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Beyond the valley : how innovators around the world are overcoming inequality and creating the technologies of tomorrow / Ramesh Srinivasan.

by Srinivasan, Ramesh, 1976-

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The MIT Press, 2019.

174.93843 S774b

Internet -- Moral and ethical aspects.

Internet industry -- Moral and ethical aspects.

9780262043137 (hc.)

x, 408 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Foreword / Douglas Rushkoff -- The power of data -- The social contract -- Foreclosing the future -- Disconnection and connection -- Blind solutions -- Brave new digital world -- Cambridge Analytica and global disinformation -- The great radicalizers -- Bernie Is born -- Digital war games around the world -- Disrupting jobs and lives -- Protecting work and workers -- Working hard, struggling harder -- Money for everybody? : exploring universal basic income -- Worker-owned technologies -- Discrimination technologies -- Keeping network power local / with Aditi Mehta -- Questioning connectivity -- African-born technology -- AI In Uganda -- Innovating from the ground up in Kenya -- Mobile power to the people : Indigenous networks In Mexico -- Blockchain : a crazy free-for-all, and maybe more? / with Adam Reese -- Technology for all -- Educating and protecting our future.

In this provocative book, Ramesh Srinivasan describes the internet as both an enabler of frictionless efficiency and a dirty tangle of politics, economics, and other inefficient, inharmonious human activities. We may love the immediacy of Google search results, the convenience of buying from Amazon, and the elegance and power of our Apple devices, but it's a one-way, top-down process. We're not asked for our input, or our opinions -- only for our data. The internet is brought to us by wealthy technologists in Silicon Valley and China. It's time, Srinivasan argues, that we think in terms beyond the Valley. Srinivasan focuses on the disconnection he sees between designers and users, producers and consumers, and tech elites and the rest of us. The recent Cambridge Analytica and Russian misinformation scandals exemplify the imbalance of a digital world that puts profits before inclusivity and democracy. In search of a more democratic internet, Srinivasan takes us to the mountains of Oaxaca, East and West Africa, China, Scandinavia, North America, and elsewhere, visiting the "design labs" of rural, low-income, and indigenous people around the world. He talks to a range of high-profile public figures -- including Elizabeth Warren, David Axelrod, Eric Holder, Noam Chomsky, Lawrence Lessig, and the founders of Reddit, as well as community organizers, labor leaders, and human rights activists. To make a better internet, Srinivasan says, we need a new ethic of diversity, openness, and inclusivity, empowering those now excluded from decisions about how technologies are designed, who profits from them, and who are surveilled and exploited by them.

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