Two members of the group have enrolled in an ethics course at Glasgow University, so thinking about ethics is on tap in the Wednesday sessions.
How do we hold on to the good, they ask, given what is happening now with the Internet? The creators of Internet helped make something that allows other people to control us. The information provided was once reliable, now people need to filter through the fake data to get to the ‘truth’. Some of these people are quitting this version of the web (like Tim Berners-Lee who is building WEB 2.0), while others are building on it (Zuckerberg’s Meta).
The control over the everyday citizen is manifested in keeping people trapped in the past, best explained by Adam Curtis in conversation with David Runciman. Curtis describes the internet as an adjustment system, it watches your behaviour closely, compares it with the behaviour of million others, and then is programmed to suggest something that will keep you in a known pattern. It will only feed back things from the past, it can never imagine the future. The world is fixed.
The group wants a world that is not stuck in the past but is dynamic. They want to create a tool with reliable information about how groups of women (and some men) around the world get unstuck and build enterprises, information that works for them, that opens up a door to the future.
Creating something good, as with the Internet, is only the first step. The group see conversations about ethics integral to the digital object. Ethics as a way to hold on to the good because goodness requires working at it, continuously.