Digital Power and Its Discontents. USI hosts Evgeny Morozov

The digital age, which can be defined by the widespread growth of the Internet and the of increasingly high-performance communication and information technologies, has seen the extraordinary development of companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. These companies today are worth more – in terms of stock market capitalization – than the large industrial companies that until only a few years ago dominated the global economy. These giants of the Silicon Valley have created the so-called data economy, entailing important implications for practically all sectors of human activity. The recent scandal that has hit Facebook and its involvement with the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, accused of collecting data on users of the leading global social network for electoral propaganda purposes, is of great interest, shedding light on the mechanisms of what has been defined “surveillance capitalism”.

This evolution raises a series of important questions and underscores the emergence of a critical view of the digital economy as a whole. Specifically, who are the owners of the Internet and the digital world, and how do they exercise control over society and the economy? And what role will they play in the development of artificial intelligence, which is also based on data mining? Evgeny Morozov, a leading contemporary scholar of the Web and the social impact of technology, will discuss these topics during a public conference at USI Università della Svizzera italiana, Thursday, April 19, at 8PM (room A21, Lugano campus), hosted by the Institute for Media and Journalism (IMeG) at the USI Faculty of Communication Sciences.

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Evgeny Morozov (Belarus, 1984), 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.