Surveillance

Capitalism

“Privacy is dead.”

Mark Zuckerberg

IBM maintained a customer site, known as the Hollerith Department, in virtually every concentration camp to sort or process punch cards and track prisoners…”

Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Holocaust.

“…IBM engineers had to create Hollerith codes … then print the cards, configure the machines, train the staff, and continuously maintain the fragile systems every two weeks on site in the concentration camps.”

Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Holocaust.

001 Auschwitz

002 Buchenwald

003 Dachau

3 Homosexual

9 Anti-social

12 Gypsy

8 Jew

4 Execution

6 “Special Treatment”

(Gas chamber)

International Business Machines, and its president Thomas J. Watson, committed genocide by any standard.

Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Holocaust.

“It was never about the antisemitism. It was never about the National Socialism. It was always about the money. Business was their middle name.

Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Holocaust.

“I found it terrifying … her letter made me take a look at the work I was doing and say, ‘Why? What am I contributing to?’

Elizabeth Wood, ex-IBM employee.

“When the president-elect follows through on his repeated threats to create a public database of Muslims, what will IBM do? Your letter neglects to mention.

Elizabeth Wood, ex-IBM employee.

“IBM would not work on this hypothetical project … Our company has long-standing values and a strong track record of opposing discrimination against anyone on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation or religion. That perspective has not changed, and never will.”

IBM spokesman, quoted by The Hill.

“IBM does not have much information about this period … We are a technology company, we are not historians.

IBM spokesperson Carol Makovich

Vision Fund: $100B venture capital fund

$45B from Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia

Source: How SoftBank ate the world, Wired UK

Apple, Qualcomm, Foxconn, Sharp and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala … also committed a further $20 billion”

João Medeiros, Wired UK

“That’s Masayoshi Son’s vision: a future where every time that we use our smartphone, or call a taxi, or order a meal, or stay in a hotel, or make a payment, or receive medical treatment, we will be doing so in a data ­transaction with a company that belongs to the SoftBank family. And, as Son likes to say …”

João Medeiros, Wired UK

“Whoever controls data controls the world.”

Masayoshi Son, Chairman, SoftBank

Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have the same business model.

People Farming

Venture Capital, Startups, Exits, Clouds, “Innovation”, Unicorns, and Ray Kurzweil’s Church of Exponential Growth.

The Problem

The Solution

We, the people, must own and control the data.

Data about us, is us.

Corporations?

Nations?

“British Digital Corporation”

Cities?

“…deploying socialised big data and artificial intelligence in the interests of citizens.”

You?

Yes

This is a battle for personhood.

Regulate

GDPR

General Data Protection Regulation

Data protection

Algorithmic transparency

Data minimisation

General Data Minimisation Regulation

  1. If your data and algorithms can be kept on your device, they must be.
  2. Any device that holds your data must be end-to-end encrypted.
  3. Only you hold the keys and you control who the ends are.

GDMR

Source: copyleftcof.org/sponsors

Source: Mozilla Firefox

Technological Regulation

Social Regulation

“When I joined Facebook in 2016 … people would stop and say, ‘It’s so cool that you worked for Facebook.’ That’s not the case anymore … It made it hard to go home for Thanksgiving.

Former product manager at Facebook, quoted in Wired

“If we ever become too evil, we won’t find anyone to work for us.”

Eric Schmidt, then-Executive Chairman, Google & Alphabet, Inc. to me @ Claire de Rouen bookshop, 2013

Replace

Stopgaps

Demo

Alternatives

Centralised

Federated

Peer-to-peer

Freedom

(less)

(more)

mastodon.social

mastodon.ar.al

(instance of one)

their.domain

your.domain

ar.al

“The surveillance-based business model of Facebook and Google is inherently incompatible with the right to privacy and poses a systemic threat to a range of other rights.”

Amnesty International

“Facebook and Google must not be allowed to dictate how we live online. It is time to reclaim this vital public space for everyone rather than a few powerful unaccountable companies in Silicon Valley.”

Amnesty International

Small Technology are everyday tools for every people designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.

Trusted nodes

Untrusted web node

ar.al

Post

Hello, this is my first public post… I can also talk privately to other people who have their own sites.

Developer tools

Everyday tools

Demo

small-tech.org

Copy of Small Technology – 45 mins, Dig It Up, Antwerp

By Aral Balkan

Copy of Small Technology – 45 mins, Dig It Up, Antwerp

A 45-minute talk to be presented as the opening keynote of Dig It Up conferene in Antwerp on February 20, 2020.

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