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Medal Winner 2021

The Cloud Cooperative

Part 2 Project 2021
Tiia Partanen
University of Strathclyde | UK
We are on the verge of a Big Data Revolution: all facets of society are beginning to be shaped by data mining and behaviour products - constant mass surveillance, in the form of online tracking, is dangerously close to becoming the ‘new normal.’ Today, in the Web 2.0., private corporations and powerful governments hold a monopoly over all flows of information – by owning the infrastructure of the internet (the data centres, the broadband networks, the ISPs) they own the data. With our private information sold to the highest bidder and with one person’s yearly email correspondence costing 0.6 tonnes in carbon dioxide – the system, as we know it, requires an overhaul. At its core, the commoditization of data has created a fundamental asymmetry in power between institutions and individuals: this project seeks to challenge the current data monopoly and to explore what it would mean to give people power over their own data. Envisioned through the actions of a future activist movement, called the Cloud Cooperative, the project explores the phased decentralization of data infrastructure and the creation of a secure, ethical new internet.


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2021
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