Rural Women Online North East Victoria Digital Intensive Keynote Address:
‘Challenges and Opportunities of the Digital Era’ by Anna Krien

This keynote address was delivered by author and journalist Anna Krien, on 15 September 2024 as part of the Rural Women Online Digital Intensive held in Yackandandah. Full keynote recording and transcript below. An edited version of Anna’s speech was also selected as the cover article of the November edition of The Monthly, ‘The people who mistook their lives for an app’. 

Prof Julian Thomas (RMIT) also delivered a keynote address on this topic at the Greater Shepparton Digital Intensive in August 2024. Watch now.

Featured speakers (in order of appearance): 

• Mary Crooks AO, Executive Director, Victorian Women’s Trust
• Anna Krien, author and journalist
• Lisa Ryan, General Manager Digital & Business Innovation, North East Water
• Alana Johnson, Chair, Victorian Women’s Trust

Transcript:

Mary Crooks  

Good morning. Let’s get this show on the road. 

My name’s Mary Crooks, and I’m the Executive Director of the Victorian Women’s Trust, which has been responsible for bringing rural women online to Yackandandah this past week. I would like to begin by acknowledging Country. We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of Country through North East Victoria and their connection to land, water and community over thousands of generations. We pay our respects to elders past and present, and we at the Women’s Trust, see it as unfinished business in our country that our responsibility as non-Indigenous Australians is to become much more deeply connected through thought and understanding and respect to Australia’s indigenous past and present. 

I’d also like to formally pass on an apology from Helen Haines, who asked that a message be read she would have loved to have been here. Helen begins by acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which we meet, and pays her respects to Elders past and present. 

“I’m so sorry I cannot be with you due to a prior engagement, but I very much wanted to provide this message of support to such an important event. We live in a digital era. It’s a dynamic environment offering many benefits for those who can access it and navigate it. It’s an environment where there are traps for new players. I commend the Victorian Women’s Trust for holding the Rural Women Online, challenges and opportunities of the digital era program, to provide training for women across regional and remote Victoria. Today in Yackandandah, these useful, practical sessions on a wide range of digital and technology topics will help strengthen skills and highlight how to protect information, market a small business spot and protect against the ever increasing scourge of scams. What a program. Back in June, I invited the Minister for Financial Services, the Honorable Stephen Jones, to our electorate to address this very subject with two scam awareness events. Further queries from the public on this also led to the creation of a scam protection resources page on my website. I know you are in for a really terrific morning and a fascinating and thought provoking keynote address from Anna Krien on the risks and rewards of digital connectivity and how it shapes our experience of community today. I truly wish I was with you to listen to this.” 

Well, Helen’s in luck, because we’re recording it. 

“I thank the Victorian Women’s Trust for their leadership, and I wish you all well as you connect and learn with each other today. Yours sincerely, Dr Helen Haines, MP, Independent, Federal Member for Indi.” 

So welcome to this final session of our Rural Women Online program at Yackandandah. It’s been running since Wednesday of this week. I’m delighted to welcome our speaker Anna Krien and Lisa Ryan, who is General Manager of Digital and Business Innovation with North East Water. We had the pleasure of meeting Lisa for the first time in March this year here at our preliminary engagement sessions, which helped shape and fashion the Intensives in Shepparton and Yackandandah. 

So I will ask, I’ll just introduce Anna, and then after Anna, Lisa is going to deliver a short commentary on the impact of Anna’s talk on her thinking, as well as her own thinking about the issues as she’s experiencing them. And after Lisa has delivered her Vote of Thanks, Alana Johnson, who’s the Chair of the Victoria Women’s Trust, she will give some wrap up comments. 

So in choosing our two keynote speakers in Shepparton some weeks ago and in Yackandandah, we wanted people who would open up the question of the digital era connection and challenges with a vengeance. We need to be talking about these issues. We need to be thinking deeply about them, talking with one another and fashioning responses that do well by the values we hold dear, social cohesion, mutual support, doing no harm to one another, engaging in our democracy and protecting human rights, or more simply, as the Yackandandah primary school holds it over the road — “we show respect, we are fair, we are learners.” At our Shepparton Intensive, we were privileged to hear from Prof Julian Thomas from RMIT, and that address of his is now available for people to watch on YouTube through the Women’s Trust. Today in Yackandandah, we have the opportunity to hear someone very different, another great thinker and a great writer, Anna Krien. 

Anna’s published works include not all, but include Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport. In 2013, Into the Woods: the Battle for Tasmania’s Forests, Booze Territory in 2015. Quarterly Essays, Quarterly Essay 66, The Long Goodbye on Cold Coral in Australia’s Climate Deadlock. And she has been shortlisted for numerous awards, a list as long as my arm. Her journalistic work appears in forums such as The Saturday Paper, The Monthly, The Sydney Morning Herald, to name a few. It was Anna’s article — apart from Night Games years ago — but it was Anna’s article in March this year that caught our eye at the Victorian Women’s Trust, The Tate Race, where she unpacked the influence, especially on young boys in this country and around the world, of people such as Andrew Tate. And it was on the back of that that we also approached Anna to be the keynote speaker for our Yackandandah Intensive. 

Here’s a little excerpt from The Tate Race — which is apposite given what’s happening in America, I’m reminded with the guy down in the street in the second hand place with the ‘Make America Great Again’, that they’re around here — Anna says in The Monthly essay, “like Trump, Tate’s carefully cultivated online persona is a mix of swagger and shamelessness. His presence is slightly menacing as he pumps iron, smokes cigars, counts money, drives expensive cars, struts into nightclubs and poses semi naked in the mirror, all the while spouting a constant stream of self improvement bullshit.” No bullshit from Anna. We asked her to focus on the challenges and opportunities, the risks and rewards of the digital era. We asked her to tickle our brains, to really get us thinking deeply about these important issues in a contemporary world. 

So would you please, welcome to the microphone, Anna Krien. [applause]

Anna Krien  

Thanks. Thanks, Mary, thank you for having me. It’s a real honour to be here. I am in love with Yackandandah. I’ve already visited the op shop, and it took me a while to pull away from the market today to get here. Thank you for that introduction. I really appreciate it. The future is digital. A CEO of a not for profit that provides Australian school children with digital citizenship licences, told me on the phone several years ago, I was researching schools relationships with private tech companies in what would turn out to be an investigation on a handful of private tech companies and their pervasive, if not predatory, influence on curriculum. 

Anna Krien  

I’d asked why there were no modules in their digital citizenship lesson plan teaching students how to recognize commercial intent, resist persuasive design and how importantly, to disconnect. “What do you mean by that?” I’d replied when she said the future was digital. “Well, children’s lives are digital. Their future jobs will be digital.” I was genuinely confused. “It will be a component of their life.” “Yes,” I began, but was interrupted with a frustrated intake of air. “It will be their whole lives,” the CEO said. Then added that it was clear we were not on the same page. I admit the CEO and I had gotten to a bad start. I queried earlier if the not for profit’s recent partnership with Google was the best exemplar of digital citizenship, considering Google’s Australian company was notoriously avoiding paying tax here, funnelling its profits through a tax haven in Singapore. It was not a query the CEO appreciated. 

Still, bad blood or not, I remember finishing the call feeling oddly lonely. I’d wondered, ‘Is there something wrong with me? What am I not getting?’ My generation, my peers, are the last generation to grow up without the internet and all its trappings, namely social media, which is, as we’ve seen, social cohesion fray all around the world, turning out to be rather anti-social. It would be easy to be nostalgic for life, pre-devices, pre-poisonous algorithms, pre-sticky, sticky digital designs developed by behavioural engineers. Yes, that is a job title in Silicon Valley, and I admit, I often wish it didn’t exist. 

“I’m holding off giving them a phone,” a fellow parent said to me the other day as we watched our 10 year olds play tag. “Because, you know, once that happens, it’s bye, bye.” Like I said, it would be easy to be nostalgic, but childhood, pre-internet was, of course, difficult in its own way and in ways that remain today. Not enough food, not enough care, threats of violence. I met a boy a few years ago in a story I was writing who was now in jail. He had no food in the fridge. The toilet was blocked up, so he and his siblings had to shit outside. He slept in a rat’s nest of blankets. He put himself to bed when he needed to. Guess what — he had a shiny iPad. He was across the digital divide, digital poverty. You may have heard that term been bandied about, often by well meaning people. Well, I guess the boy had access and guess what? The algorithms had access to him. It isn’t easy to disentangle an individual’s trajectory. What might have happened if something else didn’t also happen, or if something would have happened regardless of his circumstances. He had such little chance in the first place, with or without the internet with or without an iPad. But there is one thing I am increasingly certain of, the concept of digital poverty shows a distinct lack of understanding the situation we are in. Less certain, I can’t help a nagging suspicion about where the concept derived from in the first place.

Anna Krien  

Does everyone know that everyone sees a different internet? Not immediately, of course, but it doesn’t take long for algorithms to create a feed and a virtual geography that can, ironically, rather than freeing a person from their class, their identity, their prejudices, can nail them to the floor of their pigeonhole and then offer UberEats. Shoshana Zuboff wrote in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism that technologies have the potential and power to foreclose rather than foster future possibilities. 

Recently in the States, an African American scholar discovered that when she typed her name into Google, a series of ads popped up reciting her name with the question: jail records? She had to pay to find out what these websites said about her, and she discovered, as she already knew, that she had no jail history. She asked her white colleagues to type their names into Google, the adverts didn’t pop up. Sure enough, it was only popping up for ethnic and distinctively black names, suggesting that thousands, if not more, of job applications, loan applications, school applications, were being dismissed on this pop up alone. 

And the boy I encountered who had to shit in the bushes or at school because of the bathroom at home, his school had been convinced that all their kids needed was a digital transformation, that it would change everything, unlock them from their demographic. For this boy, his iPad, when scoured by police, was a swamp, and the crimes that got him into jail were largely due to that swamp. 

This is the problem we have to collectively confront, because, as this past week, many of you have learned in Rural Women Online, it’s been all about that the internet has become an essential infrastructure. It has replaced all manner of services, and yet it operates not as a public entity, but like a private company. And with a private company, its loyalties are vastly different. 

In 2019 Nir Eyal, a digital behavioural engineer and product designer had a rant about what I would call a growing awareness about ‘sticky design’. Sticky design is a term used in the biz that strives for its platform, for its multiplayer online games, scrolling whatever to be sticky, as in, your eyes are glued to the screen. I wish people would stop using these terms like ‘addiction’ and ‘hijacking our brains’. It’s 100% complete rubbish. Eel wrote Silicon Valley classic in 2014 titled, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, and he stressed emphatically that there’s a difference between addiction and overuse for the majority of us. He said what we’re talking about is just overuse. He was playing with semantics, and indeed, he’d followed up his classic with another book called Indestructible: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. A spoiler for anyone who wants to read that book, well, in the chapter, when it comes to children who are distracted, it’s mum’s fault, m’kay. 

Getting hooked on a product says, Nir is the price of progress. We want the product to be engaging. We can’t get upset at a tech company for making a product that is kitted up with hooks and triggers to keep you in its thrall. It’s up to the individual to unhook themselves, even if that is one kid against a legion of mathematicians and computer scientists. As a former Facebook employee, Hammerbacher once said, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads, and that sucks.” 

According to experts, it’s far too easy to fall into technology. Fall into using technology in a way that limits our cognitive abilities instead of enhancing them. That’s what this week has been about, learning how to use technology, not letting technology use you. Studies show that our cognition and brain are changing due to the way we interact with technology. Our memory, in particular, has been modified. Some researchers call this digital amnesia. Others call it cognitive offloading, the tech is freeing us up to focus on more important things. 

In 2015, five months before he died, acclaimed neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks typed up his observations on our unfolding digital life, concluding what we are seeing and bringing on ourselves resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale. Sacks’ thoughts, as he was writing, were seeking, trying to pinpoint what he found was disturbing. There was the obvious, myriads of people in the street staring into little boxes, briefly walking into front of traffic. And there were the big threats too, foment online, foment of terrorism and extremism, the undermining of democracy, the misuse of technology. But these were not at the core of Sacks’ disquiet. 

“These threats, of course, concerned me,” he typed, but at a distance, as real, as terrifying as these threats are, they were perhaps too familiar to Sacks to be overly compelling a new medium, yes, but humanity’s ability to deceive and thieve is as old as time. It was what was disappearing under the small, under the new, that made Sacks uneasy, the massive trade off in something perhaps seemingly small, something perhaps immeasurable, and yet in all his working life, the neurologist consistently found something utterly vital in the act of being present. For decades, he’d met with patients rendered amnesic by the destruction of the memory systems in their brains. These patients of his floundered in a kind of space, their bodies a panic of sensations unanchored by history, memory and presence. And now to the physician, it seemed as though the majority of the population were willingly ceding certain cognitive abilities to the virtual world without necessarily understanding what they were giving up. Sacks worried about disruption, not the innovative Elon Musk kind, but in the bonds between parents and children, between people, about the subtle, pervasive draining out of meaning of intimate contact from our society and our culture. And that was it, the nub of his disquiet, not what was new in the world, but what was disappearing. 

The future is digital, talk tech, and you’ll be feather punched with phrases like this, ‘digital frontier’, ‘digital revolution’, ‘AI’, ‘the next frontier’, ‘transformative innovation’, ‘virtual realm’, ‘metaverse disruption’, and don’t forget, ‘thought leaders’. And like every frontier, it’s often said the pioneers came first, clever people with clever gadgets, who spoke a strange language. Their mission, largely the result of two world wars and the Cold War in the 19th century, prior to the 1940s when the first digital computers were built. Computers were actually used to describe human computers, people who did sums, often women, on a large scale. 

In the early 1920s, an English mathematician had an idea for numerical weather forecasting, which we now enjoy, but he famously abandoned that idea after working out that he would need a factory of 64,000 human computers to produce a forecast in time to beat the actual weather. Perhaps he wrote, some day in the dim future, it will be possible to advance the computations faster than the weather advances. 20 years later, the electronic digital computers began to usurp human computers, though many of them did go on to become programmers, and in 1950 the first successful numerical weather prediction was produced before the actual weather. 

So yes, the pioneers of the digital frontier were clever, and in those first decades, it was primarily funded by the United States Defense Department. In 1969 America’s military launched the ARPANET, the first version of the internet. Military strategists wanted a communication system in which these new, non-human computers could speak to each other across vast distances, specifically without a central command, so it couldn’t be knocked out by a Soviet nuke. Scientists, mainly engineers delivered the ARPANET, linking government agencies, defence contractors and universities across the country, and then settlers began to arrive, academics and scientists who used the ARPANET as it was intended to communicate and share resources.

Anna Krien  

By the late 70s, the sector expanded beyond military goals, the region between San Francisco and San Jose, once dominated by fruit orchids and canneries, was dubbed Silicon Valley, where, despite its foundations being predominantly the result of government spending, the preferable American narrative was congealing around a scene of startups, tech wizards, entrepreneurs and venture capitalism, or increasingly consumed with the belief they were not just heading up a digital frontier, they were creating a revolution. 

Sure enough, many of us will remember the boxy computers with black screens, green glowing text began to appear in our homes, users had to install the programs by hand with floppy disk. There was the clunky brewer of dot matrix printers. There were video games of ‘pong’, fun, but easy to walk away from and reciting some of the digital pioneers achievements today, tiny wafers of circuit boards, external memory, the mouse, email, IP addresses, domain names, they’re so ubiquitous, they hardly seem revolutionary. 

But when computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, there’s no doubting, mistakes changed. A software system for navigating the digital frontier, Berner-Lee’s World Wide Web was not so dissimilar from an explorer’s map of the frontier, and if we think of it, like the charts of say, Captain James Cook, then perhaps the internet, launched two years later, was like the First Fleet. 

From sing-song dial up to the staticky shriek of connection, 1991 was also the same year the Soviet Union dissolved. Already, military funding had been petering out. Defence decoupled itself from the tech industry. It had fledged and the digital frontier became a site of colliding ideas and ambitions. Now, just as ideologies were projected onto physical frontiers, those early decades of independent governance in colonial Australia — an arguing hotbed of raw economics men, unionists, democracy activists, yalemen, agriculture dreamers — those on the digital frontier also had blueprints, venture capitalists made much of a new economy, their hype triggering the.com stock market boom. 

Others waxed lyrical about a global village; information would be democratised. Radical thinkers dreamt of displacing the 20th century industrial behemoths, while pale wizard boys dreamt of replacing these same business people. TV specials covered the brand new phenomenon, talking up ‘net surfing’, the ‘information superhighway’ and ‘virtual communities’. People weren’t just going online for information and products, but for connection. “It’s as if you walked into a cocktail party,” said Howard Rheingold in 1991, “And you could even reel back the conversation to the beginning so you could see what people are talking about.” And it’s true, people were connecting, sharing stories, advice, asking questions, and, more importantly, asking questions without shame, without fear of judgement. It’s a ready made community when you need one was how it was described. 

Then, in 1996 something happened — or perhaps better put, it didn’t happen — a sliding doors moment. Last year, Cory Doctorow, a writer and journalist, coined the term ‘enshittification’. He conjured the term to describe the parasitic formula deployed by many private online platforms, but since it’s been embraced to describe the enshittification of the internet in its entirety. In his piece, Dr Rowe describes the specific journey of Facebook to make his point. 

First, Facebook was good to you. Showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say, this created a kind of mutual hostage taking. Once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook, it became impossible to leave. Then it started to cram your feed full of posts from accounts you didn’t follow. At first, it was media companies. Then when those publications were dependent on Facebook, it dialled down their traffic, driving publications into supplying full text feeds into Facebook’s garden. This made publications dependent on Facebook. Their readers no longer visited their websites. Publications were hostage to the readers, and the readers were hostage to each other, and all of them were hostage to Facebook. 

Facebook tuned the algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to boost their articles to readers, even though those readers had explicitly subscribed to them and asked for Facebook to put them in their feeds. Now, Facebook started to cram more ads in there, mixing Peola from the people you wanted to hear from, from strangers who wanted to commandeer your eyeballs. It gave advertisers a great deal, charging a pittance, and then charged a lot once they were in. Sellers became dependent on Facebook, unable to carry on business without access to those targeted pitches, then they jacked up the prices. Stopped worrying so much about fraud, and colluded with Google to rig an ad market through an illegal program called Jedi Blue. 

Today, Facebook is, as Dr Rowe says, terminally enshittified, yet despite the job carnage, the platform’s illegal data harvesting of over 87 million users, which was sold for millions then deployed in all manner of campaigns, including Trump’s 2016 campaign. Despite the exposure of Facebook’s experiment, a secret experiment on users in 2014 that saw the company tamper with the news feeds of 700,000 users to see if they could a) alter the emotional state of their users, and b) to see what emotions kept people online. You know what that emotion is — anger. 

Despite all this, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, remains a feudal overlord in the tech world. His net worth, 170 billion. “I don’t know why. I don’t know why they trust me. Dumb fucks.” The young Zuckerberg famously quick to appear when he was at Harvard, musing about why their fellow students had sent all their personal information to his new website, the Facebook. Hold that thought, “they trust me” now, as glib and juvenile, Zuckerberg was about trust, and likely still is, it’s crucial to understand that nothing in society works without trust. To devalue trust is to devalue society. It is to devalue us and the connections that bind us. So what happened? How did the cocktail party become enshittification? 

1996 on the digital frontier. Back then, no one had heard of social media. Zuckerberg was in primary school, and the young internet was abuzz with the frontier people I described. There were business communications, science communications, some bonding, enlightenment, yes, dangerous ideas, and there was also a lot of porn. 

Congress began to take notice for 18 months, they argued about instituting some kind of governance to regulate the internet, bring it in line with mediums such as television and radio. The telecommunications Reform Act was penned underneath it, the Communications Decency Act. This was the first attempt to regulate the internet, more than 25 years ago. With a specific focus on children, the new act sought to prevent minors from accessing online porn, criminalising such content and criminalising full stop of seeing content. It unleashed a furore on the digital frontier. 

“Governments of the industrial world, you weary, giants of flesh and steel,” wrote a poet, John Barlow from Wyoming, sometime lyricist for the Grateful Dead. “I come from cyberspace,” he bellowed, “the new home of the mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You were not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders.” 

Ponderous, grandiose, slightly ridiculous. Barlow’s manifesto charged through the digital frontier. His Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace was the first item to go viral on the internet, illustrating not only the speed in which ideas would now be able to travel, but also how potentially unfortunate this feed is now there was no guard rails, meaning amateurish, half baked, not very well formed ideas could easily be flushed into the world.

Anna Krien 

The manifesto captured the feverish gold rush feeling, demonstrating a substantial sense of exceptionalism on the digital frontier, just as settlers on the physical frontier of the Western American plains in the 19th century believed their expansion to be manifest destiny, land claims ordained by God, here too was an over-egged brouhaha of rugged individualism, bravado, a cowboy fantasy, conveniently forgetting that it was the military that got them there in the first place. 

Barlow’s organisation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, roared into life. The internet was covered with images of blue ribbons for free speech. The great web blackout, blackouts or websites switched their screens black for 48 hours in protest against the Act. In the end, it didn’t take long for the movement to squash parts of the act within the court, with the Supreme Court ruling in favour of the First Amendment. 

“It was a stunningly dumb bit of legislation,” Barlow later said about the act, and it was poorly formed, with potential to be wielded by bad actors in Orwellian ways, but those early internet activists were naive in their determination to keep regulation out. So focused, as writer Akash Kapur notes on the risks of government intervention, that they failed to anticipate the threats posed by the private sector. 

You see, the Libertarians weren’t the only ones on the digital frontier who didn’t want government regulation, and while the profiteers likely didn’t give a stuff about the First Amendment, it did, and still does provide helpful moral dressage for their motivations. Think Elon Musk’s stance on free speech. Think Zuckerberg’s unironic claim two years ago, “by giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent”. Again, this is just an echo of earlier frontiers for centuries, influential shipping merchants used moral equivalences, to rationalise their business, to rationalise dispossession. 

In fact, often went the reasoning the act of colonisation was benevolent, wrestling the land from uselessness and sterility the squatter Edward Palmer wrote, in the early days of North Queensland, imbibing the centuries rationale that failing to improve the land was immoral, while pastoralism and agriculture was Christianity, civilising land and the savages who dwelt on it. On the digital frontier, these platitudes for merchants were, and continue to be, ‘free speech’, ‘opportunity’, ‘innovation’, and, ironically, ‘democracy’. And in the late 90s, if the radical online activists wanted their digital utopia to be free from government regulation, then who were they to disagree. 

“We’ve been here before,” says Lizzie O’Shea, an Australian writer, lawyer and chair of the Digital Rights Watch. In her book Future Histories, she details the parallels between the modern tech sector and the early decades of the car industry back in the 50s through 70s. Both sectors came out of their starter boxes, aggressively fighting and shirking regulatory bodies. In the mid 20th century, car manufacturers were promising, guess what? Freedom, connectivity, and they were lobbying hard against government safety regulation, regulation they said would stifle innovation, even as cars such as Ford’s 1970 Pinto model proved to be death traps, bursted into flames in minor crashes, claiming multiple lives. The car industry said it’s the individual’s responsibility to learn how to drive. 

It is now documented that car manufacturers poured millions into lobbying against safety standards that would cut into their profits, just as the tech industry fights regulation today, similarly, just as the car industry pointed at drivers a tech company like say, Google may team up with a charity to provide kids with a digital citizen licence program. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for taking responsibility, which is why, if we want to guarantee that these technologies help us, we need a robust system where ethical and regulatory aspects are considered. 

You know, there were moral panics about books, there were moral panics about the radio, there were moral panics about television, and it’s true, people had misgivings about each of these new mediums, not only how they may affect society or how they may impact status quo, but also legitimately about what might be lost, small things that perhaps no one ever thought to measure. Like singing together, oral storytelling, boredom. Each encroachment and encroachment onto ceded ground. Who knows? But it doesn’t matter anyway, because the internet’s not books or television or radio. That’s what the pioneers and settlers on the digital frontier have been saying. The same rules don’t apply. 

In 1996 something went unscathed by the furore that squashed the Communications Decency Act, a clause that went largely unnoticed. It’s today referred to simply as Section 230 or as Jeff Kossif, an American writer, says, “the 26 words that create the Internet as we know it today.” 

It says: “no provider or user of interactive computer service should be treated as a publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” 

26 words, they change everything. 

Unlike publishing and broadcast media, which are liable for any egregious content they air, Section 230 frees online platforms from the threat of being sued for content posted by third parties, let those on the digital frontier decide how to moderate, if at all, how people interact on their platforms, what videos they post and so on, hold the user accountable, not the platform. Section 230 writes a cash caper has come to emblematize the long leash granted to the internet. This was the digital frontiers manifest destiny, Tumblr, four, Chan, Reddit, MySpace, Bandcamp, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, X. 

It’s Nazi Germany’s Goebbels, amplified propaganda, bad faith actors, millions of so-called bots, bad bots. They’re called sowing seeds of discord — bad bots, by the way, said to account for more than 30% of online traffic today — hold the user accountable, not the platform. But what about the algorithms that promote poisonous messages? What about the earnings? YouTube earned 7 million from Andrew Tate before they decided to deplatform him. 

Yes, the pioneers and settlers spoke of and continue to speak of opening up new territory, about being on the cusp of cutting edge solutions. And for a long time now, they’ve confused themselves, not only as being pioneers and settlers, but as creators, their codes laying down the path of a frontier into otherwise empty space. 

Empty space, Terra Nullius, nobody’s land. Well, we’ve been here before. The future is digital, they say. Well, Google would say that, wouldn’t they? If the digital frontier is perceived by as pioneers and settlers, as an empty space or as a wild, uncultivated, incoherent place or a cyberspace of their own making, we can only be certain of one thing, they couldn’t see us, they wouldn’t see us, or simply felt it was imperative to improve us. Wherever there is a frontier, there is an ever shrinking territory. 

Before his death, Oliver Sacks worried that we had ceded too much ground to the tech frontier, that we’d given up the greatest amenities and achievements of civilization, the sanction to be oneself truly absorbed contemplating a work of art, a scientific theory, a sunset, the face of one’s beloved. I think Sacks was justified in his concern, and indeed what he observed, it became much worse in the years following his death, but he also held up hope that people would come to. And I think we are. It’s a groggy, bleary eyed awakening, like finally being tapped on the head in a game of duck, duck, goose. We’re like newborn foals, unsteady nations, slow, regulatory bodies unequipped to react.

Anna Krien

The poet Barlow wrote in his manifesto, “your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement and context do not apply to us. They’re based on matter. And there is no matter here, and that’s the magic trick of the business.” There’s no matter here. That’s the guise that tech is other worldly, a virtual world. It slips like smoke around normal things like standards, like regulation. Of course, there’s matter here. There is copper and wire in the ground. People log on for an entire public infrastructure network, and the computer chips, the hardware, the rare minerals, the critical metals. All this is matter. There are factories. E-waste. There is the ongoing theft of artists, work of books fed to machines. Real things, real losses. There is an ever growing stake in the global emissions pie — 4% now — in the data centres, blocky warehouses full of servers. Someone cites the size of suburbs.

They have a bigger carbon footprint than the airlines industry. There are 11,000 data centres worldwide, 300 in Australia. And just as the fan may start to whir in your laptop, to cool down servers and data centres, typically, 100,000 servers need to be kept cool, like a pasture, writes anthropologist Monserrate. Server farms are irrigated. They use a massive amount of water. A single Google Search uses about a millimetre of water. A typical interaction with AI ChatGPT, half a litre of water. 

In 2021, Microsoft announced it was on track to build between 50 and 100 data centres each year. Nigeria, the locals of Lagos compete with data centres for access to potable water. Last year, the people of Uruguay and Chile began to protest in the midst of severe droughts and water rationing when their governments gave approval for multinationals to develop vast hyperscale data centres to roll out AI machine learning. Nothing is for free. It’s very real. The internet is very, very real. 

Many years ago, about a decade at least, when phones were not so ubiquitous, pulsing in our hands like hungry Tamagotchis, I’d sat next to a woman on a bench to eat my lunch in Melbourne City Square. Distress was rippling under the surface of her face. “Are you okay?” I asked. “I think I’m about to be broken up with,” she said. She looked at me, her eyes sad and at a loss. “Oh,” I’d said. And I remember we sat together, two strangers on a bench, but now leaning into one another like sisters, and we both watched as he approached. When he was close, I turned, put my hand on her hand, and stood up. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. She gave me a weak smile and then turned to look at him, and I still recall her face open wide, vulnerable as a delicate plate. 

I don’t know why I remember this now, except that I wonder if it would happen today. In Oliver Sacks notes, he mentioned his concerns about bonds between children and parents, particularly newborns, as they tried and often failed to get their carer’s attention, so absorbed as they were in their phones. I worry about the bonds between strangers, and there was something else too. Perhaps it was the woman’s bravery and his bravery too. They were going to face each other, a reminder that being human is painful, but also brave. Connection is sacred. It isn’t media, and trust shouldn’t be a tech bros play thing. The future isn’t digital. The future is you and me. It’s the earth we walk on and will one day return to. Not our phones, not the internet. 

The future is tomorrow and the next day and the night as well. Pinprick, stars, moon, dark, velvet matter and bringing you all together here this week. Yes, it was about tech, but it was women who did it. 

It was Mary, Jess, Leanne, Alana, Lisa and the rest of the team; people, not tech. Yes, strive to know tech. Strive to know it better than tech knows you. But remember, it was a woman that brought you together today, not tech. 

Thank you. 

Lisa Ryan

Thank you Anna, that was amazing. 

Hi everybody. My name is Lisa Ryan. I’m the general manager for digital and business innovation at North East Water, living and breathing the tech world every day and the challenges that it presents. I’d like to thank Mary for asking me to do the Vote of Thanks today, and also to Leanne for the opportunity to be part of this program. 

It’s, yeah, it’s a really interesting space. I think the risks and rewards are sometimes tricky to balance. And, you know, I think, you know, there’s an element where it’s not going away. You know, the things that you’ve touched on around the development of, you know, computer pong brought back a lot of memories for me, and your beautiful description of the internet with the words and the static, and I can hear that now in my head. I’ll spare you all what it would sound like. 

But I think, you know, some of the things you’ve touched on really did hit a nerve for me, particularly around the human element of it. For those of you on my LinkedIn, I do have one that technology, you know, it’s about faith in, it’s not about the faith in technology, it’s about the faith in the humans that we deal with. So there’s good and there’s evil, and, you know, there’s ways that we can program and the ways we can use technology to provide opportunities or to provide risk, but it’s about us sharing what that looks like. 

I wanted to just share a bit of a proverb so we all know that, you know, give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach him to fish and he can feed himself for a lifetime. 

And I guess for me, that there’s a story. When I went to London about 15, 20, years ago to start a first internet bank. You know, it was all very exciting, and it was when it was still very new. We didn’t have phones with the internet. We didn’t have all of this, but the idea of a clicks and bricks bank was really awesome, and it was exciting. And I went, Yeah, I want to be part of that. 

Unfortunately, it didn’t happen, because back then, you didn’t have the internet on your phone, you didn’t have banking on your phone, and it was all a little bit crazy for the US government to go, not sure about banking on a phone that’s never going to take off. Before I left, I went to a camera shop and I bought a camera, best camera ever, 10 megapixels, you know, great zoom. It’s going to take great photos regardless of my ability. But the guy at the store said to me, you know, soon you will have a phone that does photos, and you’ll watch videos, and it’ll have your maps, and it’ll have your books, and it will do everything that you want to do instead of the eight things you’re packing. And I remember, I looked at him and I laughed, and I said, “I’ll just take the camera. Thanks. That’s going to be a long way off.” 

And, you know, and here we are, and, and I kind of, I relate that to the fish, and I go, we can’t just give people a phone and expect that they’re going to know how to use it. You know, what a phone could do 15 years ago was make a call, then we got to text messaging, then we got smartphones, then we got all this other stuff. I mean, we were just joking about having corded phones in the house and landlines and having to, you know, hide our calls and our secrets in the corridor. And, you know, my kids don’t even know about that. You know, cordless phones were a great invention when I was young, and now here we can do all this stuff. 

So how do we balance that sort of innovation and that convenience of having everything available on a phone? I’m not going to get lost, I’ve got an emergency contact, I can push a button. You know, these are positive things, but with that comes the risk of security and safety, understanding my digital footprint to everything that Anna said, you know, how do we actually teach people to use those things safely? Knowing that there are algorithms and that sticky design, they want you to stay online. They don’t want you to switch off. They want you to keep clicking. So it’s about us being present. 

And I love that expression, because, you know, I often have, you know, two phones. I have a work phone and I have a personal phone, because several years ago, my kids used to joke about the Bat phone, and I thought they thought I was Batman, because I was really cool. But I worked out it was the ‘bad phone’, because whenever I answered it, it took me away from them. 

So I had to start saying, Well, I have to separate my life a little bit. I have to create those boundaries and do it safely. But at the same time, I work in technology. I’m all about innovation and change, and what can that give me? So you know the biases as you talked about the racial stereotyping online and with the invention of AI, and, you know, the disquiet and the trade off. And, you know, I really loved all of that, because it’s so true. You know, he wasn’t worried about Elon and the amazing innovations that can come from that. You know, it’s about the smaller aspects and about keeping our footprint safe. 

You know, I think the other great thing with innovation is you look at things, and I always call it up with my team. But, you know, Garry Kasparov was the Russian champion of chess, and he got beaten by a computer, you know, nearly 30 years ago. But he said, “it’ll never replace humans, because it’s the creativity of what I did the seven other times I played the computer that got it to learn.” So humans will never replace computers, and we can’t lose that human element of who we are. 

Innovation driving growth, but the regulation aspects that you spoke about, I think are really strong, and I see that now, particularly with AI. You know, AI is neither good nor evil. It’s the programmers that actually, that actually make it good or evil. We look at Terminator, and I often joke with my team, you know, robots are going to take over. What are we going to do? And they’re just like, No, no way. And I’m like, but Terminator was, you know, bad in the first one, but he was good in the sequel. So it’s the same robot, you know, we just have to look at how we program them, so and robots won’t take over. It’ll be a long time just to make sure we are not going home with that thought. 

But, you know, I think there are opportunities, but there are ethical considerations for that. I think in communities, it’s really hard, and the work that Rural Women Online do is amazing, because I think closing that gap in digital awareness, you know, closing that gap around. What can I do with my phone or my laptop or my iPad? But how do I do that securely and safely? How do I protect my data? How do I protect my digital footprint, and more importantly, as humans and as storytellers? How do we share that safety with others? How do we share the learnings that we have so that we can actually protect each other. How do we tap into the opportunities that digital gives us, like employment and training and opportunities around social connection and telehealth and in regional communities? That’s a challenge as well, because our networks aren’t as great as they are. You know, 5G is a dream. Like 3G is still on the freeway. It’s still on the road to Beechworth. You know, we’re not there yet, but I think that awareness and that learning is what we need. 

So I think if I can leave you with one thing, you know, teach a man to fish, give a person a phone, but pass on that learning. Teach them how to use their digital technology, teach them how to stay safe if you’ve actually been, you know, phished, or you’ve been hacked or you’ve lost money online, share that story. It’s not embarrassing, it’s not a secret. It’s about awareness, and it’s about growing and sharing that with others. 

So thank you, Anna. I really enjoyed your talk, and thank you for the work that you’re doing here, because it’s really important, and particularly in communities where we don’t often have access to these programs, it’s essential to understand that there’s good and there’s bad, there’s risk and rewards, and just making sure we continue the conversation about how to balance those thank you.

Alana Johnson  

[Applause] Well, lovely to see you all here. And hasn’t that been a wonderful way to spend our morning? I get to do the last bit, which is the thanks. But now listening to Anna, I realise I actually get to do the best bit, because Anna left us with this wonderful thought. Thought about the value of the bonds between strangers, and I think that’s what we’ve all experienced this week, coming together in person and all contributing to each other’s learning. So thank you, Anna, for that lovely thought. I’m really going to take that with me. 

So to you. Thank you so much for the effort. So much interesting information. I’m going to listen to the recording because there was a lot in there, a lot to unpack, so that I can talk about it with other people. 

And Lisa, thank you, because you make it the reality for us in our communities and our lives. So thank you for sharing your thoughts, we need to thank the NBN represented by Charlene Donovan down there. So Charlene has been a great supporter of this program now this year, but also she has provided the funding for our catering. And as we know, the bonds between strangers are greatly aided by food. So we have a lot to thank you for. It’s been a very big part of our program. Charlene has fallen in love so much with Yackandandah that she went home and brought her family back last night, and they spent the night here, her two little girls enjoying Yackandandah. So you’ve got a new fan in the local community. 

And talking about food, the women’s shed. I’m not sure if any of them can hear me back there, but the catering this week has just been fantastic, and I just need to make a point about the fact that the lemon slice seem to disappear all the time. There’s a couple of culprits in the room here, but it’s been fabulous homemade food. It’s just lovely. 

We arrived in Yackandandah back in May to talk to lots of community groups and people about understanding the communities around here, in the different valleys, the women, what their needs were. And that has been just a fabulous partnership with local community groups. They’ve helped us develop the program, they’ve helped us find speakers, they’ve helped us with the marketing. They’ve come along this week, and those bonds now have been formed, and I think the Victorian Women’s Trust and the communities of this valley can only benefit together from that. 

They’ve helped us find a great range of fantastic speakers, and we’ve found staff for our help desk, people who’ve come and held stalls for their own organisations. We’ve had Telstra here. It’s just been wonderful. The willingness of people to come and participate in the program. 

And then we’ve had some fantastic sort of expert helpers, like George Egan and Daniel Flack. And wonderful set up through GV Party Hire for all of the equipment and setting that we’ve had here. 

Talking about strangers, we now have new best friends after our second program starting in Shepparton last time, and now here we’ve had the RMIT team with us, so there’s Jenny and Kieran and Robin down there. They’re no longer strangers, they’re our mates, and we’re working together. And what we’ve done through Rural Women Online is of mutual benefit to both of us, and we’re looking forward to future work with you. 

We need to thank the funders, the Bendigo Bank, Community Enterprise Foundation. One of the really nice things that happened here in Yackandandah Is that one of our presenters was from the Bendigo Bank, Shelly. Shelly has been here with Lisa from the Tangambalanga Police, and they have been a tour de force. The two of them like a duo, and everybody has loved their session. So that’s been really nice to have that input from the Bendigo Bank on the ground. 

The other major funder that we have to thank is the Helen MacPherson Smith Trust, because without their enthusiasm and their willingness to back this, the whole Rural Women Online program wouldn’t have been possible. We’ve got to thank the rooftop media team, Sam and Hannah and John for the AV and the sound and Chris Lello and Jenny Lannon for coordinating the booking of the hall and the venues that we used, Jane Murphy from the Yackandandah Community Centre; Jason standing back there for photography as he’s been popping around. 

And then finally, of course, none of this would have happened without the team that came together to form Rural Women Online. We’ve now been together for two, two and a half years, is it Mary? It’s been fantastic to organise the program this year to be able to do the intensive in Shepparton and the Intensive here in Yackandandah. 

We have a great deal to thank Jess Dugdale-Walker, sitting there at the back, her enthusiasm and capability has just been amazing, and she does it all with a smile, I don’t know how. And this has given us this program has given us the reason to bring on board Leanne molcain, who is a local, lives at Beechworth, has been so professional, but her local knowledge has just been amazing. And so we’ve now got a new best friend in Leanne too, and we’ll no doubt be doing further things with her. 

And with us, not today, but during the week, have been Bim and Ally, and some of you might have met them. 

So finally, here at the front I have to thank Mary Crooks, the Executive Director of the Victorian Women’s Trust and a project director of the Rural Women Online. For those who don’t know Mary, you might have gathered, she’s an incredible driving force, the Victorian Women’s Trust wouldn’t be what it is without Mary Crooks. I sometimes think she’s more than a driving force, she’s a bit like a tsunami, and we have so much to thank her for. Every woman in Victoria has a lot to thank her for. So thank you, Mary.

This keynotes were presented as part of Rural Women Online. We thank NBN for their support of each keynote event. Rural Women Online was made possible thanks to support from our major partners, Helen MacPherson Smith Trust, and Bendigo Bank Community Enterprise Foundation.