This is a RadicalxChange production. Welcome back to Radical Exchanges. In today's episode, Anasuya Sengupta speaks with Matt Pruitt as they discuss the culture of free information on the Internet and the hidden power dynamics that underlie who gets to share and access this information. Anasuya is co director of Who's Knowledge, a global campaign to center the knowledge of marginalized communities, which collectively represent the majority of the world in digital spaces on the Internet. She is also a lauded poet, author, and activist. This discussion explores the power dynamics and privileges built into our digital technologies as Anasuya underlines the radical importance of empowering underrepresented communities on the Internet. This exchange asks you to evolve your thinking of what exactly the Internet is, who it represents, and who it's for. It's a truly introspective talk, and we hope you enjoy it. This is a continuation of our mini season called a new era of democracy and was originally filmed for our RXC TV program. This is the Radical Exchanges podcast, and this is A New Era of Democracy.

I'm doing well, and and thanks, Matt. I'm glad to be I'm glad to be here, with you. So thank you for inviting me.

Well, one of the ways that I think about what I do right now is to connect unlikely, allies and unlikely, coconspirators across different worlds, different communities, and different spaces. And I do that primarily as cofounder and co director of Who's Knowledge, which is, as you said, a global multilingual campaign and a feminist collective, to center the knowledges of marginalized communities online. And by marginalized, we mean marginalized by historical and ongoing structures of power and privilege. So, really, the minoritized majority of the world. And in order to do this, we are centered very much in a, in a sense of knowledge justice, and of making sure that we are, honoring, amplifying, and leading with the design and imagination of those who have been marginalized

Yeah. That's, that is a big question. I'm gonna try and do it some justice. Twenty five years, it's, it feels both like forever and yesterday in one breath. Right? It's so interesting, especially at this time where, I feel like time is both stretched and compressed simultaneously. I was amongst the first generations in India to study computer science in school. So, we actually got to use computers. We, of course, had to share them because they were a precious, precious resource. I remember we had to make sure that we took up our shoes whenever we went into the computer lab because, you know, those three computers that about 10 of us were sharing, was such a precious and at that time, really cutting edge, technology for us. And yet I was privileged to be part of the generation that could study computer science at school. And that was because even though I was from a middle class family, I was so called upper caste, or what we say, is. And the caste system, as you know, is an extremely, pernicious and deeply oppressive social structure that has been around for millennia. And so recognizing that as I experience different forms of discrimination as a woman in a patriarchal society, as a middle class person who had certain, spaces denied me because of, my lack of resources or, the choices I could make. I could still make many more choices than the Dalit or Muslim or indigenous or Adivasi. In in in our context, we call them Adivasis, the first inhabitants of South Asia, of India. And so growing up, I recognized, even in my own living, this simultaneity of being both in positions of power and this power in positions of privilege and disprivilege based on context. And most importantly, as we were discovering this new digital world, I was simultaneously feeling that sense of being on the margins looking in. My national newspapers essentially talked about the rest of the world as the center. Right? Europe and North America was the center of the world. We in India were looking into that center from the peripheries. We were never included unless the, stories were about poverty or about, some horrific, natural disaster or engineered man made man made disaster. And so all of these different elements of being, in that first generation to understand technological infrastructure, participate in being online, to start coding, to start being involved in a more global digital world, and yet to continue to feel different forms of marginalization is part of the experience that I bring to the work that I do today. And when we think about digital infrastructure, I think the way that I sometimes, think of infrastructure itself as many infrastructure scholars have talked about it, I find it useful to think about it as the underlying systems that we often forget exist and we only see when they break down. Right? And in many ways, the Internet is that now twenty five years on. And yet COVID has been such an extraordinarily good and brutal example of what happens when those infrastructures break down or what happens when those infrastructures are far more inequitable than we already think. So just to recognize that the Internet or at least different forms of digital connectivity are primarily led by the global South. That is most of the people who are online today are connected digitally in some way are from the global South. 75% of those online are, are from the Global South. And over 60% of the world is digitally connected even if most of them are through a mobile phone. So very particular ways of being connected. More than 45% of all women are connected. And yet, even today, the Internet to me, as a relatively privileged brown woman from the Global South, feels like my old newspaper. Right? It feels like I'm still on the margins of the world looking in. I can access it, but once I get online, the content online, the the platforms online, the apps that I use are not designed with me or for me. The content is not about me or about my communities. I'm continuing to be on the margins looking in. And if that is true for me, how much more is it true for those who are far more marginalized and disprivileged than me? And that's really the sort of sense of, critique around digital infrastructure that I bring. And at the same time, the sense of hope because digital infrastructures, because the technological infrastructures that we have today also give us the potential for bringing all of our different embodied selves online in very rich textured ways that just a telephone or just the telegraph may not have. But we have not yet realized that potential. And that's that's the that feels like my day job and my night job right now. Yeah.

Yeah. As we know. But, the way that I think about it is that when you look from the back end to the front end of the Internet, at every point, there are choices we have made about who designs, who leads, and whose imagination is at the core of the architecture of the Internet. Those choices have often been led by, historical structures of colonialism and capitalism. Right? So, there is a reason why there have been white men from Europe and North America at the heart of some of these, technologies. And even the white women who were involved have been forgotten, and, certainly, the black women who were involved have been forgotten. But one of the things we forget when we talk about sort of the back end and the front end as user experience is what's in the middle. So if you can get online, access itself, as we know, is deeply problematic and differentiated. But if we can get online, what is the content that we experience? What is the content that we see? Whose knowledge do we see online? And Wikipedia is a really good proxy for that because, of course, it is unlike, you know, most other top 20 websites in the world. It is a community project. It is a free and open source project. It's built on free and open source software. It is, based on the amazing and dedicated work of volunteers around the world, and it continues to have the, elements of structural power that you were speaking of. So, while I was at the Wikimedia Foundation, we started disaggregating some of the data around both content and contributors. And, there's a lot of data around this. But suffice it to say, even the broad aspects of it are quite shocking, which is that the encyclopedia that we imagine is the encyclopedia of the world is still deeply limited in who contributes, so mostly white men from North America and Europe. And, only one in 10, of the contributors are projected to identify female. 20% of the world, mostly based in Europe and North America, writes about 80% of the world. Right? There are more articles about Antarctica that are geotagged on, Wikipedia than about all the, countries in Africa. So just to recognize that the Internet not just sometimes and reflects the the power dynamics and inequities of our physical worlds, but in some ways, exacerbates it even further because we have a mythos around the Internet being democratic and emancipatory and a place of possible global solidarity. It's not that it is not. I mean, you and I are talking right now across time zones, across continents. We met digitally. We've never met in person. Right? We've, pursued our common interests digitally as many of us have over the last few years and really over the last twenty years. And yet, even as we have the possibility of that, if we'll if we continue to assume that all that the Internet is is a space of possible emancipation and, democracy without really looking at these power dynamics, especially around content, I think we do ourselves a great disservice.

That's actually a really good set of observations, and thoughts, Matt, and it's something I think about a great deal. You know, Fred Turner was, I think, you know, from counterculture to cyberculture is an excellent book for anyone who wants to understand the history of the Internet, and understand why it's important for us to know this history. And I think there's a very great truth in the fact that what then ends up getting embedded within the technologies and infrastructures of the Internet, our values of what we sometimes politically call libertarianism, but essentially are like values of individual freedom, individual agency, without always seeing those in context of the structures of power and privilege that give you certain kinds of individual freedoms and individual agencies. And when you have the imaginations of those who come out of those that ethos, designing these digital technologies, then what you end up with is a user experience that is entirely based on those values. So the way I think about it, to offer the counterexample is what happens, for instance, or what would happen? The counterfactual. What would happen if a group of indigenous techies from the Pacific Islands were to have designed the Internet, were to have first sort of thought about how TCPIP would work, what BGP looks like, what, you know, network systems feel like, and then how the web, works, what hyperlinks, feel like, how how do we navigate between web pages. I think that would be a very interesting way in what in in the values that would be at the core of that design. I would imagine that some of those values would be deep collective interconnectedness and honoring of sentience that is beyond just human. Right? Mhmm. Not to honor this the the the sort of assumed sentience of the machine in the ways that, you know, the folks the singularity folks might think. Most frightening concept in the world. But, anyway, I love that, you know, we we're thinking about machine sentience when we don't even sort of humanize each other Yeah. And humanize other forms of sentience that exist in the world. Indigenous knowledge systems, many indigenous knowledge systems, they're not monolithic, of course, for instance, recognize and remind us that humans are the youngest form of life on this planet, that every other form of life are our elders. So what would that form of epistemic knowledge of ways of knowing, doing, and being have meant for the values of an Internet or a digital infrastructure created that way? Right? So that counterfactual I'm offering as a way to imagine what might have been different depending on who had constructed this, Internet. At the same time, you know, Fred Turner is right also. The Internet would not be here, at least our present form of the Internet wouldn't be here, without public funding. I mean, the Internet comes out of defense funding in The United States. And so much of the Internet around the world, just reminding those who who who may not be Internet infrastructure scholars that it's what at the moment the Internet has more than 70,000 networks connected around the world. So much of it has been through public funding. And yet what happens when we either root our understanding of the Internet in the individual or in the institution, which is to say we think of all states as the same, all corporates as the same, all nonprofits as the same, is that we forget to analyze both the intention of the technology, the design of the technology, and the impact of the technology. Right? Or, equally, the intention of the use and control and the impact of the use and control. So when you talk about decentralized systems, for instance, I would rather ask us to imagine a world in which Internet infrastructures are distributed, that they have different nodes of centralization and decentralization based on what we are trying to do. Yeah. Yeah. Right? Like, small communities cannot. I mean, it is very difficult for them to handle some of the economies of scale that are offered by a centralized node. Yeah. However, if that centralized node is oppressive, then we know that small communities do really, really amazing hacks around connectivity around across the last mile mesh networks, you know, local networks. But that is not necessarily the way that all networks need to be. What happens when you have on the other hand, rather than this kind of crazy vacuuming up of humans as data that the big proprietary companies do, but rather smaller distributed datasets governed by the communities from which that data comes? What does that what does that mean for our algorithmic, world? How how does that change from, you know, the the experience of algorithmic oppression to algorithmic justice, for instance? So so I I'm in fact using, a a concept that my partner actually uses because he is an act in Internet infrastructure scholar. You might want to have him on at some point, Matt. But, he calls it distributed governance. Mhmm. Right? Rather than centralized governance or decentralized governance, infrastructures like the Internet need a form of distribution where based on what we need them for, we have nodes of centralization and and, the spread of decentralization. The other way that I also think about it is how do we make sure that those who are not yet visible in this leadership and governance are talking to each other so that they're building solidarity. They're building a critical mass. They're building the power to push back, to resist. Because we are resisting a bunch of things right now. We're resisting the actual everyday oppression that big tech has over us, the ways that we are no longer even consumers, but actually data points. We are resisting the ways of that big tech's lack of care and duty of care makes our everyday experience on the on the Internet often deeply violent and painful. We are resisting the fact that we don't see ourselves on the Internet in terms of public knowledge. We are resisting the fact that these technologies are often alien to the ways that we think and work and do, and that we have to learn to do them that way. We are resisting the fact that the Internet is incredibly monolingual rather than representing over 7,000 languages that humans speak and communicate with. So we're resisting all these different structural elements of power and privilege, and the only ways that I can think about that resistance being powerful is in this form of not just distributed governance, but distributed imagination and distributed resistance.

It's really amusing you say this because I met Ted Nelson at one point, at the Internet archive, you know, Friday lunch at the Internet archive where you meet everyone. And I remember having this really interesting conversation with him where I was talking about the politics of the Internet. And he kept saying to me, not the politics of the Internet, the politics of the web. And I said, no, Ted. The politics of the Internet. He was like, no. No. No. In the politics of the web, we we it was a very interesting conversation. I hope I can have it once again with them. But this is an excellent example. I should have used that example with them saying your own idea about hyperlinks is is a political choice. It has it has design implications and and implications of politics. But, I think the way that I look at it is that anytime you look at to think about a digital, a radical digital project, you just have to look at any radical project in the world. Right? And, yes, of course, it it might feel a little different digitally, but we're no longer in a world where we think about online and offline as a binary. None of us do. We recognize that we are digitally embedded just as, you know, digital infrastructure is physically embedded. So, we're on this continuum of the online to the offline, all of us who are digitally connected, and those of us who are not, even if, we don't have agency and control over that. So, I think of a few principles and practices around this, and I I'll just offer you some of the things we do that demonstrates this or has a flavor of it and some of the things that other extraordinary people do in the world. At the core of, a different imagination, I think, and at the core of many of the imaginations of marginalized communities around the world is a very strong sense of collective imagination. So the dance between the individual and the collective. There's a great understanding that we are we both have individuality, but we are also relational. It is always relational between us and the collective. When you design that way, then immediately, there is a really extraordinary creativity around both what the individual brings and then what the collective works on together. And it becomes reflective. Right? It's the individual to the collective, back to the individual. And one of the ways that I think about this, for instance, is any community led or, independent archive, a people's archive. Right? Why is it different from a mainstream institutional archive? It's because the textures, the flavors of the way you even think about space is different. Right? So just as an example, there's a there's the black cultural archives in, The UK, in London. It took decades for it to be set up, but it's an archives of Afro descendant folks in The United Kingdom, particularly Afro Caribbean folks. It is one of the few people's archives of its kind. It's one of the few that has a physical presence as well as a digital presence. And when you think about how that space is constructed and who uses it and how they use it, it's very differently experienced than the British Museum or the British Library. Right? What is archived is very different from the British Museum or the British Library. It's it's not just academic publications. It's certainly not, you know, treasures from a colonized past. It is often memory of a colonized past and and present. It is told through those who have been through these histories or or who are descendants of those histories. Right? The the those who take you through that experience, who narrate that history are very much those who have the lived experience of it. So that the way you even participate in understanding these histories and recognizing their multiplicity and their plurality is to to recognize at the heart of it both the transgenerational trauma that has been part of Afro Caribbean history in The United Kingdom and the immense creativity and imagination with which the empire has struck back. Right? That sense of context to bring back what you said about Ted Nelson, That sense of context, that sense of design, that sense of leadership, and that sense of a collective holding of what is what is not a homogenization of history, but a a holding of multiple strands of a heterogeneous history, right, that that there is a plurality of histories that are being collectively held is a very different, flavor than most colonial archives. Yeah. So, you know, to be fair to archivists of the present, they are trying to break that, experience, but it's still very hard. And so if you then take that example of of of the of the physical archive that is different when it is led, imagined, and and, curated by those who are part of that living history, and then imagine the Internet or or digital projects of the same kind, you get that flavor of, what it could be like. So, in whose knowledge is case just for as an example, we write collaboratively. We write collectively. Everything that we write or we speak tends to be a collaborative process. So we are we we we tend to, push the boundaries of academia, for instance, by writing in peer reviewed journal articles in multi multivocal with multivocality, with multiple voices. So we it's a collaboratively written piece. We, embed audio in it. We sometimes push the visual. And so just and even the visual, the elements of what is visual is based very much on, you know, the different cultures that are that are and the politics and the backgrounds of those who are writing or speaking. So every element is as intentional as possible, as thoughtful as possible, as respectful as possible, and as honoring of the different imaginations as possible. There's something really interesting about how technology, at least big tech, moves towards a kind of homogen homogenization, a kind of flattening of difference because it's as though we are terrified of difference. We want everyone to look like us, to feel like us, to be like us. And by us, I mean, you know, whatever version of the man we're thinking about. And yet, liberation is really, you know, there's a wonderful feminist activist, called Charlotte Bunch who says, revolution is a symphony of liberations. And so liberation is really an honoring of multiplicity, of plurality, of difference. And what will it mean to have a digital infrastructure then that is actually multiple digital infrastructures that are imagined and experienced differently with different communities being able to actually control and govern that. In some ways, the early Internet was that. Right? I mean, the early, early Internet with, you know, with all of its flaws and problems, but there was a way in which the early bulletin board systems, the early online spaces, it was already hugely skewed and who could and couldn't access it. But there was a way in which some of those early spaces were it still had a flavor. Each of them had a different flavor.

And now there's there's this part of what has happened with big tech and the way that, you know, Silicon Valley Tech Capital has taken over, our digital experience is that the only difference we are kind of allowed is what some techie sitting in Palo Alto or Menlo Park has decided we can experience. Right? And so I think there's a there's a there's there's a great, boundlessness. There's a great potential possibility as people take back control. There's a fascinating example in Aotearoa, New Zealand of a of a Maori, community who has decided to have its their own speech to text translation work and linguistic software. And they control the dataset. They control the tech, the actual infrastructure. Mhmm. They they decide on the use. And they have basically, decided the community of Papa Rio has decided that they will certainly not sell their data to proprietary companies, but they will also not open it up to the free and open source movement. Because for them, the free and open source movement is also, with all its good intentions, is also another form of privilege that their community members have never been able to access. And so what does what happens when we when we have more and more of paparillos in different parts of the world. Right? That's that's my hope. That's that's my imagination.

like, that way. Oh, no. They totally were. I was just the the only facet of those communities that I was sort of pointing to was that they were still elements of self governance and self design. Right. We've lost that as well. Right?

And who's again?

That is true. I will say that some of the early, communities online included some of us who were privileged enough from the global South to be on it. Right? Yeah. Our first years of university or whatever, we we could get online and be on it. But there's always been privilege. So I I totally agree with you. I I don't think we're disagreeing at all. And you are right that even even with the the there's an there's an illusion, if you like, of of of self governance as well that's part of it. But but Wikipedia is a good example of what you and I are both talking about, which is that you have there's an outright critique of what big tech is doing. Then there's a critique to be had of even the spaces that we think of as better than big tech. Yeah. And the reason for that is because if we if we feel righteous about the spaces that we have constructed that are, in resistance to big tech, and honor them without some tough love

Then we are not being transformative. Right. Right? And so often, because I am a Wikipedian, I will talk to my community. I will talk to Wikipedians and Wikipedians and say, this is my offering of tough love. Yeah. Because I love this community. I love being part of it. This is critical infrastructure, and we need to do so much more. Right? And I think there's an element of that, Matt, to sort of bring it a little bit full circle to that sort of Fred Turner reminder of Yeah. The original Internet culture, which is that there's a certain rightnessness, you know, self rightnessness, and, and a kind of the hubris is is is sort of in. There's a kind of self congratulatory mode. Yeah. Look at what we've done. How cool is this? Right? Yeah. And of seeing in the Internet as sort of a a disruption of history, of seeing it as exceptional when, to be honest, everything we see about the Internet has been said about other infrastructures in the past. Right? It is true that it has changed the speed and the range through which we communicate, but there is a similarity to other infrastructures, particularly communications infrastructures in the past, and there's a similarity to the dynamics of power. So Wikipedia is, in my tough love, one of the things, that we and not just I, but all of us who are sort of trying to remind the Wikipedians who have created this infrastructure over the last twenty years is that if it is truly to be the sum of all human knowledge, which is, you know, a powerful mission, who is human on Wikipedia? Who is missed out, and who gets to tell that story, who gets to write that content. And not just that, but what are the ways in which we can go beyond the notion of knowledge gaps, which is where weak opinions are right now? So there's a gap in content. There's a gap in contributors. But how do we go beyond that to say there's a gap in justice? There's a gap in who gets to participate in this incredible volunteer community with the same kind of, powers and, credibility that, you know, the stewards and the admins of the Wikimedia movement do. And just as an example, to bring it home a little bit, I've asked this kind of anecdotal question to to friends over the years who are within the movement, but I've asked an American white man, for instance, how much of his childhood can he find on Wikipedia? Right? Instances of the books he read, the events that he went through, the inspirations of his life. I've asked that question of myself. I've asked that question of, black and brown and trans women and men from the global South. And a cis white man from The States is likely to tell me about 90% of my childhood is represented by Wikipedia. I will find something, and it that it will be okay. And in many of our cases, less than 50%. Mhmm. Right? But and it goes deeper than that. It goes to, the kinds of ways in which Wikipedia is even constructed and written. Right? And by that and this is where I move beyond content and contributors to one of the great pillars of Wikipedia guidelines and and policy is the notion of neutrality. Right? Yeah. That all content on Wikipedia must be neutral. Now it's a guideline that is used with good intention, of course, as all these things are. The idea is let's not have people, you know, inflecting it with, you know, crazy political views that are, problematic. We should be unbiased. We should be balanced. But as we know and as social scientists tell us increasingly, there's no such thing as neutrality. Mhmm. There's absolutely no such thing as neutrality. Fact is still embedded in power. Whose facts do we know more of? Right? Do we know, Jagdish Chandra Bose as well as we know Marconi in terms of the development of the history of the radio? We do not. I know Jagdish Chandra Bose because he's Indian. But if I ask that question to anybody who who's, you know, who who listens to the radio, they would all have heard of Marconi. They would not have heard of Bose. Right? Yeah. What does that mean? So facts are embedded in power. And when we talk about neutrality, what it can do, which it often does on Wikipedia, is it pushes against every form of knowledge that doesn't have the evidence that is understood through the Western knowledge system. Right. So Wikipedia, even as it sees itself as a community project and a crowdsourced project, Many of my communities will never use the word crowdsourced because the word crowd itself for us, as you can imagine, often has elements of violence. So we'll say community sourced, But it's based still in, elements of the Western academic system and in notions of the Western encyclopedia. Yeah. Right? So it has to be based on reliable sources, and most Wikipedians want those reliable sources to be peer published reliable sources. Books, pub peer published journal articles, well known newspapers, and so on. Right? Now, again, that's not a bad thing by itself. But what Wikipedians have to understand is who do you leave out

When you have that at the core of it. Right? Yeah. So what if we were to move from the notion of neutrality to the notion of evidence? Because evidence is important. Right? So what is an evidence based knowledge system or repository of knowledge? What happens when we move the notion of evidence from just reliable published material, which are most often in your lingual languages. I mean, you know, Google did a projection when they were first doing Google Books, and they found that there are, I don't know, approximately a 130,000,000 books ever published, most of them in European languages. There are over 7,000 languages. Language is language is a proxy of knowledge, and yet most of us in the world have not had our knowledges published in the same way as European or North American knowledge. So what happens when the sources of evidence are also shifted to be different? What happens when we have oral citations? What happens when we have visual citations? What happens when we have citations of sound that are not just spoken? Right? I mean, how how can we push the notion of what evidence is to recognize the many different forms of evidence in the many different forms of knowledge systems that exist in the world today. Yeah. And that's the kind of journey we want Wikipedians to be on with us. Yeah.

Actually, it's a little different than that because it it loves contestation in some ways. You know, when I first started editing Wikipedia, even before I started editing Wikipedia, I used to my my anthropologist heart was overjoyed by the talk pages because, you know, the talk pages are where people discuss the substance of the article itself. And everything on the talk page is a contestation of what is on in the article. Right. Right. But the but the contestation there is based on an ability to understand and be comfortable with argumentation, to prove your point, to prove your position, to back it up with evidence, right, with reliable sources and citations. So so it's not so much contestation in that sense. What it is is that Wikipedia's notion of neutrality is that there should be no expressive political opinion Right. In an article. Right? So this is not opinion. This is fact. And you are, you you are essentially, offering fact by backing up your statement with reliable sources and citations, right, to Right. To establish the fact. And so what that does is that without recognizing that fact is embedded still in power, without recognizing that reliable sources are still embedded in power, what you will end up with is what happened to me when I first edited Wikipedia with a full length article. Right? I I not even full length. I started what is called a stub a paragraph, and it was on a a African feminist, who who's a well known philanthropist. I by then, I've been sort of copy editing it Wikipedia for over two years. I sat and wrote a paragraph of four or five lines with about 11 references. And I chose the person, Bisi Adelai Fayemi, because I knew that there would be good citations around her. Okay. You know? She's she's very well known in Nigeria. She's known across Africa. The organization she set up is very well known. So I wasn't even going to the, you know, the outliers. I was pretty much I I felt quite in the middle. I did this, and within five minutes, I had what is called a speedy deletion notice, which basically is this is rubbish. You know? Take it off if you can't prove why it should be here. The only reason that I, as a newbie, Wikipedian, didn't walk away from Wikipedia for the rest of my life is because I was, at that time, sitting in the first ever Wikidamba, which is the, gathering of African Wikimedians. And I was sitting next to someone who had been the one of the chairs of the Wikimedia Foundation boards, a long term Wikipedian, and I could kind of nudge her and say to her and I had been editing during my lunchtime. And I could nudge her and say, Florence, what do I do about this? And Florence looks at it and goes, this is ridiculous. And basically, like, sort of marches off to the top page and says, this is ridiculous. This does not make any sense. You have not substantiated why it should have a speedy deletion notice Yeah. Etcetera, etcetera. Right? And I could then substantiate back. And part of it was recognizing that whoever this Wikipedia was who had strolled by, on a fine, you know, afternoon in in Johannesburg was probably sitting somewhere in The States, had never heard of someone like. The name itself was what the hell is that name? Nigerian newspapers are considered to be, you know, deeply controversial. They're not sort of good, publications, you know, with good journalistic values. They probably assume that, you know, Der Spiegel and New York Times is everybody's local newspaper. Mhmm. Right? And so and and Nigeria is one of the largest countries in the world. Right? Yes. Literally, one of the largest countries in the world. So for us not to recognize how skewed publishing is, academia is, all the different sources of, you know, mainstream, knowledge as we know it, public knowledges, and, therefore, its impact on Wikipedia means that, essentially, Wikipedians are still struggling to, yeah, to to accept that the humanity of some of us is not yet the humanity of everyone. Yeah. And not just the humanity of some of us, but really, literally, the humanity of most of us in the world. Yeah. So when you think about

Both and is the answer. So, just as an example, we recently, co convened with Wikimedia Deutschland, which is the institution or the the the sort of Wikimedia chapter that holds Wikidata, which is the largest free and open source structured data repository, online today, and WikiMovemento Brazil, which is the Brazilian based, Wikimedian group. We co convened a conversation on decolonizing structured data. Right? Because most people laypeople don't understand how structured data, sort of influences us. But, of course, structured data is machine readable data that sort of governs the way that we now interact with most apps, most platforms in the world. Mhmm. It tells us what to look at and how to look at it. And what we were trying to get, both the Wikidata team, the technologists of Wikidata, who have been working on Wikidata for nine years, as well as the contributors of Wikidata, who are the, you know, the volunteers around the world, to recognize is that Wikidata and the notions of structured data are still very much centered in one particular understanding of categorizations, of classifications. Right? It is a very particular western eighteenth century onwards, enlightenment driven Yeah. Version of the world that is the categories of Wikidata. And when you categorize that way, a whole host of the ways that we live and the ways that we know each other are completely lost. One of the examples I was pointing out, was, for instance, the, the, Australian indigenous indigenous notion of Jakubba, which western anthropologists have called dreaming or dream time. Right? And then have proceeded to call it Aboriginal art. Mhmm. Chukupa is not art. It is a visual representation of philosophy Mhmm. Of mythology, of ways of understanding the past, present, and future, literally ways of being. Mhmm. Right? But if you don't understand that, and if that is not even something that your taxonomy, your ontology can comprehend, then what we will end up continuing to do is to continue to reify and, exacerbate the notion of dream time as a Aboriginal art.

Right? And so in doing that work, we have to work both with the individual contributors to to sort of help expand their consciousness around this work that they're doing, and we have to work with the institutions like Wikimedia Deutschland and the Wikimedia Foundation, and the technologists and other staff who are there, because transformation is always going to be a dance between the individual and the institution. And it's always going to be both transformation from within these institutions and from without it. Yeah. It's always going to be that. And I say this as someone who was part of those institutions. Right? I I I I I was on the executive team of the Wikimedia Foundation for three years. So I recognize that these are difficult conversations to have. But because they are difficult, we cannot get away from the urgency and the necessity to have them. Yeah. And that's really the way in which we work. We we we do both. Yeah. Right? We we play that that sort of dance as far as we can. We ally with as many friends and coconspirators as possible. We see this work as solidarity in action because none of this can be done with any single individual or any single organization. This is work we all have to do together.

And so it is always going to have to be a collective journey Yeah. If you like. It's a collective uncovering. Yeah.

That's beautifully put. That really is. And translation is a really interesting choice of word, and it's a powerful choice of word. And I'm going to use it very, sort of, literally and then go metaphoric with it. One of the things we're engaged in doing, and hopefully, this will be out in February, we're hoping to launch in February, is what we're calling the state of the Internet's languages report. So we're looking at the multilinguality of the Internet and and trying to see how multilingual it is. And it's really I'm I'm I'm not sort of giving away the plot by saying, it is woefully not multilingual. And in fact, most of us in the world have to use our our nearest colonial language, as we say Yeah. To access the Internet and to access content. Now one of the really interesting things is as we were doing the research around this is that we realized that the most translated book in the world Mhmm. One one shot at it, Matt. The Bible. The Bible in over 2,000 languages. The most translated document in the world?

Well, document as opposed to to book, but the most translated document in the world is the universal declaration of human rights Oh, interesting. In over in over 500 languages. Right? Now both of these, fascinatingly, have a very interesting form of universality Yeah. Embedded in them. Oh, yeah. Different, but but related and similar. You know? Yeah.

Correct. And the way, again, it's used becomes universalizing. Right? Yeah. It's why it's one of the reasons I prefer the old testament to the new. But, anyway, also a rabbit hole. But, you know, it's a great telenovela is is the old testament. But there's a way in which, you know, for most of us from the global South, the church, the state, and the corporation from the sixteen hundreds onwards have been in an unholy, pun intended, nexus to govern our bodies, our minds, our resources, our imaginations, and to completely dehumanize us. Right? Yeah. That's what the project of colonialism has been and continues to be included in in digital spaces now. But the universal declaration of human rights is a really interesting example as well. Because even as we think about human rights being important for all of us, there are elements in which that universality is also not necessarily contextually understood. Yeah. Right? And so I reject in some ways or I critique let me put it this way because I do use the human rights framework when it's appropriate. I critique the universality or I critique the notion of universality. I also critique the notion of cultural relativism. Yeah. Because in both of these notions, there is a way in which they're co opted and used to actually oppress communities in different ways. Right? Cultural relativism internally, even more, and universality, sort of, more externally. When we when we are embedded in pluralism, however, we are, in a sense, doing exactly what you say, which is we are doing our best to celebrate difference without flattening it, but also not to use difference as a form of oppression. Right. And I think that for me, it all centers around power. Right? How do we use power? How do we abuse power? What is the actual lived experience and practice of what happens to us? It doesn't matter what words we use, what words we don't use, but how in our relationships with each other are we ultimately living our values? Mhmm. And how do they how do they then sit in our bodies and in our minds and in our imaginations? So so there's a really interesting way in which that universality and universalism that is at the heart of tech Yeah. Becomes an issue because Silicon Valley then assumes that the global is literally the hyperlocal of Silicon Valley.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. So the notion of globality is used and abused, but they don't actually understand what it means to be global in any meaningful way. Yeah. Yeah. Right? If there's if there's, if there's an attack on a user of Facebook in Menlo Park, that's more likely to be taken up immediately and looked at rather than, you know, three years of, you know, Burmese refugees and the Rohingya who literally went through genocide because Facebook Yeah. Could not invest in a Burmese language translation team? Yeah. Yeah. That's an unbelievably three years? That's unbelievably

Yeah. It's

And and what happens if you don't imagine a Tower Of Babel at all, but you imagine, I don't know, the bazaar of multiple languages. Right? Right. Yeah. Exactly. To use another sort of Internet meme.

I think I think at the core of this is that power is contextual. We always have to remember context. We always have to recognize that those of us who are oppressed today in one context could be oppressors tomorrow or in the next hour in another context. We always have to have that, you know, discomfort of recognizing the dynamics of power like a second skin. Right? I have to be harder on myself than anybody else in thinking about power and how I walk through the world. It all comes down to the practice of it. And I think it's really, really important that as we look at the digital world and at digital infrastructures, we recognize that those who create the problems do not have the imagination to solve those problems.

Right? So they can and must support us as we do it because, sadly, they are also the ones with the resources. But the imaginations of those of us who have been at the front lines of the oppressions of digital infrastructure need to be at the core of the design of whatever multiple sets of futures that are going to come. And safety, to be honest, is a really low bar. I don't just want an Internet that are safe for me, though. I think that's a necessary but insufficient condition. I want Internet. I want a digital set of infrastructures where I can be joyful, where I can be the fullness of myself and where all my communities can be the fullness of their multiple selves. That's the set of internets that I want.

Yeah. I clearly, you and I need to have, like, you know, long conversations to be able to go down those rabbit holes, Matt. Yeah. I'm looking forward to the rabbit hole conversations.

Thanks again to Anasuya Sengupta and Matt Pruitt for that liberating conversation about the intentionality, design, and impact of tech and how we can turn algorithmic oppression into algorithmic justice through distributed governance. As a note, the whose knowledge state of the Internet languages report will be linked in the description. This conversation was initially produced by Aaron Benavides for RXC TV and was shown at the twenty twenty one Radical Exchange annual conference. The Radical Exchanges podcast is produced by G. Angela Corpuz, Jennifer Marrone, and Matt Pruitt, and is co produced and audio engineered by myself, Aaron Benavides. And finally, we'd like to extend a big thanks to listeners like you. Radical Exchanges is a Radical Exchange Foundation production. You can help support the Radical Exchange Foundation by visiting radicalexchange.org.