Celso Bessa (sɛwsʊ bɛ:sa)

Prefiro construir pontes a muros

society

What if email didn’t suck?

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What if email – which can be seen as an instant messaging tool – and its related technologies, protocols, and regulations had received much more attention from F/LOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) and public interest technology practitioners and funders in the last 15 years?

What if, for the last 15 years or so, we had more research, updates, and improvements not only to the technology and protocols but to its regulations and the issues around it as well? For example, efficient and non-privacy intrusive anti-spam, meaningful compliance to anti-spam laws and protocols, etc.

What if we had had reliable, safer, private, and easier to use encrypted email? Would it have curbed instant messaging apps? How would disinformation campaigns be different? How would surveillance capitalism have reacted to it?

5 uniformed women seated and two on foot to the right, they are looking to the left, where a man and another womenare showingyon some flags. Between them a white board with some letters. Behind them, some trees.
Same vibe, but with ones and zeroes instead of flags.

Coded Bias, an examination of societal issues and artificial intelligence, is available on Netflix

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Coded Bias (Shalini Kantayya, 2020) is a documentary examining at some of most pressing problems of our age, the nexus of societal issues like racism, genderism, ageism and several biases and machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence. If you have the opportunity to watch it, please, do it. It is now available on Netflix.

Coded Bias trailer

A few days ago had the opportunity of a live streaming of the movie followed by a conversation Joy Buolamwini (author of Gender Shades, an influential research on racial bias and facial recognition technologies and co-founder of Algorithmic Justice League), Cathy O’neill (author of Weapons of Math Destruction), Ruha Benjamin (author of People’s Science and Race After Technology) and Zeynep Tufekci, and other incredible researchers and activists, in an online event promoted by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF).

Here are some bits of the movie and the conversation that I think are interesting or newcomers to this discussion:

  • The assimetry of the power (“who owns the fucking code”, Buolamwini) in the tech and data police making, gathering and implementation
  • The soundbite “data embbeds the past“
  • How there is no recourse or accountability most of deployed artificial intelligence and biometrics systems and services
  • How powerful Facebook (and other platforms for that matter) are. They could say to regulators or political candidates: “If i churn X voters to you, you don’t regulate me” (A paraphrase of what is actually said by Zeynep Tufekci.
  • Joy asking “who are the gatekeepers of the jobs” of the so-called 4th industrial revolution
  • Joy saying: “people assume if the machine says, it is correct.”
  • Kimberly Crenshaw highlighting how the law protect economic interests and the market by default.
  • Algorithms don’t object or whistleblow when a company,the government or other institution does something wrong [By the way: algorithms, models, automated systems and robots don’t discuss and can’t organize themselves to demand better working conditions and wages]
  • Ruha Benjamin and Joy discussing how there is great power in controlling the labelling and the decisions of using AI and how we need to create/change the language to highlight and reframe societal issues and related use of tech. [Which reminds of how the power of satire and parody for positive society change is understimated by some activists and parts of the academia]
  • Crenshaw drawing the attention to the importance of fighting for tech literacy and real accountability

As mentioned, If you have the opportunity to watch it, please, do it. It is now available on Netflix. And if you are interested in setting up a watch party and discuss the movie, let me know.

a website showing up a digital white face with some geometric shapes over it and the text about doing a watch party
Watch Party pages at the Coded Bias movie website

“The social contract is broken, and that’s why the game feels rigged (What Robinhood and Facebook have in common)”

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“[…] technology is not simply a tool—neutral on all possible outcomes, good or bad—but something more dynamic, messy and complicated. It’s a complex system where the workings of both the technology and our society, and crucially, how they interact with each other matter greatly[…]

Instead, it’s always important to pay attention to a company’s incentives, and especially how it makes money. This is especially crucial with digital platforms, where the real mechanisms aren’t as easily visible. […]

“we still face this idea that the internet is a game, that the virtual world is something distinct from the real one. This condescension is even embedded in the phrase IRL—“in real life,” meaning not online.” […]

This complex interplay between business models, technology, and existing power structures in our society means that we have to move beyond simple narratives: The underdog is winning! Technology is liberating us! The underdog has lost! It must be technology’s fault! […]

The social contract is broken, and that’s why the game feels rigged. […]

When things are so unequal, and power so concentrated on one side, moralizing takes about whether r/WallStreetBets is a mob ring hollow. What makes them “a mob” for trying to profit together, while Davos is a distinguished gathering? […] But the internet isn’t a pony that empowers only the nice groups we like (Arab Spring dissidents, but not white supremacists), nor does it magically and instantaneously alter the power dynamics in society (so the underdog can suddenly be assured of a Hollywood ending).”

Zeynep Tufekci

Great article by Zeynep Tufekci published on The Atlantic. A highlighted a few parts below, but you should read it whole: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/02/gamestop-mess-shows-internet-rigged-too/618040/

We are so much more than what they are forcing us to accept.

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We think intelligence is about playing Go. But practically no one plays Go. Or chess. Real intelligence is being able to walk through an incredibly crowded street on a busy evening, nimbly, when you don’t even think about it, while at the same time recalling memories and replaying things in your brain. What I’m saying is that human beings have been reduced to a very simplified version of themselves, which they’ve accepted, in order to fit into this machine model, both of society and the internet. But we are extraordinary and we can do extraordinary things. We are so much more than what they are forcing us to accept.

Adam Curtis interview to Tom Hodgkinson at Idler