Why We Need a Democratic Approach to Data w/ Salomé Viljoen

Paris Marx is joined by Salomé Viljoen to discuss existing proposals to expand individual data rights or treat it as a form of labor, why we instead need to see data governance as a collective democratic project, and how that would give us the power to decide what data is collected and what it’s used for.

Salomé Viljoen is an affiliate at Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and a joint postdoctoral fellow at NYU School of Law’s Information Law Institute and the Cornell Tech Digital Life Initiative. Follow Salomé on Twitter as @salome_viljoen_.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Read Salomé article about data egalitarianism for Phenomenal World.
• People who write about informational capitalism: Shoshana Zuboff and Nick Couldry on one side, and Jathan Sadowski and Julie Cohen on the side that Salomé prefers.
• People talking about data as property or labor: Andrew Yang through the Data Dividend Project, Eric Posner and Glen Weyl in “Radical Markets,” and Jaron Lanier.
• Proto-data egalitarian examples: Andrea Nahler’s proposal for a civic data trust, Barcelona’s civic data trust, the US Census, and learning from libraries’ management of public information.