The Internet in a post-PRISM world

The Internet in a post-PRISM world
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abstract for an #ict4d seminar at the @oii http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/events/?id=649
Tuesday 11 February 2014 16:30 - 18:00, Oxford Internet Institute, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS

This seminar will examine the Internet in a post-PRISM world, and ask if its power to tackle global poverty will be lost. While recognising the danger of nation states breaking up the Internet, I will concentrate on the already existing threat of tracking & big data and the emergence of algorithmic regulation. ICT4D may never have delivered on the promise of development anyway, so I won't mourn its passing but will point instead to the risk of a neocolonial cybernetics running across the Internet and the Internet of Things, and the risk of renewed subjugation through ideas like Smart Slums. Based on my experiences with civic hacking and the crypytoparty movement, I will identify participatory methodologies and critical pedagogy as key to post-digital citizenship and to our ability to disrupt predictive 'states of exception'.