DIGITAL LIFE
Big tech companies hold consumers and governments hostage with dependency-based discourse, says teacher
Tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Meta do everything to increase the dependence of governments and consumers on their products, says Rodrigo Ochigame, 33, a professor of anthropology at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Ochigame, originally from Mato Grosso do Sul and a computer science graduate, went to the US to study at two centers of excellence—the University of California, Berkeley, and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)—how computer companies adapt their discourse to gain advantages.
He gained prominence in the public sphere as a critic of Silicon Valley with an article published on the American news website The Intercept, in which he described how an ethical AI researcher at MIT received funding from investment funds to campaign against technology regulation.
His book "Informatics of the Oppressed," written in 2020 and translated into Portuguese this year, shows how big tech services are subsidized by anti-competitive practices, such as the inclusion of free WhatsApp in internet plans, and contracts with the government, such as Google's presence in universities through cloud services. At the same time, local and collaborative projects are left uncovered by public policies.
"The zero-data franchise gives Meta's platforms a very large and extremely unfair competitive advantage, creating dependence on this company for a huge number of users," exemplifies the researcher.
"Brazil should not only prohibit the zero-data franchise of big tech companies, but use it in reverse: there should be subsidies for people who don't have mobile phone credit so they can use non-extractive alternatives, such as Signal [an ad-free and non-profit messaging app]," he adds.
The same, he says, applies to cloud computing services, where there are open-source alternatives, such as NextCloud. "It works perfectly, we use it at Leiden University, but it's not free, there's a transparent cost—you have to pay, but no one is exploiting your data."
For Ochigame, it's necessary to overcome the lobbyists' strategy that only large technology companies are capable of delivering cutting-edge technology. "What's the advantage of living in a high-resolution virtual reality, using state-of-the-art devices, if the sponsored advertising content is generated by artificial intelligence and optimized for technological manipulation?"
To do this, says the researcher, it's necessary to seek out theses and accounts that "won't easily appear in social media news feeds." Even the official history of Silicon Valley, he adds, reinforces the prominence of "ingenious inventions by geniuses" like Larry Page (Google), Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates.
"In the case of Google, there is an erasure on at least two levels: the collective work of the field of information science and the more feminized field of work of librarians that gave rise to modern information science," the researcher exemplified.
It was while he was at MIT, in 2019, for example, that Ochigame met a retired librarian, Theresa Tobin, who introduced him to the work of the Cuban researcher María Teresa Freyre de Andrade, fundamental to research in information science. "Google Scholar does not index any of María's main books, although the Cuban online encyclopedia EcuRed has an extensive article about her," he says.
The Cuban digital library system of the 1980s, incidentally, is cited in the book as visionary. "A peculiar quality of the information science that developed in Cuba is that Cuban information scientists recognized that the metrics and algorithms they used to prioritize some information over others could never be neutral," says Ochigame.
In the current scenario, the researcher says, the US should oppose the construction of democratic digital infrastructures because the Donald Trump administration is captured by large corporations. "China (which is a dictatorship) will also not support these projects, as they contradict its regime of surveillance and censorship."
Brazil itself, the professor states, was once an example in the search for alternatives to Chinese and American technologies. "The first Lula government had great courage and audacity in supporting free software, which made Brazil, in the past, a certain leader internationally."
However, this public policy has lost strength since 2010, and today the Brazilian government has also been signing billion-dollar contracts with big tech companies to install foreign servers in public companies such as DataPrev and Serpro. "At this moment, the federal government has become complicit with the tech giants by making a discourse of digital sovereignty that has been co-opted by lobbyists," says Ochigame.
For the researcher, the country needs to propose free public alternatives. "In Brazil, there are already some laboratories with supercomputers for research purposes to which university researchers can submit proposals for use and be able to use part of this computing capacity for a period of time, and this model can be extended to general-use services, such as email and cloud computing."
"Of course, it's an investment that needs to be made, but it's not astronomical," says Ochigame. "For the kind of benefit that breaking this dependence and this enormous geopolitical vulnerability would bring, it's actually a rather modest cost."
https://ochigame.org/
mundophone
