Politics & Communication with Joshua Gee

For those that don’t already know. I was lucky enough to attend the 2011 Personal Democracy Forum after winning one of the 2011 Google Fellowships. After meeting amazing people and learning a ton, I am collecting my (admittedly scattered) thoughts on the conference into a series of posts.

By design, pdf was brimming with optimism. If you get a bunch of activists and technologists into a room, that will happen. However, there was also an undercurrent of trepidation over the future of the web. I, for one, didn’t really understand or take seriously the forces at play which could jeopardize the idea of a free and open internet. While activists were using Twitter and Facebook to overthrow dictators, they were also being tracked for advertising purposes. Amazon and Paypal decided they wouldn’t support Wikileaks after just a hint of pressure from the United States Government. What would have happened if Facebook or Twitter decided they weren’t on the side of the revolutionaries, but on the side of the Government? What would happen to everyday citizens if Google or Facebook decided to give the CIA complete access to their back-end user data to help fight terrorism. Unlike some people I work with, I don’t think it has happened yet, but scary nonetheless. Meditations on these ideas, and on the need for citizen or consumer-owned alternatives ranged from the academic to the poetic. I particularly enjoyed all of these speakers because none of them were even remotely on my radar (a reflection on me rather than on them).

Find out more, plus the videos, after the jump.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, the author of The Googlization of Everything, talked about the challenges activists face working through what are essentially corporate networks. He made the obvious point that these are all companies, we shouldn’t expect them to act for the benefit of everyone. He also castigated the audience, reminding them that they shouldn’t consider themselves “citizens of the internet” but citizens of their own countries, where political battles are being fought that could have immense impact on the future of the internet. I almost forgot about his talk, but one line really stuck with me. He said that the internet isn’t a public square; instead, someone organizing via Twitter and Facebook is conducting a “rally in a shopping mall or debate in a Starbucks.” His talk starts at the 30:29 mark in the video below and goes for about 15 min.

Professor Eben Moglan was someone who is fantastically internet famous who I had never heard of. He is a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, and is the chief legal counsel to the Free Software Foundation. He had the unenviable task of following Dan Sinker (@Mayoremmanuel), who had one of the best talks of the conference. He proved himself more than up to the task. He made the most compelling case I have heard for identifying the forces on the internet trying to take away our online freedoms. While he was somewhat gloomy, he also presented a clear vision for a better future, plugging the project he is working on, The Freedom Box Foundation. He also delivered the killer line, “without anonymity on earth the human race will be no more.”

The final highlight was Mark Pesce, who is another person I followed on Twitter before the conference. He didn’t make any particularly insightful points, and I overhead a lot of people talking about his presentation as BS. Still, I liked it. It was conference plenary as performance art. If nothing else, he intrigued me enough that I bought his book on the way out of NYC.

I have considered myself a technological optimist, frequently arguing that most companies aren’t out to screw us and that everything is getting better. I still to believe that we should blame stupidity before we look for sinister motives. Still, these are big companies and since I do most of my professional, political, and personal work inside these networks, it does seems as if I should have my eyes open a bit more to the potential consequences and downfalls. But let’s be honest, saying you are going to “be aware” of something is really BS. Am I going to change my behavior? A bit. I am going to take some concrete steps to support privacy and free software. I made a small contribution to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I switched back to Firefox for my browser, I am going to try to use more open-source software, and I am going to update and use my Disapora profile a bit more. Not earth-shattering, but it’s a start.