The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s award-winning How to Fix the Internet is back for a sixth season.
Kate Bertash from the US Digital Defense Fund is the first guest of the new season, discussing how digital autonomy and bodily autonomy go hand-in-hand.
We all leave digital trails as we navigate the internet – records of what we searched for, what we bought, who we talked to, where we went or want to go in the real world – and those trails usually are owned by the big corporations behind the platforms we use.
But what if we valued our digital autonomy the way that we do our bodily autonomy? What if we reclaimed the right to go, read, see, do and be what we wish online as we try to do offline? Moreover, what if we saw digital autonomy and bodily autonomy as two sides of the same coin – inseparable?
Kate Bertash wants that digital autonomy for all of us, and she pursues it in many different ways – from teaching abortion providers and activists how to protect themselves online, to helping people stymie the myriad surveillance technologies that watch and follow us in our communities.
In this episode she talks about how creativity and community can align to centre people in the digital world and make us freer both online and offline.
Bertash directs the Digital Defense Fund, launched in 2017 to meet the abortion rights and bodily autonomy movements’ increased need for security and technology resources.
This team of organisers, engineers, designers, and practical support volunteers provides digital security evaluations, conducts staff training, maintains a library of go-to resources on reproductive justice and digital privacy, and builds software for abortion access, bodily autonomy, and pro-democracy organisations.
Bertash is also an anti-surveillance activist who created Adversarial Fashion, a line of clothing designed to trigger automated license plate readers, injecting junk data into the systems used to monitor and track civilians and their locations.
In conversation with EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn and Activism Director Jason Kelley, Bertash talked about why it’s important for local communities to collaboratively discuss and decide whether and how much they want to be surveilled, how the digital era has blurred the bright line between public and private spaces, and why we can’t surveil ourselves to safety.
They also discussed how DefCon – America’s biggest hacker conference – embodies the ideal that we don’t have to simply accept technology as it’s given to us, but instead can break, tinker with, and rebuild it to meet our needs. And they talked about why building community helps us move beyond hopelessness to build and disseminate technology that helps protects everyone’s privacy.
Other guests for this season include crypto and tech critic Molly White on why she’s inspired by Neopets and Wikipedia, Tor Project Executive Director Isa Fernandes on how free, open-source software can save the internet, and Harlo Holmes from the Freedom of the Press Foundation on the pitfalls of digital privacy nihilism.
You can listen to How to Fix the Internet on Apple and Spotify.
