Latest / Computer Says Maybe / Short: RightsGone? Why Zambia May Have Pulled the Plug on RightsCon
Transcript
- Alix: [00:00:00] Hey, friends. We wanted to share some thoughts on the sudden, pretty shocking cancellation of Rights Con by the Zambian government. You probably know a little bit about this drama. It doesn't portend a good next few years um, and I think we need to get ready and get information. For those of you who might not know what Rights Con is, just imagine 5,000 of your most earnest, wonderful people who do research and advocacy work to make the internet and digital technologies safe and free for everyone, everywhere. That's basically what Rights Con is. It's an annual convening where all of those people come together and it is both intellectually stimulating and exhausting. Um, really wonderful people from all over the world. It is probably the place where the highest concentration of all the people I know around the world [00:01:00] actually meet. So it's almost like a physical version of your global network showing up in a city somewhere in the world. My first Rights Con was in 2011 in San Francisco. There have been one pretty much every year. There have been some years where there haven't been Rights Cons for a variety of reasons, COVID, things like that. And every year, AccessNow, the organizers of RightsCon, they usually get some feedback. This is how you could make it more inclusive. This is how you could make it more global. And they have pushed the envelope every year to try and do those things. So this year, after an unsuccessful hosting in Costa Rica where immigration for African visa holders was really difficult, access to said, "You know what? Instead of trying to get Africans visas to a country somewhere else, let's host it in Africa." So they partnered with Zambia. Zambia agreed to host the conference. Everyone was like, "Oh my God, Lusaka is kind of hard to get to books these tickets in an environment where lots of people are losing funding and prepares for months." So we're talking hundreds of sessions with hours of preparation, [00:02:00] pitching, structuring, preparing papers, preparing presentations, preparing collaborations, preparing side meetings and dinners and happy hours and all kinds of things, thousands of people putting hundreds of hours of time into this event. And five days before we were all supposed to travel, the government of Zambia posts a kind of cryptic postponement of RightsCon. Turns out they hadn't notified AccessNow. Turns out that a negotiation ensued that I'm sure AccessNow fought bravely to potentially reverse the decision and ultimately RightsCon was canceled. I have some theories as to why it happened. Those feel less important, but I feel like that's kind of what people are tussling with right now is trying to understand that. So I'll share a couple of them. And then I'd love to talk a little bit about what I think this means for kind of where we're headed. So the couple of theories I've heard is one, that Zambia is in active negotiation with the US government to trade HIV health data for American companies getting priority access to critical minerals in Zambia. [00:03:00] That access to HIV health data also is connected to a close to a $400 million aid package to support healthcare provision for people with HIV and Zambia. It is an extremely transactional and disgusting negotiation happening that if you read about it, you will be grossed out, but it is really telling and probably politically important to understand the extent to which the US government is now transactionally leveraging foreign aid to extract from countries like Zambia, particularly on issues like critical minerals. So theory one is that the US essentially said, "Hey, as part of this negotiation, lots of stuff gets tossed around. Maybe you could just cancel this really annoying conference where lots of people are gonna complain about our friends like Elon Musk and have high expectations of American social media companies, which we just don't think really should matter or be allowed to convene." Also, there's a bunch of queer people that are gonna talk about politics and political things that this administration doesn't really like, so do us the favor and tell 5,000 people not to show up and [00:04:00] support your local economy. So that's theory one, is that the US did that. Second theory is that China did that. Zambia is currently in a negotiation with China around tariff negotiations related to critical minerals, which is hugely consequential for Zambia and economy and Zambia's relationship with China, which is increasingly competing with the US in terms of its foreign aid packages and just as transactional. Second theory is that China said, "Hey, those 4,000, 5,000 people, we don't really like what they have to say. They're always complaining about our our surveillance and our technology. Tell them just not to come to Lusaka. Thank you. Uh, goodbye." The third theory is that, again, lots of gay people, lots of queer people, lots of queer researchers and people working on queer issues because guests who is most affected by repressive digital rights policies, it is marginalized groups. So it turns out lots of the sessions, they got gay names in them. Um, there's lots of words and language that apparently maybe somebody from the government of Zambia looked into the [00:05:00] conference that they had agreed to allow to be hosted there and said, "Oh, actually, we think this is a problem and we want to cancel it because the themes in the statement they made don't align with national values, direct quote." So that's the third theory is basically it's an anti-gay move by an African government who didn't do their due diligence before agreeing to host Rights Con as a conference. Those are the three theories as to what led to the cancellation. I think that's kind of irrelevant. Like I think it's interesting and I do wanna know what happened because it does feel like such an extreme measure for a government to take. And I think that there is a lot we can learn about risk mitigation in the future and like maybe there are some things that could be done to make it less likely to happen and like knowing that, knowing what actually went down, I think maybe useful in some senses. But I think regardless of why they did it, it says something about what this space could look like moving forward. And there's a couple of things [00:06:00] that I'm thinking about three main ones. One is that the space for truly global conversations on politically critical issues is collapsing. The questions we need to ask and answer about the effect of technology on society, the rules we need to design collectively, the ways we need to engage in these issues could not be more important, could not be more complicated and could not be more global, and that space is only going to get more important. And I think what this tells us is that space is gonna be even less available to us. The second thing I think it tells us is that we've entered a new era of hard line diplomacy where nation states are so much more comfortable throwing their weight around in a way that you just wouldn't have seen even a few years ago. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for the end of US Hegemony. I don't like bullies. I think the US has used its leverage in ways that are really disturbing, sometimes hard to decipher in this space historically, but I don't think [00:07:00] having more bullies on the block is gonna make anything better. And in fact, I think it makes everything feel more precarious and more under threat. And I think we're gonna see more of this explicit overt steps taken by nation states to undermine people that are working in good faith to build public interest, global technologies. Like I think that's just gonna get worse. And I don't think that's gonna be good. The third part of this is that the global network of people who have over the last 15 years built relationships, built trust, built collaborations, built quality understanding of what our digital world is even, have learned so many things together about what we need to build for the future. That community is under threat in a way that I don't even think I had realized until this week how much worse it has gotten. Two years ago, it was that they lost a lot of their funding. A year ago, it's that the US government is openly suing certain organizations for this work. You have [00:08:00] governments that used to nominally be, at least pretending to be the good guys, actually attacking organizations that historically they would have at least pretended to be values aligned with. And to me, that shift from a network of people that were working kind of elegantly around national interests and able to do some things with governments and kind of move through spaces and get access to power and money, that era feels over. It feels like these nation states are now adversaries through and through. It says to me that this global network, as it has become even more precious to the future of the global internet and technology and all of our safety and freedom online, as it has become more important, it's also become more under threat. And I think that trend will continue. It's gonna be important for more people who are less directly involved in this kind of work to understand it so that they can support it and they can be more vocal about it. If you are not someone who was going to [00:09:00] RiotsCon and are just interested in tech politics questions and know that this stuff matters, finding organizations in this orbit to support better understanding what these organizations are trying to do, getting a little bit more into the weeds in some of these things, I think the more people in more general public areas that understand the stakes and understand the issues, I think it makes it a lot harder to attack this group of people who have been kind of out on a limb doing this work at great cost to themselves for a really long time. And I don't think that is gonna last us much longer. The time is now to feel more solidarity with those organizations and trying to defend the defenders. That's the sort of third piece of this is that I'm just worried about the network of people that work on these issues, particularly those that come from global majority countries and maybe their home environments are even more oppressive than Zambia. It's all relative, but it does feel like there's never been a more critical juncture to find ways to support this space. Personally, RightsCon as a community, as a space, has been critical to the way I've evolved in my understanding of these issues. It's the oasis I have [00:10:00] gone to and returned to to meet people, understand things, connect with others that get it, like deeply, deeply get it, and are working in ways that I find really inspiring and oftentimes working in conditions that I can't even really imagine. Like I can respect the bravery, but like the work that's done is just really incredible. And I am so disappointed that this has happened and I can only imagine how much more devastating this is for people that have fewer resources, have spent more time trying to put something together for next week. I was really excited. We were gonna host a live show with lots of African voices who are working on and in Africa on digital policy and digital rights issues. That's obviously not gonna happen.That's obviously kind of small potatoes in the context of I think what a lot of other people are experiencing. I just wanna say to AccessNow who organizes Rights Con, less do you worry that people are thinking in the same way maybe they've thought about in past Rights Cons where they're like, "Ugh, why didn't they do it like this? Um, no one is thinking that [00:11:00] everyone has your back. Everyone appreciates that this was an attempt to bring a global conversation to Africa in Africa and that there was always gonna be a little bit of risk in that this all falls at the feet of Zambia, who I realized maybe that government is in really horrific positions where global powers are leveraging them and their policy opportunities and possibilities in a way that's really gross and transactional. I get all of that, but this falls at the feet of the Zambian government for making a choice like this to decide to host something like this and to pull the rug out at the very last minute. And access now, you know, I know I'm not a lawyer, but I feel like you should sue them because this is completely unacceptable and there needs to be some consequences. And to everybody else who's scrambling, I wish you nothing but the most generous refund policies from all of the airlines where you're trying to get money back from. And I hope that the work that was prepared for next week sees the light of day. And I think if there's anything that we can do as an organization to platform the voices, the projects, [00:12:00] the materials that were gonna be shared next week, do let us know. We're really open to figuring out a way that we can be helpful. There's just like a lot of brilliance that no one is gonna see because even though there was all this preparation, it's just not gonna happen. So I'm so sorry for all the people that were affected and I hope it's different. I hope it changes. I hope this is the, the, the bottom and that everything from here is gonna be up. I, I'm not confident that's the case, but I couldn't imagine a better community to be fighting alongside. All right. So for those of you who may miss out on the opportunity to get some brain food, um, from WrightsCon, there's a couple of folks we've been interviewing as part of our Computer Says Kill series who I presumed were gonna be at Rights Con or I was looking forward to running into them, and the series is really focused on going deep on the people and systems and decisions that have led to the cavalier introduction of immature AI technologies into weapons of war and into the battlefield, and we're trying to take a [00:13:00] really deep systematic look at how we got here and what it means for where we might go next. So do check out the series, um, next episode comes out on Friday. Thanks to Georgia Iacovou, Sarah Myles, Kushal Dev, Zoe Trout, Marion Wellington, and Van Newman who helped put the show together.