[laughs] Thank you so much. Bye.

Thank you, again. I think that people will be interested in this. Certainly, this is going to help with our research.

Absolutely. That’s fantastic. Like I said, I think that’s a really inspiring place to end. Thank you so much. This was fantastic and eye opening, as I expected. Some of these things, hopefully we can follow up further with.

Wow.

They’re actually asking people to do huge amounts of learning in a short amount of time, and they’ve been successful at it. What can we learn from a different ethical framework from that?

I would not necessarily want us to learn from Apple in terms of their ethics, but I would ask, "What can we learn about actual...from capitalism that they’ve actually had this kind of pervasive lifelong learning?"

What you saw was that actually if you make into something usable and fun, people, for both good and bad, will learn to use it. Yet, I still think, in many ways, we teach some of our more radical civic education in a traditional way. "Let’s have people in classrooms ...

20 years ago, you probably remember these conversations, people forget this, but one of the main arguments against some of this smart technology and mobile technology is that we can do it. We can make the processors, we can do it, but how are people going to learn to use ...

I think that also touches on another of the mobile aspects that we really are interested...it’d be good to also follow up some of this conversation. There’s so many aspects of the work that you’re doing and others are doing.

What does that show about the dangers of some of this mobile organizing and these types of things, and what we need to do to look beyond immediate political struggles to, actually, what kinds of radical cultures are we creating?

I do think that I found it interesting. We didn’t get to talk about it in this conversation, about this type of...If we’re being very literal, app culture. How does app culture, which, I think, started, in many ways, as something that was more co creating, become more consumptive?

People from users, consumers, the co developers and co creators. That’s a move that, I think, goes beyond just saying, "We’re against austerity," for instance, or, "We’re for this political party as opposed to that political party."

I think that was a lot of what we were looking at. One of the interesting points that it’s be worth following up on as we progress is, also, this relationship between traditional types of social movement politics, which certainly operates on its own, and some of the things you’re ...

Absolutely.

I think, in the broader sense, you really hit perfectly, which is, how do you create mobile safe spaces that actually allow for people to make more sustained connections with each other that are radical about possibilities, as opposed to just resistance?

We were interested in that in terms of then saying, what does this mean for "mobile organizing"? I think the book project we’re working on, which we should have out next year, is we saw this as a type of guerilla democracy in terms of...In this interesting way of being ...

What does that mean? How do we create ones that are resilient, ones that have interesting cultures, ones that don’t try to apply particular past paradigms onto them but still, that they can draw from?

I think the third was the ideas of resilient mobile communities. One of the aspects that I found most problematic is if you look at a lot of the discussions around community, it’s still very, I would say, 20th century location based. People are actually forming more than just communications. ...

I think the second is the theoretical point about going from mobile neoliberalism or mobile technologies in the sense of flexibilities and the recursive aspects which we see within neoliberalism and which we see in dominant hegemonic ideologies, which being flexible and adaptive enough to operate and seeing that, then, ...

I think that’s a really good question. We chose it for three particular reasons. One is because we did see mobile technologies, as you say, dominate some of these discussions. In fact, they’re quite partial in what they can achieve. We were interested in why mobile phones and mobile technologies ...

Those were the main things that we were interested in. Was there anything that you wanted to follow up on or discuss?

I think that’s a very inspiring, powerful place. Like I said, a radically pragmatic place to end.

[laughs]

What are some of the ways in which do you think we should begin thinking about this as a kind of digital democratic radical community?

Others have said you have to create space anywhere that you can. We’re not at a place where we can easily pick and choose what opportunities we take or not. They said you have to create any opportunities you can.

I know, for instance, many people would find the Trump Administration, for instance, I said. We’re really interested in some of the things would you like to comment that a lot of people would say no, because even if I like this particular aspect, the discourses in general that you’re ...

I know that there are serious debates, and I imagine one that you’ve thought about ethically, about how much is one willing and on what basis is one willing to work with different government regimes?

That goes to we can open up any questions that you may have we talk about these types of communities and these types of really dynamic and supportive culture. We are living in an age in which a lot of our politics isn’t so supportive like that.

How do we create that narrative that this is a do it yourself, anyone can do this, this is democratic in its most pure sense? Then educational ways of thinking and agendas that say we have to combine digital education with civic education from a very young age.

One of the critical questions is, what kinds of civic education do we need to be doing with this digital civic education? Ones that allow us to go beyond, if I can again be so bold, what I think is a very liberal capitalist notion of this individual genius, which ...

This brings to the forefront a really serious question about the fact that governments across the ideological spectrum are realizing that we need to redo education, particularly among young people, particularly even reeducating some older around coding and these types of things to make them more accessible language and use.

Some of the things that have come, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, she dropped out of school because she was so smart. It’s like, "No, I dropped out of school because I felt the information was already there and anyone can do this."

When I see articles about Audrey Tang, genius coder who’s now been able to do this. What you actually say is anyone can do this.

...is the fact that sometimes I see a bit of a disjuncture between the narratives that emerge around these, particularly around people like yourself, and what is actually being said.

One of the aspects of this is, if I again can be a bit provocative...

Absolutely. That goes into my last question. I think you’re absolutely right. One of the projects that we’d like to do on the back of this book is create a global consortium that does create these kinds of temporal and spatial safe places.

How do you actually begin processes of bringing those together in open dialogue and discussions, and also saying that we’re not telling you how to, what your culture should be, but we do want to actually create mobile spaces for sharing information and changing, like you said, culture so that ...

Then you have really strong, often subversive hacker organizations that you sort of know and sort of don’t know. Then, like you said, you have a lot of gov tech and civ tech type of organizations.

We mention a lot of the fact that there’s a lot of different types of communities, from, I would say, things that are happening like in Barcelona and parts of Europe, which is very much these urban labs. Then you have within, I would say, business schools, sometimes innovation hubs, ...

That’s a really interesting point. That takes then to...I have a couple of more questions, if that’s all right.

That’s why I asked.

I want to say, very much of this, this has always been a bottom up movement. You create these local technological communities. I’m wondering, for yourself, how do you balance those things between having anti status quo agenda that does want a different type of world, with also recognizing that ...

I know that there is a bit of a discussion about how anti capitalist, for instance, you should be, and about are we, when we’re looking at things like innovation hubs, which are very interesting, are we just working around the edges, so to speak?

That is a really interesting point as well, about what is the relationship between systematic change and the experimentation that is really implicit within any system, within itself.

I’m wondering how we move beyond traditional realms of democracy to think about digital democratization more widely.

You saw in the US, for instance, the use of Facebook for teachers’ strikes. That was a little bit of a surprise to a lot of people working in this realm, particularly within even activist communities like Occupy. Then people working in good faith in the government, they say, "Oh, ...

I’m wondering how do we begin to think about this as more than just helping governments or working within a traditional political frame, and think about we can democratize workplaces, we can democratize the gig economy, these types of things, because that has been a difficult link. What you’ve then ...

I want to talk a little bit about when we think about democracy and moving it beyond traditional politics. One of the interesting things about your career, careers may be a big word, but trajectory is that, like you said, representative democracy was not where you started. You definitely, I ...

No, that’s a really interesting thing about how we don’t do this enough, recognizing the continuous political democratization within digital and computerization in general.

I’m wondering if we could talk a little bit about how this is ideological in a sense of being more than just tools, but also showing people that they can have democratic control over technologies and its use.