Cory Doctorow will be giving the closing keynote on the first day of the free online-only The Tech We Want Online Summit.
The blogger, journalist, science fiction writer, and once-upon-a-time co-editor of Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow, will be giving the closing keynote on the first day of an online event on Thursday. If that sounds good to you, it gets even better.It’s free, which means that folks like me who have been reading — and admiring — him for years have no excuse not to check him out.
As you might expect, he’ll be talking about enshittification, a word coined by Doctorow to describe practically every platform on the internet, which the American Dialect Society designated as 2023’s Word of the Year.
The event is The Tech We Want Online Summit, and it’s sponsored by the Open Knowledge Foundation, a non-profit organization that advocates for open knowledge, and seeks to define both what it is and why it is a good idea.
Doctorow’s keynote is called Disenshittify or Die!, and the event’s website has this to say about it:
“The enshittification of the internet wasn’t inevitable. The old, good internet gave way to the enshitternet because we let our bosses enshittify it. We took away the constraints of competition, regulation, interop and tech worker power, and so when our bosses yanked on the big enshittification lever in the c-suite, it started to budge further and further, toward total enshittification. A new, good internet is possible — and necessary — and it needs you.”
The keynote will be followed by a conversation with Renata Ávila, CEO of Open Knowledge Foundation, which will close the event’s first day.
Although a schedule has not yet been released for the event’s second day, the first day’s schedule, which has been released, is filled with five panel discussions, all following a theme of “The Tech We Want.” Examples include The Tech We Want Is Sustainable for People and the Planet and We Are Making the Tech We Want.
The panels are composed mostly of people working with not-for-profit organizations or educational institutions instead of with participants who are motivated by profit. For example, the panel for We Are Making the Tech We Want includes Isabela Fernandes, Executive Director, The Tor Project; Sid Drmay, Community Manager of the Open Source Hardware Association; Denis ‘Jaromil’ Roio, Director of Dyne.org Foundation (a hacker culture-focused digital community and free software foundry); Zoë Kooyman, Executive Director of Free Software Foundation; and Angela Oduor Lungati, Executive Director of Ushahidi (which produces an open source software app that utilises user-generated reports to collate and map data).
The Tech We Want Online Summit is an online-only event that will take place on Thursday and Friday, October 17-18 2024. Attendance is free but registration is required.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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