Script: audio-walk

Are you afraid of the Internet?

Intro
Bonjour, hello, can you hear me? Yes, right here behind you. Can you hear me properly, are the
earphones comfortable? My name is Silla. I am the guide of this audio-walk and it is my
pleasure to guide you through the city. I might just be a voice in your head, some digital stream
that flows into your consciousness and not really next to you, but still I am with you. But don’t
worry, that is alright, because the digital and the physical are going to blend into each other in
this walk. After all, we live in a hybrid world, no? And I am thrilled to explain to you what I mean
by that. But first things first. So, this audio-walk was developed for the Edgelands Institute.
Edgelands wants to find out how digitalization influences how we live together in a city. More
specifically how the unwritten rules of how we behave in the city, what they call the urban social
contract, has changed. What were the drivers of this change? The report focuses on one major
component of living together as a community: security. What is security? You might think of
physical security, like whether you feel safe walking home at night. Or also safe, if the police
stops you. But there is also a digital aspect to safety. Digital tools and new technologies are
changing everything. And they are also having an effect on security, be it by surveillance
cameras or websites collecting your data. Digitalization heavily influences how we live together,
and it consequently influences our notion of safety. The Edgelands Institute has written down its
findings in the Diagnostic Report “Geneva: A city of paradoxes and dualities”, and I am assigned
to talk with you about these findings.

This audio-walk was created by Dezentrum. Dezentrum is a Think and Do Tank that deals with
ways how digitalization alters the way we live together and supports ​a digital transformation that
serves society. Check out their website for further information.
Add me on Insta
Pont du Mont Blanc

We are standing here on the Pont Du Mont Blanc, the bridge was built in 1862. It is 250m long
and, as you can see, it is a major traffic axis. The river Rhône flows out of the lake Geneva or
Lac Léman as it is called in French. Depending on the weather, you can see Mont Blanc, it is
the highest mountain in the Alps reaching almost 5000m altitude. It feels almost like being in a
little mountain village, no? I’m sure you have heard of the Geneva convention so you know the
city is more than that. Geneva is a place of international influence; it is the birthplace of the Red
Cross and international humanitarian law. Geneva is a city of contradictions: it is both provincial
and cosmopolitan, conservative and daring, tradition-bound and yet innovation friendly.

Is it warm today? Can you feel a warm breeze or a cold Bise, that is the cold dry wind that blows
the strongest on the western shores of Lake Geneva. Last time I stood on this bridge, it was one
of these last warm summer days. Turn away from the cars. Are there still sailing boats on the
lake, is de Jet d’Eau running? This huge fountain pumps 500 liters of water per second in the
air? It is quite picturesque or as one might say nowadays instagrammable, wouldn’t you say so?
Shall we take a selfie? #edgelandsgeneva #digitization #jetdeau?

Well, maybe you are less of an Instagram user and more of a Facebook person, then post it
there! Or maybe none of them and you will just send the selfie to a close friend on telegram or
your grandfather on Whatsapp. Either way, you would not be the only one. Facebook has almost
three billion active users, Whatsapp two and Instagram one and a half billion active users.
Social Media has fundamentally changed how we interact with one another, how we
communicate and how we stay in touch. But not just that. We buy clothes and food via apps, we
can even sign a new contract for our smartphone online. And not long ago, during the corona
pandemic a QR code was the entry ticket to basically every social or cultural event. So ask
yourself, how often do you rely on technology in your daily routine? Technology is everywhere.
This has brought us many advantages, but with new technologies, new challenges arise too.

No one asks anymore whether you are online. We are online all the time. And that changes our
social fabric, how we live together. Many of our interactions with friends take place online and
many of our daily tasks are facilitated through digital tools. We spend countless hours a day
online. People are starting to teach their children coding, instead of Chinese or the piano. It
seems like everything is changing at a very rapid pace. Is your job going to be replaced by a
robot or an Algorithm in five years? What does this mean for us? Are you afraid of this change?
Are you afraid of the internet?

We are going to walk through the city and take each stop as an invitation to think about a
challenge posed by digital technology to our everyday lives. The stops should illustrate how
questions related to the digital world are interlinked with the physical city. So we encourage you
to see the digital in the physical and how layered this reality, how hybrid our world has become.
Enjoy.

If you are ready let’s get moving. Do you see the Rolex building? Walk towards it until you see
the traffic lights to cross the bridge in direction “Rive Droite”, that is the right side of the river
Rhône.

Follow it along until it crosses Rue de Rousseau. The next stop is waiting there for you.

Does my phone listen to me?

Quai des Bergues

Look into the River. What do you see in the stream? Fish? Look closer, do you see your
reflection? An image? Or is it a video?
How often are you streaming videos? Is the time you spend on your smartphone always
increasing? Have You ever lied about your smartphone use? Do you catch yourself reaching for
your phone in the moment you are alone or bored? Is limiting your phone use difficult for you?
Do you sometimes hear or feel phantom vibrations, that is when you think your phone is
buzzing, when it actually isn’t? Have loved ones ever expressed concern about how much time
you spend on your smartphone? Have you thought about taking out your smartphone, now,
while looking at the river?

How many of these questions could you answer with a yes? Let’s be honest, what is your
screen time?
Maybe you know what I am talking about, you’ve guessed it - these are signs and symptoms of
a phone addiction. But it’s not all your fault. Your smartphone or rather the applications are
designed to keep you as long as possible on your phone. Take a look at your Social Media
Apps. Have you ever had a hard time going offline, stopping to watch stories and reels, the
addictive videos that only last for a couple of seconds? I have to admit, I sometimes have a hard
time stopping and just recently deleted the Social Apps because I realized I spent too much time
on them.

Okay, so different question: Would you hesitate to talk to a random stranger sitting in the Bar
des Bergues ? Would you consider sitting next to them? Would you talk to them if they would
initiate? Answering a tweet of a stranger comes easier, doesn’t it? Even if the tweet wasn’t
directed to you in the first place.

I guess in the end, humans want to connect, but sometimes it’s hard in real life. That is why all
these platforms work. And the thing is, our brain releases Dopamine, a brain chemical that gives
you the feeling of pleasure when you for example get food, clothing, shelter and interaction with
others. If your brain is repeatedly exposed to a large quantity of Dopamine, it lowers its natural
production, and you get addicted to whatever caused you the excessive production of
Dopamine in the first place. And guess what your smartphone, and specifically these apps, do.
Exactly, if you post something and you get a lot of likes, you feel accepted and validated from
your social group, ergo Dopamine. This is at the end a very basic chemical reaction. Social
Media is designed to be addictive. For example, the animation when you refresh an app is not
random, but designed to trigger a Dopamine release. And the fact that Social Media is always
available makes it even more addictive. It is never-ending, like the stream of the river Rhône,
you can get completely lost in it.

Our brain is not equipped for processing all the information we find online. This becomes
evident in the fact that we cannot stop to compare ourselves with others online. Studies have
shown that teenagers are more depressed after using Social Media like Instagram regularly.
And the thing is that, as a whistleblower revealed in 2021, Meta, the company that owns
Facebook and Instagram is aware of that, as a whistleblower has revealed in 2021. But it
decided not to address the issue, as it would impact its business too much.
You might wonder, what do these Social Media companies gain from it? The goal is exactly to
keep you on the platform as long as possible – because attention is the currency. And the
longer you are on the apps the more information the Apps have about you. Because the
interface tracks data about what you look at and for how long, what you like and with what and
whom you interact. And what happens with all that data? They sell it. To people that want to sell
things to you. And not just any things but the things that you want.

You know how sometimes products appear in the advertisement windows after you’ve talked
about it? Even though you have never looked them up online? Have you ever had that uncanny
feeling that they listen to you? The thing is, that is definitely not a coincidence, but they don’t
even have to listen to you. They know your search history, your in-app interactions, past
purchases, online profiles, favorite websites and location data – and they have all that data of
people you spend time with as well. They gather this data about you and create a profile, but not
like the one that you are making yourself where you select what information you put on. One
that puts all the little pieces of information that you leave while browsing together. And they do
know a lot about you. They essentially track you around the world and the web. For example,
every website that has a Facebook, or Instagram icon or uses services like Google Analytics
embedded gives these apps information about your stay on this website. All this information
produces very precise predictions about what you might like. So if you have spent time in your
parents house and have connected to their Wifi it is likely that you will suddenly have an add of
the brand of toothpaste they usually order.

They are watching. Ah, I see you shrugging your shoulders. Only very lightly, are you maybe
thinking, ah that doesn’t matter because you have nothing to hide anyway? And to be honest
you like the personalized content? You may also feel completely in control about the time you
spend online and think that that is an individual problem that affects others but not you. And
anyway, why and how does my facebook profile and its data influence the urban social contract
that we were talking about earlier?

I hope I can illustrate this at our next stop. Now turn your back to the river and walk up Rue de
Rousseau until at your left you will see the big gray building of the department store “Manor”.
I have nothing to hide
Manor

Did you know that Manor is Switzerland's largest chain of department stores? For a second,
let’s just stand in front of the store. Do you feel the air conditioning when the doors open, that
always keeps the temperature inside at just the right point? What do you see when you look
through the glass doors? Depending on the time of the day or the year, this look will be slightly
different. Are there any specials, maybe for Christmas or Easter? One way or the other, nothing
in this sight is left to chance. This type of department store strategies are based on
psychological mechanisms. And they make you buy more things than you actually intend to.
Expensive products are placed at more attractive spots and cheaper products at the bottom
shelves, the smell of freshly baked bread in the bread area, and different floor tiles make you
walk quicker or slower. These are just a few examples of design choices to make you consume
more than you actually need. Okay, so a department store wants you to buy their products,
that’s to be expected. And it wants you to buy the expensive things rather than the cheap ones.
That’s also to be expected.

But now let’s think about how, depending on personal circumstances the shopping experience
differs. What is your monthly salary? No one likes to talk about this in Switzerland, I know. But I
do know that Manor products are not exactly cheap. Have you had times when you were more
on a budget than others? I know myself how it feels to walk through a store and the more
expensive products are taboo, also the frenzy that you have when it really doesn’t matter what
you put in the trolley. But it’s not just your budget that influences your experience in a store.
When was the last time you had to help an elderly person by handing them a product from the
top shelf? Have you ever tried shopping with a maxi cosi? Or imagine how it is in a wheelchair?

You get the point, depending on who you are, the experience in the shop is an entirely different
one. Even though we all see the same things - we see the same salad bowls, the same
pastries, the same vegetables - we do not have the same experience.

Have you heard of this story? It happened already 10 years ago, so maybe you don’t. Doesn’t
matter, I’ll tell you anyway. Target, a department store in the USA started to analyze shopping
behavior of their customers. They used data from credit cards et voilà, they gathered a lot of
information. And Target sent them coupons that would fit their profile, and gave them a reason
to go back to them again . They also did that with pregnant women, because unsurprisingly your
shopping behavior changes heavily when you are pregnant. So they could tell when someone
was pregnant very accurately. What happened is that they sent coupons to a pregnant teenage
girl still living with their parents. Target got an angry phone call from the father that didn’t know
about the pregnancy of his daughter. As customer service wanted to call again, it was the father
who apologized: His daughter was indeed pregnant, but he, as compared to Target, was not
informed. This happened 10 years ago and only on the basis of credit card information.

So imagine what Google knows about you. Yes, probably everything. We don’t lie when we
search for something on Google. If a department store like Target sends you coupons based on
your information, what would an online shop do? Exactly, customize your whole experience. In
fact, basically your whole experience on the internet is customized. Your search results are
customized, the ads on every website are customized, what you see on social media and lastly
ofcourse, your netflix is customized. Based on your profile, websites tailor the information they
show you. That is not so problematic if it is a shoe advertisement, but can become more
problematic in other contexts, for example in the case of political information or even more
problematic in the case of false information. Furthermore companies will make a profitable use
of the data they gather. For example through the targeted exploitation of already vulnerable
users through ads. Examples of this are ads of overpriced continued education targeted towards
low-income individuals like single mothers or ex-convicts; or a higher fee added to your health
insurance. So these ads do not want to help you find the perfect shoe, they target people who
are already vulnerable and want to exploit them.

And you cannot quit the Internet. It is omnipresent, it is everywhere, we buy our tickets online,
we scan QR codes, chat with friends, digital technology can feel inescapable. Big tech
companies know more about you, than your closest friends. Still think, it’s not a problem,
because you have nothing to hide?

And that leads us to the question: What are the social consequences if the internet we use on a
daily basis can be outright discriminatory to vulnerable groups, without being noticed by most of
us? Is it safe for them to use the internet? What kind of skills do you need to have to not be a
victim on the internet? What role does privacy play when we are talking about security on the
internet? With recommender systems, privacy is becoming more and more important. But
privacy can also be hard to enforce. I am going to tell you why on the next stop.

We are going to dive into that next question at the Poste.

Now turn your back to Manor, cross the street and walk up Rue Paul Bouchet, cross the busy
road Rue de Chantepoulet and continue on Rue de Berne, until at your right you will have
another impressive building, the Post Office.

Who owns the internet?

Poste - Post Office

Here we stand in front of the Post office. It is a quite impressive building that represents a
fundamental institution of any city: communication. The postal service is a critical infrastructure,
that means, it is an essential asset for the functioning of a city and a society. Other critical
infrastructure sectors regulate and organize supply for food, water, energy and information. The
postal service guarantees the dispatch of a letter from a sender to a receiver. Actually, why are
we using the postal service? I mean, technically, you could just ask a kid next door to bring your
letter to the desired address. The first reason islogistics: Besides the fact that you maybe don’t
have a kid willing to run errands for you living next door, no kid would do it for one franc. The
cost of a stamp. The postal service is rather cheap because of the standardized procedure of a
delivery vehicle delivering hundreds of letters. The second reason is trust. Compared to other
European countries, trust in state institutions is high in Switzerland. And a basic right in the
constitution protects your privacy, by explicitly stating how the opening of your mail is forbidden
by law. Essentially, the content of your letters, your privacy, is protected.
Unfortunately, that does not mean that privacy breaches do not happen. In 1989 the Fichen
scandal became public. It was huge: The cantonal police had created 900’000 files, so called
“Fiches” with detailed information about persons that they considered a threat to the stability of
Switzerland. The files were at times creepily accurate and they are now kept available to the
public, in the federal archive, if you want to know whether your primary school teacher had a
Fiche.
But how often do you send physical letters anyway? Do you only go to the post office, if you
missed a delivery from online shopping? If I say “mail” does the post office come to your mind or
emails? We are living in a digital age. Digital infrastructure is becoming more and more
important. The pandemic has even accelerated this process, suddenly every company had to
change meetings into online calls and questions into emails. But what about the trust that we
had towards an institution like the post office, do you trust the private companies that we use for
online communication on a daily basis? Do you feel safe using them?

Let’s look at Gmail, the most popular email service. Up until 2017, Gmail has scanned your
email content per default to tailor your ads. But it still does so via the so-called smart features -
that provide auto-complete suggestions or the automatic addition of appointments in your
calendar. Gmail can monitor every way you interact with the program, the dates and times you
email at, who you are talking to, and topics you chose to email about. These data are called
metadata. If these metadata are linked to the data of other services that are linked to Google,
such as GoogleMaps or Youtube, the result is a very detailed profile of you. Where all the
information Google collects about you, when you surf websites that use Google products like
Ads or Analytics, like Netflix, Zoom, Medium, Aliexpress comes together… well you get the
point. And even though Google claims that they do not use it for advertising, they keep record of
and store this information. Oh and there are ads between your emails, looking like one to spoof
you into opening it. One could go as far as calling it spam provided by Google…

And digital infrastructure is predominantly owned by Big Tech companies: From cloud storage,
servers or fiber-optic cables that run underwater across continents. These cables carry up to
95% of the global internet traffic over 1.3 million kilometers, which is essentially the whole
physical internet. Google, Meta and Amazon are the major investors and therefore, owners of
these underwater cables.

But what exactly is the problem, if the digital infrastructure is owned by private companies? Well,
the state has an entirely different responsibility towards you than, let’s say, Google. You have
basic rights, like the right to privacy, that are protected by law. Secondly, private companies
have to make profit, while public infrastructure does not have profit as its priority, but rather the
creation and accessibility of a service. See the conflict of interest. A different fundamental right
in democracies is the freedom of speech. And platforms such as Facebook and Twitter that
describe themselves as places where discussion happens, have their own policies of what can
be said and what cannot. And while many racist or sexist comments are still online, nipples are
still censored. You get the point again.

But at the moment, most state governments, including Switzerland, do not have the technical
know-how or the resources to build such infrastructures themselves. Remember how the health
department still used Fax during the Covid pandemic? Who owns the internet is a question that
only gains importance, given that we are spending more and more time online.

Okay, but enough talking about the post. Let’s go to our last physical stop: The main station, the
Gare Cornavin. And there we are going to talk some more about the government and why their
lack of knowledge at one point does not have to mean an issue for the rest of time.

So return to Rue de Berne and continue in the previous direction, at Rue des Alpes turn left and
walk until the traffic of people will become more dense and you will see the Central Station.

Move slow, unbreak things

Gare - Central Station

Welcome to Gare Cornavin. A bottleneck of transportation, where buses, trains and trams all
meet to transport 116’000 passengers from A to B on an average day. But these are not all the
available means of transportation. What else do you see? Right, taxis. Do you see Ubers? No?
Yes? Uber is a darling Start-Up of Silicon Valley that revolutionized transportation. Before Uber,
there were Taxis, just Taxisi. Taxis operate through a central office where bookings are taken
and distributed to the drivers who are usually hired as fixed employees. So there’s a middleman.
Even if you don’t know a lot about Silicon Valley, let me tell you something, middlemen are one
of the favorite things to be replaced by technology. And that was what Uber did. With Uber there
is no middleman. Instead of having a Taxi company that coordinates the match-making between
drivers and customers, customers can directly find their lifts via App. And drivers on the other
hand did not need more than a drivers license, a car and a smartphone to start driving for Uber.
And while a taxi company has a certain accountability, with Uber the trust is established by a
rating system of the drivers on the app.
Uber was a major success because of its easy interface and frankly, because it was cheaper.
And Uber took over the world, suddenly you could order an Uber everywhere and at any time.

The cheaper prices of Uber rides are due to Uber not paying any social security to its drivers.
Because drivers are not directly employed at Uber, but work under a so-called self-employment
contract. Furthermore Ubers have a flexible pricing rate, that means that they are not always
cheaper, they are regulated by demand and supply (it becomes problematic in cases of
emergency). The “most of the time” cheaper prices led to high unemployment among taxi
drivers. Many of them have lost their jobs due to the rise of Uber. And many of them were
unhappy because they thought the cheaper pricing of Uber was not legitimate, because in fact
Uber operated similar to a taxi service, by bundling the orders. And therefore, should have paid
social insurance fees.

Uber could put this business model into working in the first place, because there were no laws
prohibiting it. Uber, like many other Tech companies did not exist at the time when these laws
were written. And these are the loopholes many Silicon Valley companies operate in. As the
famous Facebook saying goes «move fast, break things» which means essentially use every
loophole you can. And for a while governments just watched as Uber or Airbnb or e-scooters
changed the way we interact with the city. Because, well, governments are not exactly known to
be quick in their response.

But while some Uber drivers are still happy with their flexible working hours, many of them
awere unhappy because their work was rather precarious. If they could not drive, they would
have no income. End of the story. And during covid when everybody had to stay home, that
became an existential problem. And taxi drivers were angry too, remember?

This summer the federal court upheld a decision of the cantonal authorities, that classified Uber
as an employer, meaning it is responsible for an employment contract and for social security.
And while a national framework is still lacking, the social insurance court of Zurich has ruled
similarly and stated that the relation between Uber and its drivers means that it is one of
dependence between employer and employee.
So, is that a happy end? Unfortunately not. In Geneva, Uber has proposed a contract where
drivers would be worse off than before, because only the time that they would be actually driving
would be reimbursed.

But nevertheless, this case has shown that, after all, democratic tools such as court pleas still
uphold power. The government can change things, but it is rather slow. New laws have to run
through procedures that take up to multiple years, which makes sense from a democratic point
of view because that way every stakeholder can voice their opinion. But that is often too slow to
effectively respond to the new realities that Silicon Valley innovations create. And this generates
tension between big tech companies and the democratic question “do we, as a society, really
want this?”

Being online is no longer something that you only do when you are on your phone. There’s no
clear separation between online and offline anymore. Digital tools reshape the way we interact
with each other and influence the pillars of our society: How does digitization change the notion
of safety, how is physical safety refigured? Is privacy safety? Is safety accessible infrastructure?
Is safety legal certainty that you still have got employment protection?

But I would like to highlight one take away from our last example: Digital tools might reshape
sectors, but we can still question that process through democratic tools. Because Geneva, the
town we’ve strolled through, is a democratic city, we can shape to a certain extent, the change
we are living through. We have to take part in the discussion around new technologies.

And that was the last piece of thought that I wanted to share with you, before disappearing in
the endless internet again. I hope you enjoyed the Audio-walk and maybe you are going to look
at some things differently. You can find further information on the topics we touched on in the
show notes on our website dezentrum.ch. And if you have any questions or feedback please
contact us.

This audio-walk was created by Dezentrum. It is a Think and Do Tank that deals with ways how
digitalization alters the way we live together and supports ​a digital transformation that serves
society. Check out their website for further information.
Goodbye and Au revoir!