Podcast: The Anti-Dystopians
Episode: Is Facebook (and Google) a Public Utility?
Pub date: 2021-02-26

Notes from Demos Helsinki Podcast:

What is machine learning and why is it (always) political? As critical information infrastructure, should Google and Facebook be regulated as democratic utilities?

For this week’s episode, Alina Utrata talks to Josh Simons, a PhD candidate in Government at Harvard University and a Labour candidate for local office in the UK. They discuss Josh’s research — what is machine learning and why is it (always) political? As critical information infrastructure, should Google and Facebook be regulated as democratic utilities? And do we need a whole new understanding of corporations' role in society if we’re going to tackle the tech industry?

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A transcript of this episode is available here.

Mentioned in this podcast

Josh Simons (co-authored by Dipayan Ghosh) on Brookings: Utilities for democracy: Why and how the algorithmic infrastructure of Facebook and Google must be regulated

Virginia Eubanks’s seminal work on Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor. Plus a review on the LSE’s blog

Cory Doctorow, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

More on the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority and Digital Markets Unit

Nowhere Land by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-land

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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