Human Rights and Internet Infrastructure
Anti-Dystopians 2.4: A conversation with Dr. Corinne Cath-Speth
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And the Anti-Dystopians are back! We have a great line up of podcasts in the coming weeks to get you in the holiday spirit. (Was Santa the original surveillance capitalist?)
This week, I talked to Dr. Corinne Cath-Speth, a recent graduate from the doctoral program at the Oxford Internet Institute and a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on Internet infrastructure politics, engineering cultures, and technology policy and governance. We discussed the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF): What is it? What exactly are internet protocols? And how can infrastructure uphold or harm human rights?
As always, you can listen to it here or subscribe here (Spotify) or here (Apple Podcasts). If you like us, please rate, review and share the Anti-Dystopians to help us get new listeners. If you want to support the production of the show, you can visit here.
Further reading from the episode
By Corinne Cath-Speth
Corinne Cath on Internet governance cultures: https://hackcur.io/whats-wrong-with-loud-men-talking-loudly-the-ietfs-culture-wars/
Suzanne van Geuns and Corinne Cath, article for the Brookings Institute: https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/how-hate-speech-reveals-the-invisible-politics-of-internet-infrastructure/
Report workshop organized by Beatrice Martini, Niels ten Oever, Corinne Cath: https://data-activism.net/2019/12/off-the-beaten-path-human-rights-advocacy-to-change-the-internet-infrastructure/
'Changing minds and machines: a case study of human rights advocacy in the Internet Engineering Task Force'. PhD Thesis University of Oxford. https://corinnecath.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/CathCorinne-Thesis-DphilInformationCommunicationSocialSciences.pdf
‘The Technology We Choose to Create: Human Rights Advocacy in the Internet Engineering Task Force’. Telecommunications Policy 45, no. 6 (1 July 2021): 102144. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2021.102144.
Other reading:
Knodel et all How the Internet Really Works, illustrated guide (with cats!): https://nostarch.com/how-internet-really-works
Ingrid Burrington: https://thereboot.com/the-infrastructural-power-beneath-the-internet-as-we-know-it/
Joan Donovan, article on navigating the tech stack: https://www.cigionline.org/articles/navigating-tech-stack-when-where-and-how-should-we-moderate-content/
Ford Foundation work on Internet infrastructure: https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/challenging-inequality/technology-and-society/digital-infrastructure/
Meme of the week
With a new variant out there, remember how to stay safe from Covid:
What I’ve been reading
The European Parliament leaked draft report referred to AI as the “fifth element after air, earth, water and fire” and let’s just say the Avatar memes are “Appa this world.” 😉
The University of California system officially banned the use of standardized testing for college admissions! (Woohoo for those of us who hate the university-testing-industrial-complex)
Great read in Wired on Amazon’s data practices (spoiler alert: they are bad)
Lovely, thoughtful piece in Logic magazine about when TikTok knows you’re queer before you do
If you caught up on our episode about blockchain imperialism, you’ll be interested (and horrified) to know that El Salvador has planned a Bitcoin city at the base of the Conchagua volcano
In Musk news you can use, Tesla ranked 27th out of 28 automakers on reliability, and the Model X received a score of 5 on a 100 point scale. And in the Internet of Things nightmare I’ve been going on about, an app outage locked hundreds of Tesla drivers out of their cars. Oh dear. 🙃🙃🙃
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