{"id":56776,"date":"2019-02-19T16:48:04","date_gmt":"2019-02-19T15:48:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hiig.de\/?p=56776"},"modified":"2019-02-19T16:48:04","modified_gmt":"2019-02-19T15:48:04","slug":"talk-with-chelsea-manning-on-tech-and-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hiig.de\/en\/talk-with-chelsea-manning-on-tech-and-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Talk with Chelsea Manning on tech and society"},"content":{"rendered":"

In May 2018, Theresa Z\u00fcger<\/strong>, who wrote her PhD thesis about digital forms of civil disobedience at Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, had the chance to speak to Chelsea Manning<\/strong> in an interview as an opening session to re:publica alongside Geraldine de Bastion<\/strong>, an expert on communication and information technology. This visit to Berlin was Chelsea Manning\u2019s first trip to Europe after her release from prison.\u00a0The whole conversation was moving to everyone in the room, not only because of the political brisance. It was a very special moment in the net society\u2019s history due to Chelsea Manning\u2019s visionary and thoughtful analysis about technology in our times and\u00a0her inspiring and humble personality.<\/em><\/p>\n

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What Chelsea Manning made clear is that the problems we are facing \u2013 such as biases in algorithms \u2013 are not technical problems, but rather human ones. In reality, this conversation about technology turned out to be more of a conversation about politics than anything:<\/p>\n

Theresa Z\u00fcger: [In her keynote] danah boyd was pointing to a huge problem with prejudices in society. Aside from biases in algorithms \u2013 how do we change diversity in our heads? How do we get to a different kind of thinking? Because I think what she pointed out is that this is actually where we have to look first.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chelsea Manning: Humans are like a machine learning algorithm, in our day to day lives we\u2019re doing the same thing that a machine learning algorithm is doing, because we\u2019re learning, so we learn biases and prejudices, not necessarily consciously, but we have to take a step back and become more self-aware of our 12 position, our probe, our privilege, our position in society and we also have to listen to what other people say who aren\u2019t us. We should be listening to people of color or immigrants. We should be listening to what their experiences are and what they\u2019re telling us because we don\u2019t have that experience. We have these biases built into our systems that we have learned, and we have to unlearn those \u2013 and that\u2019s not going to happen by continuing to go about business as usual. People have the ability to learn, and when we don\u2019t do this, we end up worse off in society.<\/p>\n

Z\u00fcger: From what you\u2019re saying right now, I feel that dissent is a very important idea in your political thinking and I wondered.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Manning: It\u2019s the primary idea of my political thinking!<\/p>\n

Z\u00fcger: [\u2026] and I wondered where you think the limit of what is debatable\u00a0in democracy is or where you would stop talking?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Manning: Well, you can\u2019t have a debate with somebody who is calling for genocide or ethnic cleansing [\u2026]. I don\u2019t necessarily think that handing every single white supremacist a microphone, like we do in America, is a good idea. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s a requirement. I mean, it\u2019s not free speech, it\u2019s hate speech. I don\u2019t think free speech means that you hand anybody who has an opinion a microphone.<\/p>\n

Z\u00fcger: I read in an interview that your actions against the wrongdoing of the American government were the result of certain values that are very important to you and, since I wrote a PhD about civil disobedience,\u00a0I wanted to talk about what those values are?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Manning: I value people, I value my friends, I value my family, I value people that I don\u2019t know that have similar experiences, I value people, whose experiences or what they go through I don\u2019t have any knowledge of. I see humanity as having an inherent value that drives me, that drives every moment of my day. I\u2019m not a perfect person, but I try my best to live by these values because that\u2019s the way I\u2019ve felt deep inside since I was a kid. We are all connected. I feel like all of us have a connection to each other, and that connection [exists] especially in a society like\u00a0ours where everything is so connected. We\u2019re connected to people we don\u2019t know in far-off places. Even mathematically, we do have about six degrees of separation with virtually every single person in the world, so really, we don\u2019t have a large world. There\u2019s this great photograph taken from Voyager One, the space probe, it\u2019s called the pale blue dot. Carl Sagan had a great poem that makes me have a moment every time I read it \u2013 and I read it every so often. We\u2019re on this tiny speck, this tiny little dot, and we \u2013 with all of our hate and all of our prejudices, and all of our frustrations \u2013 just seem so paltry and so measly on the scale of planets, on the scale of stars, and the scale of galaxies. We really only have each other, and we are dependent upon each other in a very limited ecosystem and in a world that is fragile and in a society that is fragile, and we have to recognise our role in that \u2013 each and every one of us and do the best that we can with what we have.<\/p>\n

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