Who Governs the Machine?
Citation: Katina Michael, “Who Governs the Machine? Technology, power, and the fight for democratic control”, Gender, Technology & Power Conference 2025, https://gentechpower2025.uw.edu.pl/katina-michael-2/
Keynote Presentation: Who Governs the Machine? Technology, power, and the fight for democratic control
Conference: Gender, Technology & Power Conference 2025
Date: 4 September 2025
Web Site: https://gentechpower2025.uw.edu.pl/katina-michael-2/
This presentation explores the intersections of “technology and power” through the philosophical and political writings of Simone Weil (1909-1943), Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), and Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012), and extends the analysis to contemporary questions of gender, artificial intelligence (AI), and governance through the work of Jeremy Pitt (1963- ). Simone Weil’s reflections on force, obedience, and the mechanization of the human soul lay a foundational critique of how technological systems transform human agency into passive submission, eroding ethical responsibility (Cain and Kent, 2025). Her concept of “gravity” as a metaphor for the mechanical compulsion of modern life (money, technology, and power as an end goal) reveals particularly how technological regimes often strip individuals of interior freedom and render them subjects of impersonal power (Maden, 2025). The gravity of “gravity” is in its downward pull, in effect, a force of evil to where the human soul might despair and feel like it is perpetually being crushed; like a ‘dead man walking’ (Weil, 1952; Harnack, 2022). This is of course in opposition to the force that allows one to flourish, described by Weil as being in a state of “grace” toward spiritual uplift, freedom, and liberation (Pirruccello, 1997).
Hannah Arendt, while equally concerned with the dehumanizing tendencies of modern systems, distinguishes sharply between labor, work, and action in her analysis of the vita activa (Bankston, 2022; Stanford, 2024). She views technology as both an enabler and destroyer of the human condition. In The Human Condition, Arendt (1958) warns against the rise of automation and instrumental reason, which threaten political action and plurality by replacing judgment with calculability. While Weil emphasizes interior moral collapse, Arendt focuses on the political loss of “natality”—the human capacity to begin anew in speech and action (Vatter, 2006). Arendt argues that the capacity to begin something new is a fundamental aspect of human freedom; that, by being born, individuals are not simply products of their past or predetermined by their circumstances, but rather possess the potential to act, to make choices, and to create something new in the world. In other words, while humans remain human, they will always possess agency (Herzog, 2021). Elinor Ostrom’s work offers a contrast to the often pessimistic readings of technological power found in Weil and Arendt.
In Governing the Commons, Ostrom (1990) empirically demonstrates how communities can construct sustainable, participatory institutions to manage shared technological and ecological resources. Her design principles counteract the top-down imposition of technical control with bottom-up rule-making, accountability, and iterative feedback—embodying a distributed form of power that reconnects technological governance with democratic legitimacy (Ostrom, 1994). Ostrom’s transdisciplinary approach meant that she was able to connect with diverse stakeholders in the ecosystem, observing them at the grassroots, and learning how they cooperated toward positive outcomes (Ostrom, 2009). For Ostrom, the adoption of new technology may not have been the central focus of her research, but like Arendt, she acknowledged the role of technology as part of the broader institutional and governance systems. Ostrom believed that technology could support institutions by (1) monitoring institutions and their practices; (2) openly sharing information to effectively manage resources; (3) allowing local and regional units to better coordinate; (4) enabling participation and transparency through platforms; and (5) infrastructure that would allow for the creation of feedback loops and adaptive learning (Ostrom, 2010).
This presentation concludes by proposing that democratic approaches—grounded in deliberation, pluralism, and institutional reflexivity—are essential to displacing the concentration of technological power and restoring human dignity across gender and other social categories (i.e., intersectionality) (UN Women, 2025; UNESCO, 2024). By tracing a philosophical arc from Weil’s ethics, through Arendt’s politics, to Ostrom’s institutions and Pitt’s (2020) commitment to socio-techno-ecological design, this presentation argues for a new synthesis in which technology serves collective autonomy rather than domination. As Arendt summated in one interview, “Action is a “WE” and not an “I”” (Arendt, 1973; Arendt, 2013), and this entirely relevant today in the context of public interest technology (Pitt et al., 2021b; Abbas et al., 2021a; Abbas et al., 2021b).
Presentation Transcript
Introduction
Chair (Agnieszka): I would like to welcome Katina Michael, our keynote for today. I don't want to keep her waiting, and as we have her close collaborator here, I would ask Jeremy Pitt to introduce her. Thank you.
Jeremy Pitt: Good morning, everybody. On Tuesday evening Agnieszka asked if I would do her a favour, and I said yes, of course — it's Agnieszka, I'd do anything for Agnieszka. And then she said, "I'd like you to introduce Katina." And I said, "That's not a favour, that's a privilege."
So it is my real honour to stand here and introduce Katina for you this morning. The headline is that Katina is a professor at Arizona State University, in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society. But that's just the headline figure. Underneath it all, Katina has been at the forefront of many significant works. She has been critiquing the impact of technology on society for as long as I've known her. She's one of the first people to really take apart implant technology, who recognised the rise of the surveillance society. And of course it's not just critique — she's very constructive as well. This is why she's one of the pioneering proponents of public interest technology, which might have an acronym, PIT, with which I'm sympathetic.
So Katina is kind of like the Delphic Oracle — except she's less cryptic, much more profound, much more concise, and she really tells you how it is. For as long as I've known her she has been one of the most insightful, influential and analytic, and yet constructive and extremely kind, people and researchers. So it is my honour, my pleasure and my privilege to say to Katina this morning: the floor is yours.
Keynote
Katina Michael: Thank you, Jeremy, for those kind words of introduction, and Agnieszka for the invitation to keynote. I'm sorry, folks, that I'm not there in the flesh. Both Jeremy and Agnieszka know how much I was looking forward to visiting Poland for the first time. But I think I took the instructions literally: somebody said "break a leg," and instead I broke a hand. So I'm still in Australia and need to deliver this long distance. I've tried my best, with one hand and perhaps the aid of PowerPoint — which I never thought I'd say, but PowerPoint has given me a hand this time. Excuse the pun.
Now to the seriousness of the keynote, and the topic that underpins this beautiful conference that has been put together and that I urge should happen again and again and again. The question of who governs the machine is the question, I think.
Today I want to explore that critical question, which affects us all. We're living in an age where technology increasingly shapes our daily lives, our opportunities and our freedoms. But who's really in control? That's the question most people ask. Through the lens of five remarkable thinkers spanning nearly a century, I'll argue that we need democratic approaches to technology governance, especially when it comes to gender equity and AI.
The four questions you see on the display frame our discussion today. We know that technology isn't neutral: it embodies the values, the biases and the power structures of those who create it. When we look at AI systems discriminating against women in hiring, in lending, in healthcare, we're seeing the manifestation of deeper questions about who gets to shape our technological future, and whether our current approach is actually sustainable.
So the four questions we are looking at are: Who controls technology in our society? How does technological power intersect with gender? Can we reclaim democratic oversight of AI systems? And what are the systemic limits to current technological paradigms?
Four thinkers
On our philosophical journey we are going to look at four brilliant women.
Simone Weil, who died very young, a philosopher born in France. Hannah Arendt, who studied philosophy but denied philosophy thereafter, calling herself a political theorist — and in many people's eyes also a historian. Donella Meadows, an environmental scientist very well known for systems thinking. And the great Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist, because UCLA wouldn't admit her into an economics degree for her higher research. In fact she ended up in a department that had only four women doing their PhDs at the time, and it had been years since a woman had been admitted. Of course, she had the last laugh as the Nobel Prize winner in 2009 — and the great joy for me is that I was connected only one step from her, as Professor Jeremy Pitt did meet her in the flesh. I'm positive that if Professor Ostrom were alive today, even though she would have been advanced in age, Professor Pitt and Professor Ostrom would be researching together.
Interestingly, none of these four women had children, but in many different ways there were people in their sphere who were their children. Elinor Ostrom, of course, ran the Workshop with Vincent Ostrom. Vincent was her postgraduate supervisor — at least one of four. She was so interdisciplinary that she needed an engineer, a sociologist, a political scientist and an economist to help her through her PhD. But Vincent, fourteen years her senior, became the person she was preoccupied with, both as her marriage partner and in collaboration. Elinor describes him as the real McCoy. He wanted to teach game theory, for example, and many other aspects of natural systems, because he loved doing it — he was the one, she said in many of her interviews. Their relationship was quite amazing. When she was away on field trips, as they advanced in age, she would always call back to the Workshop students to say, "Are you looking after Vincent well enough?"
In the case of Hannah Arendt, her well-known supervisors were Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. Amazingly — and we'll hear more about this — she became a refugee from her home country, Germany, fleeing the Holocaust and much more. And Simone Weil even put her own life on the line, going out to become part of an army, given that she believed so much in the cause of freedom. Donella Meadows also died quite young, not as young as Simone Weil, but meningitis got her probably at the peak of her career. She was there estimating how systems, given finite resources in the world, might buckle.
But there is one other person here, Jeremy Pitt, who brings all of these different things together. Perhaps not overtly in the case of Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt, but he has spoken to me in years gone by of Simone Weil.
In the context of this particular presentation, we'll be looking at Simone Weil's notions of force, obedience and the mechanisation of the soul, and the juxtaposition of gravity and grace. With respect to Hannah Arendt, we'll look at the concepts of labour, work and action — and for her, action was the most important of these three principles, because it allowed for political engagement — and at this notion of human natality. Think about what "natal" means. And in the case of Hannah Arendt, the importance of spontaneity, which she spoke about in many works, but especially The Human Condition.
With respect to Donella Meadows, of course the systems thinker, we have these notions of boundaries — boundaries explored by Elinor Ostrom thereafter. I have tried to find out whether Donella Meadows knew Elinor Ostrom, and I can't conclusively determine that. They may even have clashed on a number of points, as Donella Meadows looked at population explosions as well as finite resources that, if not carefully conserved and preserved, may well become so finite that they're eliminated. At the same time, Elinor Ostrom was a little more positive in her assessment, especially with this notion of common pool resources and commons governance, and the importance of institutional design, particularly with an emphasis on polycentricity and self-organised systems.
Of course, it took Jeremy Pitt to bring different aspects of these works together, and perhaps he is the only one who actually travails the micro, the meso and the macro through different types of thinking. We'll come to that as we get on in the presentation. But for Jeremy's part, it's the contemporary applications to AI and notions of computational justice — with a belief in socio-technical-ecological systems. That emphasis on the ecological is also found in the works of Donella Meadows and Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom, of course, is famous for her work on forests, irrigation, fisheries, farming, water catchments, water basins, policing and so many other cases that she was able to observe and write about, in order to win her Nobel Prize along with Oliver Williamson.
Simone Weil: gravity and grace
We begin with the weight of gravity.
This is a book, Gravity and Grace, brought together by Gustave Thibon. These were notes, also available as audiobooks. It may take you between four and six hours to get through. It's a heavy piece of work, and very personal.
Weil uses this metaphor of gravity for mechanical compulsion. She talks about money, technology and power as downward forces — and of course these are the things that drive our world today. She talks about the erosion of interior freedom and of ethical responsibility towards one another in particular, and towards the planet. She talks about how technology transforms human agency into passive submission. At times we may become automatons in this way.
In a nutshell, she describes how modern technology pulls us downward, away from human flourishing and towards mechanical obedience. We become ones and zeros. She saw firsthand, because she worked in factories, how these systems — bureaucratic structures and technological regimes — strip individuals of their interior freedom, turning them into what I call dead men walking.
She has this suspicion about hierarchies, as Elinor Ostrom did when she studied large police command areas and called them heavily bureaucratic.
But Weil didn't see this as inevitable, that gravity was it. Against the force of gravity she posed grace: the human capacity for spiritual uplift, freedom and ethical action. This notion of action is what intersects with Hannah Arendt's notion of action. Grace is an upward movement toward freedom. You can break free from gravity. It's for the preservation of human dignity. We can look at this in the self, and ethical action remains possible within whatever context you are in — no matter what has befallen you, no matter what has happened in the past. So there is a glimmer of hope, even though gravity is the overarching force that we are fighting against, towards the potential to enhance human flourishing, care, empathy, love and all those things that we know are against conflict and against harm.
Here is the tension in a diagrammatic way: gravity in the first triptych — Simone Weil's notion of fighting the enemy, fighting the machine, the system, technological power, the evil, the negative forces — towards that third triptych, in a state of grace. This middle triptych is quite confrontational.
I didn't believe, in fact, that Simone Weil as a philosopher would go from the thinking to the doing. She was in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, where she joined an anarchist brigade to fight for the Republican side, though her participation was brief and ended due to an injury. You will see her in uniform if you search her name online. She later served the Free French movement as a political analyst during the Second World War in London, but died before she could return to France to actively fight the Nazis.
Simone Weil's life is one, I believe, of empowerment and of the potential for humans to flourish no matter the context they are in, and to fight the forces that push us downwards. So she grants us this hope, to break through and break free from the machine.
Hannah Arendt: labour, work, action — and natality
In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt emphasises labour, work and action: the three fundamental human activities. Labour, which gives rise to biological life and consumption. Work, which creates durable objects and world-building, the way we see it. And action: political engagement and plurality.
Technology, in this instance, threatens to reduce all activity to labour — and this is exactly what Simone Weil deduced from her life in the factories. Arendt's concern was that technological thinking reduces everything to the level of labour, threatening our capacity for political action.
But it wasn't all doom and gloom. Arendt gave us hope through her concept of natality: the human capacity to begin something entirely new. And again, there are similarities with Simone Weil — no matter how far the individual has fallen, there is the potential to rise. This isn't about determinism or programming, but about our ability to surprise, to act in unexpected ways, to be spontaneous. The question for technology governance is: do our systems preserve and enhance this human capacity for new beginnings, or do they tie us down invariably?
Now, while Simone Weil fought the machine, fought the system, fought the oppression, Arendt fled. This is another way to fight the machine: to flee.
Hannah Arendt fled Germany in 1933 after being briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for her Jewish identity and political research. She initially went to France, working with Youth Aliyah, before being interned in a French camp during the war. She later escaped and, with the help of the American journalist Varian Fry, emigrated to the United States in 1941. So in this turbulent eight-year period, her experiences as a refugee and political prisoner under the Nazi regime profoundly influenced her work — particularly her analysis of totalitarianism, statelessness, and, as we said, the human condition.
Interestingly, when we look at our four theorists, all of them had elements of spirituality. Beginning with Simone Weil, who loved God and notions of God in different faith systems, and identified them in her notebooks by name. In the case of Hannah Arendt, she had studied theology as well as philosophy, and although she called herself an agnostic, it was evident from her work that there was a hopeful strand going through it, talking about faith and religious ideas. Even though she rejected traditional theology per se, her writings show a lifelong engagement with the spiritual and the religious, and with concepts of love and the Jewish experience of the covenant. Fascinating.
In the case of Donella Meadows, it is written that she had a reawakening towards the end of her life, and we will see some of her clips and hear her voice. You can hear that reawakening in her voice, after her work on the limits to growth.
And interestingly, even though Elinor Ostrom's parents separated when she was younger, she grew up in a Protestant family with ideals. Elinor Ostrom even gave away her own income when she became chair of the department, to the point that she received zero dollars for her time in her headship and gave all that money to new starters in the political science field — the emerging scholars coming through, to give them a chance. This was Elinor Ostrom: a practice of giving and sharing. And you can see that in her smile when you listen to her interviews.
But back to Arendt. She not only fled the machine, she could see through the happenings and world events. When she was in the US she was conscious not only of the killing machines but of machines we couldn't see — but she could see them. She had the ability of foresight. She spoke, even towards the end of her life, on scandals such as Watergate, on surveillance, on the way technology was abused, on notions of national security and so much more.
In this depiction she identified people who, as we know from works like Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, had simply become cogs in the machine. They did not feel choked — although some of our protagonists in this image do feel like they are being choked by the machine. Perhaps by the algorithms in our modern age; perhaps constricted or constrained, or their hands tied. But others are perhaps oblivious to those wires; perhaps they are the ones giving the commands to the algorithms, so they don't care — they have become resilient in their own way as cogs in the machine. And still others know clearly what they are doing and are still moving in that direction.
These wonderful audiovisual recordings of Hannah Arendt must be watched. This interview is known as the last interview, before she died of a heart attack midway through one of her last works. She was talking to the French interviewer here about how critical thinking was dangerous — but even more dangerous was not to think at all.
My purposeful choice of these wonderful women today is not only because of the works they wrote and their relevance to this notion of power, technology and democracy, but rather because of how they themselves carried themselves throughout their lives, stuck to their values and ideals, and knew what they were about. Deep thinkers who dared us to dream. Deep thinkers who dared us to say what was correct and to take urgent action. We'll come back to this notion of action afterwards.
Donella Meadows: systems and paradigms
We go to our next theorist, the environmental scientist Donella "Dana" Meadows, who is renowned for systems thinking and her great work The Limits to Growth. Importantly, many talk about this hockey-stick growth and this drive for more and more and more in big tech companies. Beyond that, though, Donella was very much about resources all over the world. She built different types of simulations to estimate what would happen under different scenarios. The same was done by Elinor Ostrom, but in a very different way: Ostrom looked at the meso layer, whereas Donella Meadows looked at the macro layer and the globe, looking at population and finite resources and how we could make this work in a sustainable fashion.
Importantly, Donella Meadows focused on what I would call systemic change — change that required us to understand mental models, and behavioural change that was linked to structural change. It wasn't just about studying the incoming and outgoing flows, the originating and terminating points, but rather about understanding how structures were propelling us forward towards an unsustainable world.
I would like to break here, because I think it is important to hear Donella speak.
[Video clip — Donella Meadows]: …sustainability, or actually to any other goal, we need a whole number of steps, a number of tasks, a number of talents. Among them, of course, we need implementation talents: how to make things happen, how to write laws, how to make policy, how to govern, how to raise money and allocate it, how to muster resources for our goals — all of which I would put in the category of implementation, of making something come into being.
Behind that, we need models and information. We need theory. We need to know how to get where we want to go. We need to know how we got to where we are now. What has gone wrong? What has gone right? How to form the policies to be implemented.
And even behind that, we need clarity about our goals. We need to know where we are going. We need to have vision, and that vision has to be articulated. It has to be socially shared and discussed and formulated.
It's obvious, in the unsustainable world of today, that we are lacking in all of these arenas, that we need much more effort in every one of these steps, and that we have a world that is not meeting well our goals for sustainability, or anything else.
I will make these videos available to anyone who would like to see them. There are many that I have sourced for this talk; I just wanted you to hear some sound bites from this wonderful woman.
As I said, she spoke about shifting paradigms, which was difficult but not impossible. And while we have all this information we call big data coming through, and business analytics to tell us about constants and growth, and stocks and outflows and information inflows, she really talked about the importance of leveraging the goals of the system, and what our vision was.
In this talk she describes a workshop she held on ending hunger. Nobody wanted to talk about this notion, this capacity and capability to end hunger. But it took the individuals — the best experts in the world — about two days to come to terms with the fact that hunger could be resolved and addressed if everybody came together, and if there was a mindset shift or a paradigm shift.
As we work down the iceberg model, right down to the mental models at the bottom, which are the hardest to change — this is where the power is: to transcend paradigms and to shift them together towards a sustainable future, whether we're talking about AI algorithms or other things. It's the deeper levels, beyond the information flows.
Elinor Ostrom: democratic governance of the commons
So, if we submit to this point: Weil and Arendt were diagnosing technological domination, even if the systems they were talking about were not factory systems but people systems, systems of oppression. Meadows, at the macro layer, was looking at systems perspectives on sustainable change. But here is where Elinor Ostrom's work on the need for democratic governance approaches comes in.
Moving from individual to institutional solutions, from the micro and meso to the meso and macro, Elinor Ostrom revolutionised our understanding of commons governance. While economists assumed shared resources would inevitably be overexploited, Ostrom found thousands of examples where communities successfully managed shared resources through democratic, participatory institutions. This directly contradicts the tragedy of the commons narrative often used to justify technocratic control.
What she did was build a computer model with game theory specialists, with a particular number of variables in the simulation. She got individuals to sit down at terminals. They couldn't see each other — it was a blinded experiment — and they were given tokens they could spend on a particular resource. She found that in almost all cases of this simulation, people came into conflict over how they wanted to use the resources. They overexploited.
But once she removed the blind and allowed people to communicate, in the workshop, to work together in order to solve how they would use a particular common pool resource — lo and behold, there was greater productivity, less harm in the community of stakeholders, and there was never overexploitation.
This led her into an investigation of natural resource systems that had each existed for more than two hundred years. She went through and looked at case studies of what the common elements were. She said there were no two cases that had exactly the same design elements or criteria, but that she had to go to a higher level to generalise, and that these eight design principles were what emerged — as she said in her talks when she won the Nobel Prize. It was not that these design principles should be used, but that they could be used in particular real-world cases. She said "could" and not "should," because she always gave freedom to the institutions and individuals in the field who had managed the resources for so long. She said, well, these are the ones that seem to be common across all the cases that she studied in the peer-reviewed literature and had surveyed — in some cases 18,000 individual survey respondents or more, in different contexts. But again she gave freedom. It wasn't always top-down or bottom-up. It wasn't "use these norms and it will work." It was always: what has worked for you, and what can we also provide from the professional expertise that has not been known to this community? But it was always up to the communities to choose the way forward.
While Ostrom didn't focus specifically on digital technology, she understood how technology could support democratic institutions. She saw technology as an enabler: the potential for monitoring resources, information sharing between different stakeholders at different scales, coordination, participation and adaptive learning — all crucial for the legitimate governance today of complex systems like AI.
And, given how Professor Pitt has carried on this motif, I would say he sees technology as a commons. The question is: if technology, or access to the internet, is like the air we breathe — and for many of us it is; we can't think about being without a phone or an email address, it would likely render us a non-person — then AI systems affect shared social resources. So Ostrom's principles become directly applicable to this question of AI, which we will be discussing from here on.
When an AI system makes decisions about hiring, lending or policing, it's managing a commons that affects entire communities. We need collective governance mechanisms, as Jeremy has often told us in his articles — not just market- or state-controlled ones.
Comparing the theorists
If we compare these theorists, we can see that Donella Meadows focused predominantly on the macro: global system dynamics, pluses and minuses. Simone Weil, in Gravity and Grace, on the inner spiritual dynamics that we bring to the table every single day. We cannot talk about collective systems if we ourselves are at war with ourselves or with our neighbour. It is highly important that, if we talk about collective action, we begin with gravity and grace — and hopefully more towards grace than gravity.
Hannah Arendt's overall corpus touched on various scales. For the greater part she did talk about the macro as well — totalitarianism, revolutions and so forth — but she was really concerned with the public sphere and civic institutions. Of course, in The Human Condition we look at the public realm and shared practices; again, that notion of shared practices, shared resources. And Elinor ticks across the board, but predominantly at the meso layer, although she too talked to farmers, to irrigation specialists, to basin authorities, to police commands. She was well known for studying policing and polycentricity by riding in the back of a police vehicle.
But it brings us to Professor Pitt, who has worked at all these layers to bring all these things together, and I really think there's something important in his work: the micro foundations — the individual agents, the norms and the trust elements; the meso level, where he is very well renowned for his work on multi-agent systems, socio-technical institutions and electronic institutions; and the macro scale — the implications for governance, sustainability, digital justice and collective platforms.
Which leads us to his major work — although he has many authored and edited books, many authored papers, and has edited special issues to which Agnieszka, myself, Dr Roba Abbas and so many others have had the joy of submitting our work. Jeremy Pitt takes Ostrom's proven principles and applies them to digital systems, asking: how can we design AI and other technologies to embody democratic values? His work on computational justice provides a framework for building fairness into technological systems while addressing the systemic sustainability concerns raised by Meadows. And this, of course, is in his work on socio-technical-ecological systems.
Here I would like to share another video, only five minutes, a summary that I really can't find anywhere else and would not be able to say in my own words. Forgive me, Jeremy — this may be a little embarrassing to see yourself — but it is important, because you summate what most of us are thinking but have never said in the public sphere.
[Video clip — Jeremy Pitt]: …and the consequence of this experience, as we undergo this transformative process, the digital transformation to the digital society, is twofold.
First of all, there's the well-established digital divide between those who are connected and those who are not. This inequity is already manifest with regard to age, gender, geography, educational attainment and even assets. You know, the Matthew effect, where the rich get richer, is very much in evidence. So for those already with assets, such as roof-mounted domestic wind turbines and electric vehicles — if there's a storm, then you can actually be paid to charge your own electric vehicle, whereas the people who are cold and hungry in that storm actually have to make a choice between whether they heat their food or heat their house. And this divide was made starkly apparent among UK children during the pandemic lockdowns: those who had access to personal laptops and unlimited broadband connectivity were able to maintain a decent level of education, but those who had to share equipment, or were on pay-as-you-go data contracts, were significantly disadvantaged as a result.
The second consequence that might come about from the digital divide is what we might call the digitally divided. It's the extraction, the appropriation of data, which effectively creates a two-tier system between those who have power in the digital society and those who do not. One example has already been given here: this idea that you're able to put a fence, if you like, around digital data and say, right, now this belongs to me as the accumulator and aggregator of the data — despite the fact that all this data has been generated by someone else, or actually by a lot of someone elses. The value of that is going to accrue to the aggregator and not to the people who are actually generating the data. Now, you might get some new goods or services in response to that, but this is basically not an equitable exchange. I would argue that, like ownership of the land, which we could think of as colonial extraction, this is digital extraction. There's extraction of value from the people who are actually doing the work. And I would argue there's no social justice or civic dignity in this.
In fact, I can point to seven more examples of the asymmetry of power in the digital society, which relate to platformisation, community marginalisation, the gatekeeping of knowledge, addiction by design, the iron triangle of big tech, parliament and academia, differentiated pricing, and even underemployment.
So, briefly looking at each of these. Platformisation is how the network effect at the application layer of the internet results in what has been called the platform economy. In this economic model, work is done at the edge but all the revenue occurs at the centre, and this effectively gives power to the platform owner — in particular, power over the means of social coordination. This is exacerbated further if the platform owner is a transnational organisation not subject to national taxation or national laws. It means some percentage of every transaction is extracted from the local economy and aggregated elsewhere.
Now, the neo-colonialism afforded by digital platforms can result in a suppression of economic activity in the long term, and the displacement of economic activity as a platform for qualitative values. If I have a pound coin, that pound coin is a force multiplier: it's not just that I spend it, but the person whose service I spend it on spends it, and so on. This is why we refer to money being in circulation — because it creates a platform of economic activity, like airflow under a wing, under which other values can be built. If you fragment that, and fragment the economy, those values start being dissipated as people start looking towards their own survival.
And so it turns out that the public ownership of services — you know, in the UK we can see how privatisation is unravelling in the way that energy prices are going through the roof, effluent is being streamed into our rivers, the hospitals are being slowly forced under by the work they have to do, and our transportation system is a mess. So it's clearly the public ownership of services that needs to be reconsidered: if they are essential to the collective well-being and the functioning of society, then we have to restore that ownership in order to have access to some idea of social justice.
Gender, AI and public interest technology
We now move into the final section of the presentation. I would suggest that as many of you as possible go and download the proceedings of the AI for Equity conference, which [Maria Dhani?] and many others attended. It was a landmark conference, as far as I was concerned.
Now, the gender dimension: the need for redistributed power and community empowerment. Let's connect all of these pieces together. Current AI systems have consistently encoded and reproduced patriarchal biases. We see this in algorithms that favour men for executive positions, that discriminate against women in lending, and that perpetuate stereotypes about women's capabilities. This isn't accidental. It reflects the concentration of technological power in male-dominated institutions that are hierarchical in nature.
Let me give you some more concrete examples — and for those who want the links, they do actually work. Amazon's hiring algorithm systematically downgraded résumés from women. Credit card algorithms offered women lower credit limits than men with identical financial profiles. Health AI trained primarily on male data consistently misdiagnosed women's heart attacks as just anxiety. These aren't bugs; they're features of systems designed without democratic input, without representation from all.
Thus we need to reframe through Weil and Arendt. We can use Meadows' pronouncement that what we need are paradigmatic shifts, right down at that bottom layer: the changing of mental models. If we think about Weil's force of grace in the context of gender, we're talking about technology that enhances rather than diminishes women's capacity for ethical action. And Arendt's concept of natality reminds us that women, like all humans, possess the capacity to begin something entirely new, to surprise us, to act in ways that transcend historical patterns of discrimination.
The alternative is democratic governance of technology: inclusive processes, approaches grounded in deliberation — as we find in Jeremy Pitt's work — pluralism, and institutional reflexivity. Instead of letting tech companies and their predominantly male leadership make unilateral decisions about AI design, we need inclusive processes that bring diverse voices into technology governance.
Ladies and gentlemen, perhaps this is why I am here presenting to you today. If it wasn't for people like Jeremy, who handpicked so many women and was so supportive of their careers and trajectories, empowering them, enabling them and thrusting them forward towards opportunities — I am positive I would not have been promoted when I was, would not have been headhunted, and many other things. It takes people in positions of care to grant opportunity to others, to see them flourish and not be relegated to systems that provide gravity, and gravity alone.
On this next point, I would like to underscore that, despite these differentials, we are all human, and intersectionality in technology matters for all people. We can't talk about gender and technology without acknowledging this concept: women of colour, women of all faiths, women with disabilities, working women, who face compound discrimination from AI systems — and others, under whatever labels others may apply, or that they provide for themselves, or the -isms that are thrown at people. All this goes equally to all, because we are human. Our democratic approach to technology governance must address these intersecting forms of oppression that are thrust upon us, to make them enablers, not disablers.
And this is the bottom line: Pitt's socio-technical-ecological design offers a path forward. Instead of technology serving domination — think about this — we can design systems that serve collective autonomy. This means considering social justice, technical feasibility and ecological sustainability together in our design processes. Why aren't we doing that more?
I will give one of the last words to Hannah Arendt here, in her last interview of 1972–73. She says: action as we, not I. This insight is particularly relevant to public interest technology. We can't solve the problems of technological domination through individual choices or market mechanisms alone. We need collective action, democratic institutions and systemic change.
This diagram, and this paper, was developed and written — first-authored by Dr Roba Abbas, with Jeremy and myself — on how we can bring these concepts together in public interest technology: technology designed primarily for public benefit, as Ostrom stressed and Professor Pitt has continued, rather than for private profit, to make the few very rich, or the shareholders. This means participatory design processes, community accountability, oversight mechanisms that can be built in, and explicit alignment with democratic values and human rights.
Conclusion
Let me bring together our philosophical arc. We started with Weil's ethical critique of technological domination. We moved through Arendt's analysis of political action. We learned from Ostrom's institutional design principles, and we arrive at Pitt's practical framework for democratic technology governance. This isn't just theory: it's a blueprint for action, and we require the next generation to take this action forward.
The stakes couldn't be higher. Already we are given these kinds of images to consider as our current trajectory. I'm not sure what people in the audience feel about robots giving birth to embryos, and beyond. Our current trajectory leads towards increasing technological domination and further gender inequality, even if it is in the guise of equality.
But we have an alternative future. It's this one here, in the second picture: democratic technology governance that serves human flourishing. This is what it could be like. I'm not saying to do away with the machines. They should be invisible. They shouldn't be choking people. They should be granting people freedom. They should, as Ostrom said, be enablers, supporting our ideals. We should have new vision, as stipulated by Meadows. We should be changing the mental models en masse.
But there's a tiny window of opportunity right now, because we are forming the AI governance frameworks and they're yet to be fully established. Once they are, they will be set in stone. It will be much harder to do systemic change and paradigmatic shifts. And if we don't do this, we are looking at worlds colliding. It won't stay open forever.
In conclusion: who governs the machine right now? It's obvious — predominantly male tech elites and corporate interests. But it doesn't have to be this way. Through the democratic approaches outlined by our five thinkers, from Weil's ethical foundation through to Pitt's practical framework, we can ensure that all of us govern these powerful technologies, through inclusive, participatory processes.
The choice is between technological domination and collective autonomy. Between gravity and grace. I choose grace. The question is: which future shall we choose to build together?
Thank you.
Question and answer
Chair: Thank you, Katina, for this fascinating and inspiring talk. We have quite some time for questions. So, who wants to start?
Q1 — Children and "career disruption"
Audience member: Thank you, Katina, for this presentation; it was really insightful. You made a comment at the beginning, when you presented the four women, that they did not have any children. Is that sending a message that in order to be successful you can't have children? Because that's—
Katina Michael: Oh, no.
Audience member: [crosstalk] No, no — because that's what's happening in my country. We have the lowest birth rates, because women are choosing not to have children in order to be successful. So that hit home, literally.
Katina Michael: Yes. I think we should ponder your point. I've been looking at these four faces now for weeks, actually probably a month — and Jeremy Pitt's face. And, without disclosing Jeremy Pitt's situation, he was probably one of the five who is in a different context.
Technological domination may be part of the reason why some women are choosing not to have children. But again, this is a highly personal decision that comes back to the micro level. I wondered, in Simone Weil's case: she died very young; she may have had children, she may have decided to marry, who knows, had she been given a longer lifetime. Donella Meadows had been married to Dennis Meadows, and Elinor Ostrom to Vincent Ostrom — their collaborators. Fascinating. Hannah Arendt, of course, we know had a relationship with a supervisor, Martin Heidegger — very close ties in collaboration and research.
But I think circumstances matter. We look at Arendt and Weil, who were living during a time of conflict. And although we see many children born in our current times of conflict, our hearts break to see what happens to these children, who have been starved to death in many cases. So whether it is conflict, human circumstance or choice, I don't know. But I think you raise a very valid point. It hit me very hard when I was searching today to see if Donella Meadows had ever met Elinor Ostrom — and I don't think they did. They may have clashed on certain ideals and ideas, or come together very strongly on others, because both were concerned with the environment.
But these systems are now making us declare that childbearing phases are a disruption — a career disruption. And no woman I've ever spoken to who's had children ever believes their child was a career disruption. But in order to get promoted you have to tick this box and then provide a story about this career disruption. And if you've had three kids, then it's three career disruptions of X years. No mother I know has ever called her child a career disruption. But the systems dictate this.
What you are asking actually speaks to Arendt's point and Weil's point: that these forms of dominance reaffirm these questions, which really should be non-questions. And what are we doing now? We're creating robots that would allegedly get rid of the disruption, and we want the robots to bear the children so they don't have access to a human umbilical cord. You will see this raise many different opposing and diverse responses from feminists and non-feminists, and different people in different circumstances — pro-life and others. If this capability occurs, this question will be even more loaded. Probably worth a whole conference, or a hundred conferences. This is a big thing: we're at the point where the dominance of technology is impacting us in a highly personal way, and this is one example, as you've just mentioned.
Chair: Another question?
Q2 — Can there be sustainable technologies?
Julia: Thank you so much for this very inspiring talk. My name is Julia, and I wanted to ask you — I think you said "sustainable technologies," this is what I caught at some point. I was just reading about data centres in Texas and the protests there. And I think of some Brazilian indigenous authors, like Ailton Krenak, and their critique of our Western idea that we can have sustainable technologies. They criticise that, saying it's really hard to think there can be such a thing as sustainable information technologies, where the extraction of the materials is just, and where sustaining these data centres and all this infrastructure has got to a point where it seems impossible.
So, do you think it's possible to build sustainable technologies? And what is the direction of change we need to go in, in order to try to get there? Because it seems like we can only think of sustainable technologies if we forget about all this infrastructural part, which doesn't really seem to be sustainable. Thank you.
Katina Michael: A wonderful question, with so many aspects to it.
I was the Associate Dean International for an engineering school about ten years ago, and of course we dealt with green computing, green mining, clean air initiatives in different contexts. Much of this had negative externalities that could be quantified.
I think the critique from the Brazilian author is warranted, but we can perhaps think of a world where there are more sustainable technologies, where we emphasise the needs of what could make a technology sustainable. At the moment there's such interdependence between our infrastructural systems: water powers electricity, electricity powers communications, communications power banking, banking powers retail. It's highly meshed and highly interdependent. We have built this economy relying, as Jeremy says, on platforms — but not only on platforms at the service layer, but going back down, as you say, deep into infrastructure.
We can see some of the innovations coming up, and we can be further critical, based on what you've said. For instance: "Oh, we have too many data centres now above the land — let's start burying them in the oceans," in particular data storage containers. This has already begun, in cylindrical containers that are dropped onto the ocean floor. We have this problem in space, where we have space junk and we just leave it up there and hope it doesn't cause some further catastrophe.
But on the earth, it reminds me a bit of what we have done to the landscape. If you look at some of the literature in the Technology and Society Magazine, which Jeremy and I have edited in decades gone by, people would talk about the wires we could visibly see with our eyes — the terrestrial cables for telephony — and then the base stations that were put on top of homes and retail stores and libraries. Is this what our landscape was always meant to be? What is this notion of sustainability? How will we control the use of these technologies?
You've seen in my own presentation — without sounding hypocritical, saying all these things — the use of generative AI, DALL·E 3, to create these images. I must tell you, I tried to do it mindfully, in the least number of prompts possible. I generated maybe twelve images in total. But this is the temptation: if I can use, I will use. The question is: what are we going to do about setting limits?
Going back to Donella Meadows: how do we understand the interdependencies between these systems? How do we understand the public interest? How does a community understand the public interest? This is where Elinor Ostrom came in and went to the field, whether in Japan or in places in Africa. You'll see photos of the studies she did using remote sensing and GIS in the Amazon with collaborators, and you see how mindful they were about registering the points, understanding what was going on, gathering an understanding of the reliance on food security for locals, or crop security for locals.
I know we live in a globalised world, but I think we have to go back to sustainability in the context of the public interest in small areas. Ostrom noted, when she studied with Vincent Ostrom the differences between large-area commands and small-area commands in policing, that the small-area commands knew exactly what was going on. But to fight corruption in the bigger area commands, what happened was that people would be rotated — so they didn't really get to know the people in the location, the places, the crime spots, the characters, the ones who could give information as key informants, because they kept being shifted around. At the local level, though, people knew, for example, when to fish — Monday, Wednesday and Friday — and the limit was, you know, sixty fish or whatever it was. They knew this. And even though it hadn't been written down, as in larger institutions, people knew what they should do and were mindful of the practice.
In the same way, I think that with sustainability, even though we're talking about a global scale, all change is local. And for some communities, their world-build in 2030 or 2050 is very different from the West and its understanding of what a world-build would look like.
In our institutions, we talk about agentic AI now as if it's the magical answer to everything, or about how we're going to build intelligent supply chains — to do what? This is the question: what is our goal, and what is our vision? I see a disparity in my MBA classes: when I talk to students in the classroom who are CIOs and CEOs of organisations, they have these beautiful ideals about visions of sustainability, and yet when they get back to work on the following Monday they're hit with the same oppression: this is the system, these are your KPIs, this is what you have to meet — profit, profit, profit. There is a minimal shift in some parts of the world and in some organisations, a value shift, a paradigmatic change. But I think we will need to set limits. Otherwise, what are we going to do — keep growing data centres? I don't want to mention the big tech companies, but this is the whole thing: when are we going to recalibrate this?
You can find some of the ways of addressing these problems in Jeremy's work, because Jeremy stresses the ecological, not simply the socio-technical and environmental: norms, rules, policies, guidelines, soft law and so on. He's talking about ecology, and I think that's the only way — if we understand this methodology and this design process in this way.
But I'm almost stumped by your question. I understand it; I'm clutching at straws to try to respond to it in a logical way. But I don't think infinite resources and hockey-stick growth is the answer, and "as much as you want, all you can eat." This is what has brought us to this point, with the pressures on water and on different minerals in the ground. I look at Arizona, where I was for many years: by 2030 they're saying there won't be any water, because any wells that are there are being used for mining and not for people to drink. Where are our ethics and where are our values? Do we want to see people drink water, or do we want to start mining for money? This is the question.
Chair: Thank you. Karina was first.
Audience member: There is no first.
Q3 — Charlotte Hess and information as a common pool resource
Audience member: Thank you so much for your inspiring talk. Thank you for your clear arguments, and thank you also for making the effort to articulate the work of such inspiring [women]. Thank you for all this.
If I can, I would add another female author, who helps, I think, to bring in and link with the ecological aspect and concern that Julia asked about: Charlotte Hess. Because I really think that the meeting with Hess was fundamental in linking technology and ecology.
If I have a few seconds, I'll talk briefly about Charlotte Hess. She was a librarian at Indiana University, and she was responsible for setting up the seminar website of Ostrom's [workshop]. What she explains is really very interesting. She was responsible for entering the site's project texts, bibliography and so on, and she did this using the hypertext protocol. Once she had entered the texts, she realised that she had overloaded the other digital resources set up by the different laboratories of her university. And she saw for herself that the internet is not an unlimited world. It's not an immaterial and non-rival resource — because I use my university's resources, and I take up all the resources.
After that, she wrote with Ostrom an article that I really love, in 2003 I think, and the title is "Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource." Can I read this quote from the article, written with Ostrom? "The complex nature of knowledge as a commons requires a three-way distinction, because it is composed of both human and non-human elements: ideas, artifacts and facilities." What this implies is that these elements can never be separated. They form an arrangement; they cannot be separated, and they refer to the ecological make-up of information.
Sorry to be long, but I think that Charlotte Hess is really a fundamental author to explain that there is no cloud — there are no clouds — there are really embedded resources. And also to link the question of autonomy with the question of sovereignty. So, thank you so much, Katina, and I think we could add Charlotte.
Katina Michael: I think this is a beautiful comment. Thank you so much for your generosity and for sharing this link. I'm smiling because I wish I could be there. This is an incredible conference with incredible brains in the audience, and I hope to meet you each one day.
Something important — and yes, Charlotte Hess, I will add and we will cite. I didn't know this until four years ago. I was up late at night in Australia, having a meeting with Arizona State University, and I learned that Elinor Ostrom actually worked at ASU and set up the Center for Complex Adaptive Systems in the college I'm part of, the College of Global Futures. I was having an administrative meeting with executives and I mentioned Jeremy's work and Elinor Ostrom's work on common pool resources, because our dean at the time was investigating water. I mentioned Elinor Ostrom's name and they said, "Well, what are you talking about — she was here." And this is why, they said to me, we have the School of Complex Adaptive Systems alongside the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, the School of Sustainability and now the School of Ocean Futures. We have these four schools in the College of Global Futures, because it's such an important area.
But I did not know that she stressed information. And yes — deliberately, I have put everything in the cloud today. I could have chosen any Zoom background, but this was the reason: the cloud has infrastructure, it's in the ground, it's taking up resources. So I love your comment, I love the exposure to Charlotte Hess, and I look forward to it.
Amazingly, Ostrom's spirit was one of collaboration. She was interviewed the week she received the Nobel Prize — the interview had been organised long before — by an interviewer from Indiana University, and I'm not sure if it was Charlotte herself; I have to go back and check. It's a beautiful 45-minute interview, and the interviewer is saying, "But how did you magnetise all these people to come together?" And she says, "Well, I didn't do anything, they were already at Indiana." And the interviewer says, "No, no, but you brought this interdisciplinarity. Were you mindful of doing this? Did you understand that this wasn't a thing for tenure, for how committees would see papers published in different avenues and different disciplines?" She said, "Oh, I didn't care about that. I cared about my students getting tenure." She also cared about them producing solo works. But she said, this interdisciplinarity — we can't solve these complex problems on our own.
So she had this infectious capability to bring people together, naturally, organically, with amazing humour and almost, as the interviewer says, nonchalance: "Yes, of course the engineers can work with the sociologists, and the sociologists can work with the political scientists, and the political scientists have to work with the economists. Of course they do. These are complex adaptive problems." So I'm not surprised by the emphasis on information — but what a wonderful quote that is. Thank you.
Q4 — Ostrom's successors and the open-access commons
Chair: I think we have time for just one more question, from Mayo.
Mayo: Thank you very much for the presentation. Building on the previous comment — my question was: what do you think about not Ostrom's work, but what followed from Ostrom's work, applied to technology?
Clearly there is the application of it by the Ostrom school itself, by members like Charlotte Hess. There was also the work of Schweik and English on the success of internet and open-source [commons], where they applied Ostrom's framework. And I agree with this critique about the lack of vision regarding the sustainability of knowledge. But I would add another one, which is why I think this conference is also relevant, and which has to do with the humans involved in the commons and their rights, in the sense of commons theory. I think that the different schools in commons theory don't pose the question of individual sustainability, only collective sustainability — but how do Wikipedians, for example, have money to eat? That's a response that came from the social and solidarity economy approaching the platform economy, saying: no, we have to find solutions like cooperatives and other ways of organising work to ensure that this is also sustainable for those who are there.
But beyond this element, my question is: what do you think about the approach of the [digital?] commons scholars like Yochai Benkler, or [Steve ——?]. In particular, one of Benkler's papers called "Between Spanish Huertas and the Open Road: A Tale of Two Commons?" — I actually saw Benkler presenting this paper in front of Ostrom, and I saw their debate, in which Benkler pointed out that in the commons there are two roads. One was the Ostrom school, referring to the importance of governance. But then the [digital] commons scholars say that what defines the commons is not the conditions of governance; what defines the commons in the digital sphere is the condition of access. So if a resource is open access, that is what makes it a commons — not necessarily the element that governs decision-making — because the new technologies reduce the cost of collective action. So it was not so much about how people organised, but about how the resource is accessed as a public good. And the two critiques, of sustainability and of human work, can also be applied to this other approach to the commons, of the [digital] scholars and open access as a commons.
But anyway: what do you think about this other scholarly vision of the commons as open source, or regarding open access, with respect to the questions you have posed? Thank you.
Katina Michael: Firstly, to say: I think you're very clever, and I would love to hear your own response to this amazing question. Your depth of reading of these scholars is deeper than mine, for sure.
I do think about open-source software. I do think about open access — as scholars we see this every day. And is it a question of access, or is it a question of the public interest? For example, in terms of collective action, I'm on the steering committee in the US for the National Deep Inference Fabric, which is there to democratise generative AI. It's fascinating as a concept, because obviously generative AI uses underlying datasets that are predominantly open source, inclusive of deepfakes and other things. But I see their hope: to democratise access to generative AI systems.
I think this also has multiple levels of inquiry. Not simply: is an object open, is this software open, available to the third sector equally as it is to government agencies and corporations? But is it a question of access? Is it a question of public interest? Is it a question of a collective common pool resource?
My hope is that one day all resources are open, apart from those that are interpersonal in nature and private — correspondence between two people, two partners, two close friends. But I think we need to, and must, have a society that has data — at least good-quality data — open and accessible. And while I personally don't believe in a blockchain approach for making this open and accessible, we do need some way of understanding the authenticity, the authorship, the vintage, the location and many other facets.
Again, with her work on GIS — geographic information systems are an example, and GeoAI is such a powerful mechanism. Cadastral blocks have a location. Yes, postcodes change, but they have a location. They have an x and y coordinate; that's a minimum bounding rectangle, or a polygon, or a point of interest. It also has depth and breadth and elevation and many other points. You can have moving artefacts that will be traced with time, whether they're connected vehicles, or assets as they move around organisations or beyond, taken home by employees and so forth — or things that people could borrow that they don't have to buy.
And while this may be my ideal world, I want us to compare, based on what you've said, what holds us down in that scenario: the gravity versus the grace, and where we could move towards in order to have full human flourishing. What does that look like? And not to be afraid to dream. Because right now we talk about flourishing, and the next thing we do is use a piece of software that is oppressive, or a form that makes us fill in every criterion even though the item is private and personal. They say it's informed consent, but you make me do it, otherwise I can't use the resource. And that's the problem: we're giving away too much from a personal, private perspective — and yet, from a shared understanding, we need more. We need more, and we need it to be open. And I would say that is a common pool resource.
But it's complex, and your question is much more sophisticated than my answer. I think I'll leave it there, folks. Thank you.
Closing
Chair: Thank you, Katina. And, last but not least, let's give a little bit of time to Jeremy Pitt.
Jeremy Pitt: Thank you, Agnieszka. Katina, thank you so much for that wonderful talk. My comment is that, of course, you are far too generous to me. The fifth person in that list should of course be yourself. But you are far too generous, far too inclusive, and far too attractive of many people, in the same way that you've just been talking about. So I'd like to redo this talk, but putting you in for me.
Katina Michael: Thank you, my mentor — I publicly state that. And I'm glad, folks, that Jeremy Pitt sent me an email that I saw around 2006, because it completely changed my academic trajectory. I, with my fellow collaborators, have been the recipients of that care and empathy. But I know you know what I'm talking about: in your own lives there would have been people like Jeremy — female and male and others — who put you on a trajectory that has enabled you to be at this conference, which is no mean feat in itself. And I just wish I was there to hear your presentations. I do actually have a class at half past, so I'll have to leave — that one ends at 9:00 on Australia's timetable. But thank you, Jeremy. Thank you, Agnieszka. And may you have a wonderful rest of the conference.
Chair: Thank you, Katina. Again, I think we all leave this room inspired by your talk. Thanks a lot.
Katina Michael: Thank you. Bye-bye, friends.
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