Digital colonialism
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:19
not as planned, but we are trying basically
00:21
to do a performatic, instead of talking to you, what we want to do here on stage is to talk among us. Because sometimes we feel that all the speakers from the global south are all the time brought to the north to talk to you and to try to explain our realities.
00:41
And we want to shift it a little bit and we want to talk among us because it's about time that we talk among us about something that is affecting not only us, but it's affecting all of us, all the world, but the south might have some answers to these problems that we have today. So the way that we will do it is Alan Mills
01:03
is a Central American writer and he prepared a timeline that you could follow as he reads this timeline about colonialism in the past. And then he will do readings and then we will have the conversation and he will read again and you can tweet
01:21
and read the tweets again and comment on those and we will do it again. As we hope that it will start functioning soon. But yeah, it's very experimental. I hope that you bear with us and at the end we will have some opening for the public to ask questions and interact.
02:16
Hi everyone, since we're having technical difficulties, we're gonna have to hack this a little bit. I'm going to pose a question to Renata
02:22
as to why she constituted this, why she felt this was important for us to have this discussion. The notion being, I think we're trying to escape this prescriptive approach to how we should adopt the internet, what it should mean, the tools around which we should use that. And I was just telling you girls earlier
02:41
about the whole idea of a hack to a song that we all love. We know that who run the world is girls, but we're now at who runs the world, apps. Who run this mother, apps. That's where we're at. There's a tyranny of applications, which is one form of what we want to address today.
03:01
But it touches on something bigger. It touches on a lived experience that goes beyond just prescriptive technologies. Okay, the girls are getting comfortable. Ellen, are you comfortable now? So, I mean, what do you guys think when you hear the word digital colonialism? Are we trying to be alarmist here or are we trying to paint a picture of a reality that is unpleasant?
03:23
We need to just, you know, have this conversation. Well, I think that one of the main issues in Nigeria, and I don't know if you feel it the same in Africa, is that this new form of colonialism arrived at the moment that we didn't overcome colonialism that happened to us when the Spanish arrived
03:43
and the Portuguese arrived in Latin America and in Africa and the British. And it arrived, we tried, like it was some movements of emancipation and those, capitalism crushed those efforts, basically. And now we have new forms of oppression on steroids
04:01
and new forms of capitalism even stronger. So as we saw the situation in Brazil fall apart, for example, and as we saw these really, really, really intense, oh, let's connect Africa, let's connect Africa,
04:20
let's connect Africa, I was not, I mean, it is not only a suspicion, it's a fact in front of us that nothing good can come out of it. So that was the motivation, the primary motivation of preparing that. And also because our techie talk is, oh yes, it starts in 1991, the web,
04:42
oh yes, the internet. And it is so, it looks so into the recent past, you know? And it is historical somehow. And it is with the eyes folded as nothing happened before. So this approach, I think that is kind of,
05:02
I mean, it is absurd not to look back at history and facts to address these topics. I don't know, Joanna, I mean, you have been at the epicenter of the hope and the, yeah. Hope and sadness, yeah.
05:20
So I think when we talk about colonialism, your rights to bring back the history and mention that never ended, but it's on steroids and is a new sort of imperialism practices. And we can use those two terms, colonialism and imperialism
05:40
because they are connected to territories. And now what we have are companies that have more users than some countries, you know, as Rebecca mentioned, Facebookistan. It has more, for the first quarter of 2016,
06:05
Facebook have more users than the absence of China. So those companies, mostly from the US, are also the drivers of the core, more than half of the internet traffic that we have.
06:24
The content comes from like 30 countries, being Google, Facebook, Netflix, on top of it. So those countries are extending the territory. It's beyond US.
06:41
We have no jurisprudence most of the time. Now the fight are of the countries and it's in Brazil, in Guatemala, in Kenya, but also in Europe is to bring their own jurisdiction, their own values to the practices of those companies.
07:02
And we know that's not happening. So you can go from copyright fights to data protection. And so it's a new sort of colonialism on asteroids and the colonized are not only the developing country.
07:21
Absolutely. I mean, I think of it on a number of levels. First and foremost, you look at the conversation we're having about the diversity of people who are actually designing and building and engineering the technologies we're using. It starts there and then you link it to the fact that a lot of it is being designed for us and not with us. And especially now when we venture off,
07:41
say the social media networks, it's all these ideas of connecting the next billion users. There's a language there that for me is dangerously intrusive. It's all about we know because we want to come help you. You don't seem to know, so we're gonna do it for you. And so it's coming with this idea of we're coming to help you, how can you be ungrateful? And it's almost as though there's no room for pushback,
08:03
which for me worries me because why are we trying to, why can't I get to ask what constitutes some internet somebody wants to give somebody in a village somewhere? Why they get to decide that that is some internet? These are some of the questions that for me make sure, as much as I don't want the word colonialism
08:20
to be used in this context to be alarmist, you have to look at it in its exactly traditional definition as an establishment of a colony in one territory to by political power or in this case a technological power for another. And so this is where we're starting and it's exactly what's happening and we must have that conversation. So now we will do a pause.
08:42
This was the idea, the account is called Hacking Coyotes. And Alan will be reading as I scroll down and we will connect later to what we are seeing of the past and the present and how the past can somehow explain and give hints to what we can do now.
09:02
Okay, is my microphone on? One, two, one, two. It's okay? No? Okay. Okay, let's use this. Okay, I will read this timeline. And yeah, you can follow it at HackingCoyotes in Twitter.
09:27
HackingCoyotes, some tweets on all new digital resistance. Resistance in the digital world. Let's take the indigenous cultures as an example of digital resistance.
09:42
Let's take a look at the Maya. As we all know, some centuries ago began the European invasion of the Abyayala territories, North, Central, and South America.
10:00
The empire strikes first. The Guaraní, Mayan, Aztec, Inca, Aymara, Taino, et cetera were subjected to the imperialist powers, a long and painful colonization process.
10:23
It is rarely taken into account that colonization implies the clash of two or more writing and calculation systems. Decimal versus vigesimal.
10:40
While the colonial digital culture is based on the number 10, the Maya digital culture is based on the 20 digits of the fingers and toes. Decimal versus vigesimal. Digital clash. In the end, the decimal system was imposed as hegemonic.
11:05
However, the calculation is not knowledge that arrived thanks to the Europeans. A new regime of time was imposed over the territories conquered,
11:20
as well as a regime of knowledge, production, control, and access to information. So basically, what we were talking about earlier, right, of how history is told to us and how in the digital,
11:42
it is even banishing more culture of what we know, what we don't know, and the ability to reshape even history out of it. I mean, and especially with knowledge production, the conversation we were having earlier is how we were taught history in the various educational regimes we went through
12:02
was a very curated form of history, even within our own structures. Yes, granted, very independent governments thought that's the best education system, but why is it, for instance, that I would learn about the queen and the British empire, not about the Mayan empire? These are questions that I'm not asking only for the sort of people
12:21
who are designing in the West, but it's also questions we have to ask ourselves, and these are reflections we need to start putting out in the open. Forms of knowledge production, for instance, when we have Wikipedia being set up in all these tools for education, advancing education through mobile phones, this, that, and the other, when we know the history of how and who is able to produce or place content on Wikipedia
12:41
is just perpetuating what we've seen before, and so for me, it actually frustrates me to some level that then again, the space to ask this is to say I'm coming from a privileged position, I should not ask it. I'm like, goddamn, guys, this is a problem, and we need to be allowed to reflect upon it. It is some form of control when we're using words like knowledge,
13:00
to get knowledge in the digital age, it's to Wikipedia it or to Google it. We need to start unlocking our thinking. Those are just platforms, and not the centers of knowledge. Yeah, and I think that on top of that,
13:23
there is the censorship that based on the country company's values, regardless to the country's culture and promotion of diversity and so on. In Brazil, a few months ago, we had the page of the Ministry of Culture,
13:44
Facebook fan page, blocked because of a photo of an indigenous person that wasn't wearing clothes, so breasts, and then the minister pinged Facebook and said, look, this is a ministerial page,
14:01
put it back, please, and he said, no, no, no, it's against our terms of services and so on. So we have a new set of regulations, that's terms of services that don't abide to basic human rights as countries should.
14:21
So it's a different way of setting up the territory, the jurisprudence, and imposing moral values that do not belong to us. Well, and actually, but wasn't it about internet freedom, right? Freedom, like what freedom?
14:43
What I see, the only thing that I see is new forms of control, actually. Control of ideas and ideas that can be communicated online, and whether those ideas fit the narrative and fit the priorities of not even a state. It is this new state that a group of companies form
15:01
in coordination with Brussels and Washington. And control of ideas, control of you, control of where you are, what you do, control of even democracies, if we look deeper into what the future of algorithms will do. I mean, and on the thing of internet freedom
15:22
and linking it to histories, is to think about freedom and what it has come to mean in different territories that are otherwise not free. And what for me breaks my heart is internet freedom, especially as is being dispensed as a notion or as a principle for connecting the next billion, freedom, or the free idea of free internet
15:42
has come to mean no cost, but not the liberty of actually having freedom of choice. So the tools and what is being dispensed is actually saying it will be at no cost to you, that's some form of freedom, that's cool, right? Yay! So, you know, who ran the world? That app, but not the fact that you have freedom of choice. So it's a completely false trade-off
16:02
that is actually very dangerous and that needs a lot more push back around because if we're teaching people the principles, for me, the spirit of the internet is you have to be able to create as much as you consume. So the problem with this mobile phone and especially mobile first idea is that very few spaces, think about it, how much can you actually innovate on a mobile phone?
16:21
How much can you actually build using a mobile phone? So yes, we've been told Africa and other places are mobile first, but what does that actually mean when we think about it? We're just creating a next billion consumers and not necessarily the next billion creators. Those building those apps are using those laptops that now suddenly are nowhere to be found. So yes, on one hand, this looks good, but we need to be able to critique what that means
16:42
and actually not just amongst ourselves, but in this kind of diverse setup because there are different actors involved at any one point in time. So it's no longer sufficient for me to just have this conversation with local developers. I have to have it a different strata. It just makes me the loud, mad woman, but it's what I got to do.
17:04
Actually, to respond to that, and actually the problem is politics as well because every time that there's an attempt at reverting the model and thinking the things in different ways, if it's a powerful enough country, I mean, you know which lobby will do all attempts
17:23
at blocking it, you know? And we cannot isolate these problems from the superstructures of the TPP, T-TIP, and other big frames. I mean, if you do something to actually protect your population and have a more reasonable privacy policy
17:40
and more creative industries, like you say, no, consume local, code locally, and so on, oh, no, it's a barrier against free trade, right? If you want to do something aggressively in resisting this new model of brewing the data of people, you are listed as enemy of the free internet,
18:03
isolated and disconnected from economic and social rights. I mean, the narrative, and activists are dragged into that narrative, you know? And, oh, no, Cuba is evil, but you know Silicon Valley rules. Yeah, that's super tricky
18:21
because of course we are for internet freedom, but for a few years, it has been used as an instrument for external foreign policy in the US. So to push zero rating, to push Facebook into more countries,
18:41
and it goes hand by hand of war against terror and so on. And we get this terminology as activists, but because freedom is good, freedom is nice. But we need to rethink. I also think that is because precisely we adopt the terminology that is imposed to us
19:02
by a language and by a way of thinking by the culture of Silicon Valley, basically. And we do not really find different meanings and like can occupy the language of the activism that we do. And I think that that's a missing part
19:21
of an alternative viable discourse on that. Brazil tried, Brazil tried, and we saw the bullying against Brazil recently. India tried, let's see what happens in India. And maybe Alan could go back to how we are used to hack colonial practices.
19:45
Yeah, thank you. We go back to the coyotes. Yeah, so different calendars, different times. And the indigenous remain alienated from the official systems of knowledge production.
20:06
Not only the written culture against the oral culture, it was writing versus writing, books versus books. The native writing techniques are prohibited
20:22
or remain unused due to the fact of violence or the brutal regime of work. Their knowledge is obliterated. Yeah, here we have a good codex burning. The indigenous codes, codex, are destroyed.
20:44
Their transmedial textualities and their calendars go into hiding and resistance, like the Popol Vuh. So the author of Popol Vuh is anonymous. According to Luis Cardoso Aragon,
21:02
this author would be a magic elder, just like the Popol Vuh's magic heroes. Anonymous? Popol Vuh survived as an oral, textile, and sculptorial narration. It has always been a transmedia narration.
21:25
Faced with such an adverse situation, the first hackers appear. They must protect this collection of knowledge that is vital to the community. The figure of Diego Reynoso appears,
21:43
a native who learns the oppressor code and transcribes the ancestral knowledge to the Latin alphabet. Is this man Diego Reynoso? Is this man the transcriptor of the Popol Vuh? Reynoso is a person whose existence is barely documented.
22:02
It could be the secret name used by one or several transcribers of the sacred book. The contemporary hacker figure may be related to the ancestral figure of the trickster or the coyote from original peoples, the shapeshifter.
22:24
Coyote uses mischief as a tactic, seeking flaws in the systemic network. It is an immoral being. It puts the institutional normalcy on hold. The coyote, sometimes rabbit, possum, or another animal,
22:43
is a feature of knowledge between different worlds or between different realities. So here we have an Aztec coyote, a Navajo coyote, the real coyotes as well.
23:02
So, let's go back to the female coyotes. Okay. Thank you. I actually wanted you to tell a little bit more
23:20
about the Angolan coyotes. I mean, in this case, and Alan, we had this conversation earlier. So is the coyote in this case the oppressor or the one who's trying to seek their liberation? Because we refuse to call them the oppressed, they're just trying to push back. And just thinking about some form of coyotes starting to emerge, I don't know how many coyotes
23:41
you've heard about what the Angolans have been doing with Wikipedia and Facebook Zero. It's a classic thing. So you've prescribed this version of the internet to the wonderful, great people of Angola who then decided that's great, but that's not the internet we want. We want an internet that can allow us to access music, videos, images, and anime.
24:01
What do the good people of Angola do? They started putting, hiding links to all this, the JPEGs and all these other file formats in Wikipedia articles, and then putting those in closed Facebook groups so that they have a completely closed loop. So you've given us two free forms of something,
24:20
they took it, they hacked the coyote out of it, and it's forms of digital resistance starting to emerge. And if that doesn't speak to the fact that you can prescribe or you can ask us what we want, either way, we'll take what you bring and make it count. And now Facebook, Wikipedia, and others are caught up in a copyright issue because how many links can they take down? The whole idea was to give these people internet.
24:41
If you keep putting it down, then what happens to their benevolent ideas? This just speaks to the fact that you can keep trying this model, it doesn't work, but they're gonna be coyotes. So next is gonna be an image of some really cool Angolan coyotes here, and we encourage more and more coyotes to keep coming up if that's the only form of internet we're going to keep getting. And also that brings me back to the point
25:03
of the so-called internet freedom that forgets to address the things of the copyright issues. I mean, you have seen most of the listed countries recently by a regime that does not make sense since ages ago, that is only filling the pockets by, as we said, 30 companies,
25:23
and it's not only filling the pockets of 30 companies, but justifying part of the surveillance capitalism because one of the justifications of the surveillance capitalism is we need to track content and we need to track who acts as who because the author needs to make the profit, you know? They're authors, they're profit that always stays there,
25:43
that never pays taxes in our countries. The tax that we pay actually from this neo-imperialism is precisely our prosecutor's systems persecuting copyright violations that are nothing else but access to knowledge
26:01
and most of the time legitimate access to knowledge in many, many cases of automated control. And that brings me back to, I mean, the way that we consume and we produce and reproduce content in Latin America, I mean, the Cubans are quite particular because they not only consume content
26:23
coming from everywhere, I mean, from everywhere by a piracy, I mean, you can find in Havana, you can find DVDs from Iran, cinema, from French cinema, from African movies, everything. Because nothing is permitted, everything is allowed somehow.
26:43
So you don't have this mediated access to knowledge and access to content that many countries in the global south have or compared to the very limited choice that many countries have when they are complying with this absurd copyright laws
27:01
and how it shapes behaviors and it shapes the way people act in society. And in Brazil, it's a little bit similar because you have big content production, right? Yeah, sure. So in Brazil, we have been, and I met you being a coyote fighting copyright enforcement through Creative Commons
27:24
and we still have a terrible copyright law but we fight a long run to get the civil rights-based framework approved for the internet but now exactly the copyright industry's pressuring
27:42
to put through cyber security, cyber crime bills to change it all. And so the coyotes in Brazil are howling to the moon very loud to try to change it and hack it and re-establish what we achieved. But we have been talking here a lot about content,
28:03
access to knowledge and examples on how people have hacked that and perhaps thinking about the forms of control of this new digital colonialism or imperialism. I wonder if you have examples of hacking and coyotes
28:23
that are addressing the form of control related to data and privacy and the surveillance capitalism that we live now. Salir ves cuyotes are just paradoxically disconnected.
28:41
Like there's many cultures somehow resisting to be, the thing is that even the development agenda, the international agenda, everyone, this big push and this new urgency that at some point it seems that owning a mobile phone
29:01
and being connected and being connected all the time becomes more urgent than many basic things that need to be fixed in society. On top of that, they're selling us the utopia that an app and the civic tech will solve serious inequality issues and democracy problems that we have in our countries.
29:21
And if empowering, in many cases in the global south, empowering the middle class, upper-middle class fascist elites and reproducing these very, very dangerous, and I mean, who's funding that kind of effort? As you know, apps for democracy get funding
29:43
as large as $1 million in countries with actually serious, serious, serious inequality issues and are given to so many times to useful idiots pushing for this system of surveillance capitalism and pushing for this system where Silicon Valley rules.
30:04
So that resistance to that, community organizers that still talk to the people and are still the guardians of the big victories for humans of the last century,
30:21
labor rights, union rights, the right to protest. I mean, those are the guardians, actually. They disconnected, paradoxically. Those who fought for civil rights and human rights last century have many of the keys on how to respond to this, I think. It is not a magic app that will encrypt everything.
30:41
I think that it is that power of claiming and reclaiming the already gained territories that we have to be united for.
31:02
There's the last bit. Yeah? Okay, I keep going. Is it not by chance that the people who transport traffic individuals between borders in Latin America are called coyotes? The protagonists of the Popol Vuh
31:22
are two twin siblings that embody the trickster hacker figure for the Maya. They embody coyote in the book. Throughout the tale, the Mayan heroes avoid a number of trials until they triumph
31:44
in the oppressor's own cyberspace, Xibalba. Hunahpu and Xbalanque delve into the imperial cyberspace to defeat the Lords of Shadow that prevent access to the light, the light of knowledge.
32:06
The hacker shapeshifter twins defeat those who hinder the friendship between the different beings who live together in the community. And here we have some hero magic twins,
32:23
some sacred twin tricksters. And with the final triumph of the twins over the empire, they become the moon and the sun, the communities reading eyes. They become hope.
32:44
Due to the cultural hacking, we have open access to Popol Vuh today, a collection of survival strategies that everyone may take advantage of. Over the timeline, you can check some digital Mayan music
33:00
by Pajaro Hawar from Guatemala. Because indigenous mestizos, individuals from Western cultures read the Popol Vuh, and they even reinterpret this knowledge in different variations and languages. The decoding of closed knowledge is an ancestral practice
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that guarantees community survival. Hunahpu and Xbalanque values still prevail. For example, many Latin American populations pay homage
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to figures such as folk saints that embody these ambiguous and transitive values. The coyote values are embodied by characters sanctified by the community, despite the fact that their existence has not been authenticated.
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And here we have Mashimon, or San Simon, the most important Maya folk saint and mestizo Maya folk saint in Guatemala and in Central America. So as a conclusion, we could say the coyote, trickster, hacker, ancestral figure
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is still alive. The shapeshifter is still alive. Ede, Alan, if you were to give a takeaway about all this and why you curated or expressed yourself through this format, what would be the one thing in case all of this just all went over somebody's head? Why this?
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Why that artistic and visual and historic approach that you did? You could have said this, but you chose this format. I don't know. I just wanted to present a short story able to concentrate to have all of this
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long history of ancestral hacking practices together. I guess I decided to take the Maya as an example because I know this culture a bit better because I am from Guatemala. I come from Guatemala. And I discovered that these people were using hacking techniques
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from way behind in the time. It is nothing new for them to resist against a digital imposter or imposition or there's nothing new for them to hack. It's a very familiar practice for them
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and I decided to put it all together over Twitter because I don't know. I wanted to express in a very clear way this overlap between the past and the future because I'm speaking about ancient practices, but I am trying to perform these practices
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in the terms of today, of today's technologies. So that's why I decided to do it this way. And as you can see, I discovered that Mashimon looks a bit like anonymous.
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And the mask has, these two masks have some resemblances, some similarities. And I decided to do a circular timeline. The interesting thing of Mashimon is that there's a Guatemalan saint
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that can do good and can do evil. So this amorality is very interesting as well. And also indigenous cultures across Latin America have this duality because they have been imposed to live in a system for 500 years, in a system that is not, it wasn't created by them
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and kinda shaped by them. It was imposed on them. A little bit like the mobile phones, you know? I mean, a little bit like this, no choice but A or B that are controlled by one. And so it is very interesting to see how the dynamics of keep these parallel lives,
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keeping your identity, but adapting and adopting and hiding new identities in the non-indigenous world. So in the online and offline now. And I think what's nice is we couldn't come here and just talk about the problems of digital colonization and cry about it, the hacking approach
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and having this historical perspective that it has been happening, give us some hope and inspiration to other practices in digital environments, you know? So I don't know if anyone has a question, comment.
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So, ooh, lots, could you? Everyone went. Oh hi, coyotes. Thank you very much for that. I think it's a very useful way of looking at things
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and I say this as a privileged white man. I actually feel like I'm colonized as well by those industries and governments and practices. So you show that infrastructure embeds power relationships and still part of it is still delivered through Twitter, this massively centralized US-based company.
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So it made me think that maybe we're a lost generation looking at the devices being used here and around, looking at what we are and how we do it. But we know a clear way for truly universal technology that belongs to everyone, that we would everyone control. It's free, liberal software
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to take back control of the machines. It's decentralized services where we keep control of where the data flows. It's end-to-end encryption when we take care of the keys. So if our generation is lost, what's the plan for the next generation? How the children in your countries and everywhere around the world, how the teenagers could be made to understand that
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if we didn't understand it ourselves? Just to quickly respond on that, and we have to be very careful because the TPP, the TIP and TISA are tightening our hands
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to answer precisely with the public policies related to that. I mean, it might be against those even to take the options that we want. Can I go? Hi, thanks. It was really interesting for the insights.
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Before I make my comment and ask you actually a question, I will tell you a little bit about my background. So I come originally from Russia. I live here in Germany for four years, and my perspective on copyright, security, and this kind of stuff changed a lot. So when I lived in Russia, I thought it was okay to download a movie and watch it,
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just like this. Apparently, I don't think like this anymore, but I do agree that there are some companies that own the world, and they're all kind of in Silicon Valley. But then in many countries, including the country where I'm from, there is no infrastructure
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and there is no support for companies to grow and develop, no for government, no from people. They cannot earn money. And I can tell you a lot of examples of companies going from Russia and becoming American companies just because they can grow and be successful. They also want to earn money. So my question is about the hackers.
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Like there is always this resistance, people like saying it's okay to break the copyright laws, it's okay to download the movies, even though the authors also want to earn money and they don't produce just for fun. So the question is, is it like destructive way, the right way to just like fight the system
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that yes, they kind of enforce you from the States, maybe their companies, their movies, the Hollywood. Is it the right way to actually hack them to download it for free? Or maybe like we should more support the local companies, the markets, make infrastructure for them, like talk to governments
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and actually encourage them to support these people. Yeah, just a couple of thoughts about that. I guess as the mic gets to the next question, I can quickly address the two things. And I think we're already hacking time. Nobody has told us to stop, but it would be great to know how much time we have. Both points are really interesting and you're right.
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I mean, at the end of the day, there are people who have been waiting. We've been waiting on the world to change or so many people have been waiting on the world to change. They've been waiting for their governments to get things right. For those development organizations saying they're bringing all these things to them to get it right. And I think we're also living in a race against time in that sense of people want things unlocked and they want them now. So it speaks to the fact that even with our own governments
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or with our own power structures, which we did not address or have time to address, they have to understand that they're just signing off on like WIPO, the intellectual property treaties that completely skew the balance of power is messed up. So it's really the political and policy approach should definitely be the right way,
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but I don't know if we can truly tell people to keep waiting on the world to change. I think there's still some hope because even as much as we're lost, we know we're lost and we're trying to get found. We are trying to unlock this knowledge. We are interacting. We are acknowledging. So I think that's how better to get found by first acknowledging you're lost.
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So I think it's not necessarily entirely dystopic. So I think I have hope that we could make things easier. Actually quickly, there's one example that you can look online later, Bolivia. Actually Bolivia has a long-term plan, 10 years plan to get what Jeremy wants. Let's see if they ever achieve it, but they got it really well
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because there's like first indigenous president that knows how to hack the system it seems. Hi, thank you for this talk. It's really insightful. I have a quick question related to, so I'm from India and I spend a lot of time looking at the net neutrality fight that happened there recently with Facebook
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and it really showed the dark side of digital colonialism. But the other thing it also exposes is the inequality in the country itself where people like me who have the privilege to come to the West and see what free internet like Richard Stallman's version of free looks like compared to people who are coming from farms who have no access to this technology. So Facebook's narrative,
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when they were critiquing the government trying to make the internet more open was that why are you not allowing us to give farmers access to this knowledge? And it actually is fighting, it's making worse the inequality that already exists for corporate gain. So I just wondering if you have any thoughts on how to fight that sort of rhetoric
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to prevent internal struggle to get worse because of these kind of conversations. The way I see it is with all these technologies that we are adopting, they're just really amplifying what already exists. This is a failure of systems that have been before.
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This is shortcomings of the first liberation that we underwent in different post-colonial countries. And I think it gives us a bigger, even bigger responsibility as a kind generation of people who are here talking about this stuff to figure out how do we take it to the next level without widening it further. Now technology has great potential to do great good and great harm.
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We have to first acknowledge that first and foremost and also acknowledge that it's already being applied in very unequal structures and very unequal societies. I'm encouraged by what's happening in India with digital media startups that are fighting or just organically growing there. I would love to see that about innovation in Kenya and other places. In fits and starts it's happening. It doesn't mean it will necessarily address it
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but I think it touches to the idea of being a lost or lost on your way to be found type of generation acknowledging these things. The technology in and of itself is not going to be a panacea. It's not going to just powerful, make everything right, clean and whitewash all the problems away but really understanding under what continuum we're applying technology. So I think our role is to be awakened
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not just to the technological but also to the political, cultural, social, all of that and I guess through technology as well. So it's one of those situations. Yeah, and Merged Cielo's know for a few time, a long time, engineers developing their own architecture
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of the internet, using our code and standards are neutral and they are not. They have this political implication since it's noting that has been evolution that awareness of the political implications of standards and protocols that need to go higher
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in this lack of the development of applications and so on. On the other hand, we need to have our politicians get aware of this process of digital colonization, be able to question what is internet freedom,
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how this concept has been used for marketing purposes just like concepts like big data, smart cities. Those are commercial concepts and Renata wants to talk. No, and not only that, just to close, it is also political.
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I mean, we need to frame it as control, as these layers of control and idea. I mean, people when you explain that is actually manipulated behaviors, manipulated, like limiting your library to four books, limiting your mobility to the places that you are allowed to enter.
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Like smart borders is about to happen in Europe actually and they're rushing to get all the biometrics of the refugees in fact and they're rushing actually and putting in the sustainable development goals the identity, digital identity. This is becoming, this is not anymore your computer
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and you, it will be everywhere and no place to hide kind of. So, it is important to frame it as control and threats to democracy. I think that that, I mean, we have seen recent examples in Argentina, Brazil and so on and how dangerous in the lead hands
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that there always has oppressed these two become. Because it's that, we are producers of information about us and about everyone around us and information is power in the end. So, to who are we giving all this power
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is I think the core question. I think I'll just close with a quote from the feminist movement that rings true across the board for me anyway. Some of you may know this, but Audre Lorde once said, for the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game,
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but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. I think at the end of the day, that is what is emerging. When we start talking about free and open source software, that's when we're saying we're building alternative tools to start taking the master's house down. So, I'm encouraged greatly to meet so many amazing people in the force movement and indeed in the key today this morning, we're told we may really be the last generation who has choice here.
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We have to make it count. We absolutely have to make it count. Thank you.