Tech Won't Save Us - The Global South Holds a Better Future of Tech w/ Juan Ortiz Freuler

Episode Date: July 16, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Juan Ortiz Freuler to discuss the recent global negotiations on the taxation of multinational corporations, how Africa is demanding the digital labor of its citizens be accounted for, how these tensions threaten to fragment the web, and why the Global South may hold a better future of technology that transcends the capitalist, centralized, and individualist platforms which currently dominate.Juan Ortiz Freuler is an Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and a member of the Tierra Común network of researchers. He recently made the case for a digital non-aligned movement. Follow Juan on Twitter as @juanof9.Tech Won't Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter.Support the show

If we shift to a mindset that speaks more to interdependence, to how we are part of a community, we can start to think about different structures of organizing information, of organizing societies. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast that is always interested in thinking about better ways to organize technology to serve the public good. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm joined by Juan Ortiz-Freuler. Juan is an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and a member of the Tierra Comun Network of Researchers. Today we're talking about a recent piece that Juan wrote for Open Democracy called The Case for a Digital Non-Aligned

Movement. I just want to give you a heads up that since recording the last episode I got braces, so I might sound a little bit different. It should be fine. If you like our conversation, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Make sure to share it with any friends or colleagues you think would be interested. And if you want to support the work that I put into the show, you can join patrons like Marcus by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a contribution. Thanks so much and enjoy the conversation. Juan, welcome to tech won't save us. Hi, Paris. Thanks for having me. It's great to speak with you. So you recently wrote a piece for open democracy, where you talked about the ongoing tax negotiations, or I guess

the tax negotiations to tax tech giants globally that recently collapsed. And you explained how the discussions that went on with that are kind of part of a broader way of thinking about how technology actually creates value and where value comes from and whether the global north with technology that is so entrenched in the capitalist mode of production can really kind of develop the solutions that will be necessary to create a technology that better serves the public good, knowledge creation, human flourishing, you know, all of these things that we really want technology to do, right? And so I wanted to start just briefly for people who don't really know about these tax negotiations. Can you give a bit of a background on what is being negotiated? What happened

recently, I guess, where they broke down? Who the main players are in these negotiations and what they were really trying to achieve? Over a year ago, negotiations started at the OECD, which is the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It's a relatively novel actor in this global system of institutions. It's, according to many, a club of the rich countries. And so it's interesting that they're hosting these negotiations for a global tax reform, right? The OECD hosts very little countries from the global south. And most of the countries that are from the global south

that participate actively in the OECD typically join during a neoliberal government. So we have like Mexico, for example, but it joined during the pre-government of Peña Nieto. We have Chile, which has within the South American continent is kind of the most aligned with a Chicago school. And so within this context, we are seeing that there is this push for a global tax reform. And it goes beyond the tech sector as such. This is about all multinational companies,

though there are a number of interesting caveats there where, for example, the mining industry is not going to be a part of it. So we see those interesting details come out. But the core companies that are at stake and one of the reasons why this debate has moved forward is the tech sector. So it started off with France saying we are going to tax Google and Facebook because they're not paying enough in taxes in France. Recently, the OECD published new data about tax base erosion, and they say the median value of revenue per employee in jurisdictions with no corporate income tax was $1.4 million. So basically, they're showing that what big multinational corporations do is profit shifting, right? They collect revenue in

a country and then they say, we're not making any profits here because we have to pay this sister company that is based in, say, Ireland or another country that has interesting tax breaks. And so in terms of each of the actors in this debate, we can simplify it into four big groups. We have the multinational corporations. They want to minimize what is due in terms of taxes, but they also want to reduce the administrative burdens of complying with multiple tax frameworks. Let's say France puts out its own tax framework, then South Africa puts out another one, Indonesia puts out another one, and then they have to hire a bunch of lawyers for each country to define exactly how much they

have to pay in taxes, but also the risk of double taxation, which would be they're paying taxes for profits in Indonesia, and then the US is taxing them for those same profits in the US. So they're kind of on board with having one framework across the board. The question, of course, is how much they're going to pay. And so behind them, we have the US, which is the home of most of today's tech giants. And it's interesting to see how, on the one hand, you see the White House, say, criticize a lot of these tech giants for being, quote unquote, too liberal. And at the same time, they're very much behind their backs when it comes to the debates around taxes, right? Trump has publicly said that he's

going to tax French wine and it's going to be impossible to purchase in the US after he puts those tariffs in. When it comes to something like this, like he's completely on Jeff Bezos' side, right? Because their interests align. Totally. It's difficult for people who are following US politics very narrowly to see how these debates at a global level play out very differently and how this diplomatic arm of the US starts playing to these big tech companies. And so this has moved forward to some extent because the EU, which is the jurisdiction with the largest group of wealthy consumers in the world, 445 million people with per capita income of 34,000, which is a bit lower than the US,

but it's distributed a bit more equally. It's also a jurisdiction where typically there is more public services. And so the governments need to collect more in taxes. And none of these big multinational tech corporations are European. So the Europeans don't really need to fight for those interests, so to speak. And then we have this fourth group, which I'm grouping as the Global South, which struggles immensely to collect a dime from any of these multinationals. If they try to make a move, they're typically called rogue nations. They might face sanctions through the WTO or through bilateral Trump's tariffs, for example.

We have a whole spectrum of countries within this. And so for the lowest group, any crumbs are good. They're struggling to collect any form of tax from any multinational at this point. But then we have a higher bar of some governments that are basically trying to see how this framework can suit their interests best, right? So whereas the EU, for example, is saying we should define how much will be collected based on how much sales, say, Apple makes in Europe or how many ads Facebook sells in Germany. Some of these governments, and in particular the Africans, have put out a document saying part of this assessment we make to define how much goes to African countries should look at the user base, right? We have a number of users based in our countries that are performing tasks for these big multinationals,

and they should be paying for that, quote unquote, labor. And we can go into the details of that later on. But basically, they're saying when Facebook is using our citizens to click on stuff, they're training Facebook's algorithm to become more efficient in defining the relationship between, say, someone who likes fishing and someone who's going to vote for a certain candidate. And that helps Facebook understand what type of ads they should serve that group of people. And so this coalition of African tax experts is saying that's something that should be taken into consideration when this framework is designed. I love that they're putting out that proposal. And it wasn't one that I heard

about before I read your article. So I find it really interesting. And I do want to come back to it. But figuring out how we define value, especially when it comes from these multinational technology corporations is really important right now during the pandemic, because it's really just throwing everything on its head, right? And so many more people are relying on these tech companies. So the pandemic has put the whole economic system in flames. We have on the one hand, the private sector that seems unable to cope with the duties that were outsourced to it by the state in liberal economies. And so we have the government stepping in and providing huge amounts of money

to ensure that strategic and sometimes not so strategic companies don't go bust. In the US, we're talking about the largest relief package in US history of $2 trillion. And so basically, the governments are coming in to save the private sector companies, but also to ensure that the citizens get enough to eat. If you're unemployed, if the health sector needs more ICU beds because the private sector couldn't plan ahead, that's government money going into the private sector. In normal times, the government basically sources most of its budget through taxes. And now what we're seeing is the expenditures grow, but the tax base gets hugely eroded. The World Bank is projecting that growth could shrink by 8% globally, right? We're seeing, for example, 50,000 retailers in Germany are expected to shut down because of this pandemic. And at the same time, we're seeing that Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft are amongst the eight companies whose market capitalization grew the most in the

past year despite the pandemic. And so we're seeing that this group of companies is basically the ones that could be chipping in. They're having a huge expansion whilst, you know, other sectors of the economy are shrinking. But the question is, how are we going to tax them, right? There's a nonprofit called the Fair Tax Mark. They've estimated that between 2010 and 2019, this GAFAM group, which is Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, and we could add Netflix in there, they've managed to leverage loopholes to avoid paying 100 to 150 billion US dollars in taxes. And to put this into context, that's the same amount of money that in 2015, in the context of

the Paris climate change negotiations, the rich countries pledged to give so-called developing countries in climate finance so that they could deal with the climate collapse. That's basically the size of these loopholes. So in rich countries, what they're doing to deal with this increase in government expenditure in the context where the private sector is not going to be able to pay as much in taxes as was expected is debt. They print money and they issue bonds. And so they cover that black hole. But in many countries in the global South, that's really not an option, right? I'm from Argentina, a country that before the pandemic was dealing with a huge debt and a lot of inflation. And so we basically can't issue more debt, not internally, because that's basically inflation in the form of printing, and not externally, because our debt is considered quote-unquote unsustainable by the markets. And so there's two options where the government

either issues extraordinary taxes on anyone who's made extraordinary profits, and there's still a question of whether or not that's enough or basically going after anyone who has any form of savings. The only alternative left to those two is crippling inflation. And that's not an option given Argentine history where that's caused a huge amount of pain and distress for the whole population. And so right now, the question is, how are we going to be able to tax these tech giants that are growing, whose industries are thriving? Because in the context of the pandemic, they've taken over retail, they've taken over a whole swath of sectors. They're replacing the shops that are distributed across neighborhoods, etc.

And now you rely on, say, in the US, Amazon to provide food distribution. You don't go to the corner shop anymore because there's a risk of you getting COVID. And so Amazon is basically taking a huge amount of clients from those brick and mortar shops. I want to underscore the point that you made about the debt, because during the pandemic, there's a lot of discussion in the US, in Canada, in the UK about how we can just rely on, say, the Bank of Canada or the Fed or the Bank of England just to print money, to create debt, to give governments the money to spend to fund the pandemic response, right? And I think it's really important to note that for a lot of countries in the Global South, that isn't really an option in the same way as it is in the Global North. Definitely. That's what's happening across

the board in many, if not most, of the countries in the global south. And so it's a desperate situation for governments where they're seeing that after this first wave of health problems, there's going to be a huge economic problem. And there isn't really an easy way out of it. Europe is talking about sovereignty and how they need to be less dependent on other countries because when COVID disrupted those commercial lines, their population was kind of at risk. And that means that they're going to import less from the global South, right? And so how are we going to get the dollars we need to buy the ICU beds, the ventilators, and a whole chunk of things that during the 80s and 90s, we were told, you know, you're just going to be part of this global system, globalization. You don't have to produce everything.

You should just produce crops. And you're going to buy all these industrial products from more advanced nations that can produce them more cheaply. That was never a good bargain. But now we're seeing that even those countries that were pushing for that bargain are now saying, you know, quote unquote, America first, Europe first. And we're left with our pants down in the middle of a pandemic. And so the situation is super desperate, I think, for many, if not most of the countries in the

global south. And my concern is that after this first health crisis, we're going to have an economic crisis. And after that, in regions like Latin America, where, you know, political situations are becoming more unstable in Venezuela, in Brazil, in Chile, in Ecuador. This could lead to other types of tensions that we thought we were over with since the 70s, where we had kind of a dark period of military dictatorships. And so we really need this kind of planetary scale negotiation on how we're going to get out of this, because it's not an issue that the global south was responsible for directly and was pushed into a commercial and economic system where it was always the underdog. And now we see the overdog pushing harder on the

necks of these people. I think that's really important context to have in there for people who aren't as familiar with the situation and, you know, how this all works on the global scale, right? And that brings us to these two different framings for how value can be calculated or observed when it comes to multinational corporations, but particularly these tech platforms, right? Because on the one side, we have the EU, and I'd imagine some other global north countries like Australia, Canada, backing this notion that the taxes should be based on the sales and the profits that companies make. Whereas there is an alternative proposal out of countries in the global south that says, actually, we should be considering the profits that companies make. Whereas there is an alternative proposal out of countries

in the global south that says, actually, we should be considering the benefits that these companies derive from the populations who use these tools, who contribute that labor that they're not compensated for. So can you describe in a bit more detail these two different perspectives on how value should be defined when it comes to these platforms? And how would the second framing of that change the way we perceive how value is created on these platforms? Yeah, so the conversation is evolving under the understanding that profits and revenues aren't the same. And so there is profit shifting, right? And so the EU, for example, is saying what we're going to do is tax global profits, we don't care where that profit is being, quote unquote,

made because we know there's profit shifting. And so what we want to do is distribute that single pot of profit this multinational is disclosing, say, in Ireland and distribute across all the countries where these companies are reporting revenue. And so profit would be revenue minus costs. And so the EU is saying, we'll just look at, say, in the case of Facebook, where is it reporting its ad sales? Where is Amazon reporting sales? Where is Apple reporting sales? Eventually, it's going to be a mix, right? And so the big negotiation is how much weight within that calculation is the revenue part of the sales going to have vis-a-vis other

variables. And so whereas the EU is going to push for this to be strongly on the revenue, because that's what would benefit them since they have the wealthiest population. Whereas in the African context, they're saying, well, we have a chunk of users, right? Only 30% of Facebook users are in the EU plus US, right? Whereas 65% of Facebook users are in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. So if we take the market in terms of users, those markets are much bigger, and they're creating a lot of value in helping optimize how this system works by basically creating these relationships and these profiles that Facebook uses to optimize its broader algorithm. And these companies also like to test their new products or try their new algorithms on populations in the global south before they roll them out in

the north, right? So they also kind of use them as testing grounds for these new technologies. Yeah, that's a whole other terrible aspect of how these multinationals rely on these frontier markets, quote unquote, where they can take risks that they would never take in central countries. And so we have all these lynchings going on in a number of countries. But of course, the pressure is not the same as if, you know, you had lynchings in the US or Europe. Zuckerberg has never appeared before the legislative of any country but the US. It relies on the US to protect its interests. And so when it has to carry out these experiments, it goes to the periphery where it knows that if

something happens, it can quiet down stuff more easily and probably the US press will pay less attention and the shareholders won't care as much. So yeah, that's a whole other aspect of how colonialism plays into these multinational mindsets. But I also think there's this moment right now where since we are thinking of what is valuable, right? Because taxation in the end is defining what is value, what we understand as value. And I think we need this radical shift in how we define value, right? So on the one hand, there is this critique of how this current system is turning

free time into labor. And on the other hand, how it pushes for a very narrow definition of knowledge. And so in terms of digital labor, these platforms are designed to keep us hooked for as much as possible. They have basically two goals. And now we can imagine, say, Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. These two goals are to serve more ads to individual users because that's how they collect profit. But on the other hand, to maximize the number of instances in which each user's actions can be surveilled in order to extract patterns of behavior that enable the continuous optimization of this general curation and ad-serving system, right? This is sub-off and surveillance capitalism. But what these tech giants are doing is basically creating a system of extraction that is making

people addicted. This is completely insane if we just step out of the scenario of normalization we're in, in that it's attacking people's freedom of thought. It's limiting what people can do with their free time. And this is free time that they've gained after working for a number of hours to survive. And this free time is now recaptured through an addiction mechanism that pushes them into providing labor for these tech companies. So this is something that out of a matter of basic principle, we should be rejecting as a system that we rely on to create value. And the other big chunk, I think, is how these knowledge creation systems have been captured by these companies for profit

making, right? If we look at the web, for example, it was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee at a research center in Switzerland. The whole point of it was how can we make research and knowledge happen? How can we enable researchers to connect to each other and share valuable information so our knowledge as humanity can advance more quickly? And then this system got captured by this small group of companies that took over our commons and privatized it and turned it into a profit making machine. And so they're now defining what we see, what we don't see, what knowledge gets produced, which types of knowledge get incentivized and how different pieces of information get connected. Right. The World Wide Web was all about you create knowledge and how you create hyperlinks to different pieces of knowledge. So over time, we kind of create this tapestry of humanity and what we know, which at another level of abstraction is kind of creating this meta map of humanity.

This meta map of humanity is now controlled by these companies that are the ones who have access to the back end, right? We don't know how many times an article was clicked on, how much minutes were spent on an article, what demographics are looking at that, what the algorithm is pushing. But Mark Zuckerberg knows, right? He has a whole system tailored to that end, and he has a whole system that he can tinker with to promote certain content or not. He published an op-ed, I think it was two years ago, talking about how Facebook was going to tinker with a curation algorithm so that it didn't promote, quote unquote, borderline content. But they never disclosed what that meant in practice. And you can't really conduct research about those changes at scale. At the same time, Facebook does know what type of content it is promoting. And we have this whole system of knowledge basically now operating to the whims of four or five people whose core objective is getting to the next quarter with a higher margin so that the shareholders are happy. And my concern is with this tax system,

if we embed these interpretations of what is valuable across the board into all these countries, it's going to be really difficult to then untangle this machine, right? When people think about superintelligence and AI, they're always saying, we need to make sure that there's a kill switch so that if this superintelligent machine gets out of control, we need to make sure that there's a kill switch so that if this super intelligent machine gets out of control, we can pull the kill switch. That's not how technology works, right? It gets embedded into society to the extent that there is no kill switch because it's socially embedded. The problem with fossil fuels is not that there's a machine that stops us from getting rid of fossil fuels, it is that our whole economic system is based

on fossil fuels. And so we could from one day to another say, like, nobody uses any more fossil fuels, but the whole system collapsed because we've become dependent on it. And so the risk, I think, with this conversation around tax is that we further entrench these ideas about what is valuable into our economic system, into our social system, into our cultural systems. And we further those ideals of profit at the expense of other systems of knowledge that could provide us with answers to the climate collapse and to our individual quest of understanding who we are in this finite time we have on planet Earth. And so I think this is a moment that could be kind of that

Bretton Woods moment where a big chunk of the world is sitting down and defining how are we going to understand our economic system and what goals is that economic system going to serve? I think that's a great point. And you also write that if nations don't sit down in this way, if we don't come to some new agreement, then the tensions that you outline with these two kind of different views of value and how these platforms should operate and who should benefit from them could actually cause an increasing fragmentation of the web, right? Because we already have China, Russia, some other countries increasingly enclosing the web in their jurisdictions behind firewalls with various

restrictions that they have. So what do you think the threat is with this fragmentation? And what would it actually look like if it were to take hold? Typically, when we think about fragmentation, we think about it along national borders, right? I think there's two big groups of processes that are already ongoing that are fragmenting the web. On the one hand, we have this fragmentation along national borders, and then we have fragmentation along corporate borders. But both are fragmenting this possibility that the web put out of, you know, let's have this global system of information. That's why it's World Wide Web. I think most people forget that WWW stands for that, right? We have a global system where we have the possibility as humanity, as a planet, to start sharing our ideas and connecting. But basically, if we look at this fragmentation

along national borders, I think this is going to be triggered by the perception that the current system isn't distributing value fairly. For example, the Africans saying, well, we shouldn't be defining this framework in terms of revenue, we should be adding more weight to the issue of users. And it's also being triggered by national security arguments, sovereignty arguments, and clear examples, as you were mentioning. It's the US now signaling it might be banning TikTok, China banning Twitter, the US putting sanctions to block Iranians from using GitHub, and the Venezuelan government from using Adobe. It's China phasing out the use of US software in the federal government. It's the UK

phasing out Huawei. It's implemented in many cases, as you were saying, through firewalls. China has a super effective one. Russia is now developing similar capabilities. Is this going to be an export for, say, China and Russia? Is this something that they're going to go next to, say, Nigeria, that has a population of 240 million and say, well, you know, you could be developing your own apps and do like China. We now have TikTok. Are you interested in that? We can sell you services so that you have a captive market. And I think if we have to imagine what this could look like growing up, I'm in my 30s, it was like the DVD regions, right? In Argentina, we were part of a region that was kind of,

you know, South America. But if you traveled and maybe someone brought back a DVD that they brought in Europe, you couldn't play it because the DVD would say, sorry, this DVD is not from your region. Right. And there is kind of a process of carving that out where Europe is pushing for GDPR in other countries. And we see that, for example, for a time, a lot of U.S. newspapers weren't operating in Europe because they didn't want to be sanctioned by Europe. So they would say, sorry, you're in Europe. We're not allowing you to access our content. But then we have this other type of fragmentation that is already quite developed, which is around corporate borders. And I think the trigger is continuing in this status quo of corporate lobbying of legislative bodies and regulatory bodies so that they don't take action against this system of walled gardens

and silos where you're not able to leave Facebook because they're keeping all your contacts hostage. I have over a thousand contacts in there, a number of people of whom I have no other contact from them, and I can't leave. I've basically put up a message that says I'm no longer on this platform, but I can't erase it because people still reach out to me through that. And it's implemented through design abuses. It's lack of interoperability by design. And it's kind of what we had, at least I remember growing up. And if someone had an Apple computer and you had a PC computer, it was a huge mess to share a file because they couldn't access Word documents and you couldn't access their system. And you have to go through all these hurdles. And that's basically what we have right now with

social media when you compare it to, say, email, where we've been emailing and you had your own email provider and I had my own email provider and they were completely interoperable. But now if you have Twitter and I have Facebook, we can't share messages. And they're basically hoarding different types of information under different corporations. And that, to some extent, is the fragmentation of this global system of information, which is no longer interoperable. And that hinders our possibility as a humanity to make progress by connecting all these pieces of information. It's also really worrying, right, about how successful these companies have been at really locking down what we do online and keeping us on their platform. I've had a similar

problem to you with Facebook, where I just have to keep my profile because there are certain people who I communicate with through there. And that's it, right? And now you talk about how obviously we need solutions to this. And we need to think about how we can develop different forms of technology that promote knowledge creation and that recognize where value actually comes from and that it's not necessarily through profits, right? One piece of that is the capitalist structures of these major platforms that already exist limit the way that we use the web. But can you explain how these limitations happen and what the broader effects of these limitations are on the way that we use the web. But can you explain how these limitations happen and what the broader effects of these limitations are on the way that we use the internet and the way that we use

technology? This is what many people who work in kind of the tech sector call centralization, right, where these companies have become central actors. When you think of a web, it's kind of a distributed system where the different strings attach to different parts, and you can navigate it in a horizontal way. But what these tech companies have done is put themselves as a central actor. And so everything goes through them. So this has a number of aspects. One is the economics, right? So within the rules of engagement right now, they're leveraging economies of scale. And so in particular, when it comes to hosting, for example, the biggest cost is a fixed cost, the infrastructure of setting up these huge

cooling machines that are keeping the servers from frying themselves up. And in the case of Amazon, it's the most profitable division, right? Amazon Web Services, which is probably what most people do not associate with Amazon, according to Amazon, is its most profitable division. And so they're growing a lot based on these economies of scale, where if you're a small actor, it's very difficult for you to compete with this company that already has set up all this infrastructure where adding one more website to their server costs nothing to them. Whereas for you, if you're setting up a new company, that might mean setting up a new server machine or having to expand, and there's no chance of you two competing in price. But there's also the network effects. When you

join a particular service, it's more valuable the more people who get added to that, right? So if you bought a phone in the 60s, say you had a landline, the question was, who are you going to be able to call on that landline, right? If your friends don't have a phone, then you don't really care about having a phone. And the same is true about Facebook today, right? You have to stay on Facebook because quote unquote, everyone's on Facebook. But there's also design abuses, right? So a lot of these companies, what they do is they're connecting to say sister or parent companies. So they're doing it horizontally. So if you try to open a link on say the Gmail app on iPhone, the default is that the app will ask you, do you want to open this on Safari or do you want to download Chrome?

And so they're nudging you to download a sister company, but they're also doing it vertically. Right. So we have Amazon relying on its infrastructure to compete within its own marketplace. So Amazon designs the marketplace and then starts selling products to outcompete other companies that are trying to sell products within that marketplace. But Amazon can rely on its whole intelligence infrastructure to understand who's selling what, what's selling at what price, when people are going to buy certain products. And so they can discriminate against certain competitors. And we see that with Facebook closing its API to apps that become, quote unquote, too successful. And so Facebook becomes a bit concerned that those apps are going to take some space or market from them. We see it through lobbying as well.

These companies spend millions and millions of dollars ensuring that regulators and legislators don't touch their business model. In the short term, decentralization has a huge impact on knowledge, right? We see that, for example, Google and Facebook have an influence over more than 75% of the traffic to major publishers. And so in this way, they're defining, you know, through a very opaque system, what people are seeing, how people understand the world around them, what happened today in Washington or in Buenos Aires. And so they have a huge leverage. This is too much power. Facebook,

according to its own research, claims that what you see or don't see on Facebook can determine voter turnout, can impact on people's mood. And this is a corporation that doesn't really explain how it's leveraging that power and doesn't allow you to study it at scale. And so they're on the one hand saying, we have this power. Look, it's amazing. We can push for voter turnout. But then they're not saying, you know, if they're using it in the public interest or how they interpret the public interest. And so I think on the one hand, it's too much power. But on the other hand, it's just ridiculous that we're dedicating all these resources to a task that is super petty, right, to just increase ad sales in the case of Google and Facebook. Even the founders of Google in a paper that you can still find online,

they're saying, and I'm quoting, "'The goals of the advertising business model "'do not always correspond "'to providing quality search to users.'" This was when they were talking about creating a search engine that is what we now call Google, and they were saying,

we need to go out there and create a search engine that is not based on ads because ads aren't good for search. And now they have this huge infrastructure that 89% of it is funded through ads. So we're trapped with this infrastructure that is now dedicated to providing for these very narrow capitalist goals of profit. Now we have this worldwide information system being built and controlled by a handful of actors. And they have privileged access to the knowledge that emerges from our collective work on the web and a privileged position through which

to define what knowledge is being produced, prioritized, and consumed. And so I think we need a radical shift. We have to dedicate this to, on the one hand, this urgent matter, which is to understand how we mitigate, adapt, and distribute the impacts of the climate collapse. And on the one hand, this urgent matter, which is to understand how we mitigate, adapt, and distribute the impacts of the climate collapse. And on the other hand, I really would like to see these systems dedicated to creating a state of abundance where people's basic needs are met and we can free mental space so people can explore and understand who they are. And we can provide them with tools so that they can engage meaningfully with others so that we can share ideas and can understand each other in relation to others. But that's not what these

systems are focused on today. And so I think this whole tax debate also calls for us to see how these companies define what is valuable in a very, very narrow way, and are to some extent the epitome of how the capitalist system has understood value over the last couple of centuries and how it's exploiting our humanity. Yeah, you explain that the capitalist system of the global north has created this centralized web that we have today. And part of what you propose in the piece is that the solutions to the problems that have been created should come from the global south. And so you propose that we might need a new version of the non-aligned movement, which was this group of

countries during the Cold War who were not on the side of the capitalist West, but also not a Soviet Union. So what would you see this digital non-aligned movement and these solutions that would come from the Global South looking like? I suggest it's going to have to come from the Global South, because on the one hand, if we look at the global north, for example, from a practical perspective, as we were discussing before, there is no kill switch. The north has embedded the current model into its whole social and economic system, and it won't be able to shift easily. It's like what we're seeing with fossil fuels, right? But then there is a cultural aspect where the cultures of the north are so intertwined with the

rationalities of capitalism itself that they struggle to imagine any articulation of a technological future that is radically different from our technological present. And so when we look at the South as kind of a mirror of what we're just discussing, from a practical perspective, the South basically needs it. It's in a material condition where the populations are regularly having to protest on the street because there isn't enough, right? There isn't enough material resources to have a dignified life. But also, I think what's interesting is from a cultural perspective, the South has, quote unquote, the necessary imagination. It has seen its own cultures shattered by colonialism, and it has seen how the pieces

of its pre-colonial times were repurposed into a new narrative that was favorable to its rulers. So I lived for a while in Mexico, and in Mexico, that's in your face all the time, because you see how these colonial structures, these literally colonial buildings were built on the top of pre-colonial structures, right? And so you can see these pyramids or these palaces everywhere across the country, right? And that's something that is in people's minds, right? We were part of another civilization that had a very different value system, that had a very different take on the world. And so they can understand that this current system is not everything. They're not as normalized, I would say, as people in the global north. They still have this friction. And it's

also because this system constantly excludes them, right? And so I think that's where the global South has a bigger urgency to create the shift. And it also has the necessary leverage. If we think about what is valuable, again, to these global corporations, at this point, we're in a 50-50 moment where 50% of the world population is considered an internet user and 50% is not. When we look at the quote-unquote periphery from a capitalist perspective, that's the type of knowledge that is valuable. There was a recent report from the British competition agency where they say it's with the long tail that Google out-competes Bing, where Google manages to

crawl an extra 20% of very small websites, and that's what some people are considering valuable. And so basically, what is usual is not as relevant as what is different. That's how these companies are constructing value from that capitalist perspective. But also, we can look at our colonial past and see how a lot of medicines were stolen from traditional communities all across Africa and through a patent system taken over by large corporations in the global centers where none of that process of knowledge building of centuries from these traditional communities was ever acknowledged to them in either monetary or non-monetary terms. So I think the global South is in a position where both it has more to bring to the table

because it's not at the center of this process of normalization and it's better prepared to see this facade as what it is, basically a construction that is being normalized by certain actors to kind of further their profit schemes. And they have this urgent need to change it because the systems they're embedded in are not sustainable. In terms of what's going to come out of this, I think it's a super interesting question, one that is very difficult to address because it's one of those paradigm shift moments, I think. So it's interesting when you listen to, say, Tim Berners-Lee's early interviews, he talks about how he went to a number of conferences and tried to show his invention and people basically wouldn't understand what it was about. For a couple of years, it was just so different to anything that was out there that it wasn't something that they would understand. And there's also an interview

to David Bowie where they ask him about the internet, and he says it's an alien form, right? We don't really understand what it is. And I think we're going to face one of those situations in the next couple of years when this shift happens, and we restructure all these systems of knowledge into something very different. I think someone who's doing very interesting stuff around these questions is a colleague of mine at the Berkman Klein Institute who's called Sabelo Malambi, who's looking at Ubuntu as a theoretical framework that comes from Africa and what that can teach us in terms of how we build AI systems.

So if we think of these AI systems and we think of the web, one of the key aspects is how it's focused on individualism, right? How the individual is the core component of all of this, the quote unquote user. We never talk about the collectives in there and how if we shift to a mindset that speaks more to interdependence, to how we are part of a community, we can start to think about different structures of organizing information, of organizing societies, and of organizing value as such. So I think it's going to be a shift where we first start to think about ourselves first as members of a community and as interdependent to other members. And I think this is a kind of a crucial moment because COVID not only is creating

this stress on our economic system, but it's also making us reconsider our position within society. There was a very interesting op-ed by Naomi Klein where she's saying, every time I go out, I have to consider who else touched this, who touched this doorknob, who put this box of food at my front door. And so you have to picture there's a whole system of workers behind everything you engage with. There's a community of people you engage with daily, right? And so the moment we start considering that there is this whole infrastructure of relations that's around us, we can, I think, start considering how those relationships work and pierce through a system that seeks to hide those relationships because those relationships

can show something to us about power and about how power is getting concentrated and how some of these actors leverage those relationships to extract value from us and are not providing decent wages for one thing. But in a broader sense, how this power is being leveraged to pursue very narrow goals of profit and not these broader possibilities of knowledge. And as another colleague of mine, Paola Ricaurte says, knowledge is in plural. She stretches the word knowledge and says knowledge is because we don't even want to claim that there is one single system of knowledge and how we can broaden that up and how through that process, we might find different ways

of living in community that are less detrimental to our climate. I think that's a fantastic point. And, you know, imagining what this alternative might look like will be difficult, but it's also a really important thing that we need to do. And we also need to be paying attention to the ideas that are coming from the global south, because they might be thinking about this in a much different and better way than we might come up with in the global north. Juan, I want to thank you so much for joining me today and for sharing your perspective. Thank you, Paris, for having me. Great pleasure. Juan Ortiz-Freuler is an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and a member of the Tierra Comun Network of Researchers. You can follow him on Twitter at at JuanOF9. You can also follow the podcast at tech won't save us.

And you can follow me Paris marks at at Paris marks tech won't save us as part of the Ricochet podcast network, which is a group of left-wing podcasts made in Canada. Thanks for listening.