Talking About Power Asymetry

Talking About Power Asymmetry

Wednesday 2D Convener: Kaliya Young @identitywoman

Notes-taker(s): Kevin Marks

Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

Annabelle: continue woman's breakfast thoughts on representation of groups we are supposed to be serving - refugees was a strong point  the book Asymmetric Society is worth reading: main actors were people; now businesses

 A person to a website relationship is very imbalanced - the problem with infocards is you create an illusion that people have power in the relationships, but the big site has more.

Fairness and justice matter we have an opportunity to level inequality Privacy Power differential in tech

Anonymity can be powerful - an anonymous article was cited in Japanese parliament on daycare issues giving a voice

Bill: how do we reshape  structure for more symmetry?

(Kaliya reshapes room into a circle)

Anabelle: there are models of fairness where they don't really exist. The Personal Cloud initiative rely on individuals having an electronic resource that they own and maintain. We rely on individuals having the time and money to take care of that We get data anonymity and power for those with the luxury to afford this

Kaliya: Bob Blakely and I have a paper based on a keynote we did on this. Those with wealth and power have more ability to maintain their identity

Annabelle: if you have the resources you can remove advertising if everything relies on advertising, do we have to reconsider that way of funding the web

Annabelle: "you can chose to sell your data" - we're still framing it as commerce - selling yourself as a product

David: that happens because of lack of trust - if you could trust the assertions we make, would be paid for by the risk reduction for the RPs

Annabelle: if you're a content provider with revenue from advertising, trust isn't going to affect your need to sell that information

Kevin: if we have verifiable claims we are creating an incentive for redlining to prove you only have high value readers

Lewis: VRM is premised on people having the power to share their own data, and get back power from markets

Annabelle: markets don't work that way in practice: in theory every consumer has the ability to shop anywhere for food or banking; in practice a lot of that ends up based on redlining through store location

Lewis: I don't think VRM will take us to the promised land, but we should look at radical changes

Mike: Any situation between humans and businesses is asymmetric by default, as the trust model we rely on as humans doesn't work. One way to solve this is to incorporate everyone, - and I'm mike, inc and I sue you

Annabelle: you can't copyright facts

David W: I like inverting the corporations are people trope but it doesn't really change the power

If corporations have the capacity to mine us to create IP based on our data - the deepest from of IP is our identity; why can't we copyright our identity.

Kaliya: I want to talk about power asymmetry in the physical world - even how we sit in the circle and who is choosing to sit how – how much space do you take up expresses power and comfort. We watch that happen and need to help those signaling lower power and bring them in. This kind of observational skill and leadership is essential. If we want to make space designed to get input from different populations. There are also gender race and class asymmetries that happen in this community which we don't always bring up.

Mike: there really is real discrimination on the internet. If the thing on the other end thinks you're a woman or a man, or in certain zipcode you see different prices and ads

My daughter si s sociology major, and helped me think about blacklivesmatter that colour-blindness is not a thing that we can do - classism in power asymmetry is going to fail everybody

Annabelle: people's identity and the various privileges and systems of oppression impacts their experience online - certain groups have to think more about their identity online have to present themselves. A great example is women in the gaming community over gamergate where women are attacked mercilessly for having an opinion on games while female, and presenting as a women can be a threat.

Kaliya: becasue our culture has a lot of power asymmetry it causes problems inherently

Annabelle: Facebooks policy for 'real names' discriminated against Native people's names because they don't look 'real' to the algorithm,or transgender people who don't use their birth names.

Anil: what can we do in order to not impose the first world perspective. What can we do proactively to ensure that. I went to a workshop with non-profits on the role of identity for people who have been trafficked. If you require them to have an identity it makes them much more targeted, which I hadn't considered. As architects, what can we do to bring in those perspectives?

Maybe we should get rid of gender given what goes wrong,. The way we classify our identity gets encoded in code, it's not black or white. It gets messy

David: if the laws of identity are true, then people can assert different identities.

Annabelle: we can't rely on market forces to protect the rights of minorities - they don't have market power by definition - how do we inject ethics into the system?

Anil: this is not abstract for me - I fill out where the market forces don't make sense - i need to bring an investment convening perspective; I don't know the answers. Although I am not the same complexion for people here, I'm not at the margins of society. Problems of power asymmetry exist - what can we do to provide solutions.

Bill: what are design principle that we can build into this - we need to bring people into the deign process. Native Americans, transgender, people fleeing abuse. Identity and relationship matters.

Kevin: markets can empower too - ebay created ways for people to build businesses, whereas advertising is based on stereotyping and prejudice

Annabelle: the same day delivery article re amazon is a good example of unintended consequences - Prime users in certain neighborhoods gave a racist/classist effect that gave a power imbalance. Evaluate your decisions based on that. That we are in this room is indicative of privilege; we are going to make mistakes. When we get feedback from a community we need to be receptive to that feedback. no one solution is going to work for every community. The way that social space has evolved not he internet - 10 years ago the forum was the be-all and end all -there were walled garden communities with moderators and known membership. We have evolved into this twitter/tumblr model where everyone is screaming at each other. When you talk to the social justice community there is a struggle to create safe spaces for people. You can't do that without that behavior injecting into that space  - a single global community doesn't work. Especially when you have groups with mutually conflicting needs for their safe space. We need to recognize that systems don't work for everybody.

Discrimination lawsuits work for race, gender etc but we don't have that based on class. If we dissect power that is correlated with wealth and privilege. If a child has a collection of power imbalances. Class and poverty being the overwhelming factor.

Kevin: class in a different sense is legally represented by class action lawsuits

Anil: privacy and security become a luxury good, only available to a specific class of people. I know nothing about Bill Gates's kids because he can provide that buffer. It's an example of it being a luxury good. Look at the design of systems.

Kaliya: one of the things we need to think about is how we talk to different populations. I would like to write some kind of document about in person dynamics. I'd like to invite people who haven’t ' been aware of that to have some kind of knowledge about it. Those who choose to speak about dynamics we see get pushed back on as victims.

Literacy and awareness of this is key

Mike: telcos, military kinds of things are part fo our models –top down, command and control. Our identity systems place people into roles they have to play. we have created a software tradition that isn’t embodiment of our beliefs that this should eb an asymmetric system.

What does a symmetrical system look like.

Bill: how our stances in the room effect our design. Watching IIW try to shift the dynamics. Developing a literacy of power.

Kevin: the language of standards is an authoritarian one, and we are told MUST and SHOULD and MAY, and have all evidence and examples removed