Keegan Rankin

Join co-op representatives as they swap stories, compare notes, discuss tactics and problems with each other, and answer any questions you have about what it's like to work with free software in a co-op--a relative rarity--in the tech industry.

Other people: Clayton Craft Aaron Wolf Dan Fourie Denver Gingerich Joel Brock Valerie Young Watson

Agaric is a worker-cooperative—one person, one vote. Agaric builds websites with free software and a central goal of our work is to empower people to have control over their technology and content. As much as possible contribute our code back to the community. Agaric uses Drupal and has contributed to a plethora of Drupal modules and documentation. Some highlights of our current work and projects we are involved in are Drutopia and Visions Unite. Drutopia (https://drutopia.org/) is a Drupal distribution for organizations to be able to coordinate and share their work publicly. Drutopia is controlled by its users and therefore they are not disempowered and at the mercy of proprietary service providers who can take away service, raise prices, change terms and services and abuse user data. Another project Agaric is involved in developing is Visions Unite (https://visionsunite.gigalixirapp.com/about). Vision Unite seeks to provide a neutral infrastructure for conversations and coordination to extend to many more people, as equals, than it traditionally has. Visions Unite uses sortition (random selection of participants) as a tool for participants to choose what messages are distributed to groups they represent so that quality information and ideas are surfaced in a democratic manner. Through sortition we avoid giving power to people who seek to concentrate it in their hands and instead equally spread decision making power throughout the network of participants.

Other people: Louis Elkner-Alfaro

This talk will describe four mechanisms by which the big data paradigm degrades user autonomy:

1) Sensitive data is being aggregated without transparency and without meaningful consent from users;

2) Search functions and algorithms, content recommendations, and ads expose users to unwanted and potentially harmful content;

3) Behavioral analytics creates profit, often by exploiting addictive tendencies, both by platform design as well as by targeted content;

4) Dataism, a growing trust in the "objectivity" of data, justifies and reinforces norms while further marginalizing deviant identities and behaviors.

Each of these mechanisms are increasingly problematic when the platform in question is sexual in nature or is dealing with the collection, sharing, and use of intimate data. Keegan will provide examples of the ways in which different sex technologies, through these mechanisms, are violating users' capacities for self-determination, sexual or not. The technologies discussed to exemplify these mechanisms include pornography, dating apps, sex-tracking apps, and period-tracking apps.

The aim here is not so much to prescribe any certain path forward to overcome these complex issues, but rather to provide insight on the rapidly evolving terrain of our consumer culture, and perhaps inspire deeper and broader consideration of the relevance of technological discourse and digital privacy to sex education.

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