 Hello and welcome. I'm Lynne Fries, producer of Global Political Economy, or GPE, Newstocks. Capitalism in the Age of Intellectual Monopoly, authored by Cecilia Rickup and Cedric Durand. Centering Society and Big Tech Reform by Richard Hill. Rigging the rules how Big Tech uses self-trade agreements and how we can stop them by Deborah James. When Big Tech came for the farm, a blueprint of resistance from Asia's small farmers by grain. Those are a sampling of essays that are part of a compendium of 15 essays published in the 2022 edition of The State of Big Tech, a research project at IT for Change, supported by the Fair, Green, and Global Alliance. This is an eight-member alliance that aims to power voices of peoples and communities all over the world, and that's collaborating with over a thousand partner organizations and countries where people in nature are under constant pressure. Under the theme of dismantling digital enclosures and at the invitation of IT for Change, scholars and activists alike, representing a broad spectrum of fields and experience, have contributed to this inaugural edition of The State of Big Tech. And as stated by IT for Change, the essays break down various phenomenon, such as the creeping onslaught of ed tech into public education, the digital capture of food systems, big tech's attempts to monopolize research and corner innovation networks, to their Trojan horse proposals for instituting their power in multilateral spaces, to the questions raised by Web 3.0. But going beyond detailing the problem statement, our contributors also capture attempts at popular mobilization and bold visions for alternative digital futures that attempt to break out of the privatized status quoist enclosures. Today's video short will feature clips of three of those contributors talking about their own respective essays. And those essays include Milford Batemans, the investor-driven fintech model and its discontents, Michael Quetz, building a socialist social media commons, and Sofia Montsave Suarez and Philip Suferts, the big tech takeover of food systems in Latin America, elements for human rights-based alternative. We go now to our featured clips. Interest in preparing the chapter in this book is fintech, short for financial technology. It's something that is being widely celebrated across the world, but particularly in the global south, because many see it as a way that will bring development to local communities and facilitate poverty reduction and many other benefits. The evidence so far is that there are some benefits for communities in terms of easier access to credit, easier savings, better access to remittances, cheaper payments. But when you start to look into the long term and how these trends develop, you actually see that there are many downsides appearing and they are now at risk of swamping any of the initial upsides to fintech. So that's what I've tried to look at. It's still researched at an early stage, but certainly it's very worrying that so many of the initial upsides are now being completely obliterated by these downsides. And that fintech is now turning into a new way of extracting value from the global south along the lines of the old colonial projects. And so I've documented some issues of that and the other disbenefits I can find. And at the end of the chapter I point to a new type of model, a people-centred fintech model which is about local communities using fintech platforms as a way of directly benefiting the community and not having to interact with big tech or international investors but doing it themselves and promoting fintech and adopting and adapting fintech in ways that help local communities in the global south. My name is Michael Quett and today I'm going to be discussing an article I wrote for IT for Change about social media. It's called Building a Socialist Social Media Commons and it's about how to transform the social media landscape so that it's truly democratic, bottom-up and egalitarian and environmentally sustainable at a global level. So right now, over the last few years, the antitrust community has proposed a solution for social media to force big social media networks to interoperate with smaller ones so that smaller networks have a real chance of growing their user bases. However, in their solution there's a commitment to competitive capitalism and the private ownership of social media networks that pursue profit growth expansion and try to maximize their user bases in a war of all against all for a finite user base in order to maximize revenues and profits. So I think that the harms that we see in big social media such as privacy violations and user manipulation as well as a consumerist model built around advertising that threatens the environment these things are going to remain intact under their model. So I argue in the paper that instead we should be trying to take this further and try to build a truly bottom-up community-owned and controlled social media ecosystem one that's free and open source and decentralized so that we don't run into these harms and so that people are in control of their social media experiences. I offer as a model the Fediverse which began development over a decade ago and is a set of interoperable social media networks that already exist in the real world today with over several million users. I also discuss other alternatives to further decentralize the already existing interoperable social media landscape and I explain how this works in the article and then I close the article out by discussing some legal solutions because it's one thing to have an alternative that exists in the real world that is functional and doing quite well but it's another thing to scale it up because the big social media networks already have corner in the market so I have a set of legal solutions that I think could be put into place that would actually transform social media into a socialist commons. In order to make this work, obviously we would need a big grassroots movement because you can't destroy a trillion-dollar corporations without pushback and attempts to stop it from happening. Big tech is trying to control all domains essential for life. Food is one of those. In a lens with big food and agribusiness, big tech is a major factor in potentially increasing the corporate capture of our food systems but agribusiness is not the only entry point for big tech in agriculture. Big tech is also trying to penetrate and control a small-scale farming. How is it doing so? It is providing digital infrastructure in rural areas as well as digital platforms for accessing markets, digital advisory extension services, agri-digital financial services and access to smart farming for scale food producers. Why is this a problem? By controlling digital infrastructure, big tech is in a comfortable position to legitimately create a small-scale farmer's data. Big tech attempts to reorganize food production in a manner that will deepen the subordination of a small-holder farming to the interests of global capital. Capturing peasant and indigenous collective knowledge and monopolizing the rents that can be generating from it is a central piece in this endeavor. Big tech jeopardizes the rights of peasants and of indigenous peoples. Defending our food sovereignty is a crucial element in today's struggle against big tech. All of the essays contributed to the 2022 Big Tech Compendium can be found online at it4change.net. The direct link is as follows, all in lower case and the first word is plural. So that's projects.it4change.net forward slash state hyphen of hyphen big hyphen tech forward slash. In addition to the essays mentioned in today's video short, the companion's other titles include Rise of the Platform Economy, Implications for Labor and Sustainable Development in Developing Countries, Taming Big Technification, the European Digital Markets Act, Big Tech and Digital Hype against COVID-19. Can data save lives, the right to health in the digital era? Web 3 and the Metaverse, which way for the web? Big Tech and the Smartification of Agriculture. Taxing Big Tech, policy options for developing countries. Changing Dynamics of Labor and Capital. Many thanks to it4change for putting this content into the public domain and to all the supporters and contributors to this research project. And thank you for joining us.