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Speaker1:
And.

Speaker2:
Welcome to Radical A.I., a podcast about technology, power society and what it means to be human in the age of information, we are your hosts, Dylan and Jess. And in this episode, we interview Devia Siddarth about decentralizing A.I. democratization and how we can utilize the logic of social movements to influence our technology design.

Speaker3:
Divya Siddarth is a political economist and social technologist at the Microsoft Office of the CTO, working to understand, preserve and extend democracy through technological process and innovation. She previously taught classes at Stanford University on building technology for good and creating a more secure world for political activism and engagement in civil society. Divya also spent several years in India as a research fellow working with activists and politicians to think through democratized alternatives to existing tech platforms.

Speaker4:
And finally, important context for this conversation. Divya is a visiting scholar at the OSTREM Workshop, which is one of the leading spaces thinking about the common

Speaker3:
And we'll just jump right into it. So we are so excited to share this interview

Speaker5:
With Divya, with all of you. We are on the line today with Divya Siddarth, Divya, welcome to the show.

Speaker6:
Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker5:
Of course, absolutely, it's great to have you here. And today we are talking a lot about democratizing A.I. politics and social movements. And I and let's just start with democratization. We've heard this buzzword quite a bit and we're going to ask you to clear it up for us. So how would you define democratization of A.I.?

Speaker6:
Yeah, well, this is a great question and I think one of my pet peeves and also core driving forces, which is. In this age, kind of big tech platforms, I think the word democratization has come to mean increasing access to a system as being democratizing that system. And this can be a major issue because increasing access to something like the Internet is a great thing. Giving people who are unbanked access to banking is a great thing, but that's not democratizing the economy. Giving people access to the Internet is not democratizing the Internet. It may be a clear prerequisite to democratizing something, but it's not the same. And I think instead thinking about democracy as the structure of power relations and as a way to provide meaningful voice and agency over decision making rather than simply access is really crucial. When we think about democratizing or democratizing technology development as a whole. There's also, I think on the political side, a conception of democratization as being inherently tied to the democratic structure of a country or of a nation state where democratic tech ecosystem of the tech ecosystem that occurs within a democratic country, which is really not the case because intentionally designing for democratic logic is very different from having technology operate within a democratic state and letting. The broader structures of a nation state defined whether or not technology is democratic or is not democratic, let go of the opportunity to again think about those power structures, the voice the technology provides, who has access to actually changing and directing it rather than just using it. And so with all of that, I think a positive version of the democratization looks like is producing economically, structurally, technologically democratic outcomes, intentionally being designed with democratic logic, including meaningful voice and participation, having clear governance structures that are themselves democratic and clear accountability structures. And all of those pieces really fit into this broader concept of democratization.

Speaker4:
So there are, as we know, parts of the world are nation states that identify and function as democracies, as maybe representational democracies, et cetera, and then there are nation states that do not necessarily identify or their structure is not in democracies. And when we talk about democratizing, I as we kind of break down some of the nuance, is this is this a term that can be global, I guess, or does it does there have to be a movement towards democracy in order for itself to be democratized?

Speaker3:
Yeah, I mean, I think

Speaker6:
Both obviously democratization across non technological spaces, institutions, workplaces, nation states, et cetera, are important for democratization and the other spaces. I also think tech can be an enabler that or a decent enabler of that. It's really important as we build into the technology that make that choice. And in terms of a global movement towards democracy, I think that that is a piece of what we'd like to enable with our technology development. So I would almost put that question to say, how can we enable that with the way we're thinking about technology, with the way we're really thinking about the future? I think as a as a political project and as a technological project, not just one or the other, and expanding our political and technological imagination to build systems that design for and foster democratic participation in many ways that aren't nation state focus and in some ways that are.

Speaker4:
A quick follow up on that is democratization good? Sometimes I feel like there's also critiques about democratization, especially in terms of centralization. And just there's all these multisyllabic words going on here. When we think of democratization, should we go towards, you know, this is a good, good value, like we should be moving towards this?

Speaker6:
Yeah, that's a great question. I do actually have this great article on decentralization, kind of asking the same question, which is so many systems right now are calling for decentralization in different ways. But what does that really mean? And tying it to this idea of a floating signifier from Levi Strauss to say, you can put anything on to this word? Right. I think democratization kind of functions similarly, and that can be useful. It's definitely good in building coalitions. It's good because there's something in democratization that's about experimentation and not about pointing towards a perfect end state. But it also leads to a lot of space open in terms of calling all sorts of things democratization that perhaps aren't. And and that's kind of where we started, I guess, in this conversation. And in terms of is this good or bad, I would really say looking at the material outcomes is the only way we can figure out whether it's good or bad. I think it's a value to build into technological systems. Yes, I think it a good value in that sense, but it can't be good absent leading to the kinds of outcomes we want to see. And that's the only way to really determine whether whether it's being implemented appropriately, whether it actually means anything at all when it's being applied to a system. Right. I mean, it can be very much an empty word, I think.

Speaker6:
And what that word is imbued with practically is system specific. So democratizing something like social media might look very different from democratizing something like workplace coordination. And we can't use the same concepts across both of those things. But we've seen successful democratization across both of those. I mean, I think the cooperative movement is there is a constant reminder of the democratization can look like in practice and cooperative look so different regionally. I work with a lot of cooperatives in my time in India and even in the same town, cooperatives can look incredibly different in their structures. But I would say there's a democratization there and that's always been closely tied to other social movements. And then in terms of social media on the Internet, perhaps democratization there first looks like public accountability through a public interest mandate or it looks like data interoperability. Regulation now is not the same as communities having full agency over social media. It's not, but it's a step in that direction. And it could have the kinds of outcomes that we want to see. So I think there is a real deep expertise that's required to figure out what democratization means in various contexts. And we definitely don't want it to become the kind of word that can just be applied to technological systems without thinking about the material aspects.

Speaker5:
So without running the risk of accidentally trying to prescribe like one set of democratizing principles on all tech systems, I'm going to ask us to do something tangent to that just because for me, it helps to be a little bit specific about some of these processes. And so when you when you talk about using democratic logic, like the same kind of logic that's in government and then putting that logic into technological systems, what are some of those pieces of logic? What are some of the values and the processes and just the things that we are placing within these technological systems to actually democratize them?

Speaker6:
Yeah, I think you absolutely agree on concrete examples. And one of the great ecosystems that I've been thinking about working with recently is the broader digital democracy of Taiwan, which I think does have a lot to offer in terms of providing just that concrete understanding. And I'll say one piece is the design and the goals of the technology. So are these designed for democratic ends? I would say the first piece here is access, which is things like universal broadband, things like digital competence, education that they have that are constantly expanding the range of citizens that can functionally access platforms and participate in digital democracy and bridging the digital divide to right by holding offline spaces that feed into online processes. So access, I think, is the first piece in design. But secondly, I think this means inclusive design and useful participation towards an end. So rather than optimizing for engagement or encouraging comments without a practical outlet, as we see in other technical or even civic tech systems, this legislation process that uses technologies that are underpinned by consensus algorithms, diversity scoring, right reporting agreement across lines of difference. And so having this participation towards an end and some accountability structure that says people have voice over clear decisions that then have material consequences that people are accountable to, whether that's a government or the private sector in terms of regulation. So the second piece is socio technical and participatory, probably implementation structures. And that means taking a technology that may or may not have, quote unquote, democratic design at its core, say, GitHub or Google Docs, for example, like these to me are value neutral or potentially in some cases not even value neutral technologies and saying, can we implement these in a way that furthers democratic participation, that gives people more access to information that they might need to make decisions and all of those kind of things.

Speaker6:
So if they can become used to disseminate policy information, if they can become GitHub, for example, as a tool for civic hacking, as a way to make the budget more transparent or run participatory budgeting structures, then those become democratic technology, even though they may or may not have only been conceptualized in that way. And they certainly are not only used in that way. And then I think the next piece is a broader collective ecosystem. So just returning to the example of Taiwan for a second, because I realize I didn't quite set this up. So Taiwan basically had a social movement in the in 2010 called the Sunflower Movement. And this was kind of analogous to Occupy Wall Street in some ways and directly occupy the parliament sorry, the legislative building of Taiwan basically, and set up all of these processes for collaborative consensus building and disseminating information and deliberation that made such a difference and electrify the public to such an extent that folks from that movement started getting incorporated into the government directly to bring those platforms into the halls of legislation. And so that the major example of this is Audrey Tong, who's timelines for a digital minister, was one of the leaders from the movement and also from the Associated Civic Hacking Collective Zero.

Speaker6:
And I think this really exemplifies now what does it look like to take something that was built in a social movement context that has that idea of distributing power, flattening hierarchies, distributing voice, but also has the technological backdrop to say we do that in a way that it's a means to an end. It's not just inviting comments. It's not just civic tech for transparency without accountability. It's really inviting comments to say what's the next steps we should take here? And the next steps ended up being the ecosystem. Agreed. Like, we want to become more institutionalized. We want to be a part of government processes. Right. And taking that forward and then building these technologies that are designed and implemented to further democratic ends. I think that's not just something that we can see in democracy and government. That's something we can see in democratic decision making more broadly, which is the kind of things that I think we need to build into the governance of tech systems and I think governance and not government, because I think there can be ways of civil society, for example, is more involved in the governance of technological systems without. The government being involved in the least, and that just looks like very robust accountability structures. The good version perhaps is Facebook's oversight board. Right. And these kinds of ways of allowing people to have a stake in the technologies that they end up using in their lives anyway.

Speaker4:
So I'm curious how we can bring social movements and how they're built into this work of democratizing A.I., and I'm curious if, like what barriers we might see out in the field when we attempt to do that?

Speaker6:
Yeah, definitely. I think there's an incredible amount of work with the base. And also, as we've seen, significant barriers. I would say one of the major few of the major things about social movements that I'd like to see more of the space are one really mapping who has voice and decision power and where power sits and in systems and where we'd like it and where the gaps are. Another piece is social movements are, by their nature, sustained. Right. That's really what sets them apart from other kinds of sort of shorter term political actions or goals and the really collective challenges by people with common purpose and solidarity. And they often extend for a really long time and have the ability to grow and create a system around them. And this is absolutely what I see already happening to an extent in the space, the communities you've been able to create and I like there is a lot of that happening. And and I wouldn't claim to be an expert on all of it. But I think what we can really bring in is concrete structures of collective decision making across sort of the pipeline of A.I., whether that's data comments of data trust and data unions, whether that's bringing stakeholders in on implementation. I did some work on climate policy, for example, which is we might think of as pretty orthogonal to some of these questions, but a lot of it ended up centering on how do we bring in community organizations, civil society organizations, the mutual aid groups that are being spun up for covid into the top down decisions that are happening around contact tracing, that are happening around resource allocation. And I think there's really those bridges are something that technology can build but isn't currently being directed towards.

Speaker6:
And so there are a lot of kind of gaps that can either widen as we're currently seeing. I think I as a space and I might even take issue a little bit with what quote unquote the space is, which I think you've done a lot of kind of interrogating on this podcast. But let's just say as a space does have inherently power concentrating, kind of centralizing effects. Right. It can come from everything from requires a lot of compute basically requires huge resources that's inherently centralizing all the way to a tiny number of people are able to make decisions that run these autonomous kind of decision making systems that huge numbers of people have to live with but have no transparency. And you and I think the social movement logic here is the opposite of that transparency, meaningful voice participation beyond access to tech and into directing the technology. And to me, that really comes back to how do we find that? There's this quote by Ruth Wilson. Feel that I love find a future that already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities and kind of grow that future. And I think that's what we have to do here where incredible work is happening. There are so many kind of pieces of this collective change happening, incredible social movements as we've seen around the world, and also technology that's pulling us in this power, concentrating direction rather than building the alternative futures we see are possible with the tech we have, with the institutions we have, with all the community work that's happening. And really creating that future is is the work.

Speaker5:
Whenever we talk about and by we I mean me and my colleagues, whenever I talk about like imagining the future in a democratized technological space or like a decentralized space, I feel like the first topic that always comes up is block chain. And this is like such a big buzzword. And especially since we've never talked about it on this show, I don't want to go too deep into block chain at this point. But could you offer just maybe like a very, very brief description of what block chain is in case anybody who's listening is still unsure about what that word actually means and how the block chain is a decentralized technological entity and artifact? And if it if it uses this decentralization and good or bad ways as of now.

Speaker6:
Yeah, absolutely, I think at its core, block teams are the block created a system of recording information, right. That makes it transparent, difficult to impossible, difficult to tamper with, and is is basically a tamper proof ledger way of storing data. And I think the reason it's been really exciting to some folks in this. Wanting to decentralize way is that it often eliminates the need for any kind of quote unquote, middleman organization to do that verification process that we see we need for financial transactions, we need for governance even. Right. There's a huge amount of verification that happens in a lot of our day to day that hypothetically fluctuating structures could obviate the need for and have that be much more peer to peer where you can verify on the block itself rather than meeting all these external entities. So at its core, I think that's the promise. However, I also think that in practice. First of all, cryptocurrency is one of the initial implementations or use cases, a blockade has been very centralized in a lot of ways. I mean, from the monetary perspective, if you look at holdings of Bitcoin, it's even more centralized than the broader economy to the kind of structures that I used as consensus algorithms, which not to get too technical, but they're culpable for the mistake.

Speaker6:
And the most important thing is they require either huge mining kind of rates, which are very expensive, and also the environmental concerns or stake, which is a lot better on the environmental side, but still requires staking some currencies. They're they're very kind of economic needs to have be a part of this system. So we're seeing that the well, the infrastructure allows for some level of decentralization. It's not necessarily that all the implementations themselves are centralized. And I think that's where we really come to do a decentralized just the technical architecture. And then if we keep our centralized and social systems in place, then you can use what I see as a many ways, a fairly value neutral technical architecture in service of a range of ends. Now know, the fact that there's this decentralization potential built in means that it does have the is to create great governance systems. And I think a lot of folks in the Ethereum space especially are working on this. And I did some work on personhood algorithms are trying to sketch out an alternative to work in terms of state, which is just I find that I'm a person and then I can participate in governance and sort of a broader way than we already have voting and things like that.

Speaker6:
And not to like I think there's a lot of exciting work happening here, but it's really one of those situations where we can't have decentralized architecture and then keep the centralized kind of system surrounding it and expect that the outcomes will really be decentralized. And I think there's also something to be said about some centralizing structures that can have virtues and combining a decentralized protocol, for example, with accountable centralization, kind of coming to stakeholders collectively govern a centralized good. Right. And I think there's a reason that a lot of a lot of progress has been made by organizations that do have some sort of centralized Decision-Making structure and are yet accountable, at the very least to their members. We can even think of corporations at their best as something like this, where you can combine decentralization of power with accountable centralization and use some technological implementations of decentralization for one end and then the governance mechanisms for accountable centralization on the other. Then I think you could really start sketching out what is a different type of a world look like.

Speaker4:
We've alluded to this throughout this conversation, but I'm wondering if we can take a step back and look at centralization, because that seems to be like the problem statement of moving towards decentralization. When we think of centralization, what should come to listeners minds are the specific examples of ways that maybe centralization works well and then also reasons why we should be moving towards a decentralized space.

Speaker6:
I think centralization like decentralization, like democratization, like these big words can have that same floating signifier problem where you can put a huge range of concepts under the word. So I'll just say, I think some positive examples of centralization look like, for example, a local government. Right. They're able to, to some extent, centralized power by collecting taxes and deciding what those taxes are used for. But there's a huge amount of in the ideal state, which is what we're talking about, accountability in terms of elections, in terms of, in some cases, direct democratic participation, which I think potentially technology could enable a lot more of representative democracy to say, yes, resources are centralized to an extent so that we can create programs that work at scale, that work across neighborhoods, which is something we need to do. But there's a lot of accountability in a decentralized way to make that centralization process work across different communities. So I think that's a positive kind of mechanism of centralization. However, there are also significant negative mechanisms of this, which are we see incredible concentrations of wealth, power, capital right now in the economy and in the political space is a direct outgrowth of that concentration in the economy and particularly in the tech sector between kind of monopolies, the enclosure of what I would call the Commons, the digital commons, rather than the physical commons, which is what happened a few hundred years ago. There's this kind of centralization, has zero accountability, has very little transparency. And so I think not even getting into the nuances that I know have been covered on this show in terms of who gets the power when it's centralized. Right. The the racial issues here, gender issues, Western imperialist hegemony, all of those major problems that lead to deciding when power is centralized, what entities are centralized in just thinking more in the abstract that this power concentration with no accountability does not lead to positive outcomes for people because people just don't have any decision making power over what those systems priorities are. So I think it's really, to me, the difference between accountable and pluralistic centralization versus unaccountable, untransparent and concentrating centralisation.

Speaker5:
You mentioned the Commons briefly in your response to that last question. I'm wondering if you could maybe outline for us what you mean when you say the Commons and how that applies to technological systems.

Speaker6:
Yeah, absolutely, and this is now I think there a lot of. Reasons like common space thinking is a little bit coming to the forefront. Some of these conversations and could really chart a path for itself. A comment is basically some sort of shared resources. But it's not just the resources. It includes this idea that these resources are maintained or co-produced by a community or group of stakeholders. And so there's this idea that there's no comments without commenting. Right. So common. You know, some people think of it as a set of resources, but it's not just that. It's that plus this governance mechanism that is the quote unquote common link and it's managed across the rules and values of a community. So the idea of the Commons has been around for a long time. Famously, Elinor Ostrom, this kind of concept of governing the Commons pulled from the idea of natural resource commons. So how do people in a neighborhood manage the lake that they all lived with? And there's some you can't necessarily exclude people from going to the lake, but if someone fishes all the fish from the lake, then other people can't. And so a lot of communities that come up with a series of social norms and rules and sanctions to make sure that everyone had access to what they needed from these common common resources. And now when we think about the digital commons, I think that there is a little bit of a different ecosystem at play because some of these comments are inexhaustible. The knowledge comments, for example, me reading a Wikipedia article doesn't in any way take away your ability to read that article. And so you even have this idea of collective abundance that all it requires is this intentional community shepherding and stewardship of that collective abundance.

Speaker6:
And I think Wikipedia is a great example of that. And there are even smaller kind of data comments where neighborhoods come together and pull data to figure out what some of the major problems are or where taxes need to be diverted and things like that. There's scientific commons where different researchers pool scientific data so that they all have more to work with in terms of reaching more robust conclusions and things like that, where it's a different concept of the commons, but the same idea of community stewardship, taking something that is already shared resources and really intentionally making it useful for for large groups. And even coming back a little bit to the conversation and to the conversation, I think this is where these emerging technologies can have incredible impact in creating this abundance and in creating structures to steward this abundance. And this is already happening a little bit and trying to open up new Internet protocols with identity payments, with data sharing and things that have been inclosed, are put behind walled gardens basically by a lot of private entities, but would lead to so much more innovation, productivity and solidarity and wellbeing if they were out and able to be changed and accessed and built upon by many. And going back to the Taiwanese ecosystem, I think it's this idea of open protocols of open data Updater Commons that allows for a huge amount of innovation on top of the foundations that already exist. And so we bring a lot more resources into the digital commons for that shared ownership instead of having it be common and find rather than commodifying. Basically, I think that could be a really big piece of how we imagine these countries and in a practical and usable, unbuildable way going forward.

Speaker4:
And then we also have this concept of the tragedy of the commons, which basically, if folks are for folks who haven't heard of it, if a group of people is, there's no sort of regulation whatsoever. And so you have like a pasture with like your own individual sheep, your own individual self interest is going to drive you to have your sheep eat as much of the grass as possible and then there won't be enough for other people. Do we see the same kind of tragedies as a model that can also work as we strive to understand the digital commons right now? Or is this just a totally different situation?

Speaker6:
Yeah, well, I think, in fact, there's been some pushback on the tragedy of the Commons by saying it's sort of describing more of an open access system than a common system. Right. Which is the reason this happens is that there weren't governance stewardship mechanisms in place where that community comes together and says, don't you can't continue doing this. And this is one of the problems we see with something like open data versus the data commons, where it's given that there's an abundance principle here, it's not necessarily that the data gets overfished or something bad, but it's much more when you just open things out without intentional stewardship around it. It often has no impact on existing power structures. Often organisations that already have significant capacity are the ones that use that data. Most often it's not the small civil society organisations or even the small startups or citizens who are interested in answering questions about their neighborhood. They use open data because it's not set up to be used in that way, whereas something that's much more set up as a commons has that bridge built in that it requires a lot more work. It requires investment. Opening things up is actually a lot easier, especially in the digital space where there is and you can download things infinite time so you don't lose a lot by just opening up. But what you do lose out on is all of the things that can be built on top of that if those bridges are made with intentional government.

Speaker5:
Something that I'm wondering in this conversation is how plausible is all of this? I know that especially when it comes to buzzwords like block chain and democratization and decentralization and all those like multisyllabic words that we've been throwing out in this conversation, it seems very futuristic and very you topic. But I'm wondering if this is something that we can actually look forward to in the near future or if there's still a lot of work that needs to be done before we can get there.

Speaker6:
Yeah, I mean, this is the big question, but I think how I answer it myself is a lot of this work is already happening. We don't even have to wait for the future. We have to find the smaller places where it's happening and help us grow. So data comments like I've been talking about exist in tons of different ways across the world, both in a very online way. And also, as I was doing fieldwork, for example, on a project I was doing earlier on, collaborative, something like a quote unquote data commons has existed in an offline capacity for years and years to make cooperative structures work. And so that, I think, is already in place in terms of some of the deliberative process since we've been talking about they're great tools like Polish and Lumière that are run cooperatively, are run as open source foundations that help organizations do that kind of consensus building work. There's really cool work, I think, in the startup community on this idea of quote unquote, exit to community, that they're helping more smaller organizations instead of exiting to being acquired or exiting to IPO as startups are want to do, figuring out how do we exit to community ownership and realizing that that actually helps with growth, that helps with innovation, because it's for people who are most invested in whatever that organization is putting out that can do the most in terms of growing it.

Speaker6:
And the space, I think, coming out of fairness, accountability, transparency, community, but also more broadly, finally grappling with this. What I would say is inherently centralizing notion of what it looks like has been so much more discussion of open sourcing, some of the foundational organisms in the space, so much more trying to engage in collaborative and community design rather than totally Top-Down design. I don't think that this is a this is a full victory. I mean, I think a lot of these are really small offshoots of a broader future. That's possible. But I I'm always concerned about thinking about this as something we have to wait for build towards when I think it's much more we have to grow it and we're already in the process where we can be growing it and we can be finding those those places already. And that's what I spend most of my time doing. And perhaps that's why I'm so optimistic, because I see all of these offshoots and have worked across a lot of these organizations to really see that the future is being built. And what it needs is the broader institutional power hierarchy differences that we're working towards to really blossom.

Speaker4:
Is it possible to incentivize these centralized systems so so even like the government and tech and all the complexes to give to be back or to centralize themselves? I guess that's a funny way to put it. But to bring themselves back to community ownership model, because it sounds like to you, we haven't jumped the shark on that, that that's the necessary next step. And I'm wondering for those kind of technological giants who are like, no, we like our agency, we like our self-regulation. We don't want to go back to the community to have them regulate us. How how can we make that move?

Speaker6:
Yeah, that's a great question also. But I think there is a huge role for regulation and for government involvement to play in mandating things like data interoperability. Right. Just the basic is that we need to say you can move from one platform to another in a way that you can't currently do, mandating some level of data sharing, mandating open access to researchers, perhaps a public interest mandate for social media platforms. These are all policy proposals that are actively being considered. They're not necessarily pie in the sky proposals, especially with a new appointment in the MIT administration. And do I think we can walk up to existing kind of. Highly concentrated entity either in the tax base or otherwise and say, hey, how would you feel about community ownership? Like, no, I unfortunately don't think that that would succeed. But I think between some level of enablement from the public sector, between investment and growth in communities, by communities which we're already seeing happening, between seeing the success of these. And that's something I tried to point out here, which is just these are incredibly effective systems. Data comments lead to a lot more innovation and success than siloed data does. Effective democracy in Thailand, for example, leads to way better outcomes on major public health crises covid than the US system. And so building that argument that, look, these kind of structures work and so many folks across all of these places, whether it's tech companies or government, are there because they believe in building towards. Human flourishing access agency and making the argument that these systems work better is useful. There is also the material piece which some people just massively benefit from the systems we have and don't want to change that. I'll always be true, but building the movement and again going back to the social movement, framing, building coalition across a range of allies rather than kind of narrowing down to a very small number of people who are exactly aligned is, I think, the way to move forward across all of these different pieces.

Speaker5:
A lot of times when we talk about some of these like high level concepts such as democratizing A.I. and trying to create these digital commons, it feels like it's a little bit out of reach. It seems like, oh, that needs to be left like the lobbyists or the policymakers or the people who are in power to actually make change happen. And I'm wondering if for those people who are listening to this podcast episode and just might not have any influence over policy at all in their day to day lives, at least not large influence, what is something that we can all do just in our daily lives to possibly influence and help further this decentralized model of technology?

Speaker6:
That's really exciting question, I think there's a lot that can be done, and I think that's very close to my heart because that's really how I enter the space in terms of working across nonprofit tech for good projects and really eventually seeing and mapping out who are these projects and building or who are these systems. I'm a part of really helping. And I think first, just having that understanding with any of the work that you're doing, whether it's tech policy or really anything, I really feel that. Any work can contribute to this project if it's really aware of how it interacts with distributing voice and agency and most of like a lot of the work that folks do does that. And then there's obviously I have the incredible privilege of spending my day to day life on this, but that is is really inaccessible for many. And I acknowledge that. And I'm really grateful for being able to do this. But I think some of that is organizing in your community is figuring out the organizations that are already doing this work and supporting them, going back to the basics. There's always kind of some level of commons work that's happening, I think. I recently moved to New York and I moved to New York in the middle of a pandemic, and I felt really isolated for a little bit and then found these amazing mutual that mutual aid communities that were just operating on my block and running community bridges and running programs through the worst of covid, basically tenants union places that are just agitating for community involvement in public planning. And I really think this is happening in every in every vertical and every neighborhood in different ways. That's not necessarily tech enabled. And look, all the best work in this space is not necessarily tech enabled. So I think there's a huge amount of work to plug into it and be a part of.

Speaker4:
And though, of course, we could talk about this for for much longer. We are coming to the end of our time together. So for folks who would like to continue this conversation with you or find out more about your research, where can they go?

Speaker6:
Probably the easiest place is at the exercise on Twitter, also feel free to e-mail me at 1:00 a.m. dot com. Yeah, I'm really, really excited to plug into this community. I think it's an incredible example of the work you've done in such a short amount of time to bring people together, to imagine these ecosystems, to think about the specifics, whether it's legal or policy or ethical on how to do it is such a great example of everything you've been talking about. It's been a real honor to be here.

Speaker4:
Thank you as well for all your work. And thank you for joining us today.

Speaker2:
We want to again thank Divya for our wonderful conversation, and I think what I'm really reflecting on right now is just the idea of the commons like what a commons looks like in the technology space, which for me, when I used to study like sociology and this concept of the tragedy of the Commons, which, you know, as David pointed out, there's also some critiques. Hum. But the idea of like a natural resource, like like water or or even air or something. And I'm just I am curious about what are the differences and similarities between something like that, where there is by definition a materiality and then something like technology, which in some ways there is a materiality in the servers or there's a materiality in how we utilize, you know, precious metals to to build it. But then there's also this immaterial space or this like perceived immaterial space of, you know, we're we're out in the ether of the Internet or we're thinking about these spaces kind of in between that that cross across borders again, almost by by definition now. And so I don't know if there's tensions there because obviously they're connected. And obviously they both have to do with systems of power, as David was talking about, who can make those decisions and who can't, who are not necessarily powerless. But there's definitely a power gradient that empower certain people who are already in power to make those decisions on behalf of millions or billions of people, because technology goes, goes, goes that deep across our world. And then there's people who just do not have that voice. And so how do we centralize pun intended and we centralize that that voice, how do we decentralize our technology in these systems of power and in some instances, systems of oppression? Just what did you think about this interview?

Speaker3:
I think I love centralizing decentralization. Definitely. That's that's the biggest point of the day. I agree with a lot of what you just said. I think that the tragedy of the Commons is fascinating to discuss in the context of the Internet. And I I really like your call towards materiality. I think that I for a second, I'm going to ignore the materiality of the the digital world just so I can envision what resources look like according to users of, let's say, the Internet, because to me, as a user of the Internet, it seems like resources are infinite. It seems like I will never run out of data. I will never run out of Wi-Fi. I will never run out of information. It's almost like there's an opposite, like equal and opposite problem. Instead of having finite resources, I have almost too many. Like, there's too much information to go around. There's too much information to pass through to know what's real. And so I think there's this interesting it's almost like a reverse tragedy of the commons, like what happens when you have too much of a good thing, although, I don't know, maybe misinformation isn't a good thing. So maybe this information on its own necessarily isn't just a good thing. But I did find Deva's comment fascinating about how there isn't really an ability to lose resources online in the same way that you can lose material resources.

Speaker3:
So, again, let's take like servers and the materiality of technology out of the picture just for a second and talk about like the ephemeral, ethereal part of technology that exists in, like the cloud and just the ability, the access to information that we have. If I was to download something like Dibia was saying, it doesn't make somebody else unable to download that same things. I'm not taking things from anybody by by taking something from the Internet. But we do lose things that aren't resources online in these centralized spaces. We lose the ability to equally distribute power amongst all the people, all the users. And so I thought that was that was a really fascinating point, that if we if we design technologies with affordance is for decentralization, then we have the ability to allow power to be equally distributed. And I think that power is a resource in this scenario. What we're trying to equate the commons to some sort of like digital alternative. But it is fascinating to think about what an overabundance of resources looks like online, because I think we're we're met with that challenge every day.

Speaker2:
Yeah. And this conversation made me think of just how how we define our, like, our problem definition when we design technology or how the assumptions that we make about humans, about human psychology directly informs the technology that then we create downstream. So one of the reasons why I'm harping so much on the tragedy of the Commons idea is that if we assume that humans are selfish, if we assume that humans are going to grab as much power. As possible at the expense of other people, at the expense of, you know, the fellow humans or, you know, other creatures as well, then we're going to design our technology differently. Right. And I think we're I think what it's going to do is create this echo chamber of us all trying to grab more and more power, more and more agency, because we're like, oh, well, if we don't if we don't get it, then someone else is going to get it. If we don't fill this niche in the market and someone else is going to and it falls into our techno solution ism, I think, to some degree, because everyone's just trying to, you know, move fast and break things. And I think that that's something that we need to be really aware of. Like are we just are we just doing something because we're like, well, we don't trust we don't trust other humans to do the right thing. And so we're going to create the thing as people going to quote people in power to do the best thing for for everyone, but then not actually ask those people what they need.

Speaker2:
Like, is that is that what we're going to do or is there a way to be a little bit more community oriented or participatory oriented? And and recently, if you have been listening to some of our recent episodes, you know, I've been on this whole scale kick of like, what can we do? Can we be ethical at scale, like period when we design technology at scale? Can it be ethical? Is there a way to actually get people's voices involved? And I think this for me is another nail in the coffin for for that for that idea to some degree of like well, there at scale, it's almost impossible to get all of those community voices, all those stakeholders involved, which is why you have hierarchies and governments and stuff like that. So I'm not necessarily saying get rid of the governments. Let's not do things the way that because this is the system that we have. But I am saying that there does need to be a push towards ensuring that community and multistakeholder approach, not just the stakeholders who are putting, you know, a massive, massive amounts of money or power into the system. But but but everyone who's going to be impacted downstream by these systems and technologies that we're designing

Speaker3:
But is true to the nature of governance and the nature of just trying to make things happen in the world. You kind of you need people to lead. You need to have some way to centralize decision making that actually makes things happen. And I don't think that that needs to be by the people who have the most power. The people who have the most money are the ones who need to be the centralized entity that they make the decisions. But I do think that there needs there needs to be some sort of governance that affords a decision making process. And if you put of if you put 20 people into a room and you tell them to make a decision, you can't completely decentralized that decision making process. You can't have everybody put equal input. And then a decision is just made. You have to have somebody make the decision to get everybody to either make a vote or somebody to make the decision to make the decision for everyone. There will be these natural centralized forces that kind of come out of a decentralised a a decentralized scenario or situation. But that was actually what I found so fascinating, talking about block chain with Divya. And I'm also just kind of a block chain geek because I, I, I have been trying so hard to understand how block chain and cryptocurrency works for years now, and I keep feeling like I understand and then I kind of don't understand again.

Speaker3:
But I really appreciate. Divya is quick intro and 101 on on the subject and I do think that her point about block change was spot on in the fact that block chain is technically decentralized in its infrastructure. So it's built to be decentralized and to allow collective decision making power by all of the people in an equally distributed way. But it doesn't necessarily get deployed in a set in a decentralized way. There are a lot of centralized entities that regulate it or that govern it in various ways. And so I think this is a very promising example personally of a technology that has to make things happen. So there has to be some sort of centralized entity that's allowing decision making to occur. But it has that decentralized foundation and infrastructure that affords the ability for people to hold those centralized entities accountable so that they aren't just subject to whatever exploitation or decision making that that centralized entity is making for them, which is the case of a lot of tech platforms that we encounter in our day to day lives as it is.

Speaker2:
And obviously, we could go back and forth about this. These are huge topics that we also hope to cover in future episodes. But for now, for more information on today's show, please visit the episode page at Radical Eye dot org.

Speaker3:
If you enjoyed this episode, we invite you to subscribe, rate and review the show on iTunes or your favorite podcast. You catch our new episodes every other week on Wednesdays. You can join our conversation on Twitter at radical iPod and as always, stay radical.

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