Interactive workshop | How can democracies claim control of digital tech?

Description

Join us to imagine an alternative internet

What does it take to imagine a world where digital tech is controlled by the people, for the people?

Join us and imagine different types of digital technologies and an alternative internet that respects democracy and upholds social justice.

We’ll hear from experts to explore examples from Germany, Chile, Kenya and the UK. Together we will discuss:

• Who controls tech?
• Does digital sovereignty offer a viable alternative?
• Can existing democracies deliver alternative technological futures?

Then, we’ll put the questions to you in the audience, and work together with researchers to design an ideal: a) a social networking platform and/or b) an AI chatbot.

Hosts

• Hunter Vaughan (Senior Research Associate, Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, UK)
• Julia Rone (Research Associate, Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, UK)

Speakers

• Julian Jaursch (Project Director ‘Policy | Platform regulation’, Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, Germany)
• Julia Pohle (Research Fellow of the Research Group Politics of Digitalization, WZB, Germany)
• Sebastian Lehuede (Postdoctoral Scholar at the Centre of Governance and Human Rights, UK)
• Nai Lee Kalema (PhD Candidate in Innovation and Public Policy, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, UK)
• Dominik Dezman (Information designer and media scholar, University of Amsterdam)

This event is co-organised between the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy and DAAD Cambridge.

About the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy

The Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy is an independent team of academic researchers at the University of Cambridge, who are radically rethinking the power relationships between digital technologies, society and our planet.

We are based in CRASSH (University of Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences).

About DAAD Cambridge

Supported by the DAAD-University of Cambridge Research Hub for German Studies with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office (FFO).