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

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

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The rise of new technologies is making the United States more economically unequal, says Professor Ramesh Srinivasan. Americans should be pushing the current presidential candidates hard for answers on how they will bring economic security and how they will ensure that technological transitions benefit all of us.

"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," says Srinivasan. Now is the time to debate solutions like basic income and worker-owned cooperatives.

Concurrently, individuals should develop digital literacy and get educated on the potential solutions. Srinivasan recommends taking free online and open courses from universities like Stanford and MIT, and reading books and quality journalism on these issues.

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RAMESH SRINIVASAN:

Ramesh Srinivasan is Professor of Information Studies and Design Media Arts at UCLA. He makes regular appearances on NPR, The Young Turks, MSNBC, and Public Radio International, and his writings have been published in the Washington Post, Quartz, Huffington Post, CNN, and elsewhere.

Check his latest book Beyond the ValleyHow Innovators around the World are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow at

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TRANSCRIPT:

"RAMESH SRINIVASAN: In the United States, we're in the middle of an election season and 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 that 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 they are going to ensure that technological transitions are ones that benefit all of us. And how they can 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 in 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. And I, 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, at MIT. And it doesn't have to just be those universities. It could be almost anywhere. So I would really encourage everybody to take, you know, 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. So that's part one, like take advantage of the open internet.

But part two is be really, as much as possible, try to be critical. Play with different kinds of platforms. So what if you use DuckDuckGo instead of Google. How would the results be different? What if you deleted—just play—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 a second point.

The third I would say is there are a number of good books and writers and talks and TED talks, et cetera. 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. And I would really encourage everybody...

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