The tech shift: Push politicians for answers, and develop your digital literacy | Ramesh Srinivasan

In the United States, we're in the middle of an election season. As a voter in the United States, I would ask our candidates to actually acknowledge and provide proposals that are realistic about how they are going to take care of workers and the middle class in the midst of these massive economic transformations.

These transformations are aided by private corporate-run technology that we're witnessing all around us. I would ask our candidates again in the United States election to explain to us how they are going to maintain economic security in a country that becomes more and more economically unequal. How are they going to ensure that technological transitions are ones that benefit all of us? How can they introduce work of the future, where the digital economy actually works for everybody, for technology users and workers of the future?

There are a number of different steps that we can take. They aren't sufficient to overcome these inequalities that I'm writing about and beyond the valley, but they are really important nonetheless. First of all, one of the most powerful aspects of the internet, which still exists, is the ability to learn from lots of different streams of content. As a university professor, a bunch of the places I went to university at, both my undergrad and graduate degrees, offer free online and open courses completely free, taught by professors at Stanford and MIT.

This doesn't have to just be those universities; it could be almost anywhere, right? So I would really encourage everybody to take... you know, there's no need to be scared about the technical side of things, but to take the right types of classes on data literacy, technological literacy, artificial intelligence, and ethics. Not because you have to be a geek or you want to become a techie, but because these are the new languages by which human possibilities and actually human sociality, like our ability to communicate, are being expressed.

As we've spoken about before, that's part one: take advantage of the open internet. Part two is to be really, as much as possible, try to be critical. Play with different kinds of platforms, right? So like, what if you used DuckDuckGo instead of Google? How would the results be different? What if you deleted your cache in your search history? Would that impact anything on Google? Develop a literacy through playfulness. Try to understand, in a more relational or experiential sense, what digital pathways might look like.

That's the second point. The third, I would say, is there are a number of good books and writers and talks—TED Talks, etc. I hope I'm one of them with my book "Beyond the Valley", but there are a number of others who are writing for a completely mainstream public about these digital transformations. I would really encourage everybody to look at some of these books, and I'd be happy to suggest some as well. Cathy O'Neil, she's pretty incredible. She wrote a book called "Weapons of Math Destruction." It's a really catchy title and it's just a really, really good book. It's an important book.

But there are other books as well that we can consider. Last, and I think very importantly, is to look at the right journalistic sources that are also reporting on these issues. ProPublica has done great work on this. The Intercept has done some work on this. The Guardian has done some work on this. There are a lot of different kinds of platforms; Wired, of course, has done great work on this.

More than anything, we need to pressure our companies that are making labor and work obsolete in the interests of innovation. Its innovation for whom is really the question we have to ask them. For all the jobs and for all economic security you take away, you need to provide us with something. Here are all these different possibilities we can engage with, from thinking about universal basic income ideas to worker-owned cooperative ideas, to regulatory ideas, to competitive market ideas.

There's a lot out there, and I ask us all to maintain a little bit of optimism but push. You know, we got to push on all fronts. We are at an inflection point when it comes to top-down control over very many different aspects of our lives through privatized corporate power over technology. We can work with these companies and try to push them to make sure that they restore balance in our lives.