Digital Dystopian Event
Susan Nevin
The speaker for this event was Yasha Levine, who was born in the Soviet Union, and escaped to the United States as political refugees, and came to live in San Francisco. He then became an investigative reporter, and has been researching the internet as a weapon. Levine claims that the Internet started as something new and magical. However, the sheen is wearing off and people are becoming afraid and paranoid of the internet. People are convinced that the internet has been hijacked and is now used as a weapon of meddling, and is not what it was before. Additionally, some people think that the internet is what caused Trump’s election.
Levine also argued that never before in the history of mankind had the internet been used to convince people of things in the way it did in 2016. The internet is not an innocent technology. The Internet has been used for surveillance and propaganda for years. Fear after the 2016 election was based on the idea that the internet was never used for a weapon. People are now seeing how the internet is giving dominance to monopolies and people are making money selling things to us. Altogether, we just saw the internet in the wrong light, and Levine is shining a spotlight on it.
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