Berkman Community Newcomers: Siva Vaidhyanathan

This post is part of a series featuring interviews with some of the fascinating individuals who joined our community for the 2014-2015 year. Conducted by our 2014 summer interns (affectionately known as "Berkterns"), these snapshots aim to showcase the diverse backgrounds, interests, and accomplishments of our dynamic 2014-2015 community.

Q+A with Siva Vaidhyanathan

Berkman faculty associate and Professor of Media Studies at UVA
@sivavid
Interviewed in summer 2014 by Berktern Rex Troumbley

As a Berkman faculty associate, what’s different about your world? What do you get to do now that you couldn’t before, and what are you planning on doing with that title?

Being a Berkman Faculty Associate lets you get to know all kinds of scholars at different levels. Berkman is the central nervous system for digital media studies, and some of the smartest people working on these issues pass through Berkman. This has been a long time coming. I’ve given talks here but have never had a formal affiliation until now. I just finished being chair of my department and am just spending my time going to presentations listening to what other people are talking about. I haven’t decided what I’ll research next.

Your book, The Googlization of Everything, is a few years old now. A lot has happened since then, not the least of which are the Snowden revelations and a startling amount of government spying facilitated by private corporations. If you were to update your book, what might you say about the Googlization of Everything now? Is it still happening? Do you think your “human knowledge project” (organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible) is still viable?

Yeah, Snowden would change a lot, especially about how risky data retention has been. We actually learned a lot about how Google operates based on their reaction to the Snowden revelations and we found out a lot of information regarding other states. I’d also add the Right to Be Forgotten to the book. I’d include more about Google’s failure in social media, and how many services they’ve abandoned. I think Google Scholar might be next. It certainly doesn’t make them any money and they have no reason not to abandon it.

Yes, I think the human knowledge project is still possible. The Digital Public Library of America actively coordinates with other digital collection and standardizing services to coordinate search. That’s a start. It’s going to take decades, but it’s most clearly not a technical challenge. If it were worth the payoff, it would be done tomorrow. I think we need to decide whether there is a payoff to sharing knowledge freely and widely or, if we don’t actually believe that, we should stop pretending that’s a value for us.

I’m working at Berkman on Internet Governance this summer. A lot of the early literature on the Internet (or cyberspace) assumed it was ungovernable or beyond the reach of governors, but that’s clearly not so true today, if it ever was. Speculate a little bit. What will the Internet look like in another 20 years? Will it still be around? Who will be the users? What will it mean to be a user? What major factors are driving that Internet?

I think in 20 years there will be no internet, at least not one that resembles ours today. Whatever it is, I don’t think it will be collaborative. We are increasingly being encouraged to process our signals through dedicated services and users of the future will be little more than discrete consumers. What Jonathan Zittrain wrote about is happening. Big companies today are all struggling to become the operating system of our lives, not our computers. The long game is to control and monetize data through objects like smart shoes, glasses, and other devices. In the future only a few companies with be the master OS.

Censorship is also on the rise, even in democratic-republics. We’re seeing places like India, Turkey, and China flirting with censorship. We probably won’t be able to stop this. After Snowden, countries are also working hard to make sure the data of their citizens stay in their countries not only so they can conduct better surveillance, but also because they don’t want their citizen’s data trapped in the U.S. There are also countervailing civil society movements pushing to limit the U.S. and its allies in control of digital networks. Brazil is a good example. Brazil thinks the Internet is linked to its economic future and so took action to limit U.S. power in the Internet.

I hope there will be a rollback on surveillance like what happened in the 1970s following the Church Committee’s review of U.S. surveillance, but a movement against surveillance is not going to grow just because people are more aware of it. It’s going to take some real force and concerted effort by organizations like EPIC and EFF to really transform themselves into political actors. EFF has never figured out how to fire up its troops in an overwhelming fashion. If you look at the SOPA and PIPA protests, there was no central coordination. There were a number of places people got turned onto those, but no one seems to have the list of people who will get out and protest or call their congressman. The Sierra Club is good at that. Whether EFF or another group like it emerges, there is going to need to be a more coordinated effort to push against this future.

I noticed you and Larry Lessig both have email addresses that end with Pobox. What is that about?

I think sometime back in 1996 I was trying to figure out which email I should choose, and Larry suggested it to me. There weren’t a lot of good options at the time, and I knew I would be changing my affiliations over time, so I wanted one I could keep. Pobox had a good spam filter and large storage, for the time. I think Tim Wu uses the same email service. It’s not a secret handshake between us, and I still use Gmail, but for things like listservs.

When I searched for your name on Google with the SafeSearch off, I got 85,300 results but with SafeSearch on, I got 84,500 results. Why do you think Google SafeSearch is filtering out 800 results from a search on your name?

I don’t know why so many are blocked! My guess is that it’s people swearing about me online or saying other things. If I were going to figure out what they were blocking, if I was really ambitious, I would print out the results and line them up to see what’s missing from the filtered one.