ELETTRA BIETTI: OK.
Thank you for having me.
I'm really excited to do this talk.
So I'm going to talk about the argument
that data in relevant respects is like plastic.
Both of these things are produced in large quantities.
They have great benefits and very useful.
But they also, once we take them a large scale,
might have very harmful consequences.
So some facts on plastic--
300 million tons of plastics are produced every year,
which is equivalent to the weight of the entire adult
population of the planet.
Half of those 300 million tons, 100 million tons
are used just once and then thrown away.
That's what we call single-use plastics.
Plastics have the capacity of being reabsorbed by the Earth,
but we are at a level of production where most
of the plastics we produce cannot be reabsorbed.
So a lot of the waste that we produce
is here to stay with us on the planet.
8 to 12 million tons of plastic ends up
in our oceans every year.
And so, the waste that we have to deal with
increases every year, pretty much.
So how to deal with this?
Next slide.
So plastics, obviously, have great benefits.
If you had water today, there were plastic glasses.
You could take them to the table.
You could dispose of them after the talk.
Nobody needs to wash them, so very useful.
But there are also huge harms to use of plastic.
For the planet, obviously, accumulation
of waste for animals, especially in marine animals.
There are micro-plastics that they absorb.
And for humans, for instance, when we eat fish,
we might be absorbing some of these microplastics ourselves.
The problem is we keep producing those plastics.
And although we might have moved to a recycling economy,
we still haven't moved to a circular economy, which
is an economy where we are reabsorbing
all of the plastics we produce.
Now, data.
I think many of us know that a lot of data is produced.
By 2020, it is said that each individual
will be producing 102 megabytes per minute of data.
So data obviously have benefits.
By going to trip to France, I can plan my trip.
I can know exactly where I am, and I won't get lost.
Thanks, Google.
So, great benefits but also great harms--
harms to my ability to participate
to the political community and act as a citizen;
harms to my privacy; harms to my customer behavior
through being nudged just by advertisements and price
discrimination.
And yet, we keep producing, generating data, incentivizing
business models that are heavily reliant on data
production, data collection, data accumulation.
And the laws also act as financial incentives on this.
So why are we comparing the two?
Both of these things are really useful.
Both of these things completely overproduce.
Each of them, at small scale, seems to be great.
At large scale, it produces very abstract and large harms.
The difference between them is that data
is less visible than plastic.
And so maybe, we can use the example of plastic
to think through some of the harms
that data is causing to humanity today--
the planet, us, et cetera.
So each of these three individuals, corporations,
and governments have obligations to try and curb
the production of plastic and data, I argue.
And each of these three have separate types of obligations.
Corporations are obviously at the core
of why both data and plastic have been proliferating,
and they have resisted to government regulation.
They engage in lobbying.
And so, they need to be made responsible, individuals also.
So all of us are responsible through our consumer behavior
and purchasing practices.
And also, opt-ins and opt-outs on the internet
for how data and plastic are proliferating, so we should
check our consumer behavior.
Governments should pass laws that
are more restrictive, perhaps through taxation,
and should also try to coordinate
the governance of plastic and data at an international level.
So, overall, my main claim is that we
should make companies accountable
but also take responsibility for trying
to curb overproduction of data.
And in the same way, we should also do that for plastic.
Thank you.