2026-04-12 –, Seminar room 1 Language: English
How could our society and the Internet look like today? This talk visits a possible alternative timeline of technological and political history, one that leads to a different 2026. What can we learn from this reality to help materialize a different future?
We present an alternative timeline of technological and political history, one in which Big Tech conglomerates do not exist as they do today due to certain laws and policies in place and the collective actions of citizens.
In the year 2006, web technology was in a nascent and transitional period. The experience was much less commercialized and algorithm-driven in this so-called Web 2.0 era.
A group of activists who were afraid of history repeating itself via a pattern of hyper-growth at all cost organized and fought for regulations that would ensure that the Internet would not follow the same fate. They wanted to ensure that policymakers and technologists had the same commitment to public interest and that services were not dictated mainly by profits and advertiser interests.
This talk describes what happened next.
Daisy is a technologist and legal enthusiast based in Berlin. She has worked in Canada and Germany and enjoys reflecting on the technological impacts of society, engaging with community spaces, and is particularly interested in open source systems. Her non-technical interests include knitting, baking, and learning new natural languages.
Sarah is a software engineer and community organizer. She loves to bring people together and make everyone feel welcome and included. To deal with the state of the world, she sometimes needs to be offline and watch birds, hike up a mountain or start a crafting project.