Berkman Klein Center For Internet And Society: Audio Fishbowl

Rural broadband is currently having a moment in American political discourse. No less than 5 presidential candidates have released plans to connect the country’s rural places, and the FCC has recently announced a $20billion funding program for fixed broadband and a $9billion program for 5G deployment in rural America. Despite these initiatives and interests, however, rural America remains woefully disconnected from a digital world that the urban and wealthy take for granted. Worse yet, the digital divide is growing, not shrinking despite billions of dollars of yearly investment and dozens of legislative proposals. This talk explains the policies that help and hinder broadband deployment in rural America. Christopher Ali argues that our current policy architecture grossly over-privileges incumbent telephone companies and systematically discourages new entrants from offering broadband, and demonstrates how the largest telecommunication companies have an economic incentive to keep the digital divide alive. “

Dr. Howard Stevenson of the University of Pennsylvania kicked off the Berkman Klein Spring 2020 Luncheon Series with a talk and discussion on Advancing Racial Literacy in Tech. Racial literacy provides a framework for considering how to combat the proliferation of racially-biased technology. Dr. Stevenson was joined in conversation by Jessie Daniels and Mutale Nkonde. Dr. Howard Stevenson is the Constance Clayton Professor of Urban Education, Professor of Africana Studies, in the Human Development & Quantitative Methods Division of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the Executive Director of the Racial Empowerment Collaborative at Penn, designed to promote racial literacy in education, health, community and justice institutions.

Our current legal system is to a great extent the product of an earlier period of social and economic transformation. From the late 19th century through the mid-20th century, the U.S. legal system underwent profound, tectonic shifts. Today, struggles over ownership of information-age resources and accountability for information-age harms are producing new systemic changes. In Between Truth and Power, Julie E. Cohen explores the relationships between legal institutions and political and economic transformation. Systematically examining struggles over the conditions of information flow and the design of information architectures and business models, she argues that as law is enlisted to help produce the profound economic and sociotechnical shifts that have accompanied the emergence of the informational economy, it too is transforming in fundamental ways. For more information about this event, visit https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/between-truth-and-power-legal-constructions-informational-capitalism

A new book by BKC Faculty Associate and Youth & Media team member Leah Plunkett joins works by Margaret Atwood and Stephen King on Wired's list of "must-read" books for fall 2019. Leah's book from MIT Press, Sharenthood: Why We Should Think Before We Talk About Our Kids Online, "illuminates children's digital footprints: the digital baby monitors, the daycare livestreams, the nurse's office health records, the bus and cafeteria passes recording their travel and consumption patterns―all part of an indelible dossier for anyone who knows how to look for it. Plunkett thinks the offspring surveillance ought to stop and has suggestions for how to kick the sharenting habit. They are worth considering." For more information about this event, visit https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/sharenthood-how-parents-teachers-and-other-trusted-adults-harm-youth-privacy-opportunity

This panel discussion will address the topic of “Napster @ 20,” looking back from our vantage point in 2019 and examining the direct and indirect legacy of Napster over the past two decades. The panelists are Christopher Bavitz, Nancy Baym, David Herlihy, and Jennifer Jenkins. For more information about this event, visit https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/napster20-reflections-internets-most-controversial-music-file-sharing-service

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University was delighted to welcome the President of Germany, Dr. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to campus for a special event on November 1 to discuss the Ethics of the Digital Transformation. Parts of this recording are in German. For more information, visithttps://cyber.harvard.edu/events/ethics-digital-transformation

In this talk, Martin Garbus shares his truth: from representing criminal murder defendants, to representing detained migrants, to the internet’s effect on justice. When a lawyer must choose between giving a truth that will lead to injustice or lying to pursue justice, what are his obligations? For more information, visithttps://cyber.harvard.edu/events/north-havana-lawyers-truth

Israel went through two full election campaigns in 2019, featuring the cutting edge of network propaganda technologies. Justice Hanan Melcer of Israel's Supreme Court chaired Israel's Central Elections Committee during both elections and speaks about his experiences managing the two election cycles and ruling on campaign practices as they unfolded in real-time. For more information about this event, including a transcript, visit:https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/protecting-elections-online-manipulation-and-cyber-threats-experience-israels-2019-elections

Niva Elkin-Koren addresses issues in AI-based content moderation by introducing an adversarial procedure, the strategy of “Contesting Algorithms,” and discussing its promises and limitations. For more information about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/contesting-algorithms

This talk features Megan Phelps-Roper and Brittan Heller in discussion about Phelps-Roper's new book Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church.

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, technology has the potential to hide, speed, and even deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to racist practices of a previous era. In this talk, Ruha Benjamin presents the concept of the “New Jim Code" to explore a range of discriminatory designs that encode inequity: by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies, by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions, or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Ruha will also consider how race itself is a kind of tool designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice and discuss how technology is and can be used toward liberatory ends. This presentation delves into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provides conceptual tools to decode tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges the audience to question not only the technologies we are sold, but also the ones we man

This talk introduces the speakers’ new book, The Costs of Connection: How Data Colonizes Human Life and Appropriates it for Capitalism (Stanford University Press, August 2019). For more information (and a transcript) visit https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/colonized-data-costs-connection-nick-couldry-and-ulises-mejias

The twenty-odd year mainstream digital revolution has transformed in the public eye from one of promise to threat. This pessimism is reflected in assessments of the latest pervasive technology: AI generally, and machine learning specifically. How different is this technology from what preceded it, and do we need new ways to govern it? If so, how would they come about? For more information about this event, visit https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/can-tech-be-governed

There is growing awareness and concern about the role of automation in hiring, and the potential for these tools to reinforce historic inequalities in the labor market. In this work, Wilson performs an algorithm audit of the resume search engines offered by several of the largest online hiring platforms, to understand the relationship between a candidate's gender and their rank in search results. He and his team audit these platform with respect to individual and group fairness, as well as indirect and direct discrimination. For more info about this event, visit https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-05-21/auditing-bias-resume-search-engines

The Internet and AI are not only changing the future, they're changing our ideas about how the future arises from the present. In his new book, Everyday Chaos, David Weinberger points to accepted ways we work on the Internet that in undo our old assumptions about how the future works. For more info about this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-05-14/everyday-chaos

Berkman Klein community members Elettra Bietti, John Collins, Andrew Gruen, Daniel Jones, Mariel Garcia Montes, Jasmine McNealy, Sabelo Mhlambi, Sarah Newman, Kathy Pham, and Salome Viljoen share their research, passions, and musings in five minute Ignite Talks. Topics include the data economy in the European Union, maternal health around the world, youth and privacy online in Latin American, Ubuntu as an ethical framework for AI, collecting secrets, and more. For more info about this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-05-07/ignite-talks-bkc

How can advocates, activists, and academics work with technology companies to advance human rights? In this talk, David Sullivan, director at the Global Network Initiative, and BKC Fellow Chinmayi Arun draw upon a contentious exchange with Steve Jobs about the Democratic Republic of Congo to offer insights into how companies and civil society can work together on tough issues at the intersection of technology and human rights online. For more info about this event visit:https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-04-23/how-work-tech-companies-human-rights

AI Now Director of Policy Research Rashida Richardson discusses recent research on the data provenance of police data commonly used in predictive policing system. The research reviews Department of Justice consent decrees and other federal court monitored settlements related to police practices to examine the link between unlawful and biased police practices and the data used to train and/or implement these systems. For more info about this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-04-16/dirty-data-bad-predictions

We're never going to get a global set of norms for online speech, but do the platforms pick our global values and constitutionalize them? Is there something to tie our global values to the mast when hard issues arise? What would those values even be? This event features a presentation and discussion with Kate Klonick and Thomas Kadri along with panelists, Chinmayi Arun, Kendra Albert, and Jonathan Zittrain with moderation by Elettra Bietti. For more info about this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-04-09/constitutionalizing-speech-platforms

BKC Executive Director Urs Gasser speaks with Jason Farman, author of the book "Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World," about how our communication media shape not only how we understand human intimacy and connection, but also how we learn and build knowledge about our world and the universe. For more info about this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-04-08/bkc-meet-author-series-urs-gasser-conversation-jason-farman