***Archival video of this segment is available here.***
Francesca Bria’s talk will discuss the political economy of today’s digital capitalism, showing how data and artificial intelligence have emerged as important geopolitical battlefields of the global order, with the city—one of the main sites of data extractivism—becoming one of the key battlegrounds for alternative paradigms such as data commons or platforms cooperatives to tackle problems of housing, urban planning, sustainable mobility, and climate change. Francesca will look at the main challenges Europe is facing when it comes to technological sovereignty in the post-pandemic phase (e.g. digital trade, antitrust, industrial policy) and bring in the perspective she has been developing in herwork in the past years related to data sovereignty for the people (European data trust model) with citizens’ large scale participation and technology at the service of the green transition. She will also emphasize the importance of growing a European tech ecosystem (mainly based on open protocols and data sharing rules) that can benefit people and the planet. She claims: “The world has had a taste of a digital future dominated by Big Tech’s surveillance capitalism, and of how technology can abet the Big State, for instance with China’s digital authoritarianism. Now it is Europe’s turn to lead the way to Big Democracy, a new kind of humanism, combining innovation and dynamism with an uncompromised defense of autonomy, democracy, sustainability and self-determination.”
Speakers
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Francesca Bria President, Italian National Innovation Fund