Digital Power and Its Discontents

Who are the owners of the Internet and the digital world, and how do they exercise control over society and the connected economy? In recent years, the giants of Silicon Valley have extended their reach beyond the Internet and to an ever-increasing number of contemporary sectors, offering free services in sectors far beyond the original ones. User data has become the new currency of exchange of this system and companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon now have in their hands huge amounts of information (the so-called Big Data) to create and provice basic services, which in the future will be based on artificial intelligence and machine learning: a power that seems to exceed even that of the sovereign States themselves. The recent case of Cambridge Analytica has shed light on the mechanisms of the capitalism of surveillance and calls for deeper consideration of the dynamics of power of this system.

The USI Institute for Media and Journalism (IMeG, Faculty of Communication Sciences) is pleased to host Evgeny Morozov (Belorussia, 1984), a leading contemporary scholar of the Web and the social impact of technology. Morosov has been a fellow at Georgetown University, Stanford University, Open Society Foundations, New America Foundation and the American Academy in Berlin. His articles have featured in, among others, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and in the Financial Times. He is author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (2011), and To Save Everything, Click Here (2014). In 2018, Politico included Morozov among the 28 most influent intellectuals in Europe.

The conference is public and English spoken.