by Ramesh SrinivasanBeyond the Valley

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

BEYOND THE VALLEY How Innovators around the World are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow RAMESH SRINIVASAN

If you're tired of the surveillance, bias, and propaganda that are warping our world, read this book to see how things can be different – Cathy O'Neil, author of WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION

Beyond the Valley shows that there is nothing inevitable about the technology we have. Let's reach for something better – Patrisse Cullors, cofounder of Black Lives Matter Global Network

How to repair the disconnect between designers and users, producers and consumers, and tech elites and the rest of us, to bring about a more democratic internet.

In this provocative book, Ramesh Srinivasan describes the internet as both an enabler of frictionless efficiency and a dirty tangle of politics, economics and other inefficient, inharmonious human activities. We may love the immediacy of Google search results, the convenience of buying from Amazon and the elegance and power of our Apple devices, but it is a one-way, top-down process. We're not asked for our input, or our opinions – only for our data. The internet is brought to us by wealthy technologists in Silicon Valley and China. It’s time, Srinivasan argues, that we think in terms beyond the Valley.

Srinivasan focuses on the disconnection he sees between designers and users, producers and consumers, and tech elites and the rest of us. The recent Cambridge Analytica and Russian misinformation scandals exemplify the imbalance of a digital world that puts profits before inclusivity and democracy. In search of a more democratic internet, Srinivasan takes us to the mountains of Oaxaca, East and West Africa, China, Scandinavia, North America and elsewhere, visiting the ‘design labs’ of rural, low-income and indigenous people around the world. He talks to a range of high-profile public figures – including Elizabeth Warren, David Axelrod, Eric Holder, Noam Chomsky, Lawrence Lessig, and the founders of Reddit – as well as community organizers, labour leaders and humanrights activists. To make a better internet, Srinivasan says, we need a new ethic of diversity, openness and inclusivity, empowering those now excluded from decisions about how technologies are designed, who profits from them and who are surveilled and exploited by them.

RAMESH SRINIVASAN studies the relationship between technology, politics and societies across the world. He is an associate professor in the Departments of Information Studies and Design|Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the founder of the UC-wide Digital Cultures Lab. His fieldwork and research engagements span Latin and South America, South Asia, West Africa, Papua New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand and indigenous communities in the United States and Canada. He has given keynote talks on every continent in the world (except Antarctica), discussing new technology and culture. He is the author of WHOSE GLOBAL VILLAGE? (New York University Press, 2017) and (with Adam Fish) AFTER THE INTERNET (Polity, 2017). He makes regular media appearances on MSNBC, NPR, Al Jazeera, The Young Turks and more. His writing has been published by Al Jazeera English, National Geographic, CNN, Washington Post, Forbes and HuffPost.

Agent: Jeff Shreve

Publisher: MIT Press Publication: 29 October 2019 Length: 424 pages

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