There's Hope at the Edges of Power

07/31/24 • 36 min

In today's episode, we talk to Meredith Whittaker of Signal and artist Calin Segal about what surveillance and the concentration of power in the hands of a few tech companies mean for society. We discuss the context that made it possible for these companies to capture data without regard for privacy and use it to produce new social, cultural, and political dynamics. At the edges of what looks like an inescapable panopticon society, we find hope in the role of art, research, critical thinking, and organisations that prove “none of this is natural or inevitable”, in levelling the playing field.

Resources:
Selling the American People by Lee McGuigan
Profit over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet by Matthew Crain
The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World by Ajay Singh Chaudhary
When the Clock Broke by John Ganz
Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization by Andrey Mir
Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger
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Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger
The Digital Deal Podcast is part of European Digital Deal, a project co-funded by Creative Europe and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport. Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) can be held responsible for them.

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Previous Episode

Regendering Technology

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In this episode, we look at the historical entanglements of technology and gender. Made in the image of their (often male) designers, technologies end up serving and reproducing patriarchal systems. How can technology finally "undergo a sex change" to overcome its current gender inscriptions? What political imaginaries make that possible, or become possible through feminist approaches to technology? Host Ana-Maria Carabelea tries to answer these questions in conversation with Professor Judy Wajcman and visual and multimedia artist Silvia Binda.

Resources:
Baltan Laboratories, Technology Otherwise
Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein
OffDAC
Books by our guests:
Feminism Confronts Technology by Judy Wajcman
TechnoFeminism by Judy Wajcman
Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism by Judy Wajcman

Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger
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Next Episode

Operational Hoaxes

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It’s easy to discard fakes and hoaxes as misinformation. But that might be too abrupt an ending to a discussion about the aesthetics of non-fact and the role of synthetic images in our visual landscape. In this episode, we talk to Martyna Marciniak and Jussi Parikka about synthetic images and their relationship to the material realities that (re-)/produce.

Resources:
The Eye of the Master by Matteo Pasquinelli
Doppelganger by Naomi Klein
Material Witness by Susan Schuppli
Into the White by Chris P. Heuer
Operational Images by Jussi Parikka

The Digital Deal Podcast - There's Hope at the Edges of Power

Transcript

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Welcome to The Digital Deal Podcast, the series where we talk about how new technologies reshape our democracies and how artists and critical thinkers can help us make sense of these changes. My name is Ana Carabelea, and today I'm joined by Meredith Whitaker and Calin Segal.
Meredith is the President of Signal. She is the current Chief Advisor and the former Faculty Director and Co-Founder of the A