Podcasts about things may set us free

  Bio Philip N. Howard (@pnhoward) the Director of the Oxford Internet Institute and a statutory Professor of Internet Studies at Balliol College at the University of Oxford. Howard investigates the impact of digital media on political life around the world, and he is a frequent commentator on global media and political affairs. Howard’s research has demonstrated how new information technologies are used in both civic engagement and social control in countries around the world. His projects on digital activism, computational propaganda, and modern governance have been supported by the European Research Council, National Science Foundation, US Institutes of Peace, and Intel’s People and Practices Group. He has published nine books and over 140 academic articles, book chapters, conference papers, and commentary essays on information technology, international affairs and public life. His articles examine the role of new information and communication technologies in politics and social development, and he has published in peer review journals such as the American Behavioral Scientist, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and The Journal of Communication. His first book on information technology and elections in the United States is called New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). It is one of the few books to ever win simultaneous “best book” prizes from the professional associations of multiple disciplines, with awards from the American Political Science Association, the American Sociological Association, and the International Communication Association. His authored books include The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010), Castells and the Media (London, UK: Polity, 2011), Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012, with Muzammil Hussain), and Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). He has edited Society Online: The Internet in Context (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004, with Steve Jones), the Handbook of Internet Politics (London, UK: Routledge, 2008, with Andrew Chadwick), State Power 2.0: Authoritarian Entrenchment and Political Engagement Worldwide (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013, with Muzammil Hussain) and Computational Propaganda: Political Parties, Politicians and Manipulation on Social Media (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018, with Samuel Woolley). Howard has had senior teaching, research, and administrative appointments at universities around the world. He has been on the teaching faculty at the Central European University, Columbia University, Northwestern University, the University of Oslo, and the University of Washington. He has had fellowship appointments at the Pew Internet & American Life Project in Washington D.C., the Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research at the London School of Economics, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. From 2013-15 he helped design and launch a new School of Public Policy at Central European University in Budapest, where he was the school’s first Founding Professor and Director of the Center for Media, Data and Society.  He currently serves as Director of the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, the leading center of research and teaching on technology and society. Howard’s research and commentary writing has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, and many international media outlets. He was awarded the National Democratic Institute’s 2018 “Democracy Prize” and Foreign Policy magazine named him a “Global Thinker” for pioneering the social science of fake news production. His B.A. is in political science from Innis College at the University of Toronto, his M.Sc. is in economics from the London School of Economics, and his Ph.D. is in sociology from Northwestern University. His website is philhoward.org. Resources Philip Howard, Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives (2020)

Panel 1: Geo(politics) Chair: Professor David Runciman (POLIS, Cambridge) Professor Ross Anderson (Computer Lab, Cambridge) Dr Bill Janeway (Pembroke College and Warburg Pincus) Professor John Naughton (CRASSH, Cambridge) In 2016 Philip Howard, now Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford and a leading scholar on the impact of the Internet on politics, published Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up in which he tried to assess what the long-term implications of this hyper-connected network might be. Among these possible implications, he noted, are: * The IoT is likely to bring a special kind of stability to global politics (analogous to the uneasy stand-off of the Cold War) * The new world order would be characterised by a pact between big tech firms and governments * Governments may have a decreasing capacity to govern the IoT while corporate (and also bad) actors will become more powerful in the hyper-connected world that the technology will create * The IoT will generate remarkable opportunities for society but the security and privacy risks that it could create will also pose formidable problems for society * The IoT looks like an unstoppable juggernaut, so we should learn from our experience with earlier incarnations of the Internet to try and ensure that history does not repeat itself Pax Technica is an ambitious and far-reaching book, and like all such volumes, it raises almost as many questions — about international and national politics, governance, security and privacy — as it answers. The Technology and Democracy project at CRASSH seeks to use the book as a jumping-off point for exploring some of these questions. We will do this in a major one-day public event in Cambridge on 24 November 2017, featuring Professor Howard and invited experts from a number of relevant disciplines. The event will open with a keynote address, after which three panels of invited experts will discuss specific implications of a hyper-connected world. This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

Panel 2: Security Chair: Professor John Naughton (CRASSH, Cambridge) Dr Chris Doran (Director of Research Collaborations, ARM) Professor Jon Crowcroft (Computer Lab, Cambridge) In 2016 Philip Howard, now Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford and a leading scholar on the impact of the Internet on politics, published Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up in which he tried to assess what the long-term implications of this hyper-connected network might be. Among these possible implications, he noted, are: * The IoT is likely to bring a special kind of stability to global politics (analogous to the uneasy stand-off of the Cold War) * The new world order would be characterised by a pact between big tech firms and governments * Governments may have a decreasing capacity to govern the IoT while corporate (and also bad) actors will become more powerful in the hyper-connected world that the technology will create * The IoT will generate remarkable opportunities for society but the security and privacy risks that it could create will also pose formidable problems for society * The IoT looks like an unstoppable juggernaut, so we should learn from our experience with earlier incarnations of the Internet to try and ensure that history does not repeat itself Pax Technica is an ambitious and far-reaching book, and like all such volumes, it raises almost as many questions — about international and national politics, governance, security and privacy — as it answers. The Technology and Democracy project at CRASSH seeks to use the book as a jumping-off point for exploring some of these questions. We will do this in a major one-day public event in Cambridge on 24 November 2017, featuring Professor Howard and invited experts from a number of relevant disciplines. The event will open with a keynote address, after which three panels of invited experts will discuss specific implications of a hyper-connected world. This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

Panel 3: Privacy Chair: Dr Daniel Wilson (CRASSH, Cambridge) Dr Nóra Ní Loideain (Director, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London) Dr Anil Madhavapeddy (Computer Lab, Cambridge) In 2016 Philip Howard, now Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford and a leading scholar on the impact of the Internet on politics, published Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up in which he tried to assess what the long-term implications of this hyper-connected network might be. Among these possible implications, he noted, are: * The IoT is likely to bring a special kind of stability to global politics (analogous to the uneasy stand-off of the Cold War) * The new world order would be characterised by a pact between big tech firms and governments * Governments may have a decreasing capacity to govern the IoT while corporate (and also bad) actors will become more powerful in the hyper-connected world that the technology will create * The IoT will generate remarkable opportunities for society but the security and privacy risks that it could create will also pose formidable problems for society * The IoT looks like an unstoppable juggernaut, so we should learn from our experience with earlier incarnations of the Internet to try and ensure that history does not repeat itself Pax Technica is an ambitious and far-reaching book, and like all such volumes, it raises almost as many questions — about international and national politics, governance, security and privacy — as it answers. The Technology and Democracy project at CRASSH seeks to use the book as a jumping-off point for exploring some of these questions. We will do this in a major one-day public event in Cambridge on 24 November 2017, featuring Professor Howard and invited experts from a number of relevant disciplines. The event will open with a keynote address, after which three panels of invited experts will discuss specific implications of a hyper-connected world. This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

‘Pax Technica’ Keynote Address: Professor Philip Howard (Oxford) In 2016 Philip Howard, now Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford and a leading scholar on the impact of the Internet on politics, published Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up in which he tried to assess what the long-term implications of this hyper-connected network might be. Among these possible implications, he noted, are: * The IoT is likely to bring a special kind of stability to global politics (analogous to the uneasy stand-off of the Cold War) * The new world order would be characterised by a pact between big tech firms and governments * Governments may have a decreasing capacity to govern the IoT while corporate (and also bad) actors will become more powerful in the hyper-connected world that the technology will create * The IoT will generate remarkable opportunities for society but the security and privacy risks that it could create will also pose formidable problems for society * The IoT looks like an unstoppable juggernaut, so we should learn from our experience with earlier incarnations of the Internet to try and ensure that history does not repeat itself Pax Technica is an ambitious and far-reaching book, and like all such volumes, it raises almost as many questions — about international and national politics, governance, security and privacy — as it answers. The Technology and Democracy project at CRASSH seeks to use the book as a jumping-off point for exploring some of these questions. We will do this in a major one-day public event in Cambridge on 24 November 2017, featuring Professor Howard and invited experts from a number of relevant disciplines. The event will open with a keynote address, after which three panels of invited experts will discuss specific implications of a hyper-connected world. This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

ECFR’s director Mark Leonard talks with ECFR's policy fellows Kadri Liik and Julien Barnes-Dacey about Trump's air strikes on Syria and what they mean for the other actors involved. The podcast was recorded over the phone on 7th April 2017. Bookshelf: Anton Shekhovtsov, Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir Maxine David, National Perspectives on Russia Philippe Sands, East West Street Philipp Howard, Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up Picture: U.S. Navy/ Ford Williams

The “Internet of Things” (IoT) is the expanding network of everyday objects—you can expect some 35 billion connected devices by 2020. The internet won’t be about your mobile phone or laptop anymore, it will be dominated by communication between devices, chips scattered over the natural world, and sensors embedded in our bodies. Should we fear or welcome the next internet? In this session at the Disruptive Innovation Festival, Phil Howard, author of “Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up”, and Sophie Hackford from Wired Consulting, will debate the value of the IoT and the privacy concerns that arise. They will discuss how perfect behavioural data creates new opportunities for public conversation, community building, and political power, and you will have an opportunity to put questions to them.