State of Big Tech 2022: Dismantling National and Global Digital Corps

Yves is here. Documentary filmmaker Lynn Fries gives a brief overview of some of the essays from the first issue of the magazine. The State of Big Tech, with this year’s theme “Digital Chassis Disassembly”. From the introduction:

We invite you to read the first edition of our State of Big Tech Compendium. Conceived as an ongoing year-on-year endeavor that will track and uncover developments in big tech, the debut edition of this powerful collection of essays brings together important perspectives on digital corporatization from different regions and groups.

The essays in this issue examine how these dynamics unfold in a wide range of contexts, from the integration of AI in education to the digital takeover of our food systems; from Big Tech’s attempts to monopolize research and innovation networks to their Trojan proposals to establish their power in multilateral spaces. Through various examples and illustrations, many of our authors defend a basic set of issues, exploring the machinations of private power, the flaws in the current regulatory framework, popular mobilization efforts, and bold visions of an alternative digital future.

State of Big Tech aims to contribute to the vision and blueprint for national and global recovery paths for society and the economy for the 99% by providing a scorecard of tech corporation wrongdoing and a constructive and critical mapping of politics and political action based on what doesn’t work.

I hope you can take the time to try out some of the essays. I hope the review below will whet your appetite.

Lynn Fries. Originally posted on GPENewsdocs

LYNN FREESE: Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries, producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs.

Capitalism in the Age of Intellectual Monopoly by Cecilia Ricap and Cedric DuranCentering society in a big technological reform Richard Hill Falsifying the Rules: How Big Tech Is Using Hidden ‘Trade’ Agreements and How We Can Stop Them Deborah JamesWhen Big Technology Came to the Farm: Asia’s Smallholder Resistance Plan by GRAIN.

This is a selection of essays that are part of collection of fifteen essayspublished in 2022 edition in The state of big technology.

The State of Big Tech β€” IT for Change research project. It is supported by Fair, Green and Global Alliance. It is an eight-member alliance that seeks to amplify the voices of people and communities around the world, partnering with over a thousand partner organizations in countries where people and nature are under constant pressure.

Under the theme of Dismantling Digital Enclosures and at the invitation of IT for Change, academics and activists from a wide range of fields and backgrounds contributed to this first edition of State of Big Tech.

As IT for Change states: β€œ essays deconstruct various phenomena such as the creeping onslaught of educational technology into public education, the digital takeover of food systems; Big Tech’s attempts to monopolize research and innovation networks, their Trojan proposals to establish their power in multilateral spaces, are issues raised by Web 3.0. But in addition to detailing the problem statement, our participants also capture popular mobilization efforts and bold visions of an alternative digital future that are trying to break out of the privatized fences of the status quoists.

Today’s short video will feature excerpts from three of these authors talking about their essays. These essays include: Milford Bateman Investor-focused Fintech model and its disadvantagesMichael Quet Creating a Socialist Public Domain on Social Media and Sofia Monsalve Suarez and Philip Seufert. The Great Technological Capture of Food Systems in Latin America: Elements of a Human Rights-Based Alternative. We now move on to our featured clips.

MILFORD BATEMAN, visiting professor of economics at the Juraj Dobrila University in Pula in Croatia: β€œIn preparing a chapter of this book, I am interested in fintech, short for financial technology. This is something that is widely celebrated around the world, but especially in the Global South. Because many see it as a way to bring development to local communities and contribute to poverty reduction and many other benefits.

Evidence to date suggests some benefits to communities in terms of easier access to credit, easier access to savings, better access to remittances, cheaper payments. But when you start looking at the long term and how these trends develop, you actually see a lot of downsides that are emerging and now risk drowning out any of the initial benefits of fintech.

So that’s what I was trying to see. This is still early stage research. But it is certainly very disturbing that many of the original advantages are now being completely erased by these disadvantages. And that fintech is now emerging as a new way of extracting value from the global south along the lines of the old colonial project.

And so I have documented some of the problems associated with it and other shortcomings that I can find. And at the end of the chapter, I point out a new type of model, the people-centric FINTECH model. We are talking about local communities using FINTECH platforms as a way to directly benefit the community. And you do not need to interact with Big Tech or international investors, but do it yourself. And also promote fintech, implement and adapt fintech in a way that helps local communities in the global south.

MICHAEL QUET, guest fellow at the Yale Information Society Project: Today I’m going to discuss an article on social media that I wrote for IT for Change. It is called Building a socialist social networking community. And it’s about how to transform the social media landscape to be truly democratic, bottom-up, egalitarian and environmentally sustainable on a global level.

So, over the past few years, the antitrust community has come up with a social media solution that forces large social networks to interact with smaller ones. So small networks have a real chance to increase their user base.

However, in their decision. There is a commitment to competitive capitalism and private ownership of social networks that seek to increase profit growth and try to maximize their user base in an all-against-all war for a limited user base in order to maximize revenues and profits.

So I think the harm we see on major social media, digital privacy violations and user manipulation, and a consumer model built on ads that threaten the environment, these things will remain intact according to their model.

In the article, I argue that instead, we should go further and try to build a truly bottom-up social media ecosystem that is community owned and controlled, free, open source, and decentralized. So that we do not stumble upon these harmful things. And so that people can control their social media experience.

I propose as a model fedivers, the development of which began more than ten years ago. And it is a set of interoperable social networks that already exist in the real world and have more than several million users. I also discuss other alternatives to further decentralize the already existing collaborative social media environment. And I explain how it works in the article.

And then I end the article with a discussion of some of the legal solutions. Because it’s one thing to have an alternative that exists in the real world that works and works well enough, and quite another to scale it. Because big social networks have already cornered the market.

So, I have a number of legal solutions that I think can be implemented and will actually turn social networks into a socialist property.

Obviously, we’re going to need a big grassroots movement for this to work, because you can’t destroy trillion dollar corporations without fighting back and trying to prevent it.

SOFIA MONSALVE SUAREZ , Secretary General of FIAN International: Big Tech is trying to control all areas necessary for life. Food is one of them. In alliance with Big Food and Agribusiness, Big Tech is a major driver of the potential increase in corporate takeover of our food systems.

But agribusiness is not the only entry point for big tech in agriculture. Big technology is also trying to infiltrate and control small-scale agriculture. How it is?

It provides digital infrastructure to rural areas, as well as digital market access platforms, digital advisory services, agri-digital financial services, and smart farming access for small-scale food producers. Why is this a problem??

By controlling the digital infrastructure, Big Tech is in a good position to misappropriate smallholder farmers’ data. Big technologies are trying to organize food production in such a way as to deepen the subordination of the interests of small farmers to world capital.

The capture of the collective knowledge of peasants and indigenous peoples and the monopolization of the rent that can be obtained from them is a central element of these efforts. Big technologies threaten the rights of peasants and indigenous peoples. Protecting our food sovereignty is a critical element in today’s fight against big technology.

FRIS: All of the State of Big Tech essays can be found at itforchange.net. The direct link looks like this: projects.itforchange.net/state-of-big-tech/.

In addition to the essays mentioned in today’s featurette, other published collection titles include: The Emergence of the Platform Economy: Implications for Labor and Sustainable Development in Developing Countries, Domestication of Big Technology? European Digital Markets Act; Big tech and the digital hype against Covid-19, Can data save lives: the right to health in the digital age, Web3 and the metaverse: which way for the Internet?, Big tech and the smartification of agriculture, Taxing big tech: policy options for developing countries, changing dynamics of labor and capital

Many thanks to IT for Change for making this content available to the public, and to all the supporters and contributors to this research project. And thanks for joining us.

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