Prof. Chris Kelty from UCLA will give this talk on November 4, 3:45–5:15pm at the Humanities Quadrangle, room 276
Abstract:
What was the internet we could have had and how is it related to the one we do? This talk will offer part of a book project on the moral and technical imagination of the internet as a global brain, a new economy, and a participatory democracy, and how it enabled instead an ad-revenue-driven social media hellscape of privacy violation, data extraction, and autocratic monopolies. In particular it will focus on the internet as an era of artificial intelligence, and offer a revision of the place of the internet as part of the technical infrastructure of knowledge and power. What are the implications–for science and politics–of automated data circulation, ennobled by an ethics of sharing, and mystified by the most expensive statistical clustering experiments in history?
Bio:
Christopher M. Kelty is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has a joint appointment in the Institute for Society and Genetics, the department of Information Studies and the Department of Anthropology. His research focuses on the cultural significance of information technology, especially in science and engineering. He is the author most recently of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Duke University Press, 2008), as well as numerous articles on open source and free software, including its impact on education, nanotechnology, the life sciences, and issues of peer review and research process in the sciences and in the humanities.