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Anasuya Sengupta The internet is primarily monoculturally in English. Tech is primarily monoculturally in English. It's become almost what I've started calling plantation tech. It's a monocrop of knowledge and of imagination. (...)
Sanam That's Anasuya Sengupta, co-founder of Who's Knowledge. Welcome to If You Were In Charge with me, Sanam Naraghi Anderlini. And me, Kavita Nandini Ramdas. So here we are. It is a few hours before the official end of the two-week ceasefire. And we're recording. And this conversation with Anasuya for me was really interesting. Because when we think about tech and AI, and as she says, you know, monocrop and English. And the technology and the substance is in the hands of a few. But when I think about the Iran-Iraq War and all these memes, these Lego man memes. And how people are surprised by the humor and the sophistication of what's coming out of Iraq.
Kavita Ramdas You don't mean the Iran-Iraq War, although we did survive that. You meant the Iran-US-Israel War.
Sanam Exactly. Yes. You know, this current war. Yes. But the whole question of the narrative war and the use of tech. Both, I would say, militarily, which their missiles have been pretty sophisticated and people are surprised by that. But I think more so the narrative tech. //S01: Yes.// And the fact that they've taken the technology and even the substance and turned it around and used it.
Kavita Ramdas To use Lego, to use Lego, guys. I have to say, Sanam, I think I still have, what shall we do with the drunken Hegseth in my brain from having watched that.
Sanam I was, so I was, you know, when I see them, you know, people are like, well, what is Lego saying about this? And are they going to sue these guys? And I'm thinking, no, if Lego is smart, they would start doing models of the Isfahan Chelsutun and the, you know, the Golestan Palace and all these other sites and or the control, you know, command room at, you know, in the White House or something. I mean, they've given them so many ideas of what to actually provide.
Kavita Ramdas Add to their collection.
Sanam That's right. //S02: Yeah. No, I know.// Bizarre.
Kavita Ramdas I mean, I think one of the things that has been so strange through this whole period is that, on the one hand, there's been so much devastation and so much horror. That we might end up with only Lego models of some of the most prized, shared treasures of our humanity. And yet, on the other hand, I think what's been equally weirdly, somehow weirdly reassuring for so many of us in the rest of the world is that the world is actually beginning to see that knowledge is not that concentrated as they perhaps assumed that it was. And that despite all of the ways in which particularly technological knowledge has been concentrated in monopolies, as Anasuya so brilliantly reveals to us in her conversation, the people who have had to make do are doing so with radical imagination.
Sanam The reaction that I found, obviously, again, both disturbing, not surprising, but also just kind of, like, you know, eye-rolly. It was, you know, the economist writing something about, oh, how surprising that these Iranians could possibly produce such sophisticated technology. And with humor, as if we're all, like, you know, humorless. And I'm like, you don't understand our culture. Like, humor and political humor is so integral to everything that happens around us all the time.
Kavita Ramdas It reminded me of our time in Germany a little bit, Sanam, when the East German women who I met with were like, you know, somehow I think every West German I've ever met thought that all we did was live under Stasi terror. And as though we had no music, no plays, no drama, not some of the best writing, you know, out of European literature, I think there's a little bit of the same thing. Oh, you live under an Iranian mullah regime. There must not be anything. In fact, as we know, the more repression there is, the more rich and diverse the cultural resistance turns out to be.
Sanam Absolutely. And it's very funny because they, you know, they were writing from the beginning of the revolution. You know, one of their things was to write slogans on walls. You know, you'd get up in the morning and it would be, you know, some new slogan of theirs and stuff. One of the big slogans, my cousin was saying, one of the big slogans was, read the Koran. You know, Imam Khomeini, kind of like that was his statement. And somebody come and crossed it out and said, I read it, not impressed. This is 1980s Iran at the height of this Islamist fervor. And people had the courage to do that and just kind of push back and things. Another one that was really funny was, again, mid-80s, somebody put an ad in the newspaper saying, I have, I don't know, 483 prime dairy cows for sale, you know, call this number. And the number you called was the Majlis, the parliament. And, you know, so it was like pranks and this kind of thing just to kind of get away from, you know, just to poke holes at the oppression that's there. Yeah. So humor has always been there. And it's just very funny that all of a sudden, you know, the economist is like, good lord. You know, how dare they kind of thing. //S02: Goodness.// Goodness, yes. These people, the natives have humor. That's right. (..) Anyway, so, yeah, so that's been interesting. And just thinking about Anasuya's conversation about who owns the technology, who owns the knowledge, whose knowledge comes in. And some of the radical things that are happening.
Kavita Ramdas I mean, I just loved hearing about the Bangladeshis and, you know, who are the different, where are the different faces in which new knowledge is being created in new languages on the internet, which just sounded wonderful. So, no, I mean, I think one of the things we have taken away from this amazing podcast and the people we've talked to is hope, because we keep talking to people, we keep talking to people who are doing remarkable things and, you know, like the Lego and sort of like the Lego memes are breaking our traditional understandings of perceptions.
Sanam And this idea that, you know, from the premise of it being that there are big problems out there and some people sit and just, you know, groan about the problem or analyze the problem to death and just depress you. And then others sort of jump in and try and do something. And it's that, that do it, you know, the minute you take that one step, like Rumi says, you know, take the step and the path appears and you just see how many people just have that incentive in them. So I kind of, you know, when I think about the pessimism about AI, I flip my head and I'm like, well, you know, as the more people are worried about technology, the more we're also seeing that people's drive to be socially connected and wanting to be together in person. is there's also a new kind of revival of that, even though a lot of it is also quite religious, you know, wanting to feel community and so forth. It's quite interesting how the human spirit keeps kind of resurfacing and insists on being present regardless, right? So, yeah.
Kavita Ramdas Which is why I think we thought about this podcast as being about possibilities, because even in the heart of the most difficult and depressing times, I think there is this incredible resilience and this willingness to think about what else might be possible. So, you know, Arundhati Roy's famous quote, right?
Sanam Another world is possible. Well, it is. Yeah. And the future is for us to create, which brings me to, like, we're on the cusp of this two-week ceasefire deal and what's going to happen coming forward. And it's just, I mean, I feel. //S02: How are you feeling?// Well, I, you know, I sort of think about it viscerally. It's as if you're holding your half breath, you know, it's like you don't know whether to breathe out, to breathe in, whether it's a breath of hope or dread of what might be coming, because if they don't sustain the ceasefire and we enter a new round of war, by definition, it's going to be awful. By definition, this is what happens. When ceasefires break down, wars always get worse, and the likelihood of coming back to the table is always much more fraught. And, you know, as much as the Iranians, you know, strategically and narrative-wise, and even militarily have been pumping dead their chest, you know, 30,000 bombs and missiles were
Anasuya Sengupta dropped on Iran.
Sanam Imagine that MIT, Harvard, and Colombia have been destroyed. You know, the hospitals, the steel plants. I mean, you want to rebuild, but you don't have domestic steel in it. And it's hard to bring those factories and those plants back into motion, which means that something like 200,000 to 300,000 people might be jobless, right? So it's, you know, the peacocks on the international stage in their fancy black suits and stuff is one thing. And they are, I think, both loathed, feared, and possibly revered in some ways in Iran. But there's a lot of loathing that goes because of their domestic repression. In a way, the country is now in their hands. And it's like, what are they going to do to preserve what we have of Iran? I think that's where many of us are worried about what the next stage brings. And knowing, again, that there are many spoilers, both on the extreme of the Iranian side and, of course, the extreme of the Israeli side that keeps saying, finish the job. And I'm like, when I hear that in the context of war and all these years I've worked on it, I'm like, finish the job means it's another 15 years because every battle becomes finish the job. And, you know, you're destroying a generation.
Kavita Ramdas It's particularly eerie listening to it coming out of the mouths of Israelis who certainly remember the final solution as something that they had to go through themselves.
Anasuya Sengupta So there's something particularly distressing and eerie about hearing that.
Kavita Ramdas But I think even on that, since we heard from both Stephanie Fox and from Ben Cohen, I think we have to just hold out hope. And I do think that you're right to remind us that, as Anasuya reminded us, that technology is always a tool for us to use. And that means that it has both potential for immense good and potential for immense harm.
Sanam And it's interesting to see that a company like Anthropic is trying to navigate that space with saying, oh, we've come out with a new version of Claude and it's so powerful and that we have to somehow contain it. Now, again, many people would say, well, why should one company or a handful of companies contain the power of all this technology? But I suspect if we go back in history and you look at, say, medical advances or, you know, things to do with vaccines and so forth, there was a moment at which the experts and the companies and certain countries held the knowledge and the, and the technology before it was released widely. So, so, so there's, there's an element of, we have to hope that they're also good guys and some of these companies that, that, that are handling these issues. Well, Palantir is a whole different story in terms of how they have presented themselves. And as a, as a Brit, I have to say that I, that I'm just shaking my head because they're coming into our defense sector and our health sector. And I'm like, who bribed who to give them these contracts, which were no contest contracts. So I do worry about the sort of the spectrum of, you know, from the light to the dark, but yeah, it's, it's a strange moment to be recording this and to be sharing Anasuya's wisdom and just beautiful perspective on the possibilities of AI. So I hope people enjoy the conversation. I do too. (.....) We are super excited today because our guest is a very dear friend, Anasuya Sengupta, who is the founder of an initiative and an organization called Whose Knowledge? Anasuya, I'm going to back off a little bit, just, just to sort of give the perspective. (.) Every day, 24-7 around the world, people are Googling and searching the internet for information for what they presume to be accurate information and the whole information and, you know, whatever question they're asking. You work on these issues. What, what worries you about the fact that we are so reliant on particular search engines or, or the internet as a whole? I mean, that we assume that everything is there right now. And does it keep you up at night? Does it keep you up at night?
Anasuya Sengupta Well, let me start by saying it's lovely to be here. I've been looking forward to this conversation so much. It's lovely to be with friends and talking about, yeah, when feminists take over the world, which we need to do ASAP. And of course, it keeps me up at night. It keeps me up at night along with the full moon, which definitely kept me up last night. And it keeps me up at night because I think sometimes we ask the wrong questions around tech because the most important question, and I think both of you are such good examples of asking this question throughout your careers and your organizing lifetimes, what are the worlds we want to live in and what are the worlds we want to build? (.) And that is the question we need to answer. How do we get there and what tech do we need to get there? (.) And most often what has happened, and this is the difficulty with big tech as it stands right now, and big knowledge as well, and I'll explain a little bit more what I mean by that, is that it essentially has become a world in which a few white and sovereign dominant caste brown men have decided that tech is going to be the solution to all our problems without without actually articulating what those problems are and what is the world we want to live in. What are the values of the world that we want to live in? And so tech solutionism or tech utopianism starts in a sense with saying we have the solution. (.) We actually don't even know what the problem is yet, but we have the solution. We are the solution. We are the solution. And that, I think, is the really difficult context we're in, where if you start breaking down big tech in terms of what is happening to the money, the capital and the labor, it's at the heart of the poly crisis we're in. And tech, frankly, has always been at the heart of the poly crisis from the industrial revolution on, in a sense. But at this moment, it's even more at the heart of the poly crisis we are on, including the planetary crisis, because it is literally constructing a world that is unsustainable, both for humans and non-human life. And that is what keeps me up at night.
Sanam So I'm just going to unpack a little bit of this. So on the one hand, people might be listening and saying, but, you know, the internet has liberated and it's opened up things and it's giving access access to knowledge, you know, from a social media standpoint, you know, when we're looking at news about any part in the world, as an Iranian, of course, I'm obsessed right now, the last few months about what's going on. You know, if it's not in mainstream news, we find it in other sources. So how do you balance the idea that it was meant to be open and liberating on the one hand, but then, as you're saying, we're seeing these other forces coming into play, which we'll talk
Kavita Ramdas about as well. Maybe if I could add to that, Anasuya, the name of your organization is Whose Knowledge? And I think one of the questions inherent inside Sanam's query is, how do we understand who is shaping the information that we are absorbing? That's something we would be curious to hear your thoughts about.
Anasuya Sengupta Let me start with Sanam's and then move to yours, Kavitha, because they're, of course, connected and linked. Sanam, the way that I often explain it is, again, taking the long view, the historical view. Often when we think about big tech right now and the internet, we see it as a disjuncture. We see it as a break from the past, but actually it's not. It's a continuation of colonial capitalism and different forms of technology that have come through colonial capitalism, right? And by that I mean, there was a point when, you know, and this is familiar to the three of us coming from South and West Asia, which is that the telegram or the telegraph was seen as an extraordinary new invention. You know, it suddenly brought the world closer together. People who had never been able to talk to each other, the diaspora of a hundred years ago could suddenly send messages of weddings and births and deaths to each other in a way that we had never imagined. And this is well before the phone. But where did the telegraph come from? The telegraph and that telecommunication network were set up by the British to make sure that after the 1857 First War of Independence, as we Indians like to say, and the Sepoy Mutiny, as the colonial British called it, they wanted to make sure that they were in control of the empire. So the telegram telegraph network was set up. Our current form of telecommunications infrastructure is built on the infrastructure that the British Empire and then other Western European empires set up in order to make sure they had control over the empire. Does that mean that it stays that way? No, because humans are creative. We are agile. We take the instruments that our colonizers or our oppressors give us and shift and mold it and make it something much more magical and useful and interesting and germane to our lives. And so we've done that. We no longer would look at the telegram or the telephone as oppressive instruments, right? But there is a colonial history to that. Big tech right now is very similar. So the internet, again, comes out of both academic and defense infrastructures, right? The US defense was key in supporting the internet as it has been built now, as well as academic institutions in the West, but also some global South institutions. And there was a way in which the early internet felt much more publicly owned. Governments owned it, there were community spaces, community owned spaces. What has changed, especially in the last 10 years, is the hegemony of control. (..) So five or six huge mega corporations, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook or Meta, Apple, and now Nvidia and OpenAI in the AI world have almost absolute control, monopolistic control over the internet from the backend to the frontend. So all the, what we call the application layer that we all use from the WhatsApp to the Gmail, and then the backend layer of storage, literally where everything we are doing is stored, is stored in the so-called cloud. And that is owned, more than 50% of it is owned by Amazon and Microsoft. That is the level of control we're talking about.
Sanam This is fascinating. And I just wanted to just interject. So again, if we compare it to, as you said, the telegraph, the telephone, this technology that required infrastructure, it reminds me of my thesis for my master's degree. I was looking at satellite and video technology and the social and economic impact of it. And the idea of the messenger and the message, in a way, the technology or the infrastructure of passing the message belonged to the British Empire or to, you know, whatever, monopolies of companies. But the content was ours. So, you know, the message is me talking to you. I'm creating it. And it's, you know, it's us directly communicating with each other. And we own our own letters and messages. What we have now is that they own our content as well. Is that the part that, for you, makes it insidious, at least up to this point
Anasuya Sengupta in our conversation? Yes. And I mean, even in the early parts of the colonial empire, everything we sent was surveilled, right? So surveillance starts before the internet era and empire starts surveillance. So it was surveilled. And then we had levels of agency, autonomy, and as you say, control over the information we shared. Privacy then becomes a form of a human right that we all start talking about. And it becomes enshrined in multiple ways through the UN Declaration of Human Rights and so on and so forth. It's still an individual right. So at some point, we need to talk about the collective notion of it. But there is a sense in which we have some autonomy and privacy. You are absolutely right, Sanam, in that what we have right now is at the level of another global infrastructure whose speed and depth and range we have not experienced before, still literally on the legacy of previous infrastructure. So if you put the the map of the telegraph and overlay it with the map of the internet infrastructure, it's the same. That is fascinating. Submarine cables and all of it. Right. And I think the other piece to it is one, the the seeming agency and control we do not actually have. And the second is the fact that especially in the age of AI, we are the training set. We have moved from being consumers of products to being the product itself. Right. And now we are data points. AI, every form of AI is testing itself on us. So even when you look at something like Gemini or Grok, it is not that this is a well-established AI system. It is actually continually training itself on us and how
Kavita Ramdas we respond. That sounds awfully familiar when you're saying we don't have that kind of agency as someone who's been a woman's rights activist all my life. The language around that sounds really very much reminiscent of the way we were talking about our bodies and still are talking about our bodies, that we actually don't have agency, that we don't have power, that we actually don't own our own bodies, and that we are being legislated on, that our bodies are being legislated on. Can you say a little bit more about the voices that one doesn't hear from and who does and doesn't have power inside the space? Because, of course, you started your work as a feminist activist, if I'm correct. (..)
Anasuya Sengupta And will continue to be a feminist activist till I die. And I think, so it comes back to the previous question you asked me, Kabita, and this is, I think, the right place to talk about that. I co-founded Whose Knowledge with a couple of other friends because we were all three of us feminists within the space of technology and also open knowledge. We were all at the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia. And what we were seeing was that at that time, which was 2012, we were, that is black and brown, global majority feminists, were the ones really sounding the alarm. We were the canary in the coal mine, sounding the alarm on big tech at a time where everybody was still drinking the Kool-Aid, as they say in the US, right? Still seeing it as the universal panacea for all ills. And we were people who loved tech and were in tech and were not opposed to tech. We were opposed to this form of tech and the hegemonic control that we were starting to see, this kind of very few companies with far too much of an oversight on all that we were experiencing. So what we did was start Whose Knowledge as a feminist collective at the intersections of knowledge and tech justice. And one of the key things that we talked about as in the form of knowledge and tech justice was just as we asked the question, whose body is it? Whose knowledge is it? And whose imagination is it? And I think the question of imagination is really important here because again, to the point that tech has to be in service to our dreams, tech has to be in service to our dreams of the present and the future, what does a liberatory present or future look like, then whose tech, whose imagination is at the heart of that tech? So what we found was unsurprising to both of you, that when you look at even the content online, and Sanam, to your point that we think of the internet as being something that pulled us together, then absolutely. Globalization works both ways, right? It is both a means of solidarity and connection at the same time as it's a means of extraction and exploitation. The question is,
Sanam whose means and whose intentions? And polarization and atomization.
Anasuya Sengupta And polarization and atomization, even as we're trying desperately to be more collective and work together. Big tech is at the heart of that polarization and atomization with both intention and unintended consequences as well. But what we found was even in terms of content and in terms of leadership, for instance, in big tech, there are very few women in leadership positions. Five percent of tech have women in leadership positions. There are less than six percent of technical workers at Apple or Metta who are Black who are Black. So when you combine race, gender, geography, it's a really problematic landscape. Even when you think about the fact that we have a couple of the top CEOs of the big tech companies are brown men. Which brown men? Kavita and I will say to you, dominant cast brown men who have a very similar racial outlook as privileged white men in that they think of hierarchies. They think of certain humans as being more human than other humans and certain people as being more intelligent than other humans. They're constructing hierarchies of knowledge. How does that then translate to the way in
Sanam which we are either exposed to knowledge, actually kind of not exposed to it? As you know, I also, we all work with women in war zones and one of our biggest issues is that the work that women do is completely invisible. Their warning signs and what they tell us about what's happening is completely invisible. You know, we were fighting for 25 years just to get a gendered analysis of the context of, you know, Yemen, Gaza, whatever. It's very hard to get. Where is it deliberate and where is it just business as usual has always been like this?
Anasuya Sengupta I think it's both and Sonam. On the one hand, Wikipedia, for instance, is a very good example, and it's quite a simple example to use in terms of something that everybody knows and everybody uses, including us as feminist activists, right? Journalists use it even if they pretend not to, but they do. Everybody does. And the thing about Wikipedia is that it's particularly important at this moment, because it's the largest free and open knowledge repository of its kind. Every algorithmic system, every AI like ChatGPT is pulling information from Wikipedia. So, the inequities of information on Wikipedia travel. They travel the internet, right? They're embedded into everything that we look at. So, we run Wikipedia sister projects a great deal because this is part of our ways of resisting and transforming this knowledge infrastructure. We run a campaign called Visible Wikiwomen precisely because, as you said, Sonam, when we looked at the biographies of women on Wikipedia, one in four biographies on Wikipedia is of a woman, and then one in four of those biographies have (.) an image. So, invisibility is not even a metaphor. It is a literal material artifact. And that comes out of both the structural nature of patriarchy, which is infused in everything that we do, you know, whether how we studied at school and who was thought to be a scientist or who was thought to be a professor, or who we think of as a farmer, right? All of which are women. And as the three of us know, most farming activity in the world is done by women. But you don't see the image of a black woman or a brown woman pop up when you do the search for a farmer, right? And that comes out of structural patriarchy, but it also comes out of a version of the internet, which means that who is adding content to the internet tends to be people with time and access to technology, which also tends to be gendered. (.) So, Wikipedia in its early days was very much the hobby of white, young, and retired men from the global north, from Europe and North America. So, it's not surprising that embedded in this infrastructure that is literally the encyclopedia anybody can edit is actually deep, if not intentional misogyny, certainly the consequences of different forms of patriarchy.
Kavita Ramdas I think, Anasuya, that's super helpful for us to remember that in a way, the struggles for agency and voice and power that Sanam and I have been involved with on a non-tech platform, whether it is building networks of peacemakers or whether it is making sure that grants reach grassroots women's organizations. In a way, what you're saying is that same system of exclusion is then replicated within the context of tech. But there's another piece to it, which I guess I want to ask you a little bit about, because you began by telling us who was in charge of the tech system as it is. Our podcast is called If You Were In Charge. And I'm just wondering, if you were in charge, if the people who started whose knowledge were going to be able to actually wave a magic wand or have the resources that you so desperately need, what would that actually look like? Because it's easy for us to critique what is. And yet, I think often in all social movements, but especially in feminism, we don't spend as much time talking about, as you said in the beginning, the world that we actually envision. What would that
Anasuya Sengupta look like if you were in charge? (..) I love so much the premise of this podcast and the fact that it is propositional. I think, and I know you, the three of us, have talked about this at other moments and in other spaces, but I think some of the difficulty of people's movements and the feminist movement, progressive folks in general, has been that we have not often articulated our propositions enough, because there's so much to critique, so much to resist, so much to challenge. And it's completely understandable because when you have limited capacity, time, energy, and resource, you have to hold the line. So we've spent so much of our time holding the line that we haven't necessarily had the space to do the reimagination. But at the heart of our work is that reimagination. It is reimagination that can only happen in a collective. So it's one of the reasons why for us, when we began, we were the, in some ways, one of the few organizations of our kind. And I often say being first is, I don't actually like being first, because it means that why is this a world in which we're the first? And we definitely don't want to be the only or the last. And what's been wonderful is in the 10 years, we're now going to celebrate being 10 later this year. In these 10 years that we started, and Kavita, you were part of our birth in Brazil in 2016 at the AWID Forum, we have many other organizations like us, led by black and brown global majority feminists and other progressive folks, non-binary folks, and indigenous Dalit feminists. Our organization itself is a breadth and range of folks from what we call the minoritized majority of the world. And what we are constantly, constantly trying to do is both the resistance, but also the reimagination. And one example of that is in language and in languages. Because as you know, the way that AI is thought about, AI is literally a pattern recognition, ginormous pattern recognition, (.) machine tech, right? It's basically trying to recognize patterns based on the data we feed it. And it's based on something called the large language model. That is, all of this data gives us these huge data sets on which the algorithm is trained. Now language is such an important proxy for knowledge. All three of us we have to speak more than one language. We know that we inhabit the world differently when we speak English than when we speak Urdu or Tamil or Farsi. And yet the internet is primarily monoculturally in English. Tech is primarily monoculturally in English. So much of science and tech academia is primarily monoculturally in English. It's become almost what I've started calling plantation tech. It's a monocrop. of knowledge and of imagination. So when you start thinking about multilinguality and multimodality, what does that look like as a way to say to people, yes, we are imagining this from the margins, but this could actually make such a difference to all of us. So one of the experiments we're trying is to work with disability rights activists in South Asia, from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, to say, how would you come online as blind and visually impaired activists in Bangla, in Urdu or in Hindi? At this moment in time, even though Bangla, Urdu and Hindi are in the top 10 spoken languages, of all the apps that we have and platforms we have on the internet, only about half even offer some interface support. So imagine if you're blind or visually impaired, you have to come online in your nearest dominant language, or in this case, your nearest colonial language, which is English. So we're imagining together, we've done research with them around what they are using right now, but we're now imagining, okay, if you were to come online in your language, what would it look like? And the thing is that when you do that kind of imagination from the margins into the center, we know that it's going to be relevant to everyone. Because even if you look at your phone right now, right, like the fact that in many ways, the big font, the ability to make your font bigger came out of people who could not read small fonts. It came out of disability rights activists saying, listen, we just literally can't see this
Kavita Ramdas tiny font on our phone. Or the fact that we have pavement cuts in curbs, which was also around
Anasuya Sengupta disability rights activism. And now everyone with a stroller or a suitcase benefits from it. Exactly, exactly that. And so how do we start sort of imagining from the margins in and doing it in a way that offers alternatives? What would it look like, for instance, and we're working with another wonderful organization called DARE Distributed AI Research Institute, also led by an amazing black feminist, Timnick Gibru, who very famously was fired by Google for leading, co-leading their ethics in AI program. And we're looking at what do sovereign language technologies mean? What might a small language model look like? And so these are the kinds of imaginations that we want to offer. When we think about Wikipedia as being something created by all of us, feminists, people from the global south in multiple languages, what does that look like? What does the structured data that underpins the internet, which is the way that machines understand human data, it's the translator, right? Structured data is the translator between humans and the machine. If it's not based on Western knowledge systems, how does it suddenly expand the way that we think about it?
Kavita Ramdas What I'm hearing is, I asked what would it look like if you were in charge? And in a strange way of saying, well, if we were in charge, you said from the margins, working from the margins in as a collective force. And what we would be doing if we were in charge would be to actually open up these spaces for a collective voice. Am I correct?
Sanam It's just to add to that, so often we're hearing this from people who are at the forefront of solutions to these big problems. The minute the question is, what would you do? Immediately, they're like, well, I would expand the space for multiple others to come in, or I would widen the networks. Again, that hierarchy question of the folks that right now are in charge of things are so, they're holding on to the power and the control of doing things. And we're all saying it's not, you need an ecosystem. You need a whole different model. It's not a top-down hierarchy. It's a sort of scaling across. That's what we say in our work all the time. It's not about scaling up, it's about scaling across. Does this resonate with you, this idea?
Anasuya Sengupta It absolutely resonates. It absolutely resonates. And I think it's, I love your scaling across rather than scaling up metaphor. I often say that we have to start thinking of scale like a jigsaw puzzle or a tapestry, right? That it is multiple. It is, it is not a homogenous set of pins in a pin factory, to use the classic Adam Smith version of it. Poor misunderstood Adam Smith. But anyway, it is to really think about the richness, the tapestries of our worlds, that multiple textures of plurality. Really, what does it look like to have a plural vision of the world in a very deep, practical and practice perspective? And so for me, it means the dance between the individual and the collective. Yes, certain of us have certain leadership roles, and we need to understand them and play them. It's a classic feminist conversation, which is that it's not about one or the other. And we cannot see this, especially as anti-colonials, we can't see this as
Sanam territory. Yeah. And on that point, I mean, you know, in my work, and I see this resonating here, it's that it's one thing to say we want the marginalized to be able to access and have their own language or or their own ways of engaging. The other side of the coin for me, which is where my work sits, is to say it's also about what content we bring. And I think about, again, from all of our cultures, how much indigenous wisdom there is about food, about how you manage your natural habitat, biodiversity, how we behave towards each other, mediation techniques, what our poetry says. I mean, there's just such a richness of knowledge. And then so much of that sits with women and women we know don't document. It's passed by word of mouth. But prior to the internet, all of this existed and it co-existed. It just wasn't, you know, you just didn't necessarily know about, you know, how the Yemenis did it. Now we're expected to know, but as you say, our knowledge isn't necessarily, we're not given the resources or the ability to put that knowledge onto the net, right? That's one. And then the second question is, do we want it there? What happens if all of this information and wisdom is somehow programmed in? How dangerous can that be? Or is that a good thing?
Anasuya Sengupta That's such a good question, Sanam. And one of the conversations in our networks and within our collective is often around the right to refusal. And it's both and again, as all things are, because we live in a nuanced world, even though it feels like, you know, those in power think entirely in binaries. It's about what forms of knowledge we do want to bring on. And again, the agency and control we have around it. It's like our bodies. It really, it's so analogous to the feminist conversation around bodies, right? Like we have the right to pleasure and we have the right to say no. Those are not contradictory. So we have the right to bring our knowledges onto the internet, but we have the right to say no to which kinds of knowledges and how. And right now we don't have that ability to say no. We have no form of informed consent in the ways that big tech is using us and using our work. So this is one of the reasons why we work on liberatory archives and memory for exactly the reason you're saying, Sanam. How do we bring feminist knowledges online? How do we bring feminist memories online? And how do we connect all the many small community archival work that has happened over the years? Because we know feminists have been doing it. We have friends, there's an incredible feminist, Negath Khan in Pakistan, who has one of the oldest feminist archives that is a physical archive that is extraordinary, but the rest of us don't have a way to access it. So how do we do that? And at the same time, say we have the right to say what comes online and what's not. It's also a moment of such possibility from the point of view of what you're talking about, which is it's not even about indigenous knowledge versus Western knowledge. The three of us have multiple knowledge systems literally embedded and embodied in us. We are so extraordinarily lucky to be in this moment in time where we have this range of knowledge systems. What does it mean for us to be imagining tech and for us to be imagining knowledge systems where it's not one or the other? It's both and, or it's both and many. (..)
Kavita Ramdas Anasuya, one of the ways in which we have heard the world of tech respond to this lack of this set of diverse voices that we're talking about has been to say, oh, more women in tech. So more women into STEM, more engineers, more. And I wonder whether you could say a little bit about that, because I feel like, you know, in some ways, I feel like that's a representative response. You know, earlier, we were talking a little bit about what does any of this have to do with democracy versus empire. So if it is, in fact, the voice of the many, and if this is not going to be an empire, (.) then is part of it just to be addressed by saying, oh, well, if we just have more women, and I think you mentioned the extraordinary Timrit earlier, who was at Google and who brought case as an Ethiopian Eritrean woman. Can you speak a little bit about what are the solutions? And because I know we're coming up on time as well, tell me a little bit about what would make a difference and where are you seeing a difference? And is it just in the question of more representation or is it something else that we actually need to be looking for? And are there signs of hope that things that that you are seeing that make you feel like, oh, this could, we're really beginning to
Anasuya Sengupta make change. We're having an impact here. So I'm someone who believes really strongly that representation is necessary, but insufficient. And I think all three of us share that. (..) So it is important to have faces and bodies that look like ours in places of power, no matter which sector. And it is insufficient if the values that those bodies and the imaginations that those bodies embody are the same old, same old, right? I'm sitting in the UK and, you know, we have a range of black and brown bodies that don't embody feminist progressive values. I mean, there are voices here that look like us and literally don't want us to exist at the same time. There's deep self-hatred in some of those who look like us across the world right now. And so representation is not enough. It is
Sanam important, but not enough. So is there, do you see resistance in these spaces that not only about how we look and the kind of, you know, people that when they come into that tech world, but also in the approaches? I mean, what kind of resistance do you get to your work?
Anasuya Sengupta I mean, you can imagine that there are often spaces with white or brown privileged men in it who don't like hearing my voice. Happens to the best of us. Happens. I mean, I take it as a badge of honour. So, you know, when I have those deeply uncomfortable conversations, I'm like, yes, well, we're making someone uncomfortable. That means we're doing something right. So there is that. And I'm combining, Kavita, what you asked earlier with Sanam's question. I think this is a moment where the pendulum has swung so far to the right in multiple ways, but also in terms of big tech's hegemony and control over us and our sense of overwhelm around it, that there is now a growing (.) coalition of agreement, both in industry, some parts of industry, certainly across people's movements and communities as well as progressive academics and so on. And generally the lay public, which is that this can't go on and we need something different. So we are in conversations around what does distributed tech infrastructure look like? What does it look like when we bring our imaginations to bear? I often say the imaginations that brought us to this poly crisis are not the
Sanam imaginations that are going to get us out of here. Two questions, I think. One is, what is a radical idea that shouldn't be radical, that should just be the norm? And then a second one, which we often ask, is if you were a billionaire, if you had the resources that you need, what would you do?
Anasuya Sengupta I think the radical idea is that human and non-human knowledge is actually a collective public good. It's a commons. And the last thing that it feels like at the moment is a commons that we all participate in. But what is happening now, which is really important, is trying to disinvest from the control of a few companies. So what does it look like, for instance, if we were to have feminist service, (.) right, where our archives were on it, that were distributed across the world, and that we shared with other people? What would it look like for governments, again, to think really carefully about their, at least for the so-called democratic governments, to think about what it looked like for them to hold data on their people in a way that was shared, accessible, transparent, but not controlled by companies and not in the hands of companies? Thinking about a infrastructure of distributed tech that is from the tech that we use in the everyday, like our messaging systems, that is not WhatsApp, to our server systems, that is where we store things, that we can actually build in a very different way. It's not impossible. It's not rocket science. We know the science, we know the tech. What we now need is the political will and the resources to do it. So it's not
Kavita Ramdas radical at all in a way. Maybe that'll be Mackenzie Scott's next set of investments. Let's hope she's listening. That's the resource question too.
Anasuya Sengupta That's the resource question. Because tech does need the resources. That's the thing about tech. Tech, because of its, both the material infrastructure, but also, sadly, the market that has been created around tech skills, you know, we don't earn, none of the three of us earn anything like a tech engineer does. We actually need the resources to build this infrastructure in a way that has actual power. And so that's what I would use that billion for, or at least the first billion for. (....)
Sanam This was If You Were In Charge, a podcast brought to you by ICANN, the International Civil Society Action Network. Please get in touch with us if you have ideas for the show at info at icanpeacework.org. Like and subscribe and share the podcast with your friends who might be interested. I wanted to thank ADA Productions for making the show possible, and Little Monster Media for the music, and of course, Kavita Nandini Ramdas for being my amazing co-host this season. And finally, my biggest thank is to all of you for tuning in and listening to us each week. We'll be back soon, and I hope you will be too.