Join Dr. Corinne Cath and Dr. Fieke Jansen for a discussion on the politics of internet infrastructure - the theme of their latest book, Eaten by the Internet.
Eaten by the Internet makes Internet infrastructure visible as a force of political power, transforming the social world from the bottom up. This event will explore topics such as content moderation, colonialism in internet expansion, the impact of the blockchain, and online censorship.
FUTURES Podcast has partnered with SPACE4 and Housmans Bookshop to present a series of live events about the impact of capitalism on digital technology.
Speakers
Dr. Corinne Cath
Dr. Corinne Cath is a postdoc at the University of Delft, working with Dr. Seda Gürses and Prof Linnet Taylor. She is also a research affiliate at the Minderoo Centre at the University of Cambridge. Corinne is a cultural anthropologist who studies the politics of Internet infrastructure and cloud computing. Previously, Corinne was Vice President of Research at the Open Tech Fund, a US-based grantmaker focused on developing open-source technologies. She finished her PhD in 2021 at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), University of Oxford). Her current research focuses on how cloud computing is eating the internet and the adequacy of existing EU technology policy efforts that touch on cloud computing.
Dr. Fieke Jansen
Fieke Jansen is a postdoc researcher at the University of Amsterdam and a co-principle investigator of the critical infrastructure lab. She did herPhD at the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University, where she looked at the institutional and societal implications of data-driven risk scoring and biometric recognition in Brussels, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK. Fieke is a former Mozilla and Green Web Foundation fellow where she explored ways to frame the climate crisis as a core digital rights issue. Prior to starting her phd fieke worked on human rights and technology at Hivos and Tactical Tech. Fieke's research interest is to understand how the material impact of expending infrastructures are shaping the management, distribution, and depletion of natural resources.
Moderated by
Luke Robert Mason
Luke Robert Mason is a futures theorist who studies the technological developments that will alter what it means to be human. He is the host of the FUTURES Podcast where he explores the topics of artificial intelligence, human enhancement, space travel and virtual reality. Throughout his career, he has interviewed hundreds of the world’s most influential thinkers on their visions for the future. These insights have informed his collaborations with innovators in the fields of advanced science, emerging technology, and the arts; and have provided him with a unique perspective on the world of tomorrow. He is currently an ESRC-funded postgraduate student at the University of Warwick where he is studying towards a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies with a focus on the public perception of humanoid robots.
Featured Book
Eaten by the Internet makes internet infrastructure visible as a force of political power, which is transforming the social world, from the bottom up—through fifteen chapters contributed by a global set of researchers, activists, and techies. We are living a unique moment: internet technologies are the default infrastructure for society, not just how we communicate but also how we organise our social life, politics, and economy, all the way down to our material environments, like cities. Our world is eaten by the internet. This means that those who control the internet control the bounds of public speech, economic production, social cohesion, and politics, making its infrastructure a core political terrain in the networked age. The book’s chapters cover a wide set of topics, spanning from the global politics of content moderation by internet infrastructure to the colonialism inherent in the race to plug the moon, from the harms wrought by blockchain companies in rural America to the particularities of online censorship across Asia. The chapters take on thorny topics, discussing power consolidation in the advertisement and cloud industry, the role of internet infrastructure in the war in Ukraine, and tech’s environmental impact—amongst others. In doing so, this book roots contemporary technology debates in the politics of internet infrastructure and urges us to ask how can we ensure our infrastructures sustain us, rather than consume us?
Edited by: Corinne Cath
Contributors (alphabetically): Mehwish Ansari, Yung Au, Corinne Cath, Joan Donovan, Ksenia Ermoshina, Suzanne van Geuns, Gurshabad Grover, Fieke Jansen, Mallory Knodel, Ashwin Mathew, Maxigas, Francesca Musiani, Niels ten Oever, Britt Paris, Jenna Ruddock, Shivan Kaul Sahib, Michael Veale, and Meredith Whittaker.
Eaten by the Internet is published by Meatspace Press, an independent publisher translating academic research on tech to real life, or "meatspace".
You can order your copy of Eaten by the Internet here, or download a free copy of the pdf here.
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@FUTURESPodcast | #FUTURESPodcast
About the SPACE4 (Venue)
SPACE4 is part of Outlandish, a co-op that builds websites and digital tools for social good. They are interested in tech for good, progressive economics, and social change. They provide co-working, meeting, and event space, primarily to social enterprises and digital activists.
About Housmans Bookshop
Housmans is the longest continuous-running radical bookshop in Britain, established in 1945 and based in London’s Kings Cross since 1959. They specialise in books, magazines, and periodicals of radical interest and progressive politics, such as feminism, pacifism, Black politics, LGBTQIA+ politics, environmental justice and anarchism.
Ticket Information
The £5 charge for this event is a deposit that will be refunded if you attend. Tickets are free for journalists and members of the press. Contact info@futurespodcast.net for more information.