Big Tech

Time and time again, we see the billionaire tech founder or CEO take the stage to present the latest innovation meant to make people’s lives better, revolutionize industries and glorify the power of technology to save the world. While these promises are dressed up in fancy new clothes, in reality, the tech sector is no different than other expansionist enterprises from the past. Their core foundation of growth and expansion is deeply rooted in the European and American colonialization and Manifest Destiny doctrines. And just as in the past, the tech sector is engaging in extraction, exploitation and expansion.

In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen speaks with Jeff Doctor, who is Cayuga from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. He is an impact strategist for Animikii, an Indigenous-owned technology company.

Doctor isn’t surprised that technology is continuing to evolve in the same colonial way that he saw growing up and was built into television shows, movies and video games, such as the popular Civilizations franchise, which applies the same European expand-and-conquer strategy to winning the game regardless of the society a player represents in the game. “You see this manifested in the tech billionaire class, like all of them are literally trying to colonize space right now. It’s not even a joke any more. They grew up watching the same crap,” Doctor says.

Colonialism and technology have always been entwined. European expansionism depended on modern technology to dominate, whether it be through deadlier weapons, faster ships or the laying of telegraph and railway lines across the west. Colonization continues through, for example, English-only development tools, and country selection dropdown options limited to “Canada” or the “United States” that ignore Indigenous peoples’ communities and nations. And, as governments grapple with how to protect people’s personal data from the tech sector, there is little attention paid to Indigenous data sovereignty, to ensure that every nation and community has the ability to govern and benefit from its own data.

In the early days of the internet, information technology could be viewed as morally neutral. It was simply a means of passing data from one point to another. But, as communications technology has advanced by using algorithms, tracking and identifiers to shape the flow of information, we are being presented with moral and ethical questions about how the internet is being used and even reshaping what it means to be human.

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with the Right Reverend Dr. Steven Croft, the Bishop of Oxford, Church of England. Bishop Steven, as he is known to his own podcast audience, is a board member of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation and has been part of other committees such as the House of Lords’ Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence.

Bishop Steven approaches the discussions around tech from a very different viewpoint, not as an academic or technologist but as a theologian in the Anglican church: “I think technology changes the way we relate to one another, and that relationship is at the heart of our humanity.” He compares what is happening now in society with the internet to the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century, which democratized knowledge and changed the world in profound ways. The full impacts of this current technological shift in our society are yet to be known. But, he cautions, we must not lose sight of our core human principles when developing technology and ensure that we deploy it for “the common good of humankind.” “I don’t think morals and ethics can be manufactured out of nothing or rediscovered. And if we don’t have morality and ethics as the heart of the algorithms, when they’re being crafted, then the unfairness will be even greater than they otherwise have been.”

Social media has become an essential tool for sharing information and reaching audiences. In the political realm, it provides access to constituents in a way that going door to door can’t. It also provides a platform for direct access to citizens without paying for advertising or relying on news articles. We’ve seen how Donald Trump used social media to his advantage, but what happens when social media turns on the politician?

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Catherine McKenna, Canada’s minister of environment and climate change from 2015 to 2019. McKenna’s experience with online hate is not unique; many people and groups face online harassment and, in some cases, real-world actions against them. What does make McKenna’s case interesting is the convergence of online harassment on social media and the climate change file. In her role as minister, McKenna was responsible for implementing the federal government’s environmental policy, including the Paris Agreement commitments, carbon pricing and pipeline divestment. No matter what she said in her social posts, they were immediately met with negative comments from climate change deniers. Attacks against her escalated to the point where her constituency office was vandalized and a personal security detail was assigned to her.

Finding solutions to climate change is complicated, cross-cutting work that involves many stakeholders and relies on dialogue and engagement with government, industry and citizens. McKenna found that the online expression of extremism, amplified by social media algorithms, made meaningful dialogue all but impossible. McKenna, no longer in politics, is concerned that the online social space is having negative impacts on future youth who may want to participate in finding climate solutions. “I’ve left public life not because of the haters, but because I just want to focus on climate change. But...I want more women to get into politics. I want broader diversity. Whether you’re Indigenous, part of the LGBTQ+ community, or a new immigrant, whatever it is, I want you to be there, but it needs to be safe.” Which raises the question: To find climate solutions, must we first address misinformation and online hate?

On the first anniversary of the January 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol, Big Tech host Taylor Owen sits down with Craig Silverman to discuss how the rise of false facts led us to that moment. Silverman is a journalist for ProPublica and previously worked at Buzzfeed News, and is the editor of the Verification Handbook series.

Before Donald Trump popularized “fake news” as a blanket term to attack mainstream news outlets, Silverman had been using it to mean something different and very specific. Fake news, also known as misinformation, disinformation or false facts, is online content that has been intentionally created to be shared on social media platforms. Before it was weaponized as a tool for election interference, fake news was simply a lucrative clickbait market that saw higher engagement than traditional media. And social media platforms’ algorithms amplified it because that higher engagement meant people spent more time on the platforms and boosted their ad revenue.

After establishing the origins of misinformation and how it was used to manipulate the 2016 US presidential election, Owen and Silverman discuss how Facebook, in particular, responded to the 2020 US presidential election. Starting in September 2020, the company established a civic integrity team focusing on, among other issues, its role in elections globally and removed posts, groups and users that were promoting misinformation. Silverman describes what happens next. “After the election, what does Facebook do? Well, it gets rid of the whole civic integrity team, including the group’s task force. And so, as things get worse and worse leading up to January 6, nobody is on the job in a very focused way.” Before long, Facebook groups had “become an absolute hotbed and cesspool of delegitimization, death threats, all this kind of stuff,” explains Silverman. The lie that the election had been rigged was spreading unchecked via organized efforts on Facebook. Within a few weeks of the civic integrity team’s dismantling, Trump’s supporters arrived on Capitol Hill to “stop the steal.” It was then, as Silverman puts it, “the real world consequences came home to roost.”

Nicholas Carr is a prolific blogger, author and critic of technology since the early days of the social web. Carr began his blog Rough Type in 2005, at a time when some of today’s biggest companies where still start-ups operating out of college dorms. In 2010, he wrote the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction finalist The Shallows, in which he discussed how technology was changing the human brain. At the time, many were skeptical about Carr’s argument, but in just over a decade many of his predictions have come true.

In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen and guest Nicholas Carr reflect on how he was able to identify these societal shifts long before others. The social web, known as Web 2.0, was billed as a democratizing tool for breaking down barriers so that anyone could share information and have their voices heard. Carr had concerns; while others saw college kids making toys, he saw the potential for major shifts in society. “As someone who had studied the history of media, I knew that when you get these kinds of big systems, particularly big communication systems, the unexpected, unanticipated consequences are often bigger than what everybody thinks is going to happen,” Carr explains.

We are again on the verge of the next online shift, called Web3, and as new online technologies like non-fungible tokens, cryptocurrencies and the metaverse are being built, we can learn from Web 2.0 in hopes of mitigating future unanticipated consequences. As Carr sees it, we missed the opportunity to become involved early on with social platforms, before they became entrenched in our lives. “Twitter was seen as a place where people, you know, describe what they had for breakfast, and so society didn’t get involved in thinking about what are the long-term consequences here and how it’s going to play out. So I think if we take a lesson from that, even if you’re skeptical about virtual reality and augmented reality, now is the time that society has to engage with these visions of the future.”