 Hi, everyone. Welcome to the 2019 Berkman Ignite Talks. We're very excited to have you here with us. This is a bit of a highlight of some of the work that some of the community members in the Berkman Client Center think about and work on. Some of this is our direct research. Some of this is just our passion projects, but all areas that we're deeply, deeply interested in. And I'm so excited to have everyone here doing these five-minute auto-advanced talks. So we'll definitely be on time because the slides will just keep going. And after that, we'll have about 15, 20 minutes for questions from the room on all of these topics. So I'll leave it there. And I do have to say to the room that the Berkman Client Center lunches our webcast live and recorded for posterity on our website. So with that, I will hand it over to Alicja. Okay. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to do this talk. So I'm going to talk about the argument that data in relevant respects is like plastic. So both of these things are produced in large quantities. They have great benefits. They're very useful. But they also, once we take them at large scale, might have very harmful consequences. So some facts on plastic. 300 million tons of plastics are produced every year, which is equivalent to the weight of the entire adult population of the planet. Half of those 300 million tons, 100 million tons are used just once and then thrown away. That's what we call single-use plastics. Plastics have the capacity of being reabsorbed by the Earth, but we are at a level of production where most of the plastics we produce cannot be reabsorbed. So a lot of the waste that we produce is here to stay with us on the planet. 8 to 12 million tons of plastic ends up in our oceans every year. And so the waste that we have to deal with increases every year pretty much. So how to deal with this? Next slide. So plastics obviously have great benefits. So if you had water today, there were plastic glasses. You could take them to the table. You could dispose of them after the talk. Nobody needs to wash them. So very useful. There are also huge harms to use of plastic. For the planet, obviously, accumulation of waste. For animals, especially marine animals, there are microplastics that they absorb. And for humans, for instance, when we eat fish, we might be absorbing some of these microplastics ourselves. And the problem is we keep producing those plastics and although we might have moved to a recycling economy, we still haven't moved to a circular economy, an economy where we are reabsorbing all of the plastics we produce. Now data. I think many of us know that a lot of data is produced. By 2020 it is said that each individual will be producing 102 megabytes per minute of data. So data obviously has benefits by going on a trip to France. I can plan my trip. I can know exactly where I am and I won't get lost. Thanks Google. So great benefits, but also great harms. Harms to my ability to participate to the political community and act as a citizen. Harms to my privacy. Harms to my customer behavior through being nudged by advertisements and price discrimination. And yet we keep producing, generating data, incentivizing business models that are heavily reliant on data production, data collection, data accumulation. And the laws also act as financial incentives on this. So why are we comparing the two? Both of these things really useful. Both of these things over completely overproduced. Each of them at small scale seems to be great. At large scale produces very abstract and large harms. The difference between them is that data is less visible than plastic and so maybe we can use the example of plastic to think through some of the harms that data is causing to humanity today, the planet, us, etc. So each of these three individuals, corporations and governments have obligations to try and curb the production of plastic and data, I argue. And each of these three have separate types of obligations. So corporations are obviously at the core of why both data and plastic have been proliferating and they have resisted to government regulation, they engage in lobbying. And so they need to be made responsible individuals also. So all of us are responsible through our consumer behavior and purchasing practices and also opt-ins and opt-outs on the internet for how data and plastic are proliferating. So we should check our consumer behavior. Governments should pass laws that are more restrictive perhaps through taxation and should also try to coordinate the governance of plastic and data at an international level. So overall my main claim is that we should make companies accountable but also take responsibility for trying to curb overproduction of data and in the same way we should also do that for plastic. Thank you. Hi, I'm John Collins. I'm an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center and I work on digital finance issues. I also founded a little nonprofit in the state of Delaware called the First State FinTech Lab and among other things we work on access to opportunity. So today I want to talk about the cashless economy. I think probably many of you are wondering is there actually a cash economy and in the words of the Wu-Tang Clan, cash rolls, everything around me, dala bills y'all. And there are a lot of dala-dala bills probably surprising to you. In fact the cash economy in the United States is $2.3 trillion per year. To put that in a little bit of perspective the overall gross domestic product of the country, the size of the economy per year is about $19 trillion. So smart people here, 2.3 out of 19, it's pretty significant. Even though many of us probably don't use a ton of cash. So think about like what you have in your wallet right now. I'll pull mine out. I have a business credit card. I have a personal credit card. I have a debit card. I do have cash because I won a bet this weekend at a Kentucky Derby Party. That's the only reason I have it. And then aside from my wallet I obviously have a phone, right? A smart phone in fact, a cracked one, but it still works. And so on here I've got Venmo, I've got Apple Pay, I've got my Starbucks app. So even in situations where I might not have my wallet, I have this. And I can access a lot of commerce nowadays via that. And I'm not alone. In fact the Federal Reserve has taken a look at how many payment mechanisms the average American has. And 50% of us have six plus ways that we can pay for things. And you've seen that increase over time, right? There's only more fintech applications, more types of credit cards coming out. This is a really bad graph, but I just want you to take a look at that dark line that goes down. That's the amount of cash being used as the two other lines at the top there, which are debit cards and credit cards are increasing, right? And that makes a lot of sense, right? You're increased use of this. Merchants are seeing this as well. So Sweet Green, which is a luxury coleslaw merchant, they found that about 10% of their customers use cash, only 10. So they said, you know what? We're not going to accept cash anymore. We're going to be a cashless store. And there's some reasons for that. Good reasons, in fact. Man's makes transactions quicker. It makes places that have a lot of cash less susceptible to theft. And so they said, look, we're just going to be a cashless store. And a number of other stores have done this too. And that's all great, right? We're a bunch of internet nerds. We've got smartphones. We can go out and go to Bluestone Lane or go to Sweet Green or go wherever is cashless. And we can access the economy. And that's all good. Well, it's not really good. It's not good for everybody. 8.4 million people in this country are unbanked. That's about 6.5% of the population. Where I spend a lot of time washing DC, about 25% of the African-American population is unbanked. And about 36% are underbanked. And so what happens is when you have populations that don't have access to financial services and you create places where they must have access to financial services, you exclude them. And you create, as these cities get more expensive, more and more gentrified areas that are exclusionary. And the Civil Rights Act in the United States requires and, in fact, maintains that people have equal access to the enjoyment of public accommodations like retail goods. So cities and jurisdictions, the governments are responding to this in different ways. In fact, Massachusetts in 1978 passed a law saying, look, you've got to accept cash everywhere. And you've seen more recently, as these stores have kind of put out these proposals, other cities follow suit. So the city of Philadelphia, more recently, the city of New York, the state of New Jersey have passed legislation to say, look, you've got to accept cash. We're banning these cashless stores. And so where does that leave us? We're not going to be able to give you any solutions today, but in this five minute talk. But on one side, look, we've got a system that is making transactions easier and cheaper in some cases, but it's excluding a large part of the population. So that's a problem. Bans are blunt policy instruments that certainly solve the problem in part, but they don't really get the underlying issue, which is we need to provide better access to financial services for people who don't have it. Part of the solution might be innovation. It might be sort of more fintech applications. It might be regulation, because a big part of the problem is that fees and expenses related to financial services can be expensive, especially as a percentage of income. But regardless, what the policy focus needs to be on and should be on is making sure that more underserved and underrepresented populations, more diverse groups of people have access to these services and to the wider economy. Thank you. One of the many ways that I did not pay my bills before I came back to academia was by being a digital security trainer, and that made me sort of be in a position where I worked with journalists, targeted journalists, which then put me in the digital rights and freedom of expression side of the table. And I couldn't ignore through these work that that side of the table, my side of the table, didn't really get along with the youth rights side, because youth rights were a very powerful pretext to augment surveillance capabilities and also to censor people. I think that this came through really powerful tropes, like just say no, stranger danger, think before you sext, ten reasons not to sext campaigns that put the burden on young people to act better. I think that these frames are ultimately harmful and that there are four ways that we are not addressing them well. One is by seeing ourselves as protectors of youth and by seeing youth as conditional citizens, not as subjects of rights today. Also by thinking that all youth are harmed equally without recognizing that marginalized youth are facing the worst of privacy violations and by seeing youth as individual actors rather than addressing the collective responsibility of actors around them. These might sound like all things are doomed and that there are no things to be optimistic about, but I interviewed 18 organizations from Canada to Argentina and I found that there are many things that are being done well in the region. I think their work shows that it is possible to do youth privacy work that sees youth as subjects of rights today rather than as conditional citizens that promotes youth agency, that does intersectional readings on privacy and that promotes collective responsibility. CAUTI-SIGN is one of the ways that organizations promote agency among youth by promoting their decision-making and Farro Digital in Argentina and the Equality Project in Canada rely on CAUTI-SIGN for their campaigns on sexting. This is an image that Farro Digital co-created with youth to address sexting issues, sext with your head. Equality Project came up with a similar campaign designed with young people and this comes to show that when you give people a chance, young people a chance to have a say in the campaigns aimed at them, they're not going to move away from just saying no old kind of messaging. That is, however, not the only thing that organizations are doing in terms of addressing the universal threat model that cybersecurity communities have long laughed at but youth rights communities have not so much laughed at. Teddy Quimparaguay and Sula Batsu in Costa Rica are doing targeted digital security workshops for example with trans youth where there is real name policies in social media and with mothers who sometimes are the sole known users in their households where devices were purchased for young people. In Uruguay, pensamiento colectivo calls out victim blaming by shifting away the responsibility from the people who are sexting and placing the burden on the people who are sharing other people's sexts. They came up with this video that quickly went viral challenging people not to share other people's sexts and I think that this was a trend that all organizations shared all organizations creating interactive material shared which is that they're coming up with local narratives that youth seem to be thirsty for and they quickly go viral. In terms of recognizing youth as subjects of rights today and not as conditional citizens we have to do analysis that show the ways that the systems around them violate or reinforce the rights and Internet Lab in Brazil looked at all the judicial outcomes of non-consensual image sharing cases in São Paulo and found the ways that the system was failing to protect young women's rights. In Peru Iperderecho has a youth league where college students come together to do similar analysis and similar projects that highlight the ways young people are not being served today but only in potential. Now this is a very long way to say that some organizations are already undertaking different ways to address youth privacy issues and not everything is doomed. I think that their work shows us that we can do agency-based work that we can promote collective responsibility that we can do intersectional readings on privacy and that we can definitely work for youth as subjects of rights today and that we no longer have any pretext to say, just say no. This is a too-long-didn't-read version of my master's thesis. You can read the actual interviews on civic.mit.edu. There is some more comprehensive summary on the Bergman Klein Medium and if you're interested in youth privacy issues please look at the Youth and Media Lab work at Bergman Klein. Thank you Kathy, thank you everybody. This is hard, five minutes. So I first started getting into public health and platforms in 2011 when I started becoming more aware of my own health. I started becoming a runner and I joined Tumblr to document and journal my own athletic endeavors which was a very motivating and healthy practice for me. I got a lot of external motivation and validation for my fitness goals. This is me after eating four burritos and running one mile in 35 minutes which is not the healthiest thing to do and lots of people cheered me on. But I think I started to notice on Tumblr that there was this kind of crossover between being part of a health-focused community and another kind of health-focused community that was on the more negative side promoting self-harm and eating disorder and in fact these communities kind of rode this gray area, there was overlap between a pro-health community, pro-recovery community and another kind of community that was more embracing and glorifying of unhealthy behaviors and actions using memes and selfies. It got so challenging and difficult for the platform of Tumblr that they instituted policy prohibiting self-harm content in 2012 and when you search for pro-self-harm content it would show you a PSA. Now this isn't the first time that a platform has had to deal with this fact in the early 2000s, Yahoo and AOL passed prohibition against this kind of content and this is what you see on Instagram today when you surface anorexia, it gives you a PSA and also promotes pro-self pro-health content. So I'm interested in how platforms respond to this issue because I feel like you can see a similar dynamic and almost a pattern play out across public health as a whole arena. For instance, if you look at vaccines the measles was effectively eradicated in the United States in 2000 and we just this year, since the beginning of this year, saw 700 cases reported as of now in 22 states. So it's in part due to things like this, these memes that Nat Guinness and Anja Amina call part of a misinfo-demic, a spread of a particular health outcome or disease facilitated by viral misinformation. And as with self-harmed content there's a response on platforms. There's the kind of grassroots counter-speech from people challenging misinfo or with humor. I like this on the right here where the original poster's mom says, no, you are fully vaccinated this is embarrassing. So there's fun ways to deal with it from a grassroots side. But then the platforms themselves also take their own approach. There's this kind of de-platforming banning certain forms of conversation. Looking at these types of contents I feel like we're finding challenging as part of a pattern can show us why it keeps emerging and how effective our responses are. So if you look at this graph you kind of start with a map of engagement around misinformation moving down to normalization of the behavior and then eventually extremism alongside trust of existing institutions. And this maps well to the vaccine case. You start with somebody maybe a concerned parent who looks at vaccine misinfo and says I'm concerned for the health of my children eventually as they dive deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole they become resistant and eventually participate in misinfo. Another way to look at this is some researchers have looked at conversations around vaccines on Facebook and they find increasingly kind of nuanced motivations for how people are embracing this kind of content. So what should platforms be doing to reduce the spread of harmful information around public health? So I have a few different ideas basically I think that there should be number one engaging the public health community supporting efforts with counter speech and also instituting getting help from the public health community to establish good practices. Second, I feel like we should avoid some instincts to look at this as an all or nothing approach. There may be cases where the blunt force of banning is a really good idea and there may be cases where we might benefit more from intervening in these communities. Third, I would also think about every feature on your platform as its own platform. So not just the stream of information on Facebook but the recommendation algorithms the engagement, the likes those are all their own little ways of engaging and they can all be used for harm. Fourth and finally I'd also consider the public health approach for all harmful behavior on platforms. So think about radicalization and hate speech and dehumanization using the same kind of approach. Thank you very much I really appreciate your time. Good afternoon. Really happy to be able to be among these distinguished speakers and to go after Dan which I think connects with what I'm going to talk about with you today and that is trust or at least ideas about what trust is and how it comes about. So we need a definition of trust and there's many definitions of trust from economics from sociology from marketing and trust is a willingness to be vulnerable. Now, why be vulnerable? Well, vulnerability is based on a set of beliefs or a willingness to believe certain things about the thing in which you are placing your trust and I think these beliefs are really important so I'm going to talk about them in the second. So one of the first beliefs we have has to do with the fairness of the thing in which you're putting your trust. So you believe that this thing is going to act justly. There's not going to be any discrimination related to you or your use or trusting in that thing. We talked about goodness and not necessarily the nutritional value, but we're talking about goodness on the scale of right or wrong, the thing you're placing your trust in falls on the good side, the right side of goodness, right? Related to goodness is benevolence. Now, benevolence is the actual charitable act the actual doing of the good thing. So we're talking about behavior here that's really important for trust or the belief. And I put strength and ability together because I think they go together. So strength we're talking about the power to do a thing and ability we're talking about the technical know how to perform the act here, but I think they go together importantly. We also have honesty that you believe that there's not going to be any deception related to placing your trust in the thing. Please note that the pictures may have nothing to do with what I'm talking about. So we also have predictability and that is that although we can't see all of what the thing is going to do, we can forecast or we can try to predict what's going to happen when we place our trust in that thing, that organization or that individual. So we're really talking about a relationship. So we have a trustor and we have a trustee. The trustor places the trust the trustee takes in the trust right. So it's a relationship. Now maybe more people in a relationship as well as you know. Now relationships can be of two kinds. One kind is a symmetric relationship. So both sides are providing in equal ways. So a symbiotic relationship both sides mirror imaging each other. But then there's the other kind of relationship and that's asymmetric and that is one side has a different level of trust or value being placed in a relationship. Now this is really important because in an asymmetric relation one takes more risk or has a higher burden of risk than the other side. So say if you place your personal information in a system the burden of risk is on you and not necessarily on the system in this case. So how do we get in an asymmetric relationship? Persuasion right. So you persuade a person or a thing to place their trust in you based on aesthetics other cues the smile I'm giving you telling you that what I'm saying is correct right. But I really want you to act in a certain way. I'm looking for action from you. Some kind of behavior that demonstrates you're placing your trust in me as a trustee of whatever it is that you're giving me. And basically I'm asking you to have a positive outlook or a positive expectation about what it is that I'm going to do for you in this trust relationship. I'm asking you to believe in me in some way right. Now really what I'm asking you to do is give me something of value right. Whether it's data whether it's money. Whether it's kindness right. I'm asking for something valuable. And that's contextual right. So the context is really going to matter here. But really forming a relationship of interdependence. That means I'm going to rely on you for something. Whether it's efficiency for help. Whatever the case may be we're forming some kind of reliance on each other. And this means our relationship is transactional. Now transactions people think of as a bad thing but really it's about the exchange of something for another thing right. So if we look back at this relationship when trust breaks down it is because something is missing in relation to those characteristics regarding trust. Honesty integrity those kinds of things. Thank you. Hi thank you everyone for giving us a chance to be here and to share with you a topic that really matters to me. So just a few more seconds. Solvona is a zilla it actually means hello but it actually means I see you. I sense you. I recognize your humanity. I affirm the humanity inside of you. I honor the dignity that exists inside of you. And Solvona is based off of the idea that we are interconnected. We depend upon each other. Therefore we are connected in ways that cannot be broken or separated. And to try to do so is a violation. It's a loss to our own humanity. We look into the underlying causes of the social problems that we have today which are now being worsened by technology we can actually realize that this is really due to a breakdown of being able to recognize the humanity that exists in others. So this is a broken view of what humanity is. This is the neglecting of the social connections, the social cohesion that exists and ignoring those relations and pursuing self-interest at the expense of what's needed for society. And this leads to social breakage. This is when relationships within society break apart. And this ultimately leads to the violation of human rights, the failure to recognize the humanity of others. And now we're living in a society where we have technology facilitating social breakage. And if we look at some of the strongest critiques of artificial intelligence they truly lie at the failure of technology to recognize the humanity of others. And so we look at isolation. This is the failure to build technology with a community in mind. A failure to recognize the humanity of others. And we can also look into how we might place biases into technology. And the embedding of biases and the universal application of biases into technology without taking into account the structural inequalities that may exist. This is also a failure to recognize the humanity of others. And when we have content recommendation systems that are based off of the commodification of user data. Systems that are based off surveillance and trying to maximize user company profits at the expense of others. This is also failure to recognize the humanity of others. And alienation, right, being able to alienate users from the value of the product of their labor. This is also disregarding the humanity of others. And we see this as well with the centralization of data which really amounts to the centralization of power. And when we have private entities that have amassed so much power a few people that control so much power at the expense of society. This is also a risk to your own humanity. Now when there's a loss of humanity there must be a way to bridge the gap. There must be a way to reconcile this chasm that has been caused by the failure to recognize the humanity of others. And we have seen several examples that have happened in the African continent. In 1994 Rwanda headed genocide where about 15% of the population was killed in a matter of a few months. This is a social breakage. This is a loss of the relations that exist in society. But the government took a process of national reconciliation. And we've seen the same process happening in Sierra Leone after the Civil War, after a decade of fighting. The government took a national process of truth and reconciliation to restore the wounds caused by a decade of fighting. And we've seen a similar situation as well in South Africa. After decades of white minority rule of the indigenous Africans the government took on a process of truth and national reconciliation. And the idea was that whenever there's a breakage in society we're supposed to restore and restore the humanity of others. So ultimately reconciliation and restoration rests on the ideas of equity, transformative justice restorative justice. And the idea is that when something is broken we must fix it. When equity is missing we must restore it into our technology. And as we lead with equity we must seek meaningful engagement meaningful inclusion, empower communities to shape the future of their technologies and what they desire out of the tools we build. So ultimately safer AI really begins with truly seeing each other and truly recognizing the humanity of each other. Selvona. Yes, these are things I learned collecting secrets. I did do a research project in an art installation over a couple of years based on collecting other people's secrets and redistributing them. It was done in collaboration with Jessica Jorkowski who is here today. So everybody think about something private in your digital life and your text messages, emails past or present. Do you have something? Yes, everybody does. This project was exploring that. The fact that we have these things that we are leaving traces of but not necessarily thinking about the future that we're leaving them to. In survey research we discovered that while people would be very keen to read the emails of their great-grandparents had they kept them they were less inclined to want their great-grandchildren to read theirs. So we designed an installation where you have a computer that asks you for a secret and if you type one in and push enter there's a little printer that prints somebody else's secret in return which you can then take with you. It's super simple but it had some more elements. Sometimes it was in a public more brightly lit environment like on the left sometimes it was in a dark more private space like on the right. There was also sound and projection and some other like complicating the algorithm that we did. It showed internationally so in those cases it was adapted in different languages or included different languages so you see Berlin and Warsaw here and as a result I learned a lot of things so I'm going to give you just a very brief synopsis of what some of those things are today and I love how it relates to all these other topics of misinformation and trust and sexting and everything. Secrets are weird and funny. I don't mean this in a judgmental way but rather in an endearing and appreciative way. People are complex and strange and often don't have an opportunity to share those things with others. People are extremely willing to share secrets in this format even after they realize having received someone else's secret that someone else is going to receive theirs often people return to the installation practically to share more. We can't know when a secret is true. We may have an idea that some secrets seem more true some secrets seem less true but we can't really know which brings up questions about our relationship to information online more broadly. We also make assumptions about other people's secrets or rather the people who submit the secrets. For example, if you read a secret about a bully you might be more inclined to think it's from a male or if you read a secret about an eating disorder particularly from a female. Obviously this is not always the case. I'm going to give you a little sample of the audio secrets. I killed a bunny when I was seven. I enjoy it. I've lied about my identity my whole life. My friend microwaved her hamster and it died. I think Bernie Sanders is handsome. Secrets secrets are also very common not surprisingly infidelity is among the highest frequency there's many others and yet secrets also can make us feel more connected and bring out our humanness. Technology so often makes us feel disembodied and disconnected but there's something about the sharing and anonymity that we should think about as we bring more technology into our lives. They also make people happy even the dark ones and I think that it's probably because when you realize that everybody is fucked up and not just you are fucked up it kind of makes you feel better. We also tell ourselves stories about what the machines are doing. There's, anecdotally we heard theories about why people were receiving certain secrets or what was happening with the remote printers and why they got a certain sequence and this is our inclination is to connect the dots with technologies but it's useful to shine a light on that inclination itself. Anonymity and intimacy can lead to connection and compassion. Usually we don't have anonymity and intimacy at the same time and this is something that can be really valuable because you don't know who secrets belong to. And lastly, fragments misrepresent. Obviously if we think about our corpuses of our online data that's not who we are that's just one kind of slice or one representation of us so we should think about how we're leaving information in the world. These are two of my favorite secrets that came in during the duration of the installation and lastly I want to thank my collaborators on this project and they're listed up here on the screen. Thank you very much. Hi everyone. I'm Kathy, a fam. I normally talk about tech and ethics but today I'm going to tell you about the belief that pineapples will cause incontinence forever, post-parme traditions and maternal health around the world. Here are some things Vietnamese anties will say when you give birth, don't eat pineapple because it's too cold no lemonade because it's too sour and both will give you incontinence forever. Forget seafood because it'll make you itchy or crab or shrimp and no tank tops keep your body warm, cover your arms don't walk upstairs and no bathing or washing your hair for one full month. Put on socks all time, remember to keep warm drink some black chicken soup and some hot ginger these are some of the things my Vietnamese mom and aunties would say to me after I gave birth to my daughter and for any woman who walks the streets of Little Saigon in Orange County or San Jose with the baby, you can be certain that if you're walking too fast if you're going upstairs if you're not wearing socks, if you're wearing a sleeveless shirt a Vietnamese stranger will stop you and tell you how to live your life. Most of us here in the United States will have these kinds of reactions many of us westernized immigrant children we say we think it's crazy we know better, we yawn and cringe and are frustrated when we think about this but maybe they're on to something so let's explore this more there's something called the sitting month it exists in Vietnam and China and many other places it's one month of rest learning to nurse no household chores people coming to help no washing your hair and no eating cold foods but the intent is to focus on rest and recovery in Japan there's a term that means quiet and peace and pampering the new mom rests and bonds with her baby Japanese women have less uterine diseases than American women and many in the medical community believe it's because of the time to recover and in Latin cultures there's like quarantine 40 days, female relatives handle day to day chores cooking, cleaning, taking care of children and the new mom just bonds and takes care of the baby this was my mom and my four week old daughter my mom died just one week after this photo and it was taken a month after she I gave birth and I really think she hung around so she can really fulfill her duties as a mom to me to take care of me for one month so in the United States we focus so much on the prenatal the baby showers, the celebration of the baby everybody wants to hold the baby we don't focus on what happens to the mom once the baby is out this leaves many women in danger the infant mortality rate in the US is so high let's look at another culture, the Himba tribe where the breastfeeding rate is really high why? it's the grandmothers, women stay with their moms for months after birth for support recovery, guidance, care in parts of China new moms go to these luxurious recovery centers with 24 hour supervision trained nurses, nutritionists, doctors, etc and someone is always ensuring that all the rules are followed at all time and by contrast in the United States we have the shortest hospital stays women are sent home with very little support very little training in other countries they go under breastfeed and exercises for recovery and the nurses check in on you to make sure you're okay the lack of postpartum care is one of the factors that lead to the rising maternal mortality rate here in the United States we have an average of 26 deaths per 100,000 live births that's 7 times higher than Finland 5 times higher than Australia and 3 times higher than the UK black women here in the US have a significantly worse risk their rates are doubled at 44 deaths per 100,000 live births black expectant mothers in the United States die at the same rate as women in countries with much less developed medical systems every year in the United States 900 women die from pregnancy or childbirth related causes and about 65,000 women nearly die that's the worst record in the developed world so in addition to the narrative of those staggering figures the United States is the only country of our peers to have zero paid parental leave we do not value or understand the need for women to recover after giving birth this contributes to our problems of maternal deaths here in the United States so we don't have to follow all these rules and traditions and beliefs go ahead, eat the pineapple, bathe wear tank tops but we can learn a thing or two from these cultures that value recovery, care, and the lives of women maybe just one month one month of support and care can turn around the rate of dying women so we all can help to stop parental leave if you are in health care, change hospital protocol and for the rest of us be supportive co-workers, build better companies build better cultures, be part of the village that helps bring life into the world and care for the woman that makes that possible like the forward era when I'm ready so my name is Salome Filion and I'm going to tell you a story about a river specifically the Cuyahoga River and I think it's also a lesson in how we've solved particular problems by which I mean collective systemic problems that require collective systemic solutions it's also a lesson in how a river can go from a flow of water and a part of a cycle in nature to a thing of productive extractive value and use in industry to a living practice of commons management and moderation of balancing many interests both human and ecological but first I want to place it so the Cuyahoga River is in northeast Ohio it runs through Cleveland and into Lake Erie and even existed this river was valuable it was valuable to the native people who lived there the Iroquois and to wildlife now at the turn of the last century the river was part of the industrial explosion happening on the banks of Lake Erie it powered electricity and dams it was used to ship goods and with industrialization we see the first shift in our core logic about this river it becomes something else a thing of production seen in terms of its use for economic reasons and where there's industrial growth there's pollution at times the Cuyahoga was one of the most polluted rivers in the U.S. and by the mid-century the reach from Akron to Cleveland was totally devoid of fish sections of the river were covered in a brown oily film large quantities of black oil floated in slicks several inches thick in which debris and trash often caught the color changed from gray brown to rust brown as the river wound downstream and animal life did not exist one fateful day in June of 1969 the Cuyahoga River caught fire now this wasn't actually the first time this river caught fire it had caught fire 13 times before the first in 1868 and the largest in 1952 but something about this was pretty interesting which is weird because pollution wasn't a big story at the time here we see oil slicks around the Statue of Liberty and smog in New York and LA but something about this June fire sparked change the story was picked up by Time Magazine which described the Cuyahoga as the river that oozes rather than flows and in which people do not drown but decay and this powerful image was circulated nationally during a wake-up moment it helped spur environmental change in the U.S. and it was really picked up by the environmental movement and this led to fixes both local and federal so we saw the Clean Water Act passed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement was passed in the region and recently it helped lead to the creation of the EPA and I think what we see here is we really changed the way we manage water and here we see a second shift in our core logic of rivers as something with useful productive purposes sure but also something that if mismanaged can create risks of toxicity and harm and also finally something that has value and meaning beyond its role in production and for humans and I think in short this is a shifting attitude to call an extractive approach to an ecosystem or ecological approach from just thinking about what can be taken to what are permissible uses what are unacceptable toxicities all with an eye to managing the overall systemic health of something so managing a river requires communications across groups between localities up and downstream and it requires explicitly thinking about the trade-offs between agricultural industrial and the natural purposes of a river and I think this approach has really helped it's really helped the Cuyahoga River this is a picture of it today it has fish in it, people can even swim in it it's not perfect, it still has pollution but it's greatly improved and I also think that the lesson of the Cuyahoga can be a way for us to think about what other collective systemic problems we're facing and for which we can think about similar collective systemic solutions so my own work is in the data economy about the systemic problems like toxic practices the over-extraction of resources all happening in a highly relational and interconnected ecosystem of information and I think we're seeing a lot of externality or almost sort of pollutive effects in this economy and I think that we can similarly to our approach to rivers think about collective systemic solutions here that switch us to an ecological approach to data something that has productive value that poses systemic risks but also stems from aspects of us that are non-economic and that have illegible value as well so a lot of people in this room and in my larger community may think that the current state of data collection is a bit of a dumpster fire from the effects of election security rise of hate speech online architectures of hyper-connection and personalization as well as sort of underlying all of that the data imperative driving companies to ever more seamless data extraction but I like to think about the state of our data economy as more like a river on fire and that's something that we know how to fix thank you there it goes there's the last line this is great we can end on a dumpster fire note so now we have about 10 minutes till 1 and then we still have I believe time afterwards as well for just questions from the room I know that was a lot I'll bring up a slide with me with everyone's name so you can be reminded of what we all talked about but we'll leave we'll open up the room for questions we have Aletra with data and plastic John and the cashless economy oh there it is Mariel and just say no to just say no, youth and privacy Dan telling us more about public health and content moderation, Jasmine trust, Sobello and the Ubuntu framework for AI Newman and Secrets myself with maternal health and pineapples and Salome with the story of a river and regulation that was a lot I know thank you for joining us and let's open up for questions on any of these topics we have mic runners too I think I have a question for Salome what do you think is going to be the burning river and the digital economy is there anything that can shock us so much that we're going to go into collective action? I think we're kind of living it right now I think that if you look at how the media has been covering technology I think you can in and around the time of Cambridge Analytica notice a really stark shift so I think we're sort of having our burning river moment or at least I'm optimistic about our burning river moment things can always get worse but I hope they get better Thank you all for great talks I'm particularly concerned as now a grandfather because my kids are about 30 now and as a policymaker because I'm a graduate of the Kennedy School on this issue of the internet, Marielle which I believe you're Latin what do you think or anybody here what do you think and how do you draw the line between the right to freedom of speech freedom of communication and actually the right to protect our kids there's a difference there and legally I still don't understand what to do I think my personal take on this is that the key is that we need to stop posting it as it's either freedom of expression kids have the right to freedom of expression and they also have the right to be protected and so do adults and we know that there are many adults who are marginalized in Latin America and in other parts of the world who have seen the right to protection not be respected and so I think that rather than think of it as a protection versus freedom of expression we need to look at the regulatory frameworks that are starting to think of two at the same time to the young woman a Vietnamese woman who spoke about maternal one month after what I was wondering is how you think that that can if they if that can have some sort of a national implication because I realize that different cultures do it differently and even some people who were born in a culture have chosen to be vegan so they would step outside of it and they would actually have to create their own version of it but I think that women and women's health in this whole thing is enormously undervalued we see it with the lack of childcare but how do you think we can implement it on a sort of a nationwide basis that the value of women and especially pre and post maternity yeah I think with any theory of change it takes lots of different levers I think it would be great if every organization that employed women would give them the time to recover as needed and then I also think that people need to recognize what happens after someone gives birth even just knowing things like people bleed for an extra four weeks that it really takes a month to at least start to really recover and just an understanding of every person in society as a whole not just the policy makers and people in power to really support your team members or coworkers or even just people not like your neighbors when they give birth and then also for healthcare providers to really change our hospital protocol right now you're sent home after two days insurance makes you go home if you're doing like a normal delivery so for insurance and healthcare providers also to recognize that perhaps some women need more time as well so I think it takes all levers question for Dan do some of what you were talking about seem to be kind of public health authorities getting involved in public conversations to kind of combat misinformation but do you think platforms themselves like Facebook have a duty to intervene in the way that like anti-vax material is spreading on their services because I presumed they're going to be very resistant to anything that kind of alienates their customer base or alienates a particular bit of their customer base that's a good question I think that platforms generally do have a duty to have some sort of voice in the kind of content that they permit and some platforms do this I feel like very well in interesting ways Wikipedia has a very well internally regulated community that establishes a lot of things via norms, metafilters another example where they have moderators who are regulating the way the conversation happens and what is unacceptable or acceptable I think that there are ways of instituting better norms practices on these platforms without necessarily establishing policies but we aren't even seeing that from Facebook in a lot of ways so I think that's at least a place to start to start to look at Facebook and maybe Facebook has talked about having this external advisory board to help them shape up a little bit I don't have any hope for that necessarily but we're going to see what happens Hi, I have so many questions but I'll ask Kathy one I'm old so I've watched attitudes towards maternal recovery change over time I remember at some point hearing the mantra over and over that women used to be out in the fields and would give birth and would just go right back out into the fields and I'm not sure where that came from but I mean the sort of look at how other societies think about maternal health seems a whole lot more insane then some push to get back into the fields the same day which I assume was part of trying not to cast women as these weak things for whom pregnancy was a long you shouldn't hire a woman, she'll get pregnant and then she'll have to recover or whatever could you talk about the overall philosophy of women's rights and equality and how it plays out if we start embodying a more sane approach to dealing with the burdens of giving birth that's such a big question anyone else can weigh in as well so I think in a nutshell the recognition that you know asking for I think three to six months of recovery time might be too much in this country at this time but the very least is the recognition that we don't have to be proud of two days later going to train for a marathon or like get out in the field or get out to work and have this pride of honor on us I think women do it to each other as well it's like this encouragement of getting back out there but also with society not recognizing I think there's a lot of recovery that it takes and one month to six weeks or so is not that long I remember when I worked at Google somebody could take off a month ago climb like Mount Kilimanjaro and that was seen as so cool but you take off a month ago and have a baby and like something is wrong with you and so it's like this you know that's those six weeks whether it be a sabbatical to write a book whether it be like to go pike the PC H the trail and yeah the Pacific Coast Trail or go sit at home watch Netflix all day or have a baby I see how sometimes certain types of leaves are seen as a great thing that enhances your career and you're given you're even you're getting a lot of kudos from your coworkers for it and then you take leave for something like even caregiving or giving birth or any of those things and it's seen as a detriment so perhaps somehow level out that playing field that if you just it's not a negative thing and it'd be great if people saw it as a positive thing but at the very least view it as just the same as someone going off to go and take someone leave for something else and that is not necessarily a bad it's not a bad thing just well so just one sort of quick anecdote is that when Kathy went out on leave for her last child she sent out a note to our community sharing that she was taking some time away from you know all the emails and everything and I was so inspired by that and I took it as like a wow that's the way I want to do it so I feel like that's another way that to kind of promote this is just to show to kind of like show the path that we want to be on so far as we can and like show others that so when I saw that I was like that's that's how I'm going to do it I'm not available oh I gotta go and pump now sorry I need like five minutes or I need I think it's good to kind of maybe normalize I think there was an article recently and I'll hand it over that where people are showing breastfeeding through the years and there were periods of time when it was definitely not a bad thing to just breastfeed in public and we've somehow reversed course and so there's a lot to unpack unpack there so maybe we can just normalize having children and not treat it like some medical condition hi thank you for a great set of talks I have a question for Jasmine and maybe also Cibelo I like the frameworks that you are invoking sort of for trust and the expectations we have the values that we care about and also for your Cibelo for your framework for IA I was just wondering Jasmine where I'm thinking there's great possibilities to apply this I was just wondering if you had looked at your models in certain contexts and I'm thinking about the cashless economy the mental the medical health public you know information disinformation etc I'm just wondering where you might apply it and also Cibelo where else you might look for your frame when I was looking for this information I looked across disciplines so computational science sociology marketing slash business economics and they all had kind of this unified idea about vulnerability and expectations of behavior so I think that a definition or framework like this can be used across disciplines across like sectors technology for instance sociology all of those where we could like try to see where trust breaks down or why trust is sustainable and related to some of these factors because it's basically across all disciplines they have this like basic basic basic idea about what trust is and the factors that go into it I think this applies to various disciplines whether it's law or business or technology or just social issues for example if we look at how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was done in Rwanda and in South Africa especially in South Africa it wasn't really meant for retribution it was meant to be restorative and so this is a value we see in African cultures where the idea is that if there's a breaking society it's not about casting blame who's wrong or whatever the case is how can we best restore balance and restore harmony to society so we have different legal systems from different parts of the world which are based off of this idea and I think even if businesses were able to operate without putting profits above people but actually focusing on social cohesion and social action on how to maximize that we could have different business practices so ultimately to say I think many of the issues that we experience and we face today in the African philosophy I really lie at the failure of recognizing other people as equal human beings who deserve protection who deserve dignity Thank you I wanted to ask John about the cashless society idea there is a lot of work on financial exclusion and microfinance and I was just wondering was the problem that you're talking about that there aren't the right kind of banks or that some of the people who are unbanked should stay unbanked you think it would be a solution to have more banks of a new kind I don't know all of the above I think there's a lot of reasons why people are underbanked and unbanked and fintech however you want to describe it that can be a solution there's actually been a lot of good studies some of them have been industry but it makes logical sense that lenders for example to small businesses there's a much higher acceptance rate of women and minority owned businesses because the theory goes that traditionally in these communities banks have not served their interests and so by going through a and this kind of goes to frankly the secrets conversation that's what made me think of this example where there might be a fintech solution no I mean look there's all kinds of reasons I think when I think through some of them and you look at some of the data a lot of it has to do with just how expensive maintaining various accounts can be especially as a percentage of income some of it has to do again with like deep rooted historical distrust of these institutions because they haven't served interests well it's a really multivariate and you know again a ban my personal opinion is I think it is effective though not the most elegant solution certainly and so likely is going to be a mix of policy solutions that arrive at people being able to access these services because I mean look I live most of the time in Washington DC it's not too different from Boston it's not too different from New York there is a sweet green next to a soul cycle next to a blue stone lane next to and I love all of these places but if you do if they all don't accept cash you've then created these islands within cities that are already getting crazy expensive where people literally cannot go and engage with society that would seem to me to be a problem that we got to figure out so I also wanted to add to the whole financial inclusion and I draw an example from Sub-Saharan Africa where a model based on the point to exist half of the GDP in the African continent is in the informal sector and so most of the population is actually unbanked and they still find ways to still carry out financial transactions and so throughout the entire Sub-Saharan African region you find systems where the community gets together to to organize as a collective to support a particular person so the first month the community might give money to this particular family and then the next month it goes into another family this is like all over in many African countries or they might have a group savings program where they all decide to save to buy a particular thing and people have been able to send the kids to school buy houses buy cars so there are alternative ways for financial inclusion and this is based on social trust as you were saying interdependency and social capital I think there's examples in the United States too right, collectives, cooperatives who have a resource or somebody has something that another person needs or wants and so they come together to exchange value related to those things that they have or need sorry I know we're going over first of all I just want to say thank you all so so much for these amazing talks they're really excellent models for I think ways of presenting information and it's just very inspirational I wish I could always be that concise which I'm not being now so I have two quick questions for you Dan and for you Kathy I have a really personal interest in and passion for reproductive health and justice and just public health in general and I'm curious Dan what you think about like the role of journalists in the like health and misinformation space just because so many of I think like these hidden worlds on social media in spaces like Tumblr for instance aren't visible to the rest of the public and I think that might make it difficult for these policy considerations to be passed and for perhaps like more insidious ways of influencing or mitigating the spread of health misinformation online and I'm curious how you think like journalists might be able to push some of that to the forefront I think if we knew some of the top health misinformation stories that might help push the conversation forward and I just I'd love to hear your thoughts and then Kathy I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how you think all of this is going in the digital age in the US and how people who don't have health insurance at all or don't get like paid leave if they're in the gig economy if they you know work for Uber for instance like how we can keep pushing this narrative forward like even in the digital space and perhaps work even harder for that and also I think in the US specifically I've noticed a theme and almost like a co-option of some of these practices where like white women now have more access to midwives and doulas and are able to like take this time for themselves and I'm also wondering if you have any thoughts on how we can make sure that this like care taking is as inclusive as possible and that it like is actually meeting the audience the audiences that it should and especially all of the stats that you gave so thank you so much I'll just jump on the first question real quick there's a couple things I feel like journalism can do for misinformation around public health and one is I think there's a project by the I think it's the news literacy initiative I'm gonna find the name but they've been helping build curricula for schools that involve basically running students through quizzes of identifying misinformation versus factual information online so in that way like helping to build a new generation of folks who can better discern truth from fiction online and a lot of the problem with misinformation I feel like has come from just the lack of trust in the media so there's a lot of ways that I don't feel like traditional journalism can really help that because the mistrust is with them but I feel like there's some really good space for journalists and start-up journalists especially to embed in social networks and especially in spaces where this misinformation is coming from to better get to know the kind of anthropology of these spaces and to talk back to platforms and explain to them what is happening on their platforms because there's this huge gap between what the platforms are doing when they are creating their space and what is actually happening there so connecting those dots I feel like it's super important I'll just try to keep this short and the first question was to the gig economy in the world where women have access to duals etc I don't know, I think maybe other folks have better answers I feel like this is a much bigger healthcare question where when you work in the gig economy you work for these companies but not really they don't provide you any benefits so in some cases they can say it's flexible and you can do what you want but also you don't have benefits so if you have a kid you can either choose between feeding or having a much bigger discussion of companies having a much bigger responsibility to their employees in the gig economy and having to really think through that together as a society and then what you brought up with duals and midwives is so interesting on one hand you have the woman in Cambridge where I gave birth to my last daughter where you can get a dual or a midwife choose to have a baby at home and have this very cushy you have women of color in this country that can't even get good healthcare at a hospital when they deliver so there's a huge gap there and there's a lot to unpack there as well I don't really know the right answer beyond really just yelling that this is a problem and hopefully someone in this room or elsewhere can think of how to really address and recognize these issues I think we're going to leave it there thank you all so much for coming and sharing with us today