There's Hope at the Edges of Power

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

The Digital Deal Podcast (currently Art Is Not a Thing) was 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.