Read a Q&A with Peter Lewis and Jordan Guiao

Peter Lewis is the founder of the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology and the director of Essential, a strategic research and communications consultancy. He is a regular columnist for Guardian Australia and the author of Webtopia: the World Wide Wreck of Tech and How to Make the Net Work. Jordan Guiao is a Research Fellow at The Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology. He is a digital strategist and former Head of Social Media for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Special Broadcasting Service. He lived and worked at Silicon Valley and gained unique insights into the technology capital of the world.

Today, Peter Lewis and Jordan Guiao are on the blog to answer a few of our questions about their new book, The Public Square Project. Read on …

Peter Lewis

Please tell us about your book, The Public Square Project!

The Public Square Project is about reimagining our collective digital future. It’s about dreaming up a more democratic digital space for everyone, that’s not reliant on platforms that are actually very harmful and not designed for the public good. The book asks big questions, like ‘how do we have media models that help us tackle society’s problems?’ ‘Can we create civic platforms built on facts and civility?’ And ‘can we control our data and use it for the public good?’.

Where did your interest in this topic come from?

Peter was a journalist early in his career then moved on to political campaigning and working closely with civic society groups for progressive issues before launching the Centre for Responsible Technology. Jordan worked at the ABC and SBS and is a founding team member of the Centre, so we both have media backgrounds and have both been interested in how technology, media and politics coalesce together and impacts our collective ability to connect and participate in a democratic society.

You reference the 2021 Facebook Australian news ban in your blurb. The ban was reversed fairly quickly, but what do you think might be the long term implications of this event?

That pivotal moment confirmed a lot of things – that a lot of Australians have over-relied on Facebook for the work that they do, and it’s really forced the question of whether Facebook is the platform we want to continue to use for all of our communications, our interactions with one another, our way of publishing media stories, and our way of campaigning. It has highlighted just how risky it is to rely on private platforms, and more importantly that those private platforms were not built to be healthy places for civil conversation and exchange. It was a real eye-opening moment for everyone – individuals, governments and industries as well.

Do you think that the use of private data can ever be fully ethical, or will it always operate in a grey area? Why or why not?

It’s about how data is used and the parameters around that use. For instance, during the pandemic, it’s been really important to collect data about people’s movements to assist with contact tracing, so data use in that example has critical public health benefits. But commercial platforms like Google and Facebook don’t use data in that way. So how we code values and frameworks in how we use data is really important. We also need to make sure there are the right guard rails and lines in the sand with data use – for example, making sure data collection expires and isn’t used for secondary purposes.

What do you think needs to change in order for our digital future to reflect our democratic values as a society?

We need to invest and build digital systems that reflect democratic values and human rights values. At the moment the Internet is dominated by commercial platforms that only care about profit and don’t care much about the harms they put out into the world; they weren’t designed for public benefit and public good. So we need to start building products and platforms that are specifically designed for community benefits and the public good. There are plenty of ideas in the book as well so read on!

Jordan Guiao

What does a sustainable media model look like to you? How might we go about implementing them?

This is an interesting question and there are a lot of ideas in the book, but to start with, we need to make sure our media isn’t overly reliant on third party platforms like Google and Facebook who have created gateways between the audience and the media. There’s a huge imbalance that the digital platforms have created and this needs to be corrected, which governments and a lot of people around the world are starting to address. There also needs to be more investment in public interest journalism which we know is really valuable but is an area that digital platforms have essentially hijacked commercially.

This book gathers contributions from many writers, thinkers and activists. How did you go about approaching your contributors and bringing the book together?

The Centre is all about gathering the best minds together and working across academia, government, industry and civil society. We’re very lucky to have a great network full of really smart, talented and articulate people who have contributed. Movements are always done by groups of people and can’t be achieved in isolation so creating networks of like-minded people is key.

What is the last book you read and loved?

Peter: I’ve just finished Sean Kelly’s The Game. It’s a profile of Scott Morrison but written more like a literary review. It totally works in exploring how modern politics work.

Jordan: Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford. Exceptional book that demystifies how reliant AI actually is on people and physical resources, and that it’s not this magical thing that many technophiles would have us believe it to be.

What do you hope readers will discover in The Public Square Project?

We hope that people will learn something new and maybe surprising about technology, our media landscape and our public square, and how critical it is that we take it back for the benefit of the public and not for technology companies. There are a lot of very smart contributions to the book, so it will hopefully be a very invigorating and diverse read, and we hope that it inspires people to take action, or even connect with us!

And finally, what’s up next for you?

The Centre for Responsible Technology has a lot of big policy projects and research coming up – as the job of regulating technology and holding Big Tech to account is a very big job! The Public Square Project is a key bit of work for us, and the book will be part of a bigger stream of work all around the digital public square. We always have things going on and we rely on donor donations so head to our website to stay in touch with us and donate to help us keep going!

Thanks Peter and Jordan!

—The Public Square Project by Peter Lewis and Jordan Guiao (Melbourne University Press) is out now.

The Public Square Project

Reimagining Our Digital Future

by Peter Lewis and Jordan Guiao

A new blueprint for a more democratic digital space

Western democracy has always been anchored by the idea of a public space where people gather to share ideas, mediate difference and make sense of the world. When Facebook blocked Australian users from viewing or sharing news in 2021, it sounded the alarm worldwide on our growing reliance on global tech companies to fulfil this critical role in a digital world. Facebook's hostile act, constituting a very real threat to participatory democracy, was a direct response to...

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