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The Anti-Dystopians

Is Facebook (and Google) a Public Utility?

Feb 26, 2021
59:22

For this week’s episode, Alina Utrata talks to Josh Simons, a PhD candidate in Government at Harvard University and a Labour candidate for local office in the UK. They discuss Josh’s research — what is machine learning and why is it (always) political? As critical information infrastructure, should Google and Facebook be regulated as democratic utilities? And do we need a whole new understanding of corporations' role in society if we’re going to tackle the tech industry? 


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A transcript of this episode is available here.


Mentioned in this podcast

Josh Simons (co-authored by Dipayan Ghosh) on Brookings: Utilities for democracy: Why and how the algorithmic infrastructure of Facebook and Google must be regulated


Virginia Eubanks’s seminal work on Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor. Plus a review on the LSE’s blog


Cory Doctorow, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism


More on the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority and Digital Markets Unit 


Nowhere Land by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-land

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/



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