Anasuya Sengupta: AI, Colonising Knowledge, and Iran's Information War
About this episode
Anasuya Sengupta discusses the impact of colonialism on knowledge and technology, emphasizing the need to center marginalized voices in the digital landscape.
The internet is a monocrop. A plantation of knowledge in English, owned by a handful of mega corporations, built on the bones of colonial infrastructure. And we are no longer just the consumers and as ever we are the product, the training set, the data points. So who gets to imagine the future? A leadership podcast about people, power and possibilities. This week on If You Were In Charge, Sanam and Kavita sit down with Anasuya Sengupta, co-founder of Whose Knowledge?, a global multilingual campaign to centre the knowledges of marginalised communities (the minoritised majority of the world) online. Anasuya traces a direct line from the telegraph networks of the British Empire to today’s Big Tech monopolies. But this is not just a story of extraction. Anasuya shares what it looks like when voices from the margins reimagine technology. From building sovereign language models in Bangla, Urdu and Hindi, to transforming Wikipedia so that women are no longer invisible. The episode opens with Sanam and Kavita reflecting on the Iran ceasefire, the extraordinary Lego memes coming out of Iran, and what it means when the world is surprised that Iranians have both sophisticated technology and…
Sponsors
ICAN International Civil Society Action Network
More episodes of If You Were In Charge
- Guest Episode: Disrupting Peace
- Farhana Yamin, Reetta Toivanen & Rana Dajani: Iran, Gaza Reax - Why Never Again Is Now
- Stefanie Fox: Not in Our Name - Jewish Anti-Zionism Amid an Expanding Iran War
- Maya & Nancy Yamout: The Cycle of Violence and Extremism
- Sanam on Pod Save The UK - "No Winston Churchill": is the special relationship over?
- Ben Cohen: The Ben & Jerry's Co-Founder Declares War on the Pentagon
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the If You Were In Charge podcast page.