Sociotechs

The power associated to Big Tech, often equated to the ‘Big Five’ (Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft), is posing new problems at the societal and regulatory levels. Such problems lead to deeper questions in terms of power generation, use, and limitation, which a political philosophy perspective brings new flesh to. In this episode, we sit with Juho Lindman, whose award-winning paper "Big Tech’s power, political corporate social responsibility and regulation" interrogates questions in this range. Beyond regulation, he engages issues of political corporate responsibility and their relevance in the present international scenario.Juho Lindman is Professor of Information Systems in the Department of Applied IT at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) and the director of the University of Gothenburg Blockchain Lab. His current research focuses on open-source software development, blockchain governance, open data, and organisational change. His paper  "Big Tech’s power, political corporate social responsibility and regulation", with Jukka Mäkinen and Eero Kasanen, won the Best Paper Prize by the Journal of Information Technology in 2024.Resources:Lindman, J., Makinen, J., & Kasanen, E. (2023). Big Tech’s power, political corporate social responsibility and regulation. Journal of Information Technology, 38(2), 144-159. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/02683962221113596.

Digital identity, meaning the conversion of human identities into digital data, is often hailed as a route to benefits from the public and private sectors. At the same time, a different reality confronts this orthodoxy: vast empirical evidence exists on the harmful outcomes of digital identity, ranging from exclusion of entitled individuals from essential services to perilous forms of policing and profiling. In this episode, a crossover with IS Digest hosted by Casandra Grundstrom, Silvia Masiero turns from host to interviewee, discussing with Tejas and Casandra her newly launched book Unfair ID. The conversation opens up multiple ways to turn the unfairness of digital ID into proactive routes to collectively imagine how a fair ID can be built. Silvia Masiero, co-host of this podcast, is an associate professor of Information Systems at the University of Oslo. She is the Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Information Technology for Development and the Chair of the IFIP 9.4 Working Group on the Implications of Information and Digital Technologies for Development. Unfair ID is her first book. Unfair ID is available now at  ⁠https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/unfair-id/book285008⁠ References: Cheesman, M. (2022). Self-sovereignty for refugees? The contested horizons of digital identity. Geopolitics, 27(1), 134-159. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2020.1823836 Costanza-Chock, Sasha. (2020). Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/4605/Design-JusticeCommunity-Led-Practices-to-Build-the Jonnalagadda, K. (2024, September 30). Life without Aadhaar. Deccan Herald. ⁠https://www.deccanherald.com//india/life-without-aadhaar-3200235 ⁠Masiero, S. (2018). Explaining trust in large biometric infrastructures: A critical realist case study of India's Aadhaar project. The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries, 84(6), e12053. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/isd2.12053 Masiero, S. (2015). Redesigning the Indian food security system through e-governance: The case of Kerala. World Development, 67, 126-137. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X14003258 Masiero, S., & Das, S. (2019). Datafying anti-poverty programmes: Implications for data justice. Information, Communication & Society, 22(7), 916-933. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2019.1575448 Milan, S., & Treré, E. (2019). Big data from the South (s): Beyond data universalism. Television & New Media, 20(4), 319-335. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1527476419837739 Milan, S., & Velden, L. V. D. (2016). The alternative epistemologies of data activism. Digital Culture & Society, 2(2), 57-74. https://digicults.org/files/2018/01/Stefania-Milan-Lonneke-van-der-Velden_Data-activism.pdf Weitzberg, K. (2020). Biometrics, race making, and white exceptionalism: The controversy over universal fingerprinting in Kenya. The Journal of African History, 61(1), 23-43. ⁠https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-african-history/article/biometrics-race-making-and-white-exceptionalism-the-controversy-over-universal-fingerprinting-in-kenya/B69DDDFE3FECF158E157BB40304B2B6A

The recent Olympic Games and European Football Championship have highlighted once again the importance, and controversiality, of technologies associated with referee decisions. A Video Assistant Referee, or VAR, is tasked with assisting the referee concerning dubious situations in a sports game. While VAR has become part and parcel of the experience of multiple sports, including football, little is known about the complex sociotechnical fabric that plays out every single time a VAR decision is made. Today we are joined by Stan Karanasios and Bikesh Raj Upreti, respectively Associate Professor and Lecturer in the Department of Business Information Systems at the University of Queensland, who look at “addressing equivocality with technology” by means of VAR. With them, we examine the history of some glaring errors of VAR in football and use that as an entry point to discuss VAR, its genesis, and the sociotechnical profile of a technology that the many sports fans among us witness frequently.   Stan Karanasios is an Associate Professor in the Department of Business Information Systems at the UQ Business School, University of Queensland. His research focuses on how digital technology impacts organisations and society, and he has published widely on domains including fintech, the digital transformation of enterprises, and the use of social media platforms in the emergency sector. He is a Senior Editor for Information Systems Journal, an Associate Editor for the European Journal of Information Systems, Section Editor for the Australian Journal on Information Systems, and on the Editorial Board for Mind, Culture & Activity and the International Journal of Information Management.   Bikesh Raj Upreti is a Lecturer in the Department of Business Information Systems at the UQ Business School, University of Queensland. He received his PhD from Aalto University, focusing on developing applications to uncover insights from large-scale text data. He researches applied computational methods and quantitative inquiry of inter-disciplinary phenomena, and has applied such analytical tools for large-scale behavioural and predictive analytics set in Information systems, marketing, finance and political discourses.   Resources:  Karanasios, S., Upreti, B., & Iannacci, F. (2023). When Is a Goal a Goal? Addressing Equivocality with Technology. European Conference of Information Systems (ECIS), Kristiansand, 13-16 June 2023, https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2023_rip/10/.

The ongoing war on Gaza, one of the deadliest military assaults in history, has been accompanied by extreme applications of digital technologies to warfare. This feeds into the many layers of cybercontrol to which Palestine, a land under military and settler occupation, has long been subjected. Today we are joined by Fabio Cristiano to explore data violence in the ongoing Israeli assault, and the multiple implications it has in the space of human and digital rights.   Fabio Cristiano is Assistant Professor in Conflict Studies at Utrecht University. His research explores the making of international conflict in/through cyberspace, focusing primarily on questions related to automation and non-human agency (AI); violence; socio-technical knowledge production; sovereignty/territoriality; and digital rights. He is an Associate Fellow of The Hague Program on International Cybersecurity and the lead editor of Artificial Intelligence and International Conflict in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2023) and Hybridity, Conflict, and the Global Politics of Cybersecurity (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023). Resources: Cristiano, F., & Distretti, E. (2021). Toward an Aesthetics by Algorithms—Palestinian Cyber and Digital Spaces at the Threshold of (In) visibility. The Aesthetics and Politics of the Online Self: A Savage Journey into the Heart of Digital Cultures, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-65497-9_10 . Cristiano, F. (2019). Deterritorializing cyber security and warfare in Palestine: Hackers, sovereignty, and the National Cyberspace as normative. CyberOrient, https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.cyo2.20191301.0002. Cristiano, F. (2019). Internet access as human right: a dystopian critique from the occupied Palestinian territory. Springer International Publishing, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-91770-2_12 .

The foundational elements of EU migration policies and security technologies started to take a turn in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, accelerating the research and use of traditional military and war technologies such as drones in civilian border management. In this episode, we explore the role of drones in border studies, the evolving landscape of EU border technologies in the wake of AI, and how these security problems and solutions are co-produced in the frameworks of migration policies with Bruno Oliveira Martins. Bruno is a senior researcher at Peach Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), where he is co-leader of the Security & Technology Research Group and a member of the PRIO Migration Centre. His research is centered on the intricate dynamics of security solutions and their implications for border management and those affected by it. Resources: Martins, Bruno Oliveira & Michael Strange (2019) Rethinking EU external migration policy: contestation and critique, Global Affairs 5 (3): 195–202. Martins, Bruno Oliveira & Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert (2020) EU Border technologies and the co-production of security ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2020.1851470.