The Anti-Dystopians

Alina Utrata talks with Josh Lappen, a fellow Californian and environmental historian researching at Oxford University, who studies some of the most important technology there is: critical infrastructure. They discuss why hundreds of Elon Musks can’t (and won’t) solve climate change, the government funding and politics behind many technology entrepreneurs’ businesses, why low-tech solutions and indigenous practices are critical sources of knowledge, and the surprising number of technological innovations enabled by the US Postal Service (including Amazon’s e-commerce business and commercial flight). Plus, is PG&E really the worst company, what’s going on with the Texas blackouts, and should the government give you an email (and a bank account)?Addendum from Josh: "When recognizing the climate benefits of indigenous land management, we need to stress that a purely technical approach, which seeks to identify knowledge and incorporate it into existing management regimes, is simultaneously inadequate, amoral, and probably counterproductive. As we stressed during the interview, climate change is a political question which presents problems of distribution that run deeper than its problems of budgeting. In places like California, indigenous land management regimes ended due to enslavement, removal, and genocide of the state's native peoples, and modern land management practices have long depended on ignoring that fact, and the experiences of people who live on the land in general. Durably solving climate change is not just about assembling new tools; it requires rebuilding social and political systems to avoid new iterations of extractivism. In the case of cultural land management practices, that means restoring indigenous communities' role in shaping and caring for the land."Mentioned in this podcast:By Josh: How Climate-Driven Disasters Threaten Climate ProgressBill Tripp, the director of natural resources and environmental policy for the Karuk Tribe Department of Natural Resources, in the Guardian: “Our land was taken. But we still hold the knowledge of how to stop mega-fires.” As well as Jared Dahl Alder, “Cultural Fire on the Mountain: An Introduction to Native Cultural Burning" and Indigenous Conservation Practices Are Not a Monolith: Western cultural biases and a lack of engagement with Indigenous experts undermine studies of land stewardship.How California’s firefighters are made up of incarcerated people who are paid $1 a day,An explainer on PG&E and California’s (basically, annual) rolling blackouts and the recent Texas energy grid failures.If you’re wondering why California doesn’t have a train line between its two most populous cities, here’s a good explainer on the High Speed Rail (spoiler alert: its local politics), more long view coverage from Ralph Vartabedian at the LA Times. Plus, why Elon Musk’s Hyperloop literally won’t solve anything.“It’s the government, stupid.” Elon Musk is a state-made man. In case you didn’t catch the number, Elon Musk ventures’ Telsa, Solar City and SpaceX have received a total of $4.9 billion dollars from the government in tax breaks, grants and subsidies, and Tesla literally was not profitable until this year.For more on so-called libertarian tech entrepreneurs who make their fortunes contracting with Big Government, check out our previous Anti-Dystopians podcast about Peter Thiel with Andrew Granato (a mutual friend of me and Josh).More on the climate impacts of AI language modeling in the memo that Google fired Dr Timnit Gebru over, plus the environmental toll of a Netflix binge.For more on how Google buses and tech corporations are creating two-tier public/private infrastructure in the Bay, check out Inside a Secretive $250 Million Private Transit System Just for Techies.And, how Congress is Sabotaging Your Post Office. Plus a really interesting argument about the benefit of state-issues crypto-currencies aka why doesn’t the Fed just give everyone a bank account?Books:Marianna Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial StateWinifred Gallagher’s How the Post Office Created AmericaTimothy Mitchell's Rule of ExpertsHenri Lefebvre's The Production of SpaceSusan Leigh Star's Ecologies of KnowledgeRichard White's The Organic MachineNowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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? Tweet at AlinaTweet at JoshSign up for The Anti-Dystopians newsletterA transcript of this episode is available here.Mentioned in this podcastJosh Simons (co-authored by Dipayan Ghosh) on Brookings: Utilities for democracy: Why and how the algorithmic infrastructure of Facebook and Google must be regulatedVirginia Eubanks’s seminal work on Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor. Plus a review on the LSE’s blogCory Doctorow, How to Destroy Surveillance CapitalismMore on the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority and Digital Markets Unit Nowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week’s episode, Alina Utrata talks to Dr. Matt Mahmoudi, who just completed his PhD in Development Studies at Cambridge University as a Jo Cox scholar of Refugee and Migration Studies. They talked about Matt’s research about how technology is affecting migrant and refugee communities in New York City and Berlin, how seemingly innocuous technology, like free WiFi kiosks, can become de facto digital borders, what racial capitalism can tell us about Shoshana Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalism”, and if a decolonial neo-Luddite approach to tech is possible. Plus, why New York City should ban police use of facial recognition scan. A rough transcript of this episode is available here.Articles and scholars mentioned in this podcastA post by Matt on his research on The Sociological Review, Race in the Digital Periphery: The New (Old) Politics of Refugee RepresentationBooks:On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance by Cedric J. RobinsonExtrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space by Keller EasterlingRace Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class by Robin KelleyNotes Towards a Neo-Luddite Manifesto by Chellis GlendinningThe Invention of the Passport by John TorpeyUtopia for Realists by Rutger BregmanTwo Cheers for Anarchism by James ScottArticlesLeaked Location Data Shows Another Muslim Prayer App Tracking UsersWe Have Been Harmonized: Life in China’s Surveillance State (review by John Naughton)The Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang (review by Alina Utrata)PodcastPrevious Anti-Dystopians podcast on gender, colonization and the limits of surveillance capitalismMore information about Amnesty’s campaign to #BanTheScanNowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For this week’s episode, Alina Utrata talked to Julia Rone, a post-doc at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at Cambridge University. They discussed the rise of the European far-right online—what's the relationship between online disinformation and political mobilization? Why is the far-right so much better at mobilizing online than the far-left? Can platforms or content moderation policies really stop them? And is any of this about “social media” or is it just about social movements? Tweet at Alina.Tweet at Julia.Sign up for the Anti-Dystopians newsletter.Articles mentioned in this podcastJulia Rone’s publications:On the Minderoo Centre’s blog Power-Switch:Democratizing digital sovereignty: an impossible task?Public networks instead of social networks?On the London School of Economics blog:Collateral Damage: How algorithms to counter “fake news” threaten citizen media in BulgariaWhy talking about ‘disinformation’ misses the point when considering radical right ‘alternative’ mediaAcademic Articles:Far right alternative news media as ‘indignation mobilization mechanisms’: how the far right opposed the Global Compact for MigrationThe people formerly known as the oligarchy: the cooptation of citizen journalismMore from our colleagues at the Minderoo Centre:Josh Simons on why Google and Facebook algorithms are political (and should be regulated as public utilities): Utilities for Democracy: Why the Algorithmic Infrastructure of Facebook and Google must be RegulatedJennifer Cobbe on the issues surrounding algorithmic reach and recommendations: Regulating Recommending: Motivations, Considerations, and PrinciplesJohn Naughton’s excellent Observer column on why the Facebook Oversight Board is just some corporate theatre masquerading as political theatre Alina Utrata (me!) on Should you have a right to a Facebook account?Other articles:Rene DiRiesta’s famous phrase “free speech is not the same as free reach”Kristoffer Holt on the definition of alternative news mediaLeonie De Jonge on different media models and their affect on the radical right in Europe Google threatening to leave Australia altogether over proposed legal changes—would they become a “Bing” country?French President Sarkozy on “civilizing” the internet and Macron’s IGF speech on the need for more state involvement in Internet governance and regulationBooks:Michael Sandel’s excellent book the Tyranny of Meritocracy, and a wonderful Talking Politics episode with him (in case you don’t have time to read the full thing!)The Real Cyber War: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom by Shawn M. Powers and Michael JablonskiNowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

2020 was one hell of a year (literally). Alina Utrata, Mallika Balakrishnan and Kyra Jasper break down some of the things that happened in 2020’s technology politics—from the Trump Twitter ban, to content moderation, contact tracing and conspiracy theories, to how we design digital spaces that empower communities and bottom-up approaches to digital justice. Follow Alina Utrata on Twitter.Follow Kyra Jasper on Twitter.Sign up for the Anti-Dystopians newsletter.Articles mentioned in this podcastAxios roundup of all of the digital platforms that have banned Trump or Trump-related content (so far). An anarchist’s approach to social media, or how can we empower communities to shape their own digital spaces? Plus, some critiques of the Wikipedia model. For how digital platforms have affected trans folks, the Guardian on Facebook’s authentic names policy and Ina Fried on Wikipedia’s gender identity style guide.On the power of Facebook’s lookalike audience and group recommendations. Stop the Seal groups on Facebook, ads for military gear next to insurrection posts (is this a . . . feature, not a bug?), and racism in Facebook targeted housing adsOn WhatsApp’s new policy—why it’s bad (spoiler alert: it’s giving Facebook your data) and a nice New Yorker feature on Signal co-founder Moxie Marlinspike.More on Maria Ressa and Facebook in the Philippines, Vietnam’s threat to shut down Facebook unless it agrees to censorship, and Singapore’s COVID-19 contact tracing app.The SEC is investigating Zoom for complying with Chinese censorship requests over Tiananmen square commemorations—and more on Zoom’s censorship of Palestinan events. Elon Musk saying that his goal is Mars indentured servitude. Also of note, the space battle shaking down between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos (it centers around satellite internet for rural communities). Plus, in more inspiring news, the Institute for Self Reliance on community-based broadband networks (they have a great podcast too).And how Selena Gomez emailed Sheryl Sandberg about white supremacy on Facebook. Plus, some lockdown reads! David Runciman’s How Democracy Ends (it’s actually more optimistic than the title would have you believe, I promise). And Ruha Benjamin’s absolutely brilliant book Race After Technology. Nowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alina Utrata talks to Mallika Balakrishnan, one of the original founders of the collective No Tech for Tyrants. They discuss tech activism, problems with Palantir and how centering the conversation around the people and communities that tech and policies impact can help us frame discussions of technology and politics. Tweet at AlinaTweet at MallikaArticles Mentioned In this PodcastA report, co-authored by Mallika, by No Tech For Tyrants and Privacy International about UK government contracts with Palantir and associated Motherboard coverage. You can sign the NT4T petition here. For more information about No Tech for Tyrants check out their website here and here.More reporting on how Palantir’s technology was used by ICE and on trouble between the NYPD and Palantir.Speaking of Palantir, you can check out our previous podcast episodes where we discuss the founder of Palantir Peter Thiel or Biden’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, who used to work for Palantir. More on the firing of Timnit Gebru, the prominent Black scientist studying the ethics of artificial intelligence at Google, and on the links between Big Tech and academic research.What we can learn about Facebook by thinking like an anarchist, or at least by reading Yale professor James Scott’s work.On Nicholas Kristof’s article about Pornhub, and reporting by Samantha Cole about how it has impacted performers on the site. Another interesting article about how GoFundMe said it would stop processing payments for militias. Nowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Anjali Katta and Alina Utrata talk about the Big Tech issues a Biden Administration will inherit, from the FTC and DOJ anti-monopoly cases against Facebook and Google to the DoD’s cloud computing contract JEDI. They also discuss links between many Biden Administration officials and the tech industry. To sign up for the email newsletter of the Anti-Dystopians, click here.CORRECTION: When talking about the Microsoft antitrust case, Alina meant to say "Netscape" instead of "Netflix." Articles and books mentioned in this podcast.The American Prospect’s big feature on “How Biden’s Foreign Policy Team Got Rich” focusing on Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken and Michele Flournoy. More on WestExec strategic consultants (including ODNI nominee Avril Haines and potential CIA nominee David Cohen) by Politico and the Revolving Door project. Plus some progressives wrote an article arguing against Michele Flournoy for Secretary of Defense in the Project On Government Oversight .Director of National Intelligence nominee Avril Haines’ link to Palantir, along with reporting about NYPD and NHS contracts with Palantir.Fantastic ProPublica reporting on the JEDI cloud computing contract and links between DoD and Amazon. Plus an excellent Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report on Cloud Computing security, and a report by Rishi Sunak on how critical undersea cable networks are incredibly insecure.The extraordinary amounts of money Uber &co spent to avoid giving benefits and protections to drivers, and how Jake Sullivan ended up (sort of) working for Uber. Plus Cory Doctorow on Saudi investment in Uber, and Vox on how Silicon Valley is awash with money from Saudi Arabia and China.The FTC/AG suits against Facebook and their Mark Zuckerberg email quotes might explain why Google employees have been instructed not to talk about antitrust in their emails, or ever.Public Citizen’s investigation into FTC’s revolving door problem with Big Tech, plus the FTC officials who work at Facebook now. And, of course, all the Facebook folks on the Biden transition team. Biden’s new coronavirus czar Jeffrey Zients (who was acting director of Office of Management and Budget and a former Facebook Board member) Wikipedia page mysteriously deleted that he “fell in love with the culture at Bain & Co” after joining the Biden campaign. Finally, the Biden agency review teams has lots of tech players, Kamala Harris’s campaigns’ links to big tech and Chiara Cordelli’s new book The Privatized State on how government contracting/outsourcing is not good for us. Nowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alina Utrata talks to Stefanie Felsberger, a PhD candidate at Cambridge University, about her research on surveillance, data flows and mensuration tracking apps. They discuss how colonization impacted the development of surveillance technologies, why we think (or shouldn’t think) about data as a commodity instead of labor, and how the ownership of knowledge about female bodies has translated into power—from the witch burnings to period apps.Tweet at Alina.Tweet at Stefanie.Contact us.Articles mentioned in this podcast:Stefanie Felsberger’s article “Colonial Cables – The Politics of Surveillance in the Middle East and North Africa.”The woman who tried to hide her pregnancy from Big Data (and failed) and why pregnant women are such a high value target for advertisers. And if want to know more about the Smart Period Cup.Amazon experimenting with paying some consumers for their data. They’ve also entered the healthcare market.The US military is buying location data from every day apps, including a Muslim prayer app and Muslim dating site.More on testing and importing technologies in low rights environments, or how colonization spurred the development of surveillance technologies. For some more contemporary examples, how technologies developed by US military contractors in Yemen were used to disburse G20 protesters in Pittsburgh in 2009.More on surveillance tech used to target the Black Lives Matter protests here and here. And an ACLU overview on surveillance tech available in the US, as well as who has stingray tracking devices. And on the use of police drones to surveil protestors. Virginia Eubanks on how marginalized groups are often governments' test subjects (her full book on the subject here or here.) Relatedly, how Baltimore became the US’s lab for developing surveillance tech.How the UNHCR is collecting iris data from refugees in Jordan.On Chinese companies role in Africa and the Middle East, watch part II of this documentary.On the NSO Group and how their tech was linked to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the hacking of Jeff Bezos’s phone.More academic books and articles:Jarrett, Kylie. 2016. Feminism, Labour and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife. New York and London: Routledge.Lupton, Deborah. 2016. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Cambridge: Polity Press. EPub.Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham and London: Duke University Press.Fuchs, Christian. 2013. “Theorizing and Analyzing Digital Labor: From Global Value Chains to Modes of Production.” The Political Economy of Communication 2, no. 1: 3–27.Kaplan, Martha. 1995. “Panopticon in Poona: An Essay on Foucault and Colonialism.” Cultural Anthropology 10: 85-98.Mitchell, Timothy. 1988. Colonizing Egypt. Berkley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.Nowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alina Utrata talks with Andrew Granato about the so-called Philosopher King of Silicon Valley: Peter Thiel. Thiel is one of the original co-founders of Paypal, nicknamed the Paypal mafia, a co-founder of the data analytics firm Palantir, one of the first outside investors in Facebook, and the first high-level tech executive to come out in support of Donald Trump in 2016. Andrew’s research into Peter Thiel began as an undergraduate at Stanford University, when he conducted an eleven month long investigation into Peter Thiel’s influence and legacy at Stanford when, as an undergraduate, Thiel set up the highly controversial student publication the Stanford Review. We discuss Thiel’s politics, what they reveal about how he thinks about his businesses, and how he influences and shapes Silicon Valley politics and beyond.Tweet at Alina UtrataTweet at Andrew GranatoGet in touch with the Anti-Dystopians https://stanfordpolitics.org/2017/11/27/peter-thiel-cover-story/https://medium.com/@agranato/thinking-about-the-rise-of-techs-founder-emperor-4f1fdb809d05 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/peter-thiel-donald-trump-white-nationalist-support https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/21/magazine/palantir-alex-karp.html https://blakemasters.com/post/24578683805/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-18-notes https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/silicon-valley-s-political-endgame-summarized-1f395785f3c1 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/peter-thiel-donald-trump-white-nationalist-support https://www.scottlucas.me/peter-thiels-apocalypse https://thenewinquiry.com/the-scapegoating-machine/ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/28/no-death-no-taxeshttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/09/mystic-mogg-jacob-rees-mogg-willam-predicts-brexit-planshttps://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealandhttps://www.seasteading.org/about/https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/dec/29/fintan-otoole-the-books-interview-brexit-english-nationalism Nowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the first episode of the Anti-Dystopians, Kyra Jasper and Alina Utrata discuss the politics of anti-monopoly in tackling technology companies, focusing on the United States. October turned out to be a very significant month for Big Tech in the US. First, the US House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee released a report on Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google that found those companies had monopoly power. And, about two weeks later, the Department of Justice launched an anti-monopoly suit against Google. Kyra and Alina discuss some of the political arguments around monopoly approaches.Tweet at usContact us Mentioned in the episode:https://powerswitchorg.wordpress.com/2020/11/16/the-political-arguments-against-digital-monopolies-in-the-house-judiciary-report/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/06/technology/house-antitrust-report-big-tech.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/20/us/doj-google-suit.htmlhttps://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/ylj/vol126/iss3/3https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/digitaliberties/from-territorial-to-functional-sovereignty-case-of-amazon/https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjreg/vol33/iss2/5/https://www.vice.com/en/article/d3akm7/how-facebook-bought-a-police-forcehttp://web.stanford.edu/group/reichresearch/cgi-bin/wordpress/just-giving/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/business/reactivate-facebook-account.htmlhttps://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-life-it-was-hel-1831304194https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/27/facebook-free-basics-developing-marketshttps://www.wired.co.uk/article/tiktok-india-banhttps://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.13676.pdf https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-internal-metric-violence-incitement-rising-votehttps://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/daveyalba/facebook-philippines-dutertes-drug-warhttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-41801071Nowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Zeynep Tufekci on dystopia. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.