Longing back for the remote control (that i never had)

For the fourth of our ongoing series of Open Future Sessions¹ we were joined by Renata Avila who gave a presentation on openness, Big Tech and capitalism for which she had provided us with the following teaser:

“YES! It is a bird, it is a plane, it is Big Tech! Together, we will reverse engineer the term and what it means when we discuss it. It is important to understand the power architecture and which ones are the truly blockers of an open future. And why”.

This turned out to be an extremely insightful presentation that kickstarted a discussion on how to measure the adverse affects technology companies have on “openness” where openness. At some point during the discussion Renata described the current situation as one in which “the remote control has been removed and now it is the system that feeds us”.

As someone who grew up without remote controls (and largely without television) it is a very strange idea that a remote control could might be a signifier of a healthy media diet.