Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

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The Internet once promised to be a place of extraordinary freedom beyond the control of money or politics, but today corporations and platforms exercise more control over our ability to access information and share knowledge to a greater extent than any state. In Silicon Values, leading campaigner Jillian York, looks at how our rights have become increasingly undermined by the major corporations desire to harvest our personal data and turn it into profit. She also looks at how governments have used the same technology to monitor citizens and threatened our ability to communicate. As a result our daily lives, and private thoughts, are being policed in an unprecedented manner. Who decides the difference between political debate and hate speech How does this impact on our identity, our ability to create communities and to protest Who regulates the censors In response to this threat to our democracy, York proposes a user-powered movement against the platforms that demands change and a new form of ownership over our own data.

Reviews

one of the leading scholars on Internet control and censorship. * Boston Globe *
The Internet has never been the utopia of free and equal expression its ideologues would have us believe it is. Jillian York's vivid reportage shows us that the power to determine who gets to use it to speak, and under what circumstances, is now more concentrated - and less accountable - than ever before. -- Adam Greenfield, author of Radical Technologies
For years, Jillian York has been at the forefront of defending freedom of expression online. Her new book unpacks how Silicon Valley corporations have gained more control over speech than the most ambitious of governments and how ill-prepared they often are to use that power in ways that are just and fair. Entertaining, deeply informative and often very personal, Jillian's journey into the world of online speech reflects on deep questions about how we should treat one another and who makes rules for societies in our digital world. -- Ethan Zuckerman, Associate Professor, UMass Amherst and co-founder Global Voices
Jillian C. York gives us a personal, relevant, and accessible reflection on how our world has become governed by Silicon Valley. She takes us on an enjoyable journey from San Francisco to Tunis to Cairo to Berlin to trace the change from the early belief in maximizing free speech shared by the big tech platforms and we, the people, alike to the increasing policies of surveillance and control exercised by the platforms (and encouraged by most governments) that makes the struggle for free expression a much more demanding battle. Her conclusions offer hope and guidance as to what we need to do, not just for the sake of free speech but for the freedom to shape our very identity and agency." -- Rasha Abdulla, Professor of Mass Communication at The American University in Cairo, and author of The Internet in the Arab World: Egypt and Beyond.
An incisive and compelling read that places Silicon Valley'splatforms and policies in a global context. York knows this terrain intimately,and she takes us to the key battlegrounds that have shaped content moderation,internet governance, and the political economies of online expression. -- Kate Crawford, author of Atlas of AI
[Silicon Values] casts a wide-enough net over relevant topics and examples to be richly informative, while still managing to be straightforward in its style. York offers a solid entry point for those who have been following ongoing issues relating to the intersection of politics and technology." -- Jesse A. Lambertson * Library Journal *

Author Bio

Jillian C. York is Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She leads Onlinecensorship.org. She is a fellow at the Centre for Internet & Human Rights in Berlin and currently serves on the IFEX Council, the Open Tech Fund Advisory Council, and on the advisory board of SMEX. She is also a founding member of the feminist collective, Deep Lab. She was named by Foreign Policy as one of the top 100 intellectuals on social media. Her writing has been featured in Motherboard, Buzzfeed, the Guardian, Quartz, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, among others. She is also a regular speaker at global events