on Chapter
4 of the book, which
is a difficult chapter because
we had to confront a very
difficult analytic problem.
Because if it's true
that data is both value,
something from which value
can come, and knowledge,
information-- the same
two together fused--
that is, again, a new
phase in human history.
Because in the past,
knowledge has always
been sellable, valuable,
contributing to business,
but it's not literally been the
same thing as economic value.
But with data, it
starts to be fused.
And that has an
implication for society,
because even if we have
critical views of society,
we rethink it, we
interpret it, we
have to do it on the basis of
a shared coinage of knowledge,
common knowledge.
And what if that
coinage is changing?
That's the question
we ask in Chapter 4.
The coinage is
changing because it's
deriving more and more from
privately accessed, privately
processed data sources
rather than public sources
such as statistics,
censuses, public debates
about the meaning
of those, and so on.
And that's the big change.
So society will change.
Our very idea of social science
is in the course of changing.
And again, protecting
that is part
of what we have to
protect if we want
to resist data colonialism.
Yeah, I think that's
a great point, Urs.
And I think we need to
think of colonialism
as a partnership, a
collaboration that involves
all aspects of society.
It's not just the extractive
processes done by corporations,
the mining, et cetera.
It does involve all of society.
And in that respect, we
have been thinking lately
after the book was finished
about how, for instance, Frantz
Fanon defined the
psychopathology
of the colonized subject.
Colonialism creates
a particular kind
of subjectivity and neurosis.
And so we can equally start
to think about the neuroses
that colonialism is creating--
data colonialism is creating
in terms of the anxiety,
in terms of the depression,
in terms of the narcissism, of
changing cognitive processes.
So obviously, it's having
wide repercussions.
Thank you.
So moving-- let's
assume we agree roughly
on the problem
description, that there is
a pretty fundamental problem.
I also feel there
is a sense this
is a helpful lens through
which to analyze the problem,
using the concept
of colonialism.
Now, what are we
going to do about it?
This is Chapter 6 in your book.
But before we give you a chance
to share some of your ideas,
I want to turn over to
Sasha Costanza-Chock, who's
over at MIT.
And Sasha, this is
a complex problem
that's described here, where
data, capitalism, governance
structures, incentives,
how we live our lives,
all together are in an
interesting and complicated way
part of the problem description.
And I was wondering--
you have deep insights
into what seems
to me is necessary to
make a change here,
which is movements, where
activists, designers, thinkers,
builders, doers come together
and really challenge the status
quo and help to imagine
an alternative future.
So I was wondering, given your
work and experience in studying
movements, but
also taking action
yourself, what's
needed if we want
to create an alternative to
the world that's described here
as a trajectory?
That's a very simple
question, I confess,
but I'm sure you will
have thoughts on it.
Well, that's an easy one.
Before I get to that,
I did want to put
a little parenthetical
note in here.
I am concerned by the framing
of colonialism is over,
and I think we need to
critique that a little bit.
So we could talk about
the ongoing active forms
of traditionally
understood colonialism
in places like Puerto Rico,
in places like Palestine
with active settler
colonialism, displacement
of indigenous peoples by force.
We could talk about Standing
Rock, where the resource
extraction is directly
tied to displacement
of indigenous peoples
from their lands
to access the old oil, not
the new oil of the data.
Or we could talk about what's
happening in the Amazon
right now as the
Amazon is burning
as part of the process of the
increasingly fascist Bolsonaro
state desire to support
settlers and resource
extractors against the
claims of indigenous peoples
to their lands.
So that old colonialism
is still with us,
and so I think we need to--
that's a question.
What does that mean
for this theory?
What's the relationship
between the new form of data
colonialism and the ongoing
forms of both extractive
and settler colonialism?
I think we also
need to understand
the ways that colonialism--
I agree with you.
You're framing historical
and data colonialism
as being primarily about
extraction and commoditization.
But I think it's worth--
as we think about
how to resist it,
we need to also consider some of
the other larger forms of power
inequality that were
instantiated and globalized
and reproduced through
both historical colonialism
and, I would say,
data colonialism.
And so I'm thinking
of the ways--
and you talk about
this in the book,
but you didn't really
get into it much here.
So I'm talking about the
ways that race and gender
are implicated in
colonial processes.
So we could talk about the way
that surveillance has always
been a carceral technology.
Ruha Benjamin will be here next
week to talk about her new book
Race After Technology.
And so we want to
think about the ways
that surveillance
has always been
about marking other bodies,
marking black bodies,
marking native bodies
for control, exclusion,
limiting movement, and
so on and so forth,
and how that's re-instantiated
in the new forms of data
colonialism.
And also, thinking
about, at the same time
that they're reading
these requerimientos,
there's also this process
by which the binary gender
is being imposed upon native
peoples throughout the Americas
and other parts of
the world, where
a particular vision
of patriarchy
and patriarchal power is
being violently instantiated.
Third-gender people
are being massacred.
And I think that the same--
not the same, but we could
talk about how that's happening
with new data processes.
So binary gender
classification is
normalized throughout
most of the computing
systems that we are
building and developing,
the sorting functions.
And so to resist
all of that, to me,
I'm always interested in what
are people already doing?
What are the resistance
strategies that are active?
And I think that
you do a good job
of talking about
a number of those
throughout the book,
everything from the ways
that people might
personally refuse
to participate in
particular systems,
taking part in the
delete Facebook movement
and so on and so forth.
But also, you're saying
that's not enough.
We need collective action.
And even that's not
necessarily enough,
because if we just impose
certain new forms of law
or regulation, if it's only
mitigating the worst harms
but it's allowing the underlying
logic to remain intact,
we're still screwed.
I think that's
what you're saying.
Yeah.
And I agree with that.
And yet, I'm worried about
a I guess not suffic--
we don't want to impose
new binary logics
on people's
resistance strategies
and say deleting
Facebook is useless.
It's not useless.
It's a micro-instantiation
of, I think,
people's resistance
to these processes
that you're describing.
So yes, it's not enough.
But is it not what we need?
I wouldn't necessarily say so.
So I think we want
to recognize the ways
that these different
strategies might work together
in the process of forming
resistant subjectivity
to the new forms of
data colonialism.
And then, finally
design is crucial.
And there are emerging
communities of practitioners
who are thinking
together about how
do we redesign these systems,
including data sharing systems,
so that they're not extractive,
so that they are actually
consentful.
We could look at the consentful
technology initiative
at consentfultech.io.
We could talk about the
Design Justice Network,
the practitioners there.
And I'm part of that group.
We could talk about the
colonizing design group that's
developing both theory
and practice on how
to do some of this stuff.
My last point on
that would be we
want to be careful
of the emerging
explosion of seemingly
resistant groups, organizations,
and discourses.
So there's a lot of talk
right now about AI ethics.
There are industry
groups that are
being convened by
these, the big players
themselves, to talk about what--
how they are recognizing
that the public is unhappy.
There's a tech
lash, and they want
to create their own discourse
about how to mitigate that.
So I'm curious about what you
have to say about how are we
going to move into this
new moment of resistance
and not let it be captured
by the very same industry
that we think is building
the infrastructure for data
colonialism?
Great points.
Yes.
Well, I think you're right.
A lot of this has to do
with strict definitions.
So when we talked about
colonialism being over,
yes, we were
thinking specifically
about countries being
defined as colonies.
But you're correct
that if we think
about Puerto Rico,
Palestine, we could similarly
think about those in that way.
But that's why we introduced
the concept of coloniality,
to suggest that the heritage
and the legacy continues.
And it is particularly
a heavy price that--
you're right.
Minorities, women,
different populations
continue to pay a heavy
price for that cost.
As far as what to
do about it, I think
it's very fruitful
to think about--
to look back at the
decolonization struggles.
And you're right.
Maybe we do-- we are
critical that maybe
the individual choice to leave
Facebook fits into this model
of the liberal subject
as being able to act
on a particular choice.
We are critical of that.
At the same time, we
do have to remember
that in many
decolonial struggles,
sometimes people, the only
tool they had to resist
was their mind.
So even with their bodies,
they could not resist,
and sometimes decolonial
struggles happened
by resisting with your mind.
So we do need to--
we want to keep open
all of those different
possibilities.
And just very briefly,
because I know
we have another respondent, you
raised so many great points,
but the core of it is when we're
saying dropping off Facebook
or Twitter or whatever
is not enough,
we are not saying that's
necessarily a bad thing
or you shouldn't do it.
We are saying, let's not
confuse the part with the whole.
Facebook is a small
part of the whole.
So if you're doing it
knowing the whole is bigger,
that's a very different thing.
But that links to
the other point,
that if-- there
are costs of this.
Therefore, it's inconvenient--
if I organize my kids'
parties through Facebook, it's
damn inconvenient to do it
because I've been
doing for 10 years.
I don't want to stop.
That means we have to help
each other do it, which
means the acts has to be
not acts of individuals
but in a solidary form,
helping each other
carry the costs of connection.
That's the beginnings
of something,
but we don't claim to know
what that something is
going to become if we
start acting that way.
That would be arrogant.
And we just want to
light the touch paper
and start to see what
would happen if we thought
about resistance differently.
Great.
Thank you.
So we have about
15 minutes left.
I know some people have
to go and take classes,
but we will open up for
Q&A in just a second.
But Juan Ortiz Freuler, you're
with the Web Foundation.
You're a policy fellow there.
You're also affiliated
with Berkman Klein.
When I read this final
chapter about solutions,
the first thought I had--
oh, there is a new social
contract that we need.
And the Web
Foundation is actually
making a tremendous effort,
and you're deeply involved
in bringing together all
these different stakeholders
that you mentioned that are
some part of the problem to also
become part of the solution.
So I was wondering,
particularly also
your own work perspectives,
how do you think about that?
And if I looked back
at the principles
of the new social contract
for the web, actually,
it re-emphasized we need more
connectivity for everyone.
So it's some sort of
an interesting tension.
It's a movement, yes.
A new social contract, yes.
So similar spirit, but
with different principles.
How do you reconcile these
two possible pathways forward?
Great question.
So I think when
the web was built,
it was built with this
idea of the commons
that perhaps Primavera
was signaling.
It was built by
academics that understood
that they had control
over knowledge
and wanted that knowledge
to be available to others.
I think in the past couple of
years, particularly perhaps
10, 15 years, things
have radically changed.
And the way data is being
processed has changed.
And the web perhaps hasn't
accommodated those new spaces,
and those new spaces
have been taken over
by apps and actors that have
other purposes, which is
perhaps the extraction of life.
And that's where I think
that the book is super
powerful in that it
provides language
to speak about these things
that didn't exist or weren't
visible 15, 20 years ago.
And when we have conversations
within the contract
for the web, I see that
the discourse has changed.
Even when you sit
down with a company,
the starting point perhaps now
is GDPR, whereas a year ago,
GDPR was insane.
Now you can say, this
is the starting point,
and we want you to do more
on this and this and that.
And I see that these
types of initiatives
that provide language for us
to move the discourse forward
and take control over our
commons I think is fundamental.
And the question perhaps is
also, when we had colonialism
or when we thought
about capitalism,
it often created
these dichotomies--
capital-labor, North-South.
When we think that this
is an expansive move,
and now the human
body, every human body,
is part of the abstraction,
what's on the other side?
How can we-- we need something
around which to co-ordinate,
a rallying call to identify
who our friends are
and perhaps who
should be called out.
But when everyone is
part of the extraction,
who is on the other side?
Or is it that the
Silicon Valley leaders
don't give their kids phones
and so they're not part of it?
Very good point.
Great point.
Who's on the other side?
Well, at no point
in the book do we
say there's an evil corporate
capitalist conspiracy,
and we know the guys,
and let's get outside.
There is one, but that's
not our target in this book.
We're looking at-- because last
week, Meredith [? Wittig ?]
was outside [INAUDIBLE]
house and so on.
Let's assume-- that
say that's a given.
That's going on.
That's bad.
But there's a much bigger thing
that humanity has fallen into.
We're looking at
profound side effects
on many, many levels
interacting to create
an order that no one exactly
planned, although now
some people are claiming
they planned it because they
want credit for it.
So it's very
difficult. We're very--
we have huge respect
for what you're
doing at the Web Foundation.
The early versions of it
inspired our conclusion.
Obviously, we didn't know what
you've done most recently.
Because of the spirit in
which you're doing it,
the collaborative spirit,
bringing people together,
thinking-- saying
humanity has a problem,
that's exactly the sort
of register what we
want to raise our concerns to.
I think we have two concerns
with the proposal you
have at the moment, which
I share with you privately.
One is going back to
the infrastructure part.
It's incredibly
difficult to separate out
my data, my photos,
my tracks and so on,
from all forms of
other data related
to me which are being
used to exploit me
or to discriminate against me.
There's a whole
darker zone which
I'm not convinced data
portability can get to
for structural reasons.
That's the main worry.
But there's also a
moral one, that I
didn't see in your
proposal any, if you like,
philosophical interruption.
I think there are some forms
of data extraction going
on today, on the Amazon
factory floor, for example--
constant tracking of human
beings so they literally cannot
move without being tracked.
I find that inhuman.
I think it should
be stopped, period,
regardless of the benefits.
Similarly, marketers
dream that they're
going to put implants
into our bodies.
We didn't even give
you the scarier quotes.
But there's a lot of serious
marketing talk about how great
it's going to be when
we all have implants.
So feeling a bit thirsty?
Well, here's a great
bottle of water,
which relates to the bottle
of water you had yesterday,
round the corner.
Again, I think
that's unacceptable.
There's should be certain things
which just should not be done.
And I think that moral
sharpness I didn't see.
Maybe it's because
you're building
a collaborative document
at the beginning.
But I hope you will get there
as the negotiations develop.
But there's a point that
I know Ulises wanted
to pick up on the [INAUDIBLE].
Well, yes.
In the last chapter of the book,
we do have a section on tools
for common knowledge, because we
do agree with the kind of work
you're doing and
others are doing
that we need to
collectively develop
some tools to understand
how this is going to unfold.
And so we do talk about
the kind of research
that needs to be done, the
kind of universal research,
so beyond academia, not just
located within academia.
But the kind of
research that needs
to be done so that
everybody who is affected
can think through this problem
and collectively come up
with solutions.
Was that the point that--
Yeah, that's the one.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
So that's where we end up,
basically, in the book.
All right.
So we collect about
three questions,
if you would be very
concise with your questions,
and then you would respond.
We have one question right here.
[INAUDIBLE] I think there was
a question about [INAUDIBLE]..
How are you doing?
I'm Joshua Adams.
I'm an assistant
professor at Salem State.
I'm writing a chapter on digital
ethics of Google searches,
digital colonialism.
So maybe I should change
it to data colonialism.
But my question was where
do you see search engines
and search optimization in this
process in the sense of search
engine optimization
incentivizes a certain ownership
over the digital
representation of things?
Hi.
Dan Scarnecchia, humanitarian
researcher at HHI.
And I want to know
how optimistic you
are about that potential
for positive social change
coming out of this.
Coming from the discipline
I'm coming from,
I'm thinking about
the laws of war,
which did have a
lot of negotiation
going around the
ending of colonialism.
And the implementation
of some of that
was only possible because the
previously entrenched powers
were extraordinarily weak
after the Second World
War, which was just a
global fracturing of power.
And do you have
an optimistic view
of the possibility
of those solutions
without that sort
of disjointment?
We'll take one last
question, and then--
[INAUDIBLE],, a visiting fellow
at the [INAUDIBLE] Center
from the University of Geneva.
And my question is also--
I really enjoyed your talk,
and I'm looking forward
to read the book.
And it's on the unintended
consequence of colonialism,
like for example, health-wise.
Half of the indigenous
population in the Americas
died because of the flu
rather than violence.
And in that sense, what are
the unintended consequences
that you can see now, and
how we can act upon them?
Thank you very much.
Can you take first question,
search engine optimization?
Whatever order you
would like to respond.
Yeah.
Well, I think you
can probably tell us
more than we can tell you about
search engine optimization
and how that's
going to play out.
But I do think it's this
notion of customization,
the idea that we are going to
get the search results that we
want that are very
specific to us,
it plays into the
development of this identity
as perhaps building a
certain sense of dependence
on these tools.
But certainly, something
to think about.
Just very quickly
about your point,
yes, it's a big question.
Who knows what's
going to happen?
I'm encouraged, for
instance, when we see--
in terms of big historical
movements, who can tell?
But it was surprising
to see, for instance,
what's happening in
Hong Kong and the way,
for instance, that activists
are taking down the lampposts
with the surveillance cameras,
that they're appropriating
different apps like Tinder to
organize social movements when
other apps are being blocked.
Too early to tell, but
maybe those little movements
will start to add up
to something else.
Starting with search
engine optimiz--
that's a very difficult area
because we've developed habits
under this system
as it's evolved.
Some of them are pleasurable,
and we're aware of it
and we adapt.
So SEO is not necessarily a bad
thing, but the whole question
of search engines
is difficult. I
think now that we exist
in a connected space--
and that's the one
thing in the book
we say it's not reversible.
The connectability of the
world cannot be reversed.
It's a fundamental-- changed
the precondition of everything
that follows.
Then, how do we live in that?
Something like a search
engine is clearly necessary.
We want to know what is out
there to be connected with.
How it can be funded.
Could we imagine a publicly
funded search engine
that had sufficient scale
to give genuine benefits
and not exclude those who
weren't visible in its light
and yet was not driven by
the economic models that
are so profoundly
puzzling with Google?
That's a massive open question
for policymakers who--
we don't have those skills.
That's a massive collective
problem for the next 10 years.
So it's a really difficult area.
But I just want to emphasize,
our book, the one area that we
absolutely see as strong
allies is critical data
science, the work being
done on algorithmic ethics,
all of this, particularly
around issues around race,
this we take as a given,
as an essential ally
for this argument.
And we don't repeat it
therefore in the book,
but we take it as a
given because this
is part of the alliance
that has to be built.
On the question of
are we optimistic,
I think we would have to
answer that individually
because we are different
people with different views
of the world.
And that's been one of the
amazingly exciting things
about writing this book
together and bridging that.
But I think I would start
optimistic, but probably
imagine a future pessimism.
So I'm optimistic because
we say in the book
the most powerful tool that
human beings have ever had--
and we're talking about
slave populations.
We're talking about people
in Latin America resisting US
imperialism 50 years ago--
is imagination, re-imagining
the world you're in
and naming it
differently and saying,
no, I want to build
a different world,
and I am going to rename
it from now on so that I
can build a different world.
Imagination, we say
at end the book--
and this is the policy point--
is the most practical tool.
It is the starting point
for every policy proposal.
So I'm optimistic,
and we are genuinely
optimistic about that.
That's why we've
written the book.
Longer term, though,
we've got to recognize
that this is going to be playing
out in a geopolitical space
where there's not just
one big imperial power--
Spain/Portugal,
England/Holland-- but two--
US and US's allies and
China and China's allies,
with India in between,
unclear, Russia maybe willing
to switch sides, get involved.
Very unclear.
We are entering a
hyper-competitive space
of data colonialism, no
longer just involving
one part of Latin America.
The whole planet is going
to be involved in this.
Therefore, how that's
going to work out-- well,
I'm not fool enough to
be optimistic about that.
That means this
global solidarity has
to be really clear, and it has
to reach across difference,
across countries, and see it as
a global struggle for humanity.
The point about
deep [INAUDIBLE],,
yes, that's a very interest--
because in a sense,
it was literally the
bodies that happened
to be there without them
knowing it carried the disease.
That was beyond intention.
But you raise
really the question
of extermination, which we
do touch on in the book.
Not in the slides.
Maybe we should go back to
that, because it's in the book,
and I think it's
important for you
to hear what our
answer is on that.
Well, basically,
we say that what
data colonialism exterminates
is not so much bodies
but alternative ways of thinking
and alternative ways of being.
So I think-- who knows what the
unintended consequences of that
if you project it a
couple of decades or more
are going to be?
Just a gloss on that.
The starting point of
Chapter 5 on freedom,
a quote that really
shook me to the core
was from a commentator on Hegel.
I couldn't read Hegel himself.
Why not?
Beyond re-- impossible, However
long you try, unless you're--
commentators on Hegel are
extremely good, though.
[LAUGHTER]
Because they need to be.
And one phrase that I read
really shook me to the core,
and it's where we start
Chapter 5 with it.
It's a philosopher saying,
what will be the greatest
loss of freedom imaginable?
It will be to reach a state of
being where you could no longer
remember what freedom was.
That's what we think
is beginning to go on.
That's why we need to
start resisting now
and help each other do so.
What a powerful way
to end this session.
Thanks for a great
conversation to be continued.
Thank you.
Thank you, everyone.
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
