Tech Expert In NZ To Speak On Potential Of Internet

The open nature of technology creates great possibilities to positively influence the values of our society and institutions and it should be doing more than making a few people rich; says coder and activist Evan Henshaw-Plath.

Henshaw-Plath will be speaking at the Open Source Open Society Conference in Wellington on 22/23 August where he will discuss how open principles and technology can encourage more democracy and openness in our everyday lives and work environments.http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1608/S00062/tech-expert-in-nz-to-speak-on-potential-of-tech.htmHe was interviewed yesterday by Jesse Mulligan on Radio New Zealand.

Listen to the audio stream here.

Here is a brief summary of the discussion:

Henshaw-Plath AKA Rabble is a coder, activist and a little bit of an anarchist. Mulligan states that Henshaw-Plath doesn’t just talk the talk about internet activism, he walks the walk. He was the lead developer at the company that eventually became Twitter, but left when it veered off its original vision of creating a platform to help to organise activism.

Henshaw-Plath is interested in how we can apply concepts of the open source movement to larger parts of society—openness transparency and new forms of production and collaboration. As software becomes more integrated into how the whole world works we have a chance to adopt a new set of progressive values and integrate them into the institutions of our society.

Coding as Social Justice

Henshaw-Plath believes that, as a tech activist, his role is to promote social justice, and he is eager to empower civil society to influence politics through the use of software. That was the original anarchic spirit that informed the creation of Twitter, he says, and traces of it remain today. He believes the positive aspect of Twitter was its democratic and decentralised values which made it a useful free tool for many social groups.

“In the US you see things like ‘Black Lives Matter’ a social movement combating police brutality, and the very way in which we refer to the social movement is as a hashtag”

Technology - created by communities but benefits privatised

Twitter wasn’t the creation of a few coders in a room, he says, users made it what it is today. The use of hashtags, the @ symbol all came from users of Twitter and became the norm. Henshaw-Plath says a group of “slightly Asperger white guys” by writing software code, are writing the new laws that govern us; and that’s a concern for broad participation in society.

He points out that technology is increasing productivity as a result of the distributed ‘sharing economy’ and harnessing the collective community energy and minds of all users, however the benefits are still relatively confined to a small elite.

“Now we have this thing where we have increasing productivity, but we don’t have now an economic system that rewards people for participating in it.”

The Internet Of Things, UBI And The Future Of Work

“What is the future of work? What happens when trucks drive themselves?” Henshaw-Plath asks. He points out that a noticeable number of articles about the Rio Olympics are written by software and discusses how software is now encroaching on areas thought to be immune to the de-jobbing ravages of technology.

“Things we thought couldn’t be replaced by software are. Universal basic income (UBI) is that the solution, or part of the solution? We don’t know.”

Uber and the Social Costs of Tech Disruption

Despite his Silicon Valley background, Henshaw-Plath is ambivalent about the social disruption the advance of technology brings:

“Frankly I’m not sure the world is better for Uber. There’s a vision of the start-up world that is ‘let’s just roll through everything and create businesses that are much more efficient and re-capture the excess of the creative destruction, and no one else matters.”

The Unruly Future Of The Internet

Henshaw-Plath believes the future of the internet will be “unruly” as dominant players will lose their control as breakthroughs of AR, VR and Artificial Intelligence will create a resetting of the social order of internet technology.

“We’re looking at a space where companies want it to be very orderly, and they want you to live in the nice walled-garden of Facebook….Truth is most traffic is out elsewhere on the internet, Facebook, itself the dominant walled garden, can’t possibly retain its position.”

He believes there is parallel between software and the built environments of the city with processes akin to gentrification and neglected spaces being ripe for innovation before leading to mass adoption.

Opportunities Presented By Technology

Henshaw-Plath believes technology gives us the ability to have either a dystopian control based society or the flowering of a new more participatory and highly innovative society. He believes it is important that wider range of groups are participating in creation of technology and find ways for diverse people to engage in this process and get value out of doing so. In other words he asks how we can make people participants and contributors in creating society rather than just as consumers.

Grab your ticket to OS//OS to hear more from Henshaw-Plath and other leading minds seeking to reshape the way technology is applied to our society in order to create more progressive and democratic values in our institutions and environments.

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