Ramesh Srinivasan's Reading List

"Doug Rushkoff has been a friend and wrote the foreword to my book. Team Human is a pretty well known—and growing—podcast where he has interviews with people. The book and his podcasts are focused on one major theme: reminding us—and this is his motto, so I’m just going to quote it—that “being human is a team sport.” So let’s now apply that logic to thinking about technology, which is what his book does. What we find is that technologies are designed in an individuated manner. So say you and I were very similar demographically, politically, etc., and we both logged onto YouTube or we went on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. We could be presented with completely different worlds, which may have very little intersection with one another. Why is that? It’s because the algorithmic systems, the computational systems, are built on the logic of feeding, controlling (or at least shaping and influencing) the individual user. The effect of that at scale is massive amounts of polarization and actually us forgetting that our lives are deeply interconnected, on the level of family, of community, of neighbourhood, of nation and society and of the world, which faces common challenges like climate change. “We have to carefully investigate monopolistic forms of behaviour” Doug Rushkoff makes the point that this idea of collectivity and communality was an early part of the internet itself. The early internet was comprised of a lot of hippies and get-back-to-the-earth, community-oriented people in the Usenet newsgroup world, but what the internet has turned into is a set of fragmented, individualized, hyper-inflammatory at times, spaces. Rushkoff is saying, ‘Let’s get back to the logic of thinking of ourselves as interconnected and as a team. Only as a team can we create technology that helps us come together and only as a team can we solve the major challenges that we face and become more humane as human beings.’ That’s what that book is about and he also makes the point that communality is a fundamental aspect of nature itself. Trees have underground internet systems that they communicate through, mycelial networks and rhyizomatic networks. I love that he makes those kinds of points. So I appreciate his work and this book. I’ve been a guest on his podcast as well."

"Sorting Things Out by Geoff Bowker and Susan Leigh Star was an extremely influential book on me and influences my work to this day, including my work on technology. Technologies almost always rely on systems of classification and organization. One might think of Apartheid as a political system, but it was also in some sense a technological system, in that people were classified based on who they were racially within that society. They were provided with opportunities—or not—based on that. You can actually experience that if you go into the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. It’s incredible. What Bowker and Star argue is that how knowledge and information is organized and classified actually ends up defining what counts as knowledge and what we understand to be true or not true. They make the point with relation to library classification systems, for example. The Dewey Decimal System, for example, was largely comprised of Christian subject headings, because it’s a technology that was created by a Christian man within a Christian society. It therefore reflected the biases of that man and his knowledge. So that’s very important, because a lot of l technological systems rely on databases and how databases classify information has everything to do with how that information is treated and what’s considered relevant and what isn’t. We build technological systems based on who we are. Feminists have also pointed out that women’s issues have been left out of a lot of database systems. This is an important book for forming an intellectual and critical blueprint for the organization of knowledge itself. That’s a theme that people as renowned as Michel Foucault wrote about, dating back. It’s about a philosophy of knowledge and what counts as knowledge. A lot of diverse cultures and non-western communities don’t define knowledge in a static manner the way that the western Enlightenment did and the way that currently informs our tech world. My first book, Whose Global Village? was a full-on analysis of some of these themes and that book, Sortings Things Out , continues to inform me. It’s a really good book. I really recommend it."

"Evgeny Morozov is an important critical, at times cynical, figure. He identifies the problems of naive and delusional social engineering that come out of tech cultures and maybe even science cultures. He asks us to remember, much like Rushkoff, who we are as a society and what questions we should delegate to technologies which take complex human issues and problems and model them into quantifiable, comparable and deterministic queries and questions. This book is important because even though it’s several years old, it identifies a key intellectual flaw that exists in tech bubbles, which is the idea that everything can be solved by a few dudes in Silicon Valley, because they’re just going to build better tech. That attitude in Silicon Valley reflects a deep cynicism of the public sphere and about how democracy really functions, which is messy. And it really ignores, reduces and devalues the voices of people who are outside the tech world. It’s really a trailblazing book in pointing out the hubris or at least ignorance and very flawed way of designing, dominating, commanding and engineering our world that comes out of ideological circles in tech elite bubbles. I really appreciate his analysis of that issue. I wouldn’t say that in my day-to-day job now I have much interaction, but I am from Silicon Valley. I went to Stanford in the late 90s and people who lived in my dorms founded Paypal with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. I have undergrad and graduate degrees in engineering, the latter from the MIT Media Lab where I was side-by-side with a number of major figures in tech today. But for the last 20 years or so, I’ve observed something very insular in that world, something very culturally and globally ignorant. It falsely sees itself as agnostic when it’s deeply influential on people’s lives. “Right now, in the United States, 48 out of 50 state attorney generals are investigating Facebook for antitrust violations” I’m often speaking at big conferences with vice presidents of Facebook on the panel with me. I am pretty conciliatory and I try to be charming and nice to everybody. I don’t single people out as individuals; I try to find spaces where we can change and learn from one another. As you can probably tell, I’m extremely personally passionate about this. I didn’t write this book for my career. I wrote it because I believe these things. What I’m most passionate about is the objectification and the erasure of the brilliance and beauty of billions of people across the world and especially the Global South. That’s a big theme that concerns me a lot. They are being completely ignored and seen merely as passive users of our stuff, or even that our technology will liberate them. It’s patronizing at best and colonial at worst. So I’ve always been a political activist. I’ve also travelled all over the world, long before I started writing about this in relation to tech. I’ve been in probably about 80 countries, so I’ve seen these absurdities first hand. The vast majority of Google and Facebook users are not in Europe, they’re not in North America. They’re across the continents of the Global South. They’re in Asia, Africa and South America. So it’s quite telling that these companies are monetizing the lives and data of billions of people and trying to lock them into keeping their attention without any responsibility or collaboration on any significant level. That’s why some people refer to this as ‘digital colonialism.’ I try not to use that language because it’s not quite so simple as mapping, and it doesn’t give us a pathway out. Nonetheless, it’s a common term. Shoshana Zuboff, in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism , uses some of this kind of language as well. It’s an appropriate term. It’s an older term in a way, she’s been writing about this for 20 years or so."

"This is a manifesto from Ethan Zuckerman, a great colleague of mine, calling for a global communication system, where people really have power to tell their own stories and do their own journalism based on who and where they are. That was really his and Rebecca McKinnon’s experiment with Global Voices , which they created. It was an attempt to bridge divides not in a top-down way, but with a collection of bottom-up voices put in communication with one another. Ethan Zuckerman has worked with bloggers and journalists and people interested in civic life all over the world. As he explains in this book, he’s interested in bringing people together in a global conversation that isn’t erasing and flattening people, but where each can stand on their own. Global Voices is the main example. It’s a network of different bloggers from all over the world, communicating with one another via a website where all their stories can be shared. People also work to translate content with one another. That’s a very important point for Ethan because he thinks that linguistic differences can create gaps in communication, which is true. We should be supporting one another’s languages. Languages are so important and they speak to our diversity. A lot of what Global Voices attempts to do is support local journalists, but also create bridges between them. You’re absolutely right. That’s why we have to intervene. We need regulatory measures supporting a much more competitive, open marketplace, and we need to support non-profit initiatives via incentives or subsidies. Otherwise, to the winners go the spoils. You might actually note that book, Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas. He’s critiquing philanthropy, but I completely agree: Global Voices, there’s no way it could compete with a Facebook unless it was provided an opportunity to do so. That can’t happen at the moment because the economies of scale are so massive. That’s why regulatory measures and incentivization need to be part of the solution. Or Facebook should be subsidizing them. We have to figure out ways to do this. “In the United States, the youngest generation is the first in the history of this country to make less money, when you account for inflation, than their parents did. ” The tax issue is another huge problem. Amazon did not pay any taxes last year. They received a rebate. The wealthiest man in the history of the world, his company received a rebate. Examples like this represent the norm rather than the exception in the current, corrupt system. They provide us with opportunities to push back in new, progressive directions. Another point I often make is that the internet was publicly funded. This is a common theme we see in the US: we socialize the costs and privatize the profits. We all pay for our highways but then Amazon runs its trucks on and doesn’t pay anything. It’s so bizarre. It’s the same with pharmaceuticals. The National Institutes of Health National, and the National Science Foundation fund all this drug research, but then it gets patented and privatized by a big pharmaceutical company. We can’t let that happen with the internet. It’s already happening and we’ve got to stop it."

"This book is a really fantastic analysis of how quantification, the collection of data, the modelling around data, the predictions made by using data, the algorithmic and quantifiable ways of predicting behaviour based on data, are all built by elites for elites and end up, quite frankly, screwing over everybody else. Cathy gives great examples, from predictive policing systems to insurance systems, of how biases are baked into the technologies that are supposedly serving us. For example, an insurance algorithm—and this is actually illegal—will take poorer people and consider them a greater risk and therefore make it impossible for them to afford health or life insurance. She shows how bank loans are contingent on credit, but these algorithms are taking poor people and seeing them as less creditworthy. I understand that, but the question is, ‘What kind of world should we be living in? What do we think about credit or insurance based on those principles?’ So this is a very important book that addresses the dangers of hidden, opaque, biased quantification. Another key point is that it’s not simply the biases of the people who build those technologies in the absence of auditing and transparency and regulation and collaboration, it’s also the datasets that those systems learn from. We know our world doesn’t treat women as equally as men. We know that black people are treated much worse in many countries, including the United States. These are statements of fact. So if we’re going to build technologies that are learning from the world, they’ll end up implementing activities based on a racist or sexist world. “This is a common theme we see in the US: we socialize the costs and privatize the profits.” Because people treat technologies as neutral—especially because they don’t know how the technology works; people don’t even know when they’re interacting with an AI system because there’s no disclosure—we’re going to end up building a world that engineers the worst forms of inequality. Another example that Cathy O’Neill touches on briefly is facial recognition systems. From Michelle Obama to Serena Williams to Oprah Winfrey, every major facial recognition system, whether Chinese or American, thinks these people are men. Google’s image recognition algorithm also mistook various pictures of black people for gorillas. How did Google deal with the situation? They removed gorillas from their image system. Instead of dealing with the underlying architecture that is computationally producing these inequalities and injustices, we’re scratching at little scabs on the surface. We need to do better than that. I use Facebook. I use Twitter. I use Amazon. I’m trying to be mindful of how much reliance and dependency I have on them, but I believe that is a question that can only be answered by each of us individually, unless we’re talking about doing something on massive scale that would actually have an impact. The interventions would need to be systemic, if they occurred through a ‘delete Facebook’ movement, for example. But I don’t feel the burden of this should be on individual users. I would like the burden to be on activist regulators, journalists and, most importantly, our tech gazillionaires. It’s partly my personality. I’m critical, but I’m hopeful and believe in movements. I’m not a cynical person. And I see opportunities. My work has been getting a lot of attention and there’s a reason people are interested in these themes. Also, I don’t want to be so naive as to think that the nice people I’ve been on panels with from Facebook are going to change things, but they’re not sociopaths. They just don’t know what’s going on. Some of them do know and are doing terrible things—and we’ve seen some evidence that Zuckerberg has tread on that ground a little bit—but let’s hope they’re mostly just ignorant and that by bringing these issues to light we can encourage them to experiment with other models of being profitable and worth a lot of money. I actually met Mark 10 years ago. I sat with him and talked to him for over an hour. He offered me Facebook data at that time. So what we saw happening with Cambridge Analytica and Russia was a tacit understanding and assumption at Facebook. I don’t think they thought of what they were doing as necessarily wrong. Part of the problem is they’re a bit clueless about these things. Maybe they are a bit more clued in now, but that’s why these books we’re all writing are important."