Digital Development Dilemma: From Progress to Control

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• Dr Azadeh Akbari, University of Twente
• Wednesday 13 November 2024, 17:00-18:30
• Online.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Ashwin Varghese.

Please register here to attend : https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1033765429227?aff=oddtdtcreator

While the move towards digital futures seems to be inevitable, there are concerning reports about discrimination, exclusion, injustice, repression, and bias backed up by the newest technologies, such as AI-governed systems. Many of these problems are portrayed as unintended outcomes, digital harm, political repression, or planning and design mistakes. This talk takes a brief historical look at the conceptualisation of technology in the decades of development work and the faith in technological fixes for socio-political problems. It argues that without situating ICT4D programmes in their colonial, political, socio-cultural, and economic contexts, their complexities and their ‘outcomes’ cannot be analysed. Dr Akbari will introduce the digital development dilemma as a concept describing the inherent dilemma carried in the core of digital development programmes: increasing efficiency, inclusion, and participation on the one hand and paving the way for digital repression, consolidation of exclusion, establishment of new forms of technological dependency, and complicating digital self-determination, on the other. The talk includes recent examples of state control and surveillance, the increasing engagement of Big Tech companies in digital development, and new colonial models of platform-based work. In doing so, it aims to scrutinise the neutrality and idealism of ICT4D programmes by highlighting the dilemma between efficiency, control, and dependency at the heart of such initiatives.

Dr Azadeh Akbari is Assistant Professor in Public Administration and Digital Transformation at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. She has received the European Union’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Global fellowship for her project on Authoritarian Smart Cities. Azadeh Akbari’s research focuses on authoritarian surveillance and critical studies of ICTs in development. She is a member of the board of directors at the International Surveillance Studies Network and has also founded Surveillance in the Majority World Research Network to expand the scope of surveillance studies to include non-Western discourses and practices and create a place for exchange, collaboration, and activism against the undemocratic use of surveillance technologies.

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