Beyond the Valley: How Innovators Around the World Are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow

How to repair the disconnect between designers and users, producers and consumers, and tech elites and the rest of us: toward a more democratic internet.

In this provocative book, Ramesh Srinivasan describes the internet as both an enabler of frictionless efficiency and a dirty tangle of politics, economics, and other inefficient, inharmonious human activities. We may love the immediacy of Google search results, the convenience of buying from Amazon, and the elegance and power of our Apple devices, but it's a one-way, top-down process. We're not asked for our input, or our opinions--only for our data. The internet is brought to us by wealthy technologists in Silicon Valley and China. It's time, Srinivasan argues, that we think in terms beyond the Valley.

Srinivasan focuses on the disconnection he sees between designers and users, producers and consumers, and tech elites and the rest of us. The recent Cambridge Analytica and Russian misinformation scandals exemplify the imbalance of a digital world that puts profits before inclusivity and democracy. In search of a more democratic internet, Srinivasan takes us to the mountains of Oaxaca, East and West Africa, China, Scandinavia, North America, and elsewhere, visiting the "design labs" of rural, low-income, and indigenous people around the world. He talks to a range of high-profile public figures--including Elizabeth Warren, David Axelrod, Eric Holder, Noam Chomsky, Lawrence Lessig, and the founders of Reddit, as well as community organizers, labor leaders, and human rights activists.. To make a better internet, Srinivasan says, we need a new ethic of diversity, openness, and inclusivity, empowering those now excluded from decisions about how technologies are designed, who profits from them, and who are surveilled and exploited by them.

Author: Ramesh Srinivasan
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 09/01/2020
Pages: 420
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.10w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780262539609

About the Author
Ramesh Srinivasan is Associate Professor of Information Studies and Design Media Arts at UCLA. He is the founder of the University of California system's Digital Cultures Lab, exploring the meaning of technology worldwide as it spreads to the far reaches of our world. Srinivasan earned his PhD in design studies at Harvard; his master's degree in media arts and science at MIT; and his bachelor's degree in industrial engineering at Stanford. He has received fellowships in MIT's Media Lab in Cambridge and the MIT Media Lab Asia. He has also been a teaching fellow at the Graduate School of Design and Department of Visual and Environmental Design at Harvard. Srinivasan is a regular speaker for TEDx Talks, and makes regular media appearances on NPR, Al Jazeera, The Young Turks, MSNBC, and Public Radio International. His writings have been published by The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Quartz, and CNN, among others.


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