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Dear {name},
Hello! Spring is finally coming to Berlin! I hope you are enjoying a nice weather wherever you are currently at. We, the humanet3 group, have had a quite packed start of the year, especially with our first workshop on digital public spaces. We have invited scholars and practitioners from various disciplines and backgrounds to re-imagine ‘Digital Public Spaces for Democracy’ with us. Let us use this opportunity to share some insights from our workshop with you in this newsletter.
Before we started the program, we shared the artwork “Calculating Empires” by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, subtitled "A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500". The artists trace the evolution of technical and social structures over five centuries. The artwork was displayed on a large touch screen outside the workshop venue, allowing participants to interact with the map. Feel free to explore the webpage to appreciate the vast history of technology and power.
Our workshop was organized in the themes of interrelations and forces. Under the two themes, we discussed the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the concept of a EuroStack, public digital infrastructures, and Human-centered AI, among other things. Two days were filled with interesting provocations and discussions. Again, we would like to thank everyone who joined us. We hope to materialize our vibrant discussions into a publication form as well. To that end, we are currently in contact with a journal for a special issue, about which we will share more details later.
As a part of workshop, we asked all our panelists “How do you imagine a digital public space which benefits democracy?” Their responses will be published soon on our website. Also, they will be screened in the Long Night of Science at MPIB in June. We will keep you posted for those of you who might be interested in the event.
Apart from our own workshop, I attended other events in Berlin that were also not too far from our research topic. I would like to share two of them with you that you might find as interesting as I did. Let us know if you have recommendations on the events like this!
First, there was a live episode recording of Future Histories Podcast at the Rosa Luxemburg foundation. You can listen to the podcast here. Cecilia Rikap, Associate Professor at University College London (UCL), criticises tech companies for wielding power beyond simply owning things: she argues that they monopolise the production of narratives and knowledge about technology, beyond the traditional notion of owning and producing goods. Professor Rikap urges governments and the public sector to move beyond merely investing in and consuming technology. Instead, it is necessary to ask more fundamental questions about what we want and need as a society. What technologies do we need most now, and what questions can they answer?
Second, I just came back from a talk by Kate Crawford at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG). The title of the talk was “Mapping AI: How to See Planetary-Scale Artificial Intelligence”, which was a part of colloquium at MPIWG on the history of science in public. She presented several collaborations that went beyond traditional scientific communication to the public, such as “Anatomy of AI” and “ImageNet Roulette”. I’ve learned that her “Calculating Empires” came in the line of similar research that she has been working on for the last decade. She pointed out the importance of looking back in order to find a new strategy for the future. The soaring cost of generative AI technology in terms of energy consumption was also very alarming, which you can read more about here.
Best wishes,
Chaewon |
