Envisioning digital states
Why explore the intersection of technology, the economy, and governance?
“I think deeply about things and want others to do likewise. I work for ideas and learn from people. I don’t like excluding people. I’m a perfectionist, but I won’t let that get in the way of publication. Except for education and entertainment, I’m not going to waste my time on things that won’t have an impact. I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don’t take me seriously. I don’t hold grudges, it’s not productive, but I learn from my experience. I want to make the world a better place.” — Aaron Swartz, co-founder of RSS, co-founder of Reddit, co-founder of Demand Progress, chief designer of Open Library. Hacktivist.
Our lives are increasingly, ubiquitously read by machines, not people, which make assumptions, analyzes our data, makes suggestions for our next purchase, next video, next swipe, next decision. When our psychology as humans meets the technology around us, which then facilitates our connections to others, which then facilitates our access to goods and services, when then facilitates our access to money, which then facilitates our opportunities, which then, which then, which then…What does this mean when it comes to the public sphere, civic engagement? Civil disobedience? Digital participatory decision-making? What is the future of community development, community memory? Moving beyond online and real-world communities to community-developed, community-integrated technologies? What are the many ways this can take form? How do we think about these legal, socio-economic, philosophical, technological shifts?
I’m interested in understanding, questioning, critiquing and creating from a place that questions the ways we engage with the digital, how we connect, what are our access points to digital space — not just your phone or laptop or gatekeepers like Google, but as a public, as a civil society; the digital as a public good, a public service. If technology becomes the intermediary between the language we read in, the friends we make, the teachers we learn from, and more, increasingly, the services and access we get — this is a space to interrogate and to shape as a public.
What does this shift look like around the world? What are the ways governance can look like as a website? As an internet of things? As a chatbot? As a digital community organization? A technological sou-sou using Bitcoin? Digital avatars as hieroglyphs rather than icons? How is open data used in these contexts? What roles, yet unexplored, can open data play in the public domain for service design, for community development, for policy? What are the dangers in this space and in what ways is history repeating itself? If machines are assisting at key decision points in our lives, what does the future of techno-economics look like? What does equal distribution of resources and wealth look like in technologically-based societies? To what extent should government develop digitally and intervene in society techno-economically?
As I venture into two Masters programs — Technology Governance at TTÜ and Data and Economics at MIT, these are the ideas I want to interrogate, prototype, test, analyze, and question. Currently, I am not interested in being perfectly correct in my answers, but rather most exploratory and most positively impactful in discovering a plurality of outcomes, a plethora of approaches. Let’s dive in.
Digitally,
L
