We have to know what we want. We have to imagine how it looks. We have to understand how it feels, how it smells, how it functions, before we can design it. Before we can code it. Before we can implement it, and before we can sell it.
You don’t need a CS degree to know how [technologies] impact your life, so how do we start examining those impacts and then leading with an understanding of what we actually want to build, how we want to build it, and letting the imaginative capabilities of all of these people drive that.
So what would this mean for those with an interest in digitization? Despite being a new legal framework, the proposal may lead to some familiar problems for cultural heritage institutions. Many of you are aware of the problem of orphan works in copyright. This is where the owner of a protected work is unidentifiable or uncontactable, and because they can’t be found it follows that they can’t grant permission to others to copy their work.
With measurement comes the power to categorize and control. These are technologies that enable us to be judged at a distance, to be identified as a threat or a sales opportunity just by the way we look. Facial recognition takes this further. Not only can we be reduced to a set of externally-verifiable measurements, but these measurements are assumed to somehow constitute our identity.
The thing about SecureDrop […] is that it’s changed a lot in the past two years. But what I realized was that the core design, the core architecture, is almost completely unchanged from what Aaron created and called DeadDrop over 2 years ago today.
I’d suggest it’s time to fix the World Wide Web […] and I’m going to suggest the way to do this is by building a distributed Web. This is a call to build a distributed Web, to lock the Web open.
We’ve got an inflection point opportunity here and we ought to be talking about this European Court of Justice opinion and what it means, because what the European Court of Justice said is the NSA surveillance is not appropriate.
I was thinking back about all the various memories of Aaron, and I wanted to share three of them with you. Two of them fun and cheerful, and one of them a little bit less fun and cheerful.
Let’s not only liberate the documents of the world, let us act in solidarity to liberate all of humanity. Let us create infrastructure that resists mass surveillance. Let us enable people to leak documents. And let us also work to infiltrate those organizations that betrayed us.
When I was thinking about what I would talk about last night, I was reading more about Aaron. Unfortunately, I never got to meet him before he died, but I realized that he passed away on January 11, 2013, and that was actually the same day that I first heard from Edward Snowden.
What if cyber attacks could be predicted? What if before a major attack occurred, we would know precisely the right precautions to take? Read more →
When it comes to a field as fast-moving and as high of stakes as genetic engineering, how do we proceed wisely? How do we balance our own wildness and civility as we develop increasingly powerful ways to interact with the living world? Read more →
I think this question "what do algorithms do," which points to the question of agency, I think is an inappropriate way to ask the question. I think we should rather ask the question, what do algorithms become in situated practices? Read more →
I think my role for the Internet was that I was lucky to be part of the people who spread the Internet through Southeast Asia. I brought the Internet to Thailand. Read more →
My job is to integrate the brands of exclusion creating a world of southern American food, by reintroducing people to the African ancestors of American cooking, and by extension restoring respect and dignity for what they gave. Read more →