This week, I had the pleasure of attending and talking at the mind-blowing Chaos Communication Camp. I’ll write something more in detail about camp, but for posterity, here are the slides I used, and the video recording of the talk which is up online spectacularly quickly.
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The third full episode of Collusion is online! This episode, we looked at food: the role that food played in colonialism in the past, things that happen now that echo the power structures that we see in colonialism, like food speculation, and new technologies aimed at addressing world hunger.
I also came across a transcript that the crew at OpenTranscripts kindly did of the episode: it’s online here - along with our other episodes too, in full.
Links to research for the latest episode are up on the Tumblr - during the research for this episode, our main source of information seems to have been media articles and NGO reports rather than academic papers, so thankfully we didn’t have too many problems of important papers being behind a paywall.
As always, comments and criticism on the episode are welcome - we hope you like it!
Today in Dhaka, Niloy Chakrabarti, or “Niloy-Neel” as he was known online, was murdered in his home. He is the fourth blogger to be murdered this year in Dhaka - all in a brutal way, with machetes, leading the media to report it with the unthinkable phrase - they were “hacked to death”.
There have been, and there will be, many more articles calling for changes in Bangladesh. For the government to respond in an appropriate way (Chowdhury had reportedly asked for police protection just three weeks ago, and had it denied). For Bangladeshi media to support the blogger community.
But I’m writing to a different audience: the international open government community. Just a couple of weeks ago, I saw the agenda for a planned workshop run by UNDESA in Dhaka to be held at the end of the month. Its theme: “Open Government Data Sensitization, Gap Assessment, and Strategic Planning”. It made me laugh at the time - a ‘gap assessment’? Seriously?
A couple of weeks ago I was invited to speak at Datengarten, the Chaos Computer Club Berlin’s (CCCB) monthly meet up. I decided to talk about technology in international development; partly because it’s a topic I feel comfortable with, but also because the narrative and general conversation among the development sector is a world away from what I imagine CCCB to be talking about.
One of the biggest issues I’ve come across with those working in international development, or ICT4D, is low levels of technical literacy. People are keen to tout the benefits of technology, but they have little training or critical perspectives on the potential consequences around security, data (mis)management, and more. The audience I was talking with at CCCB are, in a way, the polar opposite of this - all very, very technically literate, but potentially with not as much exposure to people in vulnerable situations, for whom technology could have big benefits.
The video of my talk is below, along with the slides I used. It’s also the first public talk I’ve done in German, which was a nice milestone to reach - especially as it happened to be on my 4 year anniversary of arriving in Berlin! It was great to have such a friendly audience for the talk, and some interesting questions afterwards, too.
Hidden in the darkest and deepest corners of the web are secrets beyond what most of us would believe possible. Jamie Bartlett’s book, The Dark Net, dives into these secrets, and gives us a guided tour - the fora that many of us never frequent, the places where you can place a bounty upon someone’s head, or order illegal substances and have them delivered to your door.
But Bartlett’s attitude to many of these online spaces and the resulting behaviour, is largely uncritical, perhaps in his attempt to be a neutral and objective guide to the space. Take this statement about a Reddit community whose aim was to “troll” other community users, “generating laugh at someone else’s expense”, as he puts it.
Game of Trolls was eventually banned by Reddit; a highly unusual step for the otherwise liberal site, but testament to the pervasiveness and persistence of the Reddit trolls.
The second episode of Collusion is now up, focusing on the theme of water. In it, I talk about how the British used water technologies as a key part of colonial policy in former British India, and Luiza, my co-presenter, talks about current day examples from Palestine and Brazil. This time though, we produced two versions: the regular one, and a “closed access version”, which I explain more about below.
Last week, I was invited for an interview with Civic Radio. We talked about what it means to participate in civic life, and the role of civic technology. For me, civic life is closely connected to participation - and this made me wonder, who has the opportunity to participate in public life?
Algorithms. We’re all talking about them, but how many of us actually understand what they are? Tech critics, researchers and academics are sounding warning bells that an increasing societal dependence upon algorithms is potentially very dangerous. Data scientists that I follow, though, are excited by the possibilities that algorithms hold for society. These conflicting views can be confusing - so let’s go back to basics, and consider what exactly we mean when we talk about algorithms.
Facebook controls our Newsfeed- what we see, what we don’t, and we have little idea how it works. But we don’t necessarily need to know exactly how it works, in order to use it to our advantage. It turns out that a couple of individuals have already “hacked the algorithm” by using certain keywords in their Facebook status, to give visibility to issues they care most about - so maybe it’s time for activists to join the game.
Last week, I took part in a debate on the role of big data in development, at re:publica here in Berlin. The session was fun, and interesting, and a couple of things have stayed running around my mind since then, helped by some other inspiring talks that I saw at the conference, and conversations I had.
The biggest one: that, especially in international development, we seem to assuming that within big data holds all sorts of answers. Within the context of the “data revolution”, big data is put on somewhat of a pedestal, and in my opinion, we’re putting too much faith in the insights that can actually be gained from big data alone.