Johanna Hedva: I think now we’ll open it up for ques­tions, but I just want to say that before start­ed the pan­el I had this gen­er­al ques­tion that I want­ed to ask every­body, which was, So what are we going to do?” But I think that I want to address that to this room, because you all here are the ones that are going to help us do that. You’re the mak­ers and the thinkers and the pro­duc­ers and the con­sumers that I think have a lot of pow­er in how these ques­tions get answered. So with that I’d like to open it up, and we have a micro­phone that needs to be passed around, so wait for it.

Audience 1: I just want­ed to get your thoughts on the shift to mobile plat­forms, because as a design solu­tion it kind of has caused this shift away from what Safiya men­tioned ear­li­er, like this…people grew who up with the Internet had the abil­i­ty to sort of access the backdoor…what An men­tioned, like access­ing the code. But now with the shift to mobile plat­forms, a lot of that is more opaque. And then places like in less-developed nations where the mobile plat­form is the less expen­sive option to access the Web, it cre­ates this sort of inac­ces­si­bil­i­ty of the code or the back­door has been real­ly impor­tant to this…fighting the Web, sort of, like for hack­ing and stuff like that. So I just want­ed to get your thoughts on that shift.

Safiya Noble: Yeah, you’re nail­ing it in that the hard­ware is a con­straint. It’s anoth­er one of the con­straints. So often, I talk about if I col­lect­ed search­es and the dis­play was the size of the Empire State Building, there’d be a lot more to talk about, a lot more avail­able. And con­verse­ly, when you do the search on a mobile phone, now you’re get­ting a third or less. (I got the big phone, you know what I’m say­ing, but if you’ve got a lit­tle one…because I can’t read, I’m blind.) So this is a con­straint, and I don’t think that it’s these kinds of con­ver­sa­tions, I mean… I feel like I could make a pret­ty good bet that these kinds of con­ver­sa­tions are not going down in hard­ware man­u­fac­tur­ing design, where we go, Hey, what would hap­pen if peo­ple only got the first five hits, or they could­n’t edit code from their mobile device?” In fact, we talk about these in a schol­ar­ly way as dig­i­tal enclo­sures.” And the nor­mal­iza­tion of these dig­i­tal enclo­sures, mobile being a real­ly impor­tant one, is some­thing that is very dif­fi­cult for us to inter­vene upon. We have more black-boxing, so to speak, of the tech­nol­o­gy than ever. And it is hard­er to hack, and even the idea of hack­ing it over the course of twenty-five years has become more pejo­ra­tive in kind of a legal­is­tic way. Certainly crim­i­nal­ized in many ways.

So you’re nail­ing the right ques­tions, and I think we have to fig­ure it out. Maybe that means you’ll help us, lead us to these oth­er alter­nate plat­forms where we can try to do some­thing dif­fer­ent. And peo­ple are try­ing to inter­vene with dif­fer­ent kinds of mobile tech­nolo­gies. You might’ve seen that block phone that’s all com­po­nents, where instead of throw­ing the whole phone out when one thing fails, you just take out the com­po­nent part. So it’s like a sus­tain­abil­i­ty… Well, it did­n’t used to be a Google project. I guess they took it over because like two years ago it was­n’t. But they buy every­thing. So any­thing good, you guys are going to be mil­lion­aires when you come up with these good ideas. Is that the inter­ven­tion? I don’t know. We’ll have to fig­ure out at a cer­tain point, will Google get bro­ken up like AT&T was? I don’t know. Do you know what I’m say­ing? But I think it’s an impor­tant ques­tion. It’s more con­strain­ing, prob­a­bly, than many oth­er devices we’re deal­ing with.

Marika Cifor: And if we think about ideas of a dig­i­tal divide, if that’s a use­ful frame­work to even use, is hav­ing access to the Internet on a mobile phone the same as hav­ing access via lap­top? Or even if you think more with­in the realm of com­put­er access to the Internet, is hav­ing broad­band access at home the same, or as hav­ing it at your school the same as hav­ing actu­al empow­ered Internet access in a kind of com­plete way?

Noble: Yeah, this is about con­sump­tion. Being an audi­ence, a 247 always-on con­sump­tive audi­ence. It’s not real­ly for pro­duc­ing in the same way, oth­er­wise every­body would be try­ing to design on this, and they’re not.

Audience 2: This is for Professor Noble, or it’s about some­thing Professor Noble said but it’s open to the pan­el. About the imple­men­ta­tion of how we reg­u­late a search engine like Google or any oth­er enti­ty online that’s respon­si­ble for dis­sem­i­nat­ing infor­ma­tion at request. The Forbes arti­cle seemed to think that there’s def­i­nite­ly a legal and maybe a moral respon­si­bil­i­ty of doing that, and how do you go about that when respons­es that peo­ple could prob­a­bly get from Google are that our moti­va­tors are not only prof­it but usabil­i­ty,” and they’ll argue it from a very tech­ni­cal side of the equa­tion. And also, specif­i­cal­ly with Google, as I think every­one can agree it’s a major one to tar­get, that com­pa­ny in par­tic­u­lar at their out­set (you’re prob­a­bly aware of it) their main phi­los­o­phy was lit­er­al­ly the phrase Don’t be evil” when they found­ed Google.

Hedva: It’s still the WiFi pass­word on their shuttles.

Audience 2: That’s…amazing.

Hedva: I was just there.

Audience 2: So, how do you imple­ment that kind of change or con­vince leg­is­la­tors of that kind of reg­u­la­tion when leg­is­la­tors are prob­a­bly going to see things from that side, at least now in the devel­op­ment of these ideas? And how do you actu­al­ly not just con­vince peo­ple, but are there oth­er ways of get­ting it reg­u­lat­ed? And can you do it non-cooperatively? Are there ways to get the same effects with­out actu­al­ly get­ting Google to change their algo­rithms or their policies?

Noble: It’s an excel­lent ques­tion. So, when the Federal Trade Commission start­ed inves­ti­gat­ing Google a few years ago, about four years ago or so, into its monop­oly prac­tices, ulti­mate­ly the FTC decid­ed that Google was not a monop­oly and had a right to per­form its busi­ness duties any way it felt nec­es­sary. So part of what we’re deal­ing with is, as you all know, of course you can’t leave design school with­out know­ing what neolib­er­al­ism is. So, in the neolib­er­al kind of eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy envi­ron­ment, where in the United States since the 1980s we’ve real­ly stepped up our game around pri­va­ti­za­tion and cor­po­rate con­trol of many aspects of what we pre­vi­ous­ly might’ve thought of as a pub­lic domain or pub­lic insti­tu­tions that might pro­vide a resource…now we’re in an era where it seems whol­ly log­i­cal to most peo­ple that cor­po­ra­tions would pro­vide those resources to us. 

So this is one of the rea­sons why peo­ple report high degree of con­fi­dence in Google or in search engines, for exam­ple. Because it seems nor­mal to have a pri­vate com­pa­ny or even a publicly-traded com­pa­ny do that rather than say, the library. And so in a total divest­ment from pub­lic libraries or pub­lic insti­tu­tions that could’ve built these tech­nolo­gies too, but are not resourced at the lev­el. The gov­ern­ment also pro­vid­ed a lot of gov­ern­ment con­tracts to Google, but not to oth­er pub­lic insti­tu­tions to do some of the work that it’s done. So Google’s mas­sive­ly fund­ed by the US government.

So part of this is the envi­ron­ment, the neolib­er­al eco­nom­ic envi­ron­ment that we’re oper­at­ing in. Now, I would be on the side of giv­ing tes­ti­mo­ny about reg­u­la­tion if invit­ed to. And I think we’re see­ing in the EU, some real­ly hard crack­downs on the role of Google as a com­mer­cial, pri­vate com­pa­ny so to speak, work­ing sole­ly in its own prof­it motive par­a­digm with a dif­fer­ent set of end goals than maybe pub­lic insti­tu­tions would provide.

In the US it’s very dif­fi­cult because we have very strong dis­cours­es, now more than ever, about dis­trust­ing the state, or dis­trust­ing gov­ern­ment. In Europe, peo­ple have a dif­fer­ent sen­si­bil­i­ty in many dif­fer­ent coun­tries about the role of the state. So this is part of why the EU is actu­al­ly impos­ing a lot of sanc­tions on Google around their non-competitive or anti-competitive prac­tices, and block­ing out oth­er coun­tries, and their straight up monop­oly prac­tices. They’re issu­ing a lot of pushback.

And researchers are think­ing about alter­na­tives, and they’re very well orga­nized, dif­fer­ent­ly than we’re orga­nized here. So I think that we might get some relief, so to speak, or some mod­els that come out of the EU that might help us shift the dis­course here in the US

But I have to say that at the same time, UCLA just out­sourced its email to GMail. So, what? I mean, it’s like you can’t win. We have these pub­lic insti­tu­tions all over the coun­try that are just out­sourc­ing to these tech com­pa­nies and oth­er kinds of com­pa­nies, and divest­ing the pub­lic dol­lars from these kinds of projects.

So it’s real dif­fi­cult but I think it’s worth fight­ing for, cer­tain­ly. Because we’re start­ing to see some of the prob­lem­at­ics of the incred­i­ble sur­veil­lance that’s hap­pen­ing, the loss of con­trol over our dig­i­tal iden­ti­ties. If you think you have con­trol over it, you don’t. The doc­u­ment­ing of your every utter­ance. Once it goes on the Web, I tell peo­ple, it’s writ­ten in pen. Maybe it’s tat­tooed, I don’t know. It’s real­ly hard to get off. 

So all the impli­ca­tions of what it means to have all of our lives and all of our infor­ma­tion… Jean-François Blanchette talks about the social val­ue of for­get­ful­ness, of for­get­ting. We’re los­ing our abil­i­ty to for­get the things that should be for­got­ten, also. Wait until you try to run for Senate or Congress, some of you in this room, and some pic­tures or text roll up. I know, peo­ple are like, Don’t bring it up.” So, I think we have yet to see, and maybe it will come about that when these real­ly neg­a­tive, pro­found­ly neg­a­tive con­se­quences of what it means for these com­pa­nies to con­trol every­thing about what we say and what we do— I mean, even this talk is online right now, prob­a­bly… Then, maybe we’ll push back. It’s going to take a lot more than just reg­u­la­tion, it’ll take a cul­ture shift, too.

Audience 3: This kind of off pig­gy­backs off of what we’ve been dis­cussing. We’ve been talk­ing about the cor­po­ra­ti­za­tion of online space, but also online activism at the same time. So I guess my ques­tion is what is the dan­gers of activism hap­pen­ing with­in a cor­po­rate space? And then also think­ing about, Tumblr was specif­i­cal­ly men­tioned, and in my opin­ion Tumblr is kind of…different from online spaces, and I would just like to talk about why is that.

Hedva: I love Tumblr. I’m not on any social media site except for Tumblr, and it’s great. I feel like I’ve learned more from being on social jus­tice blogs on Tumblr, Black Tumblr dur­ing Blackout Day, Trans Day of Visibility, than my entire crit­i­cal the­o­ry degree in grad­u­ate school at CalArts, like for real. And I think one of the things about Tumblr that…it’s maybe like a step away from Facebook in that you can be com­plete­ly anony­mous on there. You don’t have to reveal any of your own infor­ma­tion. And the infor­ma­tion that you choose to reveal is often like, Yeah, I’m like a 15 year-old gen­derqueer per­son liv­ing in the mid­dle of nowhere and I can change the CSS and HTML on my Tumblr.” And I think that there’s some­thing about it that’s a lit­tle MySpace‑y in that way. I mean, obvi­ous­ly Tumblr is not a Utopia. There are plen­ty of prob­lems on Tumblr. But I think that there’s some­thing about it that… 

This is also a gen­er­al ques­tion that I want­ed to ask about anonymi­ty and Anonymous and the hack­tivist work of Anonymous. I won­der if anonymi­ty on the Internet is also in ser­vice to some kind of polit­i­cal action that can be good. Like I won­der if the rea­son Tumblr feels dif­fer­ent is because you can choose—like, you don’t have to use your real name. So on Facebook this is a prob­lem if you want to use a dif­fer­ent name than your giv­en name. Say you’re a trans per­son who does­n’t want to use your giv­en name. And Facebook has this pol­i­cy of ask­ing you, or demand­ing, Is this your real name?”

So I won­der about that lev­el of anonymi­ty and how that works. What do y’all think about Anonymous?

An Xiao Mina: I think I can speak gen­er­al­ly to anonymi­ty. I think it’s both incred­i­bly pow­er­ful and incred­i­bly dan­ger­ous at the same time, in ways that I’m still grap­pling with. A friend of mine who’s a researcher, her name’s Tricia Wang, she put forth this idea specif­i­cal­ly around Tumblr but I guess any sort of social net­work that allows for flex­i­ble per­for­mance of iden­ti­ty, it’s the abil­i­ty to explore dif­fer­ent iden­ti­ties and to ben­e­fit from anonymi­ty and not have to be locked into who you are. And she used this phrase elas­tic self,” which I just loved.

In cities, tra­di­tion­al­ly, the abil­i­ty to go to a gay bar or to these kind of third spaces where you could explore a dif­fer­ent sort of iden­ti­ty or dif­fer­ent sort of self with what you would hope is some lev­el of anonymi­ty away from the small­er vil­lages or towns you might come from, we can analo­gize that with some of these flex­i­ble spaces that allow for, if not anonymi­ty then at least pseu­donymi­ty, or some sort or a flex­i­ble iden­ti­ty. I’m not sure that anonymi­ty on the Internet is tru­ly pos­si­ble, giv­en the amount of data that’s col­lect­ed about how we’re using the Web. That could be debat­ed. But the flex­i­ble iden­ti­ty seems real­ly important.

But at the same time, and we saw this with the Dylan Roof exam­ple, it’s also a way to per­form dan­ger­ous iden­ti­ties as well, and dis­cov­er dif­fer­ent sides of your­self that you may not have explored and that are actu­al­ly harm­ful to soci­ety. So it’s an issue I’m still grap­pling with, and I think there are these incred­i­ble ben­e­fits for mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties, but mar­gin­al view­points can also be…you know, misog­y­ny might be con­sid­ered a mar­gin­al­ized view­point in terms of, the abil­i­ty to express direct misog­y­ny in pub­lic dis­course in the US is quite lim­it­ed. And yet on the Internet what we see is extreme­ly direct misog­y­ny. So that abil­i­ty to be pseu­do­ny­mous or anony­mous can pro­mote both harm­ful and help­ful atti­tudes. So I think it’s a quite dif­fi­cult question.

Cifor: I think there’s a lot of things to speak to in both of your ques­tions. But think­ing about activism for a sec­ond (and we can think of Anonymous as kind of a spe­cif­ic instance of dig­i­tal activism and its poten­tial), actu­al­ly this is one of the things we were talk­ing about in my class yes­ter­day. The kind of poten­tial for activism and what can be done well in terms of online activism. Is it the same val­u­a­tion to Like some­thing, to Like a social jus­tice cause on Facebook, as it is to go to a march or to engage in some kind of more tra­di­tion­al form of protest? And I’m actu­al­ly real­ly intrigued by the fact that most of my stu­dents did not see… They see dig­i­tal tools as enabling tra­di­tion­al activism, but that the actu­al pure­ly dig­i­tal activism does­n’t actually…they don’t see it as hav­ing much pow­er for change, which was inter­est­ing to me. And that they were very drawn, there were things they still want­ed even from activist move­ments that had come in part out of dig­i­tal spaces— So, think­ing about Black Lives Matter and oth­er kinds of hash­tag activism,” that they still are not con­vinced that it can make pos­i­tive social change with­out hav­ing a tra­di­tion­al hier­ar­chy and plat­form of demands. They were par­tic­u­lar­ly crit­i­cal… Most of them were on board with Black Lives Matter’s mes­sage, but don’t think it [can] actu­al­ly pro­voke real change with­out a more tra­di­tion­al activist plat­form where say, they’re going to take a legal kind of approach to end­ing racism in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem and things. 

So I think there’s lots of inter­est­ing ques­tions to ask about what dig­i­tal spaces can do well and what they don’t do well, and some of that is relat­ed to issues that’ve already come up around lan­guage. There’s been Ramesh Srinivasan, who’s in our depart­ment, writes a lot about the Arab Spring and the use of Twitter there, and where those peo­ple who were using Twitter actu­al­ly are and what was actu­al­ly done in dig­i­tal spaces ver­sus in phys­i­cal spaces as well. So there’s lots of inter­est­ing ques­tions to ask there. 

And speak­ing of misog­y­ny in online spaces, Lindy West has a real­ly great sto­ry about one of her misog­y­nist Internet trolls actu­al­ly kind of com­ing out to her as who he actu­al­ly is and them hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion, which is real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing if you’re inter­est­ed in that as well.

Noble: Yeah. If you look back, pre-digital, to the types of sur­veil­lance that activists espe­cial­ly in the US, on the Left in par­tic­u­lar, have been under, I think the Internet exac­er­bates that lev­el of sur­veil­lance, the end. It’s just what hap­pens. And so it’s hard for me to get on board with think­ing that the Internet is some type of lib­er­a­to­ry space because it actu­al­ly height­ens— I mean now, every sin­gle per­son who’s ever tweet­ed on any cause is iden­ti­fi­able. And trust, for those of us who’ve been trolled on the Internet, we know what the real threat of that kind of trolling is, also. 

I think Anonymous, that’s a com­pli­cat­ed orga­ni­za­tion” in that, ear­ly days of Anonymous were all about the kind of bro cul­ture, sex­ism and trolling and racism, and now they’re doing Operation KKK or Operation Hoods Off, and I’m like, What? When did that hap­pen?” So Anonymous itself is not real­ly a mono­lith­ic thing. It’s a lot of dif­fer­ent peo­ple with a lot of dif­fer­ent agen­das that’re hap­pen­ing there. And I think one oth­er thing that’s inter­est­ing about what Anonymous has been doing, I’ve been watch­ing them fierce­ly since the Parish bomb­ing on Twitter, is that they’re doing a lot to talk about like, they’re tak­ing down ISIS, pro-ISIS Twitter accounts. They’re claim­ing to have tak­en down more than 6,000 Twitter accounts and ISIS sym­pa­thiz­er accounts in the last week. And they’re issu­ing guides on how to do hack­tivism for every­day peo­ple, which is also interesting. 

But here’s the thing. Not every­body knows how to open up an IRC chan­nel and how to real­ly get Anonymous. That’s dif­fi­cult. That’s not an every­day user kind of expe­ri­ence. And also, peo­ple who do that lev­el of real­ly try­ing to con­ceal their iden­ti­ty or where they’re search­ing, if they’re using Tor and these kinds of things, those are actu­al­ly being crim­i­nal­ized. So it’s like, can you do that? To me, peo­ple of col­or, peo­ple who are on the mar­gin, using those kinds of tech­nolo­gies are more at risk because of the crim­i­nal­iza­tion of that kind of engagement.

So I guess I feel like it’s lay­ered. I don’t dis­agree with any­thing that’s been said here about the iden­ti­ty work that we can do, and mak­ing our­selves vis­i­ble, and the edu­ca­tion we can do def­i­nite­ly is hap­pen­ing. At the same time, when we think about where the real pow­er is, how pow­er oper­ates at the lev­el of the state or oth­er types of organizations…law enforce­ment, Homeland Security, NSA…I think that we’re see­ing peo­ple lose their jobs over their polit­i­cal activism online. We’re see­ing most­ly even kind of right-wing extrem­ists in the United States, white suprema­cists, what we might call our home­land ter­ror­ists, not crim­i­nal­ized. But oth­er kinds of activists criminalized. 

So these things are still explic­it­ly polit­i­cal around the agen­da and the ten­sions we have in the United States. If we look pre-Internet again, at projects like COINTELPRO, the coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence pro­gram of the United States gov­ern­ment (every­body go watch the COINTELPRO 101 doc­u­men­tary), these prac­tices of sur­veilling wom­en’s orga­ni­za­tions, anti-war pro­test­ers, Puerto Rican inde­pen­dence move­ment, civ­il rights and black pow­er activists, brown pow­er activists…it’s like who’s left? I don’t know who­ev­er’s left. I mean, what’s left is the Klan, right? Or Nazis, or that right-wing extrem­ism, that’s less sur­veilled and fac­ing far less consequence. 

So these things hap­pened before the Internet, and I think the Internet is actu­al­ly mak­ing peo­ple who are try­ing to do pro­gres­sive work more vis­i­ble and are poten­tial­ly fac­ing greater con­se­quence for that visibility.

Hedva: If any­body has one last ques­tion? Short. And then we’ll wrap it up.

Audience 4: Hi. There was a brief sec­tion where you guys were talk­ing about how a lot of the infor­ma­tion, espe­cial­ly dur­ing the AIDS move­ment, was archived. In this age where there is offi­cial com­men­tary about issues, but there’s also a lot of back­hand­ed com­men­tary through the com­ments or through Twitter or things, where do those play in the ide­al archival images, or archival data, and do you think they have poten­tial­ly pow­er where they stand? Where does that fit in the idea of tech­nol­o­gy in the dig­i­tal age?

Cifor: That’s a real­ly good and inter­est­ing ques­tion. Speaking to the archiv­ing ques­tion for a sec­ond there, which is I feel my pri­ma­ry area of exper­tise. There’s lots of argu­ments about whether we will actu­al­ly… There is so much infor­ma­tion, but whether that infor­ma­tion will con­tin­ue to exist. Web sites…you stop pay­ing for your domain name, they might dis­ap­pear, right? We have the poten­tial to pre­serve more data, but we know less about pre­serv­ing this data. We know a lot about pre­serv­ing paper. We don’t know a whole lot yet about pre­serv­ing dig­i­tal mate­ri­als of all kinds. And dig­i­tal mate­ri­als of course degrade like oth­er mate­ri­als do, and they’re kind of ephemer­al and peo­ple don’t main­tain them. Or con­cep­tu­al­ize with them, nec­es­sar­i­ly in the same way. So there’s of course the ques­tion of whether we will actu­al­ly have… There’s a poten­tial for the Internet as this kind of end­less expan­sive ocean of an archive. But we may in fact have less infor­ma­tion at some point about cer­tain moments and par­tic­u­lar­ly this moment.

So that’s an inter­est­ing ques­tion. And then with the poster I showed at the end, a lot of what the artists are respond­ing to is this kind of nos­tal­gia for an ear­li­er peri­od of activism, and for a par­tic­u­lar kind of activism, and a par­tic­u­lar kind of atten­tion to AIDS, and an atten­tion to AIDS in the past as some­thing that is done. Of course AIDS is not done. And they’re cri­tiquing in par­tic­u­lar the decon­tex­tu­al­iza­tion of those images. That is some­thing that hap­pens par­tic­u­lar­ly in a dig­i­tal space. You can do a Google image search and maybe some­thing from ACT UP will pop up and you can reuse in, well…there’s copy­right issues, but you can the­o­ret­i­cal­ly use it in any way you want to.

So it’s then kind of divorced from its entire con­tex­tu­al his­to­ry. You can know lit­tle to noth­ing about the AIDS move­ment and still recre­ate those images. And I think that’s where Justin Bieber per­haps comes into that image. Does Justin Bieber know who ACT UP is or was? Does Justin Bieber have an invest­ment in AIDS activism? He’s nev­er, to my knowl­edge, said any­thing pub­licly. Or did Justin Bieber’s styl­ist just think the ACT UP logo made a cool t‑shirt? We’re not sure. Maybe Justin Bieber is a secret AIDS activist, but (not to cri­tique his pol­i­tics) the poten­tial for decon­tex­tu­al­iza­tion of images is huge. So these images of AIDS pro­lif­er­ate, but the actu­al knowl­edge about AIDS does not nec­es­sar­i­ly pro­lif­er­ate, and it only is look­ing at a par­tic­u­lar kind of icon­ic moment of AIDS so it dis­tracts from hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions about AIDS now, and AIDS as glob­al pan­dem­ic, and AIDS in the United States as some­thing that of course dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly impacts women of col­or and poor peo­ple and trans peo­ple and peo­ple of col­or more broadly.

And part of what I think my argu­ment will be is that it won’t be doc­u­ment­ed. AIDS now will not be doc­u­ment­ed in the way that AIDS was in the 1980s and 1990s, and part of that is of course the rea­son that things get doc­u­ment­ed. Archives reflect notions of pow­er. Who has access to pow­er and who thinks they’re impor­tant and whose lives we think are impor­tant in the archival world. And what activism looks like and what dig­i­tal looks like, and there are lots of issues if we think about use of pro­pri­etary plat­forms there. It’s tech­ni­cal­ly Facebook owns every­thing you put on Facebook. So there are seri­ous con­cerns about whether you’re actu­al­ly legal­ly able to pre­serve the activism you do on Facebook, because that data does­n’t tech­ni­cal­ly belong to you, so you can­not donate that data to an archive.

Reas: Yeah. I think it’s time. Hsinyu are we doing a recep­tion in the back? So we’ll have a recep­tion upstairs, right here in the room so we can con­tin­ue some of the con­ver­sa­tions. This has been an extra­or­di­nary evening. Thank you so much for join­ing us and shar­ing these ideas, many of them hor­ri­fy­ing. But incred­i­ble to be hav­ing this con­ver­sa­tion in this room, so deep­est thank you for that. Thank you, audi­ence. And then I real­ly want to espe­cial­ly thank the techn­odi­ver­si­ty team at the voidLab. That’s Hsinyu [Lin], Peter [Lu], Sofia [Staab-Gulbenkian], and Lilyan [Kris].

Hedva: Yes, this is total­ly student-initiated, this evening. So, thank you so much. It’s real­ly amaz­ing that this is— And Echo [Theohar], way in the back. You guys are amaz­ing. Thank you for hav­ing us.

Further Reference

This Q&A ses­sion was pre­ced­ed by a pan­el dis­cus­sion period.

Biased Data: A Panel Discussion on Intersectionality and Internet Ethics at the Processing Foundation web site.