 I think now we'll open it up for questions but I just wanted to say that before we started the panel I had this general question that I wanted to ask everybody which was so what are we going to do? But I think that I want to address that to this room because you all here are the ones that are going to help us do that. You're the makers and the thinkers and the producers and the consumers that I think have a lot of power in how these questions get answered. So with that I'd like to open it up and we have a microphone that needs to be passed around so wait for it. I just wanted to get your thoughts on the shift to mobile platforms because as a design solution it kind of has caused this shift away from what Sophia mentioned earlier like this people who grew up with the internet had the ability to sort of like access like the back door like what Anne mentioned like accessing the code but now with the shift to mobile platforms a lot of that is more opaque and then places like in less developed nations where the mobile platform is like the less expensive option to access the web. It creates like this sort of inaccessibility of the code or the back door that has been really important to like this like fighting the web sort of like for hacking and stuff like that. So I just wanted to get your thoughts on that shift. Yeah I mean you're nailing it in that the hardware is a constraint. It's another one of the constraints right so often I talk about if I did if I collected searches and the display was the size of the Empire State Building there'd be a lot more to talk about right a lot more available and conversely when you do the search on a mobile phone now you're getting you know a third or less. I got the big phone you know I'm saying but if you got that if you got a little one because I can't read I'm blind so you got it so this is a constraint and I don't think that it's these kinds of conversations I mean I'm pretty I feel like I could make a pretty pretty good bet that these kinds of conversations are not going down in hardware manufacturing design right where we like go hey what would happen if people only got you know the first five hits first it or they couldn't edit code right from their mobile device I mean in fact that we talk about these in a scholarly way as digital enclosures right and the normalization of these digital enclosures mobile being a really important one is something that is very difficult for us to intervene upon right we have more black boxing so to speak of the technology than ever and and it is hard to hack harder to hack and even the idea of hacking it you know over the course of 25 years you know has become more pejorative right in kind of the legalistic way certainly criminalized in many ways so you're you're nailing the right questions and I think we have to figure it out maybe that means you know you'll help us like lead us to these other alternate platforms where we can try to do something different and people are trying to intervene with different kinds of mobile technologies you might have seen that block phone right that's all components where you can you know instead of throwing the whole phone out when one thing fails you just take out the component part so it's like a sustainability well it didn't used to be a Google project I guess they took it over because before like two years ago it wasn't but they buy everything so like you know anything good you guys are going to make like be millionaires when you come up with these good ideas is that the intervention I don't know then we'll have to figure out at a certain point will Google get broken up like AT&T was I don't know do you know what I'm saying but I think it's an important question it's more constraining probably than many other devices we're dealing with and if we think about ideas of a digital divide even if that's a useful framework to even kind of use right is having access on a mobile phone to the internet the same as having access via a laptop or even if you think kind of in more even within kind of the realm of kind of computer access to the internet right is having broadband access at home the same or has having it at your school kind of the same as having actual kind of empowered internet access in a kind of complete way this is about consumption being an audience 24-7 always on consumptive audience right it's not really for producing in the same way otherwise everybody would be trying to design on this and they're not thanks this for Professor Noble but or it's about something Professor Noble said but it's open to the panel I guess I should say so about the implementation of how we regulate a search engine like Google or any other entity online that's responsible for disseminating information request the Forbes article seemed to think that there's definitely a legal and maybe moral responsibility of doing that and how do you go about that when responses that people could probably get from Google or that our motivators are not only profit but usability and they'll they'll argue it from a very technical side of the equation and also specifically with Google as I think we everyone can agree that it's a major one a target that company in particular at their outset you're probably aware of it their main philosophy was like literally the phrase don't be evil when they found at Google it's still the Wi-Fi password on their shuttles that's amazing I was just there so how do you implement that kind of change or convince legislators of that kind of regulation when legislators are probably going to see things from that side at least at least now in the development of these ideas and how do you actually not just convince people but are there other ways of getting it regulated and can you do it without can you do it non cooperatively can is there are there ways to get the same effects without actually getting Google to change their algorithms or their policies it's an excellent question so when the federal trade commission started investigating Google a few years ago about four years ago or so into its monopoly practices ultimately the FTC decided that Google was not a monopoly and had a right to perform its business duties anyway it felt necessary right so part of what we're dealing with is as you all know of course you can't leave design school without knowing what neoliberalism is so in the neoliberal kind of economic policy environment where in the United States since the 1980s we've really stepped up our game around privatization and you know corporate control of many aspects of kind of what we previously might have thought of as part of like a public domain or public institutions that might provide a resource now we're in an era where it seems wholly logical to most people that corporations would provide those resources to us right so this is one of the reasons why people report high degree of confidence in Google or in search engines for example because it it seems normal to have a private company or even a publicly traded company do that rather than say the library and so in a total divestment from public libraries or public institutions that could have built these technologies to you but you are not resourced at the level the government also provided a lot of government contracts to Google right but not to other public institutions to do some of the work that it's done right so Google's massively funded by the US government so there's so part of this is like the environment right the neoliberal economic environment that we're operating in now I think there is some really I would be on this side of giving testimony about regulation if invited to and I think we're seeing in the EU some really hard come down crackdowns on the role of Google as a commercial private company so to speak working solely in its own kind of profit motive paradigm you know with the with a different set of end goals than maybe public institutions would provide you know in the US it's very difficult because we have very strong discourses now more than ever about distrusting the state or distrusting government you know and Europe people have a different sensibility in many different countries about the role of the state so this is part of why it's the EU is actually imposing a lot of sanctions on Google around their kind of non-competitive or anti-competitive practices and blocking out other companies and really they're straight-up monopoly practices and they're they're issuing a lot of pushback and researchers are thinking about alternatives and they're very well organized differently than were organized here so I think that you know we might get some relief so to speak or some models that come out of the EU that might help us shift the discourse here in the US but I have to say that that you know at the same time UCLA just outsourced its email to Gmail so what I mean you know it's like what you can't win you know we have these public institutions all over the country that are just outsourcing to these ed tech companies and other kinds of companies and and divesting the public you know dollars from these kinds of projects so it's it's real difficult but I think it's worth fighting for certainly because we really don't know the end we've start we're starting to see some of the problematics right of the like incredible surveillance that's happening the loss of control over our digital identities if you think you have control over it you don't right everything the documenting of your every utterance once it goes on the web I tell people it's written in pen you know maybe it's tattooed I don't know it's like really hard to get off so all the implications of what it means to have our all of our lives and all of our information John from Francois Blanchet talks about the social value of forgetfulness right of forgetting we're losing our ability to forget the things that should be forgotten also right be wait until you try to run for Senate or Congress some of you in this room and some pictures or text roll up I mean you know it's like that I know people are like don't bring it up so I think I think you know we have yet to see and maybe it will it will come about that when these really negative profoundly negative consequences of the of the of what it means for these companies to control everything about what we say and what we do I mean even this talk is online right now probably right now I'm just then maybe we'll push back it's gonna take a lot more than just regulation it'll take a culture shift to do we have one in the front yeah hello should I stand up for just yes stand up okay um this is kind of piggybacks off of what we've been discussing but we've been talking about the corporatization of online space but also like online activism and the same at the same time so I guess my question is what is the dangers of activism happening within the corporate space and then also thinking about like tumblr was specifically mentioned and like in my opinion tumblr is kind of different from online spaces and I would just like to talk about like why is that I love tumblr I'm not on any social media site except for tumblr and it's great I feel like I've learned more from being on social justice blogs on tumblr black tumblr during blackout day trans day of visibility then my entire like critical theory degree in graduate school at Cal Arts like for real and I think one of the things about tumblr that that it's maybe like a step away from Facebook and that you can be completely anonymous on there like you don't have to reveal any of your own information and the information that you choose to reveal is often you know like yeah like hey I'm like a 15 year old gender queer person living in the middle of nowhere and I can I can change the CSS and HTML on my tumblr and I think that there's something about it that's like a little my spacey in that way I mean obviously tumblr like it's not a utopia there are plenty of plenty of problems on tumblr but I think that there's something about it that this is also a general question that I wanted to ask about anonymity and like anonymous and the hacktivist you know kind of like work of anonymous I wonder if anonymity on the internet is also like in service to some kind of political action that can be good like I wonder if the reason why tumblr feels different is because you can choose like you don't have to use your real name right like so on Facebook this is a problem if you want to use a different name than your given name say you're a trans person who doesn't want to be use your given name and Facebook has this policy right of asking you or demanding like is this your real name so I wonder about that like level of anonymity and how that works and yeah what do y'all think about anonymous I think I can speak generally to anonymity as it's both I think it's incredibly powerful and incredibly dangerous in ways that I'm still kind of grappling with and it a friend of mine who's a researcher our name is Trisha Wong and she put forth this idea especially physically around tumblr but I guess any any sort of social network that allows for a kind of flexible performance of identity is the ability to to explore different identities and to to benefit from anonymity and not have to be locked in to who you are it uses phrase elastic self which I just love that this and and you know cities traditionally the ability to go to a gay bar or to to go to a you know these kind of third spaces where you could explore different sort of identity or different sort of self with with what you would hope is some level of anonymity in a way from like this kind of smaller villages or towns that you might come from you know we can analogize that with some of these flexible spaces that allow for if not anonymity then at least pseudonymity or or some sort of a flexible identity I'm not I'm not sure that anonymity on the internet this is truly possible given given just the level of the amount of data that's collected about how we're using the web that could be debated but the flexible identity seems really important but at the same time and we you know we saw this with the Dylan Roof example it's also a great way to perform dangerous identities as well and to discover different sides of yourself that that you may not have explored and that are actually harmful to society so it's it's interesting still you know grappling with and I and I think you know there are these incredible benefits for marginalized communities but what being marginalized can also you know marginal viewpoints can also be you know misogyny might be considered of a marginalized viewpoint in terms of the ability to express direct misogyny in public discourse in the US is quite limited and yet on the internet what we see is extremely direct misogyny and so that the ability to be pseudonymous or anonymous can promote both harmful and helpful attitudes I think there's there's a lot of things to speak to in both kind of of your questions but thinking about kind of activism for a second and we can think about anonymous as kind of a specific instance of kind of digital activism and its potential I actually this is one of the things we were talking about in my class yesterday and the kind of potential for activism using what can kind of be done well in terms of online activism what is it is it kind of the same valuation to like something to like a social justice cause on Facebook as it is to go to a march or to engage in some kind of more traditional form of protest and I'm actually really intrigued by the fact that most of my students did not see kind of they see digital tools as enabling kind of traditional activism but that the actual just the kind of digital the purely digital activism doesn't actually they don't see it as kind of having much power for change which was interesting to me and that they were very drawn there was things they still wanted even from activist movements that had come out of digital space in part of digital spaces right so thinking about black lives matter and other kinds of quote unquote like hashtag activism right that they still are not convinced that it can make positive social change without having a kind of traditional hierarchy and platform of demands they were particularly critical most of them are on board with kind of black lives matters message but don't think it actually can and kind of provoke real change without a kind of more traditional activists kind of platform where say you're going to take a legal kind of approach to ending kind of racism in the criminal justice system and things so there's I think there's lots of interesting questions to ask or kind of what digital spaces can do well and what they don't do well and some of that is related to kind of issues that have already come up around language right there's been remission of awesome who's in our department writes a lot about kind of the the Arab Spring and the use of Twitter there and where those people who are using Twitter actually are and what was actually done in kind of digital spaces versus in kind of in physical spaces as well so there's lots of interesting questions to ask there and the speaking of kind of misogyny in online spaces there's a really great Wendy West has a really great story about one of her kind of her internet her misogynist internet trolls actually kind of coming out to her as who he actually is and them having a conversation which is really fascinating if you're interested in that as well yeah I mean I think honestly you know if you start if you look back pre-digital to the types of surveillance that activists especially in the U.S. on the left in particular have been under I think the internet exacerbates that level of surveillance the end I mean that's just what happens and so it's it's hard for me to get on board with thinking that the internet is some type of liberatory space because it actually heightens I mean now every single person who's ever tweeted on any cause is identifiable and trust for those of us who've been trolled on the internet you know we we know what the real threat of that kind of trolling is also you know I think anonymous you know that's a complicated organization loosely liking in Cody fingers organization in that you know early early days of anonymous were all about the kind of bro culture sexism and trolling and racism and now they're doing like operation KKK or operation hoods off and I'm like what when did that happen so anonymous itself is not really a monolithic thing it's a lot of different people with a lot of different agendas that are happening there and I think one of the thing that's interesting about what anonymous has been doing I've been watching them like fiercely since the Paris bombing is on Twitter is that they're doing a lot to you talk about like they're taking down ISIS pro ISIS Twitter accounts so that they're claiming to have taken down like a more than 6,000 Twitter accounts and process ISIS sympathizer accounts in the last week and so and they're issuing guides on how to do hacktivism for everyday people which is also interesting but here's the thing you know not everybody knows how to like open up an RRC channel and how to really get anonymous that's difficult that's not like an everyday user kind of experience and and also people who do that level of really trying to conceal their identity or where they're searching if they're using tour and these kinds of things those are actually being criminalized so you know it's like can you do that I mean to me people of color people who are on the margin using those kinds of technologies are more at risk you know because of the criminalization of that kind of engagement so I guess I feel like it's layered I don't I don't disagree with anything that's been said here I mean about the identity work that we can do and making ourselves visible and the education we can do definitely is happening at the same time when we think about where the real power is how power operates at the level of the state or other types of organizations you know law enforcement homeland security NSA I think that we're seeing people lose their jobs over their political activism online we're seeing mostly even kind of like right-wing extremists you know in the United States white supremacists kind of what we might call like our homeland terrorists not criminalized right but other kinds of activists criminalized so these things are still explicitly political around kind of the the agenda and the tensions we have in the United States I'm more I'm if we look pre-internet again at projects like COINTELPRO the COINTELPRO counterintelligence program of the United States government everybody go watch the COINTELPRO 101 documentary these practices of surveilling women's organizations anti-war protesters Puerto Rican independence movement civil rights and black power activists brown power activists it's like who's left I don't know whoever's left I mean like there's not what what's left are is the Klan right or Nazis or you know kind of that right-wing extremism that's less surveilled and less facing far less consequence so these these things happen before the internet and I think the internet is actually making people are trying to do progressive work more visible and are potentially facing greater consequence for that visibility if anybody has one last question short and then we'll wrap it up there's somebody oh the microphone is coming to you hi there was like a brief section where you guys are talking about how a lot of the information especially during the AIDS movement was archived like in this age where there is official commentary about issues but there's also a lot of like backhanded commentary through the comments or drew Twitter or things where did those play in the like idea of archival images or like archival data and like do you think they have like potential power where they stand like where does that fit in the idea of technology in the digital age that's a really good and interesting question so speaking to the archiving question for a second there which is really what kind of my I feel like my primary area of expertise is but it's there's lots of arguments right about whether we will actually there is so much information but whether we will actually whether that information will continue to exist right websites you've stopped paying for your domain name they might disappear right we have the potential to preserve more data but we know less about preserving this data we know a lot we know a lot about preserving paper we don't know a whole lot yet about preserving kind of digital materials of all kinds and digital materials of course degrade like other materials do or and they're kind of ephemeral and people don't maintain them or conceptualize of them necessarily in the same way right so there's of course the question of whether we will actually kind of have there's a potential for kind of an endless the internet as this kind of endless expansive notion of an archive right but we may in fact have less information at some point about kind of certain moments and particularly this moment so that's an interesting question and then a lot of the what the poster I showed at the end a lot of what the artists are responding to is this kind of nostalgia for an earlier period of activism and for a particular kind of activism right and a particular kind of attention to AIDS and an attention to AIDS in the past as something that is done of course AIDS is not done and they're critiquing in particular the kind of decontextualization of those images and that is something that happens particularly kind of in a digital space right you can do a Google image search and maybe something from act up will pop up and you can reuse it in well there's copyright issues but right you couldn't theoretically use it in any way you want to right so it's then kind of divorced from its entire kind of contextual history you can know little to nothing about kind of the AIDS movement and still kind of create those images right and I think that's where Justin Bieber perhaps comes into that image right does Justin Bieber know who act up is or was just Justin Bieber have an investment in its activism he's never as far to my knowledge said anything publicly or did Justin Bieber stylus just think act up the act up will go made a cool t-shirt we're not sure I don't want to maybe Justin Bieber is a secret a AIDS activist but there's not to critique his politics but it's the kind of the potential for decontextualization of images right is huge so that we particular so these kind of images of AIDS proliferate but the actual knowledge about AIDS does not necessarily proliferate and it only is looking at a particular kind of iconic moment of AIDS and so it just tracks from having conversations about AIDS now and AIDS because a kind of global endemic and AIDS in the United States as something that of course disproportionately impacts women of color and poor people and trans people and people of color kind of more broadly and that then it won't be part of what I think my argument will be is that it won't be documented AIDS now will not be documented in the way that AIDS was in the 1980s and 1990s and part of that is of course the reason that things get documented our cuts reflect kind of notions of power right who has access to power and who thinks they're important and whose lives we think are important in the kind of archival world and what kind of what activism looks like and what digital activism looks like and it will be hard to know and there are lots of issues right if we think about use of proprietary platforms there right it's technically Facebook owns everything you put on Facebook so there are serious concerns but whether you're actually legally able to kind of preserve your the activism you do on Facebook because that data doesn't technically belong to you so you cannot donate that data to an archive yeah I think it's time shouldn't you are we doing a reception in the back okay yeah so we'll have a reception backs in upstairs right here in the room so we can continue some of the conversations this has been an extraordinary evening thank you so much for joining us and sharing these ideas many of them horrifying but incredible to be having this conversation in this room so deepest thank you for that thank you audience and then I really also want to especially thank the techno diversity team at the void lab so that's Shin you can you raise your hand so we can acknowledge you Peter Peter where are you Sophia and Lilian yes this is totally student initiated this evening so thank you so much it's really amazing that this is an echo way in the back yeah you guys are amazing thank you for having us