Thread by @RohanIrvine

Our keynote speaker is @aral — Small Technology.

#uxaustralia

We have a problem and that problem is called surveillance capitalism.

It is about the accrual of wealth and the accrual of information.

What happens when those who have wealth invest in surveillance to accrue information to accrue more wealth.

It has created a huge power differential where the wealthy know a lot about you, and you know virtually nothing about them.

We live in a information farming age where those who accrue the information are the first to tell you not to worry about it.

They're sharing this information with governments.

Aral is showing Tim Cook sitting at the table with the far right president of Brazil.

The leaders of the tech company sitting with Trump

And

Thomas Watson, CEO of IBM sitting with Hitler. Why? IBM engineers built the system, trained the staff and maintained the systems on site at the concentration camps.

Here are the codes they created and maintained and what they meant.

Business is still their middle name today

IBM implemented the surveillance system in Indonesia thay was used to commit massacres.

They create the drone software the US use to bomb people of colour around the world.

We are at a stage now where everyone in this room must ask:

What am I contributing to?

Who you are isn't defined by who you work for today.

This is what IBM said when an ex-employee asked what will IBM do when Trump wants the register of Muslims created.

They responded.

When asked about the holocaust IBM responded: (image)

Well fuck you.

Palantir, owned by Peter Theil, is literally named after the all seeing eye Sauron uses in the Lord of the rings.

Denmark was like: Great please create a pre-crime database. Like minority report. And they had to create an exception to GDPR so they could share info with the US

The SoftBank 100B investment fund has 45B from the Khashoggi, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia who executed a journalist who was critical of him.

But the business opportunities with him are great.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of cancer.

Softbanks goals: who ever controls data controls the world.

We know the ramifications of this data, we can't ignore it anymore.

Cambridge Analytica with a small subset of FB data swayed the US elections and Brexit.

CA & FB have the same business model.

FB have their Users
FB have their Customers

They capture everything about you, keep it forever and analyse it, then sell it to customers.

It's people farming.

Startup is a certain type of silicon valley company that either fails fast or has exponential growth.

What does infinite growth with finite resources look like?

About 2 generations before you go extinct you reach your peak success. Where are we now?

We the people need to own our data.

What we mean when we say data.

If it's a out you, you should own it.

If it's about the common, the common should own it.

Corporations shouldn't own your data.

The only thing worse than a corporation is a Nation with Police and a military.

The leftwing try and rationalise that governments or cities should own data, because of the belief they trust themselves and their friends.

But who's elected next?

If it's data about you you should control and own it.

If I have enough data about you, what can I do with it?

We used to be able to own you and your body but we can't do that (mostly).

I can still own everything else about you.

I have a great way to control you and make you behave the way I want you to.

This is a battle for personhood.

We are experiencing a crisis of personhood.

If we have an expanded notion of the self we need to extend our rights to those extended notions.

If we do not have right of the extended self we do not have rights.

The people who tell you you have digital rights are trying to make them lesser rights than your human rights.

So how do we protect?

Regulation and replacement.

GDPR

Better than nothing but protecting is what you do after your data's been collected.

The next step is Algorithmic transparency.

We need to make algorithms visible.

The next step if data minimisation.

Here's how we would regulate it.

There is zero political will to pass this regulation because of corruption and lobbying by corporations.

They fight regulation.

People who are working to regulate the market will be working to deregulate it the next day.

Aral is talking about the cozy corporate relationship that privacy conference or organisations have with corporations.

Countries are sending diplomats to silicon valley.
For profit private education is being set up to lobby governments

We are institutionally corrupt.

Aral and Laura built a tracker blocker

It's a stop gap. But it's the best we can do at the moment.

How about social regulation?

In Berlin when Google wanted to build a campus the neighbourhood created a campaign called "Fuck off Google" and it worked .

But billion dollar interests do not give up they wait, and try again.

We can choose to not contribute our labour.

The only thing you can trust with these companies is their business model.

If Google tried to give you a private experience they would go bankrupt.

Apple rely on it.

So you have to be rich to have privacy? That's always been the case under Capitalism.

Stop using WhatsApp.

They use your metadata and link it to your social graph.

The CIA uses metadata to murder people with drone strikes.

Use fastmail, mastodon and find out others on switching.social

There are people who are thinking about the whole experience around them.

Purism is a company that gives you full control over the hardware, software and services.

They're getting better, it's not going to be the best, but neither was the first iPhone.

These companies are practicing ethical design.

We are decoraters, trying to hide the rotten core of our organisation.

Let's stop being decoraters and start being designers.

Blockchain is mostly a right libertarian masturbation fantasy.

There are technologies that are useful in it but not blockchain.

We still have services connected to a centralised place and we need to think about how to decouple from them

We need to start thinking about small technology, not big technology.

When we start thinking about small technologies we have principles that float to the surface.

One group designing for another group is colonial.

A diverse group designing for themselves is decolonial.

The small tech foundation has been created to support the small tech movement.

We lack the developer tools to build the every day things because theyre built by startups and enterprises.

Aral is showing how to build and deploy a website using site.js

Aral is now building how you can build a dynamic site.

You can do anything you can do in node.js

You can do web roots & web sockets which mean you can create a chat app.

Aral has created a chat app in 4 minutes using site.js

We need to understand our whole medium which includes code.

We are faced with multi existential crisis and it's up to us as people who make the everyday things to make sure what we create doesn't contribute to them and hopefully behinds to solve them.

I hope we can build this bridge from where we are now to a future where we as a species can go beyond this short sighted naval gazing to exploring what we could be as a species.

Massive keynote!!!!!

Go visit and support the Small Technology Foundation.

small-tech.org

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