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Group activity: Making far away worlds feel closer

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Group activity: Making far away worlds feel closer

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[Group activity] What does ICC look like to *you*

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[Group activity] What does ICC look like to *you*

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A free and instant collaborative whiteboarding tool.

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Countries of Africa Map Quiz | World Geography Games

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Challenging map of Africa quiz with 54 countries, from Algeria to Zimbabwe. Test your knowledge and train your brain!

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You can find the transcript here: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/webcast/scripts/whoonearth/tae_whoonearth_02_080508.pdf

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BBC Learning English - Who on Earth are we?

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English is the most widely spoken language in the world, and the vast majority of English speakers learned the language in a classroom. Yet in conference rooms and language courses around the world, they are often told they speak "bad English." Global communication consultant Heather Hansen tells why "bad English" - with its simplified vocabulary, fueled by the contributions of non-native speakers around the world - might be more universally understandable.

In this episode of Rough Translation, we set out to discover: why might "bad English" be the best way to communicate? To find out, we'll hear insights and anecdotes from English speakers from around the world, who talk about their frustrations and joys over a language they've made their own. We'll talk to Hansen about why "bad English" is good for business, and how native speakers can communicate better by changing how they think about language.

Additional Context:

Listen to Rough Translation wherever you get your podcasts, including NPR One, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and RSS.

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How To Speak Bad English : Rough Translation

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Heather Hansen used to teach people to speak "perfect" English. Until she realized that so-called "bad English" might be a better way to communicate.

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Why Arabs And Muslims Aren't Exotic | AJ+

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story | TED

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A free and instant virtual whiteboarding with online collaboration. No signup required. Works on all devices: mobile, tablets, and desktop.

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Iran (Sabrina) | 100 Years of Beauty - Ep 3 | Cut

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Germany (Brooke) | 100 Years of Beauty - Ep 10 | Cut

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USA Men (Lester & Samuel) | 100 Years of Beauty - Ep 32 | Cut

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Collective reading 1 - Ryszard Kapucisnski: Extract

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Collective reading 1 - Ryszard Kapucisnski: Extract

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Extracts from R Kapuscinski’s  Travels With Herodotus,

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Elif Shafak on multiculturalism, the power of stories and making the political personal

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🔊 Listen Now: Who’s Your Great-Great-Great-Great Granddaddy?

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Being the Boss in Brussels, Boston, and Beijing 

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Being the Boss in Brussels, Boston, and Beijing 

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In Brief

The Problem

Differences in leadership culture can create unexpected paradoxes. American bosses, for example, think of themselves as egalitarian, yet to the famously hierarchical Japanese, they can come across as dictatorial. Such contrary perceptions often undermine managers operating outside their home countries.

Why It Happens

Managers often fail to distinguish between two important dimensions of leadership culture: attitudes toward authority and attitudes toward decision rights. On the first dimension, Americans are certainly more egalitarian than the Japanese. But Americans typically practice top-down decision making, whereas the Japanese have a strong tradition of building consensus.

The Solution

Leadership cultures fall into one of four categories depending on how they score along the two dimensions. Managers going into a new cultural environment must figure out which category they are moving to and adjust accordingly.

Cultural differences in leadership styles often create unexpected misunderstandings. Americans, for example, are used to thinking of the Japanese as hierarchical while considering themselves egalitarian. Yet the Japanese find Americans confusing to deal with. Although American bosses are outwardly egalitarian-encouraging subordinates to use first names and to speak up in meetings-they seem to the Japanese to be extremely autocratic in the way they make decisions. As a Japanese manager living in the United States and working for Mitsubishi put it: "I couldn't figure out how to adapt my approach from one day to the next, because the culture was so contradictory and puzzling."

Problems like this manager's are widespread. In many years of researching, consulting, and teaching executives and managers in hundreds of global companies, I've found that it's common for people from different countries to grapple with mutual incomprehension. Often that's because managers fail to distinguish between two important dimensions of leadership culture.

The first of these is the one we're most familiar with: authority. How much attention do we pay to the rank or status of a person, and how much respect and deference do we pay to that status? On this dimension, the Japanese are clearly more hierarchical than Americans. The positions are reversed, however, when we look at the second dimension: decision making. Who calls the shots, and how? Does the boss decide, or does the team decide collectively? On this dimension, which is often overlooked, the Japanese are more consensual than Americans.

Approaches to authority and decision making are not the only ways in which cultures differ, but they are arguably the most important in the leadership context. And if international managers confound the two, they will make mistakes in adapting their leadership styles to the cultures and situations at hand. (For a more general treatment of cultural differences, take a look at my May 2014 HBR article, "Navigating the Cultural Minefield.")

In this article, I explore the two dimensions and how they affect global leadership effectiveness, focusing particularly on how attitudes toward decision making impact global teamwork. I conclude by mapping selected cultures along both dimensions and comparing the resulting expectations about the role of the leader.

Attitudes Toward Authority

Over the past century, the biggest leadership trend in the U.S. and parts of Western Europe has been the abandoning of hierarchical management processes for a more facilitative, egalitarian approach. Command-and-control has been replaced with empowerment. Managers have been trained to stop telling their employees what to do and instead move to "management by objective," open-door policies, and 360-degree feedback. Early on, addressing the boss by first name rather than title became the norm. Company hierarchy further dissolved when the CEO began "management by walking around," having impromptu discussions with people at all levels without even letting their supervisors know. Then the corner office yielded to open-plan spaces. Since most management literature and research still come out of the U.S., business school education has largely reinforced this trend.

But attitude toward authority is one of the most striking points of difference across cultures. In Nigeria a child learns to kneel or even lie down as a sign of respect when an elder enters the room. In Sweden a student calls her teachers by their first names and, without implying any disrespect, feels free to contradict them in front of her classmates. Unsurprisingly, the management approach that works in Lagos will not get the best results in Stockholm.

Understanding this disconnect is important. In general, the greatest business opportunities lie in the big emerging economies, which include Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, and Turkey. In nearly every case, these are cultures where hierarchy and deference to authority are deeply woven into the national psyche. The management orthodoxy of pushing authority down in the organization does not fit easily into the emerging-market context and often trips up Western companies on their first ventures abroad.

Take the case of an American firm I worked with two years ago. I'll call it Chill Factor, as it delivers innovative cooling solutions to consumers and small businesses. For the previous 15 years, Chill Factor had been training its employees in the latest egalitarian leadership methods, encouraging low-level workers to show initiative, while teaching the bosses to leave their doors open, accept 360-degree feedback, and set objectives rather than issue edicts. Additionally, the business had set up the flattest organizational structure possible. This progressive culture helped the company attract talent and keep employees inspired and engaged. The entire workforce was humming with creativity and innovation.

After decades of success in the U.S., Chill Factor took a big jump and negotiated a joint venture with a company in Hangzhou, China. But within weeks the Chill Factor managers were complaining about the lack of initiative shown by their Chinese staff. As one manager related to me:
My Chinese employees don't see it as their job to have ideas or make suggestions to their leaders. They just follow instructions. Subordinates do not volunteer solutions but simply present problems. Their measure of success is to do what they are told, when they are told, and to do it well. But I expect them to produce new ideas and to give the bosses information so that we can make the best decisions for the benefit of the business.
In a session with a group of American executives and a dozen of their Chinese colleagues, I asked the Chinese managers to work as a small group and give advice to the Americans about how to handle their Chinese staff more effectively. They huddled and then presented their recommendations:

Because Chill Factor now wants to succeed in China, we hope our American colleagues could kindly make some changes:

1. Before attending a meeting with your staff, prepare more ideas for yourself.

2. Be more specific with directions to your employees.

3. Have your own plan before allocating work to your subordinates.

The American managers were dumbfounded and asked for elaboration. "The most surprising comment from our Chinese colleagues," one Chill Factor executive later explained, "was that we were perceived not just as incompetent but as arrogant, because we didn't take the time to explain to our staff carefully and in detail what we wanted them to do and how." It was a valuable learning moment for this firm, which began to pull back on some of the egalitarian practices that it had so long taken for granted as the best approach.

Of course, those who already have some international experience might not be surprised that Chinese managers defer to their bosses and that American attitudes toward status don't travel well. But understanding differences in attitudes toward hierarchy and status, as we've noted, isn't the whole story.

Attitudes Toward Decision Making

Many executives and managers assume that in more-hierarchical societies, decisions will be made at the top by the boss, and in more-egalitarian cultures, decisions will be reached by group consensus. Yet on a worldwide scale, we find that hierarchies and decision-making methods are not always correlated.

The U.S. is a striking example. American business culture has become more and more egalitarian over recent decades, but consensual decision making is clearly not the norm. American companies favor quick and flexible decisions, so decision-making power is vested in the individual (usually the boss). With a disdain for "analysis paralysis" and a belief that "any decision is better than no decision," the American manager may solicit input from his or her team but ultimately is the one to make the final determination. And in most cases, the team members not only are fine with this but expect it. The U.S. can thus be described as an egalitarian culture where decisions are made top-down.

In top-down decision-making cultures (India, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, and Russia are other examples), decisions are made quickly, but they are subject to change as new input or arguments arise. When people in these cultures say they've reached a decision, the decision is not a firm commitment but a placeholder that can later be adjusted.

Contrast that with what happens in Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and Sweden. If you've collaborated with companies in those countries, you might have noticed that a lot of people seem to be involved in the decision-making process, and it takes a long time to negotiate group agreement. However, once a decision gets made, implementation is surprisingly quick, because details and stakeholders were aligned while consensus was being reached. In these consensual cultures, it's as if the word "Decision" has a capital "D," representing a commitment that can't (and shouldn't) be easily changed.

Either system can work well, and both have their advantages. Small "d" top-down decision making is particularly suited to industries where the pace of change is fast and speed to market trumps product perfection. Big "D" consensual cultures are great for industries where development timelines are long and perfection of the product is essential. It's perhaps no surprise that two big "D" cultures-Germany and Japan-are among the world's greatest car-manufacturing nations.

Problems arise, however, when members of a single team have different norms of behavior. What happens, say, when a consensual big "D" Japanese company acquires a top-down small "d" American business? This was exactly the situation when Suntory became the majority shareholder in Beam (maker of Jim Beam whiskey). The success of this acquisition reveals some useful strategies for navigating safely through big "D"/small "d" collaboration.

As is the tradition in Japan, Suntory managers used a consensual big "D" system of decision making. One of them explained:
In Suntory the management structure is hierarchical, but decisions are most often made by group consensus. Mid-level managers discuss a proposal among themselves and come to a consensus before presenting it to managers one level higher. The next-higher-ranking managers then discuss the proposal themselves and come also to an agreement. If they collectively believe in the initiative, they pass it on for approval at the next level, until it gets to the top.
Two words define this consensual process, so common in Japanese companies. The first is nemawashi-the practice of speaking with each individual stakeholder before a meeting in order to shape the group decision and develop agreement in advance. The second is ringi, which involves passing a proposal around level by level, starting at the bottom and then working through the layers of middle and senior management before arriving at the top.

This system works beautifully, provided everyone understands and follows it. The problems at Suntory and Beam arose because managers on one side didn't understand how managers on the other side made decisions. The experience of one American manager from Beam provides a nice illustration:
There was a problem and a decision had to be made, which required a trip to Japan. The Japanese director in charge would be present, so I thought this would be the perfect moment to impact his direction. I prepared some slides for a meeting, along with my proposal. During the meeting, it became apparent that the decision had already been made by the group beforehand and was different from my proposal. Trying to discuss and convince during the meeting had no effect at all.
Learning the approach of the other culture and adapting accordingly is obviously important. Through trial and error and by asking questions, the Beam manager came to see that his assumptions about how and when decisions would get made was entirely a result of his experience working in the U.S. Over time, he learned to give his input much earlier at Suntory. But if you're managing the collaboration of two groups with different systems for reaching decisions, being flexible and adapting your individual style are not enough. You must also be explicit about the process of decision making. Define whether decisions will be made by consensus or by the boss. Establish whether 100% agreement is needed. Clarify whether a deadline for the decision is necessary and, if one is set, how much flexibility there will be for changes afterward.

Consider the case of a German-American collaboration I worked on. Early in the project, team members from both countries discussed a major decision ahead of a meeting with the company's big boss in the U.S. The team formed a point of view, and everyone seemed united on it. But during the actual meeting, after a very short discussion, the boss announced her decision, which ran counter to the team's recommendation. The Americans all agreed with the boss without a word of pushback. The German team members, however, were deeply unhappy about this turn of events, concluding not only that the American boss was arrogant but also that their American colleagues were two-faced.

Of course, these perceptions weren't exactly helping the relationships among the team members. But the situation became particularly fraught when it came to the meaning of the word "decision." One German team member explained:
At the end of a short meeting the boss would announce, "Great! We have a decision." For a German, when you say "We will do this," it is a promise. You can't just change your mind casually tomorrow. So we Germans would spend days working on the implementation. And then one of the Americans would call us up and casually mention that we were taking another direction, or the boss would show us more data suggesting a different path.
For the first several months of collaboration, the Germans could not shake the feeling that their American teammates were disingenuous. One manager spoke to his American boss about the situation, and the conversation was illuminating for both of them. The German commented, "I then understood that for an American, a decision is simply an agreement to continue discussions. And if you are American, you understand that. But for a German, who considers a decision a final commitment to march forward on a plan, this can cause a lot of confusion."

To get the collaboration on track, the two leaders organized an off-site retreat. The team members discussed their assumptions about how decisions should get made and what the word "decision" means in each of their cultures. They developed a system for collectively arriving at decisions and determining how flexible those would be, using the big "D"/small "d" distinction. In subsequent meetings, an American might be heard to say, "Great! Decision made!" only to pause and clarify, "Decision with a small 'd,' that is. We still need to run this by our colleagues at home, so don't start working on it yet." With the cultural difference brought to the surface and acknowledged, the collaboration took off.

The Four Cultures of Leadership

Making a clear distinction between attitudes toward authority (from hierarchical to egalitarian) and attitudes toward decision making (from top-down to consensual) goes a long way in helping leaders become more effective in a global context. It turns out that countries are quite broadly scattered across the two dimensions, as you can see from the exhibit "Mapping Leadership Cultures," which plots the positions of 19 countries within four quadrants. Let's look at the main expectations people have of leaders in each quadrant.

Consensual and egalitarian: Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden

Early in my career, I worked as the only non-Dane on an eight-person team. As an egalitarian American, I thought it was great when my boss told me that decisions would be made by consensus. But then the e-mails started. First from him: "Hey, team, for the annual face-to-face in December, I thought we would focus on being more client-centric. What do you think?" Then from a team member: "Hi, Per. Great idea. But wouldn't it be better to focus the meeting on how to market our services more successfully?" And from someone else: "I think it would be most effective to have presentations from all team members about their individual client strategies." And then everyone began sending responses to one another, ending with: "Erin, we haven't heard from you. What do you think?" Consensual decision making sounds like a great idea in principle, but people from fundamentally nonconsensual cultures can find the reality frustratingly time-consuming.

If you are to thrive in this quadrant, therefore, you need to go in with the following approach to leadership:

Expect the decision making to take longer and to involve more meetings and correspondence.

Do your best to demonstrate patience and commitment throughout the process, even when diverging opinions lead to lengthy ongoing discussions.

Don't expect the boss to jump in and decide for the group. The boss is a facilitator, not the decider.

Resist the temptation to push for a quick resolution. Take the time to ensure that the decision you make is the best one possible, because it will be difficult to change later.

Consensual and hierarchical: Belgium, Germany, Japan

A French director of Deutsche Bank once told me: "When I moved to Germany, I was aware that both our cultures are rather hierarchical. So I continued to make decisions as I would have in France, which was basically-after some good debate-to tell the group what I'd decided, even when I knew many people had opposing opinions about what should be done." When the director received feedback from his first 360-degree review, he was upset by complaints from his German staff that he wasn't inclusive. Eventually he realized that the Germans expected him to invest considerably more time in winning their support before coming to a decision-more than would have been necessary in a French organization.

If you likewise are not used to a consensual, hierarchical culture, be aware that in this quadrant:

If you're the boss, your team will defer to your decision, yet desire and expect to be part of the decision-making process. Make a point of soliciting opinions and input from your staff.

Be patient and thorough. Invest the time necessary to get each stakeholder on board.

Once a group decision begins to form, take special care to listen to those with dissenting opinions.

Focus on the quality and completeness of information gathered and the soundness of the reasoning process. Remember that in this quadrant, decisions are commitments that are not easily altered.

Top-down and hierarchical: Brazil, China, France, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia

We've already visited this quadrant in the company of those Americans who moved to China with Chill Factor and perceived their Chinese staff as lacking initiative, while the Chinese viewed the new U.S. managers as incompetent.

If you're operating in this quadrant:

Remember that the boss is the director, not a facilitator.

If you're the boss, you will be deferred to in public and probably in private too. Don't be shy about telling your team how best to show you respect.

Be clear about your expectations. If you want your staff to present three ideas to you before asking your opinion, or to give you input before you make a decision, tell them. Old habits die hard for all of us, so reinforce-with clarity and specificity-the behavior you are looking for.

Be careful what you say. You may find that an off-the-cuff comment is interpreted as a decision-and suddenly everyone is building that factory or reorganizing that department, when you thought you were just introducing an idea to explore.

Top-down and egalitarian: Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, United States

An American director for the World Bank, whom I will call Karen, described a challenge she was having with a Korean employee who had recently joined her team. "When I hired Jae-Sun to work for me in D.C., he had a shining résumé," Karen explained. Promoted time and again to run teams across Asia, he appeared to be an employee who knew how to get things done. Yet Karen noticed right away that if Jae-Sun was with her or another senior manager in a meeting, he seemed reluctant to express his views and instead deferred to them. "I had hoped to groom him for a bigger role in the department, but with this lack of self-confidence, I saw it just wasn't going to happen," Karen told me.

Succeeding in a top-down, egalitarian environment requires behaving as follows:

Before the decision has been made, speak up-no matter what your status is. You might not be asked explicitly to contribute, but demonstrate initiative and self-confidence by making your voice heard. Politely yet clearly provide your viewpoint even when it diverges from what the boss seems to be thinking.

Once the matter has been resolved, align quickly with the boss and support the decision even if it conflicts with the opinion you previously expressed. At this stage, if you show disagreement-especially in front of others-you may be viewed as difficult to work with.

After the decision is made, remain flexible. Decisions in this quadrant are rarely set in stone; most can later be adjusted or revisited if necessary.

CONCLUSION

Once you've figured out the nuances and complexities of the different approaches, you will make smarter choices in all your cross-cultural interactions as a leader and as a follower. During performance reviews with your Mexican staff, for instance, you might choose to explain your own approach and ask the team to adapt to you. The next week, while leading a meeting with those same employees, you might decide it will be more productive if you adapt to their cultural norms rather than expect them to adapt to yours.

The bottom line? Although you may have been a very successful leader in your own culture, if you hope to motivate and engage people around the globe, you will need a multifaceted approach. Today it's no longer enough to know how to lead the Dutch way or the Mexican way, the American way or the Chinese way. You must be informed enough and flexible enough to choose which style will work best in which cultural context and then deliberately decide how to adapt (or not) to get the results you need.

A version of this article appeared in the July-August 2017 issue (pp.70-77) of Harvard Business Review.

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To Lead Across Cultures, Focus on Hierarchy and Decision Making

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In Brief The Problem Differences in leadership culture can create unexpected paradoxes. American bosses, for example, think of themselves as egalitarian, yet to the famously hierarchical Japanese, they can come across as dictatorial. Such contrary perceptions often undermine managers operating outside their home countries.

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Erin Meyer, professor at INSEAD, discusses management hierarchy and decision-making across cultures. Turns out, these two things don't always track together. Sometimes top-down cultures still have strong consensus-driven decision-making styles - and the other way around. Meyer helps break down and map these factors so that managers working across cultures can adapt. She's the author of the article, "Being the Boss in Brussels, Boston, and Beijing" in the July-August 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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how authority and decision-making differ across cultures

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‎HBR IdeaCast: How Authority and Decision-Making Differ Across Cultures on Apple Podcasts

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Erin Meyer, professor at INSEAD, discusses management hierarchy and decision-making across cultures. Turns out, these two things don't always track together. Sometimes top-down cultures still have strong consensus-driven decision-making styles - and the other way around. Meyer helps break down and m...

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Erin Meyer, professor at INSEAD, discusses management hierarchy and decision-making across cultures. Turns out, these two things don't always track together. Sometimes top-down cultures still have strong consensus-driven decision-making styles - and the other way around. Meyer helps break down and map these factors so that managers working across cultures can adapt. She's the author of the article, "Being the Boss in Brussels, Boston, and Beijing" in the July-August 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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How Authority and Decision-Making Differ Across Cultures

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Erin Meyer, professor at INSEAD, discusses management hierarchy and decision-making across cultures. Turns out, these two things don't always track together. Sometimes top-down cultures still have strong consensus-driven decision-making styles - and the other way around. Meyer helps break down and map these factors so that managers working across cultures can adapt.

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National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution

The idea that race is a social construct comes from the pioneering work of anthropologist Franz Boas. During a time when race-based science and the eugenics movement were becoming mainstream, anthropologist Franz Boas actively sought to prove that race was a social construct, not a biological fact.
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The idea that race is a social construct comes from the pioneering work of anthropologist Franz Boas. During a time when race-based science and the eugenics movement were becoming mainstream, anthropologist Franz Boas actively sought to prove that race was a social construct, not a biological fact.

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What is "caste privilege," and what does it mean for South Asians in the United States?

The state of California filed a lawsuit, this summer, alleging caste discrimination in an all-Indian team of employees at Cisco Systems' headquarters in San Jose. The case has focused attention on how an ancient social hierarchy usually associated with South Asia has been cropping up at the ping pong tables and complementary juice bars of Silicon Valley. But how do caste dynamics leap halfway across the world to gain a foothold in the U.S.? The people accused of discriminating by caste are sometimes second- or even third-generation Indian Americans, some of whom have never been to India themselves. As dominant caste Indian Americans engage in discussions about privilege in the U.S., how are they confronting their own inherited, unconscious bias against other castes?

In this episode, host Gregory Warner and NPR's India correspondent Lauren Frayer take us into a debate over a system of privilege that is coded in one's career, last name, religion and dietary restrictions. We meet Indian Americans who are considering how their experiences with caste relate to the American pursuit of racial justice. How far does caste discrimination go inside South Asian communities in the U.S.? And how far should companies and individuals in the U.S. go to combat it?

Additional Context:

Read Mauktik Kulkarni's essay on how racial violence in the US made him reflect on his privileged caste upbringing.

In Part 1 of his series, "Caste in America," investigative reporter Phillip Martin follows Harvard scholar Suraj Yengde back to his hometown in India to understand what life is like for Dalits there.

Lauren Frayer reports on how the Black Lives Matter movement has sparked conversations about skin lightening and colorism in India.

In his book, Caste Matters, scholar Suraj Yengde describes his experiences growing up Dalit, a historical analysis of caste and the many challenges still facing Dalits in India today.

Listen to Rough Translation wherever you get your podcasts, including NPR One, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and RSS.

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How To Be An Anti-Casteist : Rough Translation

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subscribe to Rough Translation podcast subscribe to Rough Translation podcast What is "caste privilege," and what does it mean for South Asians in the United States? The state of California filed a lawsuit, this summer, alleging caste discrimination in an all-Indian team of employees at Cisco Systems' headquarters in San Jose.

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An Irish journalist discovers she belongs in a place she’s never been. A 6-year-old boy decides he’s from another country. Stories about finding home far from home.

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 Game of Thrones Symbolism: The Dothraki 

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Why France produces the most World Cup players

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Why France produces the most World Cup players

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Why France produces the most World Cup players

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Taiye Selasi: Don't ask where I'm from, ask where I'm a local | TED

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Taiye Selasi: Don't ask where I'm from, ask where I'm a local | TED

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Taiye Selasi: Don't ask where I'm from, ask where I'm a local | TED

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In our monthly podcast series We Need to Talk About ... we tackle the big issues shaping the world. This is the fourth in this podcast series, and the first which is available for everyone to listen to - we initially released these discussions exclusively for Guardian members, but we heard from many of you that you thought we should share this debate with as many people as possible, and we were happy to oblige.

These podcasts feature the experiences and questions of Guardian members, and the expertise of a special panel of journalists and guests. You ask the questions, we try to supply the answers.

Nationalism, and particularly questions regarding progressive nationalism - does it exist? what does it look like? why might we have to even ask these questions? - are among the issues we are wrestling with inside the Guardian.

Is there a presumption by some - perhaps by the media? - that nationalism is necessarily a bad thing? And is that perception tied to location? Members in Scotland or Catalonia, for instance, might feel differently from those in England.

We invited members to share with us what they feel is driving the current political surge. Is there an extent to which it's about people feeling disenfranchised and ignored, that politics no longer represents their best interests? Is it a reaction to an increasingly unequal society? Where does identity - personal and national - come into this?

The Guardian's deputy membership editor Vicky Frost is joined by Randeep Ramesh, chief leader writer for the Guardian, Iman Amrani, a video journalist who also writes for our opinion pages, and Ewen MacAskill, the Guardian's defence and intelligence correspondent, who also writes about UK politics.

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A monthly podcast in which Guardian journalists tackle a topic suggested by Guardian members and answer their questions on it. In this edition, Vicky Frost, the Guardian's deputy membership editor, discusses the global rise of nationalism with Randeep Ramesh, Iman Amrani and Ewen MacAskill

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IMPOSTURES INTERCULTURELLES - Fred Dervin

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Computer scientists often build algorithms with a keen focus on "solving the problem," without considering the larger implications and potential misuses of the technology they're creating. That's how we wind up with machine learning that prevents qualified job applicants from advancing, or blocks mortgage applicants from buying homes, or creates miscarriages of justice in parole and other aspects of the criminal justice system.

James Mickens-a lifelong hacker, perennial wisecracker, and would-be philosopher-king who also happens to be a Harvard University professor of computer science-says we must educate computer scientists to consider the bigger picture early in their creative process. In a world where much of what we do each day involves computers of one sort or another, the process of creating technology must take into account the society it's meant to serve, including the most vulnerable.

Mickens speaks with EFF's Cindy Cohn and Danny O'Brien about some of the problems inherent in educating computer scientists, and how fixing those problems might help us fix the internet.

This episode is also available on the Internet Archive.

In this episode you'll learn about:

Why it's important to include non-engineering voices, from historians and sociologists to people from marginalized communities, in the engineering process

The need to balance paying down our "tech debt" -cleaning up the messy, haphazard systems of yesteryear-with innovating new technologies

How to embed ethics education within computer engineering curricula so students can identify and overcome challenges before they're encoded into new systems

Fostering transparency about how and by whom your data is used, and for whose profit

What we can learn from Søren Kierkegaard and Stan Lee about personal responsibility in technology

Machine Learning Ethics: Algorithmic Bias in Policing, Healthcare, and More: Adversarial Interoperability and Data Fiduciaries:
Music for How to Fix the Internet was created for us by Reed Mathis and Nat Keefe of BeatMower.

This podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, and includes the following music licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported by their creators:

James: One of the fun things about being a computer scientist, as opposed to, let's say a roboticist, someone who actually builds physical things. I'm never going to get my eye poked out, because my algorithm went wrong. Like I'm never going to lose an arm or just be ruined physically because my algorithm didn't work at least on paper. Right? And so I think computer science does tend to draw people who like some of these very stark sort of contrasts, like either my algorithm worked or it didn't. But I think that what's ended up happening is that in the infancy of the field, you could kind of sort of take that approach and nothing too bad would happen.

But now when you think about everything we do in a day, there's a computer involved in almost all of that. And so as a result, you can no longer afford to say, I'm not going to think about the bigger implications of this thing, because I'm just a hobbyist, I'm just working on some little toy that's not going to be used by thousands or millions of people.

Cindy: That's James Mickens. He's a professor of computer science at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a director at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He's also a lifelong hacker.

Danny:

James is going to tell us about some of the problems in educating ethical computer scientists and we're going to talk about how fixing those problems might help us fix the internet.

Cindy: I'm Cindy Cohn, EFF's executive director.

Danny: And I'm Danny O'Brien special advisor to EFF. Welcome to How to Fix the Internet, a podcast of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Cindy:
James thank you so much for joining us. It's really exciting to talk to you about how computer scientists and other technically minded people will help us move toward a better future and what that future looks like when we get there.

James: Well, hello. Thank you for that great introduction and thank you for inviting me to have a chat.

Cindy: So let's wallow in the bad for a minute before get to the good. What's broken in our internet society now, or at least the specific pieces that are most concerning to you?

James: Well, there are just so many things. I mean, I could just give you a wood cut, like from the medieval period, people are on fire. They're weird people with bird masks running around. It's a scene. But if I had to just pick a couple things, here are a couple things that I think are bad. I think that at a high level, one of the big challenges with technology right now is the careless application of various techniques or various pieces of software in a way that doesn't really think about what the collateral damage might be and in a way that doesn't really think about, should we be deploying this software in the first place. At this point, sort of a classic example is machine learning, right? So machine learning seems pretty neat. But when you look at machine learning being applied to things like determining which job applications get forwarded up to the next level, determining who gets mortgages and who does not, determining who gets sentenced to parole versus a harsher sentence for example. What you end up seeing is that you have these really non-trivial applications of technology that have these real impacts in the actual world. It's not some abstract exercise where we're trying to simulate the thought process of an agent in a video game or something like this.

Danny: Is there something special about computer scientists that makes them like this? Is it hubris? Is it just a feeling like they've got the answer to all of the world's problems?

James: The way that we're sort of trained as computer scientists is to say here's a crisp description of what a problem is and then here are a concrete set of steps which can "fix that problem". And going through that series of steps of identifying the problem, coming up with an algorithm to "solve it" and then testing it, at first glance that seems very clean. And in fact, there are a couple simple problems we could think of that are very clean to solve.

So for example, I give you a bunch of numbers, how do you sort them. It seems like a pretty objective thing to do. We all have a very clear understanding of what numbers are and what order means. But now if I ask you to do something like find the best applicant for a particular job, even if you were to ask different humans what the answer to that question is, they would probably give you a bunch of different answers.

And so this idea that somehow, because computers manipulate binary data, zeros and ones, that somehow we're always going to have clean answers for things, or somehow always be able to take these intractable social problems and represent them in this very clean way in the digital space, it's just absolutely false. And I think machine learning is a particular example of how this goes astray. Because you end up seeing that you get this data, this data has biases in it, you train an algorithm that replicates the biases in the training data, and that just perpetuates the social problem that we see sort of in the pre digital world.

Cindy: When we were first looking at predictive policing, for instance, which is a set of technologies that try to allegedly predict where crime is going to happen, the short answer to this is it actually just predicts what the police are going to do. If you define the problem as well, police know where crime is, then you've missed a whole lot of crime that police never see and don't focus on and don't prioritize. So that was an early example, I think, of that kind of problem.

James: People who live in let's say underprivileged communities or over policed communities, if you asked them what would happen if you were to apply one of these predictive policing algorithms, I bet a lot of them could intuitively tell you from their personal experience, well, the police go where they think the police need to go. And of course, that sets up a feedback circle. And just to be clear, I'm not trying to take out some sort of maximalist anti-police position here, I'm just saying there are experiences in the world that are important to bring to bear when you design technical artifacts, because these technical artifacts have to relate to society. So I think it's really important when you're getting a technical education that you also learn about things involving history or sociology or economics, things like that.

Cindy: I want to switch just a little bit, because we're trying to fix the internet here and I want to hear what's your vision of what it looks like if we get this right.I want to live in that world, what does that world look like from where you sit?

James: Well, a key aspect of that world is that I have been nominated as the philosopher king.

Cindy: Cool.

James: And that's the first thing and really everything sort of follows.

Danny: We'll get right on that.

James: Good to see everyone agrees with it.

Cindy: Yeah.

James: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. So I think we've sort of hinted at one of the things that needs to change in my opinion, which is the way that "technical education" is carried out. A lot of engineers go through their formal engineering training and they're taught things like calculus and linear algebra. They learn about various programming languages. They learn how to design algorithms that run quickly. These are all obviously very important things, but they oftentimes don't receive in that formal education an understanding of how the artifacts that they build will interact with larger society. And oftentimes they don't receive enough education in what are sort of the historical and social and economic trends independent of technology, that have existed for hundreds or thousands of years that you should really think about if you want to create technology that helps the common good.

Cindy: And the other thing I hear in this is community involvement, right? That the people who are going to be impacted by the artifact you build need to be some of the people you listen to and that you check into that you go to the neighborhoods where this might be applied or you talk to the people who are trying to figure out how to get a mortgage and you begin to understand what the world looks like in shoes that are not yours.

Are there any places in machine learning where you think that people are starting to get it right or is it still just a wasteland of bad ideas?

Danny: Allegedly.

James: It is. Yeah. The wasteland word is, I still think, generally applicable, but people are starting to awaken. People are starting to look at notions of, can we rigorously define transparency in terms of explaining what these algorithms do? Can we sort of rigorously think about bias and how we might try to address that algorithmically in collaboration with people. The field is starting to get better. I think there is still a lot of pressure to "innovate". There's still pressure to publish a lot of papers, get your cool new ML technology out there, how else am I going to get venture capital, things like this. So I think there's still a lot of pressure towards not being thoughtful, but I do see that changing.

Danny: So one of the things that we've seen in other podcast interviews is that actually we are going to have to go and redo some of the fundamentals because we're building on weak foundations, that we didn't think about computer security when we first started writing operating systems for general use and so forth. Do you think that's part of this as well? Not only do we have to change what we're going to do in the future, but we actually have to go and redo some stuff that engineers made in the past?

James: I think it speaks to these larger issues of tech debt, which is a term that you may have heard before. This idea that we've already built a bunch of stuff and so for us to go back and then fix it, for some definition of fix. So would you prefer us to just tackle that problem and not innovate further or would you prefer... What should we do? I think you're right about that. That is an important thing. If you look at, for example, how a lot of the internet protocols work or like how a lot of banking protocols work or things like this, systems for doing airline reservations, in some cases, this code is COBOL code. It came from the stone age, at least in computer science terms.

And the code is very creaky. It has security problems. It's not fast in many cases, but would society tolerate no flights for a year, let's say, as we go back and we modernize that stuff? The answer is no obviously. So then as a result, we kind of creak forward. If you think about the basic core internet infrastructure, when it was designed, roughly speaking, it was like a small neighborhood. Most people on the internet knew everybody. Why would Sally ever try to attack my computer? I know her, our kids go to the same school, that would just be outrageous. But now we live in a world where the Internet's pervasive. That's good, but now everyone doesn't know everyone. And now there are bad actors out there. And so we can try to add security incrementally- that's what HTTPS does. The S stands for security, right? So we can try to layer security at top these sort of creaky ships, but it's hard. I think a lot of our software and hardware artifacts are like that.

It's really getting back, I think, to Cindy's question too, about what would I want to see improved about the future? I always tell this to my students and I wish more people would think about this, it's easier to fix problems early, rather than later. That seems like a very obvious thing that Yoda would say, but it's actually quite profound. Because once you get things out in the world and once they get a lot of adoption, for you to change any little thing about it is going to be this huge exercise. And so it's really helpful to be thoughtful at the beginning in the design process.

Cindy: You've thought a little bit of about how we could get more thoughtfulness into the design process. And I'd love for you to talk about some of those ideas.

James: Sure. One thing that I'm really proud of working on is this embedded ethics program that we have at Harvard, and that's starting to be adopted by other institutions. And it gets back to this idea of what does it mean to train an engineer? And so what we're trying to do in this program is ensure that every class that a computer scientist takes, there'll be at least one lecture that talks about ethical considerations, concerns involving people and society and the universe that are specific to that class. Now, I think the specific to that class part is very important, right? Because I think another thing that engineers sometimes get confused about is they might say, oh, well, these ethical concerns are only important for machine learning.

I get it, machine learning interacts of people, but it's not important for people who build data centers. Why should I care about those things? But let's interrogate that for a second. Where do you build data center? Well, data centers require a lot of power. So where is that electricity going to come from? How is that electricity going to be generated? What is the impact on the surrounding community? Things like this. There's also sort of like these interesting geopolitical concerns there. So how many data centers should we have in North America versus Africa? What does the decision that we come to say about how we value different users in different parts of the world?

As computer scientists, we have to accept this idea: we don't know everything, close to everything, but not everything, right? And so one of the important aspects of this embedded ethics program is that we bring in philosophers and collaborate with them and help use their knowledge to ground our discussions of these philosophical challenges in computer science.

Cindy: Do you have any success stories yet, or is it just too early?

James: Well, some of the success stories involve students saying I was thinking about going to company X, but now I've actually decided not to go there because I've actually thought about what these companies are doing. I'm not here to name or shame, but suffice it to say that I think that's a really big metric for success And we're actually trying to look at assessment instruments, talk to people from sociology or whatnot who know how to assess effectiveness and then tweak pedagogical programs to make sure that we're actually having the impact that we want.

Cindy: Well, I hope that means that we're going to have a whole bunch of these students beat a path to EEF's door and want to come and do tech for good with us because we've been doing it longer than anyone.

Danny: "How to Fix the Internet" is supported by The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program in Public Understanding of Science. Enriching people's lives through a keener appreciation of our increasingly technological world and portraying the complex humanity of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.

Cindy: We're landing some societal problems on the shoulders of individual computer scientists and expecting them to kind of incorporate a lot of things that really are kind of built into our society like the venture capital interest in creating new products as quickly as possible, the profit motive or these other things. And I'm just wondering how poor little ethics can do standing up against some of these other forces.

James: I think sort of the high level sort of prompts is late stage capitalism, what do we do about it?

Cindy: Fair enough.

James: You are right, there And alas, I don't have immediate solutions to that problem.

Cindy: But you're supposed to be the philosopher king, my friend..

James: Fair enough. So you're right. I think that there's not like a magic trick we can do where we can say, oh, well, we'll just teach computer scientists and ethics and then all of a sudden the incentives for VCs will be changed because the incentives for VCs are make a lot of money, frequently make a lot money over the short term. They are not incentivized by the larger economy to act differently. But I think that the fact that better trained engineers can't solve all problems shouldn't prevent us from trying to help them to solve some problems.

I think that there's a lot of good that those types of engineers can do and try to start changing some of these alignments. And there's a responsibility that should come with making products that affect potentially millions of people. So I sometimes hear this from students though. You're exactly right. Sometimes they'll say it's not my job to change sort of the larger macroeconomic incentive structures that make various things happen.

But then I say, well, but what are some of the biggest drivers of those macroeconomic incentive structures? It's tech companies. When you look at sort of stock market valuations and economic influence, it's these companies that you, the student, will be going to, that are helping to shape these narratives. And also too, it's you, the students, you'll go out, you'll vote. You'll think about ballot referendums, things like that. So there are things that we all have the responsibility to think about and to do individually, even though any one of us can't just sort of snap our fingers and make the change be immediate. We have to do that because otherwise society falls apart.

Danny: So some of this discussion assumes that we have like universal ethics that we all agree on, but I think there's always, I mean, part of the challenge in society is that we have room to disagree. Is there a risk that if we inject this sort of precautionary principle into what we are doing, we're actually missing out on some of the benefits of this rapid change? If we hold back and go, well, maybe we shouldn't do this, we're excluding the chance that these things will actually make society much, much better for everyone?

James: As an engineer trying to design a system to be "value neutral", that in and of itself is an ethical decision. You've made the decision to say like not considering social or economic factors X, Y, and Z is the right thing to do. That is an ethical decision. And so I think a lot of engineers though, they fall into that fallacy. They say, well, I'm just going to focus on the code. I'm just going to focus on the thing I'm going to build. And it'll be the users of that software that have to determine how to use it ethically or not.

But that argument is that just doesn't work. The mere fact that people may disagree over values does not absolve us of the responsibility from thinking about those values nonetheless.

Cindy: To me, especially in a situation in which you're building something that's going to impact people who aren't involved in the building of it, right? I mean, you can build your own machine learning to tell you what you want about your life. And I don't have much to say about that, but a lot of these systems are making decisions for people who have no input whatsoever into how these things are being built, no transparency into how they're working and no ability to really interrogate the conclusions that are made. And to me, that's where it gets the riskiest.

James: I often turn to existential philosophy in cases like this. For the listeners who aren't familiar with philosophy, or think that it's all very obtuse, that's true about some of it. But if you read the existentialists, it's quite beautiful, a lot of the prose. It's just really fun to read, and it has these really impactful observations. And one of my favorite passages is from this guy, Kierkegaard. And Kierkegaard's talking about sort of like this burden of choice that we have. And he has this really beautiful metaphor where he says we are each the captain of our own ship.

And even if we choose not to put our hand on the rudder to point the ship in some direction, the wind will nevertheless push us towards some shore. And so in deciding where you want to go, you make a decision. If you decide not to make an active decision about where to sail your boat, you're basically deciding I will let the wind tell me where to go. The metaphor is telling us that your boat's still going to go in some direction even if you don't actively become the captain of it.

And I think about that a lot, because a lot of engineers want to abdicate themselves with the responsibility for being the captain of their own boat. And they say, I'm just going to focus on the boat and that's it. But in this metaphor sort of society and built in biases and things like that, those are the winds. Those are the currents. And they're going to push your product. They're going to push your software towards some shore and that's going to happen regardless of whether you think that's going to happen or not. So we really have this responsibility to choose and decide.

Danny: I hate to follow Kierkegaard with Stan Lee, but is that with great power comes great responsibility. And I wonder if part of these ethical discussions is whether that's not the problem. That you are asking engineers and the creators of this technology to make ethical decisions sort of that will affect the rest of society. And the problem is that actually it should be the rest of society that makes those decisions and not the engineers maybe the harder work is to spread that power more equally and give everyone a little element of being an engineer like that they can change the technology in front of them.

James: I think that what you're talking about sort of at a broad level is governance. How do we do governance of online systems? And it's a mess right now. It's a combination of internal company policies, which are not made public, external, that is to say publicly visible policies regulation, the behavior of individual users on the platform. And it's a big mess. Because I think that right now, a lot of times what happens is a disaster happens and then all of a sudden there's some movement by both the companies and maybe regulators to change something thing, and then that'll be it for a bit. And then things kind of creak along then another disaster happens. So it'd be nice to think about, in a more systemic way, how we should govern these platforms.

Cindy: As a free speech, fourth amendment lawyer, having governments have more say over the things that we say in our privacy and those kinds of things, well, that hasn't always worked out all that well for individual rights either, right? But we have these gigantic companies. They have a lot of power and it's reasonable to think, well, what else has a lot of power that might be able to be a check on them? Well, there's government. And that's all true, but the devil really is in the details and we worry as much about bad corporate behavior as we do bad governmental behavior. And you have to think about both.

Cindy: So let's say you're the philosopher king or in your great new world, what does it look like for me as a user in this future world ?

James: I think one important aspect is more transparency about how your data is used, who it gets shared with, what is the value that companies are getting from it. And we're moving a little bit in that direction slowly but surely. Laws like GDPR, CCPA, they're trying to slowly nudge us in this direction. It's a very hard problem though, as we all know. I mean, engineers may not fully understand what their systems do. So then how are they going to explain that in a transparent way to users. But in sort of this utopia, that's an important aspect of online services. There's more transparency in how things work. I think there's also more consent in how things work. So these things go hand in hand. So users would have more of an ability to opt into or opt out of various manipulations or sharings of their data.

Once again, we're starting to go a little bit closer towards that. I think we can do much, much more. I think that in terms of content moderation, I think, and this is going to be tricky, it's going to be hard, this speaks to sort of Cindy's observations about, well, we can't fully trust government or the companies. But in my opinion, I mean, I'm the philosopher king in this experiment. So in my opinion, what I want to have is I want to have a floor that defines sort of minimal standards for protections against hate speech, harassment, things like that. Of course the devils and the details. But I think that's actually something that we don't really have right now. There's also this important aspect of having educated like citizens, right? So having more technical education and technical literacy for laypeople so that they can better understand the consequences of their action.

Cindy: That we know what choices we're making, we're in charge of these choices and have actual choices, I think are all tremendously important. EFF has worked a lot around adversarial interoperability and other things which are really about being able to leave a place that isn't serving you. And to me, that's got to be a piece of the choice. A choice that doesn't really let you leave is not actually a choice.

James: As you may know, there have been some recent proposals that want to solve this portability issue essentially by saying, let's have users store all their data on user owned machines and then the companies have to come to us for permission to use that data. There's a sort of push and pull there in terms of, on the one hand wanting to give people literal power over their data, such that it's actually their machines that are storing it versus saying, well, if I look at like the computers that are administered by my relatives, for example, who are not computer scientists, these computers are offline all the time. They've got like terrible, ridiculous programs on them. They're not reliable. Now in contrast, you look at a data center, that's administered by paid professionals whose job it is to keep those machines online. So there's an advantage to using that model.

Do we want to still keep our data in centralized places, but then make sure there's plumbing to move stuff between those centralized places or do we want to, in the extreme, go towards this peer to peer decentralized model and then lose some of the performance benefits we get from the data center model?

Cindy: That's a good articulation of some of the trade-offs here. And of course the other way to go is kind of on the lawyer side of things is a duty of care that people who hold your data have a fiduciary or something similar kind of duty to you in the same way that your accountant or lawyer might have. So they have your data, but they don't have the freedom to do with it what they want. In fact, they're very limited in what they can do with it. I feel very optimistic in a certain way that there are mechanisms on the technical side and the non-technical side to try to get us to this kind of control. Again, none of them are without trade-offs, but they exist all across the board.

James: Yes. And I think an interesting area of research, it's an area that I'm a bit interested in myself, is what are specific technical things that software developers can do to provide obvious compliance with legal regulations. Because these laws, they're just like any human creation. They can be vague or ambiguous in some cases, they can be difficult to implement.

And I think that part of this gets down to having these different communities talk to each other. One reason it's difficult for computer scientists to write code that complies with legal requirements is that we don't understand some of these legal requirements. The lawyers need to learn a little bit more about code and the computer scientists need to learn a little bit more about the law.

Cindy: It's also the case, of course, that sometimes laws get written without a clear idea of how one might reduce it to ones and zeros. And so that may be a bug if you're a computer scientist, it might be a feature if you're a lawyer, right? Because then we let judges sort out in the context of individual situations what things really mean.

James: So one of the gifts of the philosopher king to lure people under these semantic morasses

Cindy: Thank you so much king.

James: No problem of course. It's been great sitting here chatting with you. Let me return back to my kingdom.

Danny: James Mickens, thank you very much.

James: Thank you.

Cindy: Well, James teaches computer science at Harvard, so it's right that his focus is on education and personal ethics and transparency. This is the work of the computer scientists. And I appreciate that he's working and thinking hard about how we build more ethical builders and also that he's recognizing that we need to kind of move beyond the silos that computer science often finds itself in and reach out to people with other kinds of expertise, especially philosophy. But we also heard from him about the importance of the role of the impacted community, which is something we've heard over and over again in this podcast and the need to make sure that the people who are impacted by technology understand how it works and have a voice.

Danny: It wasn't just sort of this literally academic kind of discussion. He had some practical points too, I mean, for instance, that if we do need to improve things and fix things, we found some ways of doing incremental security improvements like HTTPS, but some really have to overcome a lot of tech debt. And I don't think we're going to be in a situation where we can ask people not to book airplane tickets while we fix the fundamentals, which again, points out to what he's saying, which is that we need to get this stuff right earlier rather than later in this process.

Cindy: And I loved hearing about this embedded ethics program that he's working on at Harvard and at other places and the idea that we need to build ethics into every class and every situation, not just something we tack on separately at the end, I think is a very good start. And of course, if it leads to a line of students who want to do ethical tech beating their way to EFFs doors, that would be an extra bonus for us.

Danny: It does make everything a little bit more complicated to think of ethics and the wider impact. I mean, I did take on board his comparison of the ease of building a centralized internet, which might have deleterious effects on society with the obvious solution, which is to decentralize things. But you have to make that just as easy to use for the end user and then somebody who's hacking away trying to build a decentralized web, that's something I definitely took personally and will take on board.

Cindy: There's trade-offs everywhere you go. And I think in that way, James is just a true educator, right? He's requiring us all to look at the complexities in all directions so that we can really bring all those complexities into thinking about the solutions we embrace. After this conversation, I kind of want to live in the world where James is our philosopher king.

Danny: Thanks to you, James Mickens, our supreme leader and thanks you for listening today. Please visit eff.org/podcast for other episodes, or to become a member. Members are the only reason we can do this work. Plus you can get cool stuff like an EFF hat or an EFF hoodie, or even an EFF camera cover for your laptop. Music for How to Fix the Internet was created for us by Reed Mathis and Nat Keefe of BeatMower. This podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International and includes music licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 imported license by their creators. You can find those creators names and links to their music in our episode notes or on our website at eff.org/podcast. How to Fix the Internet is supported by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology. I'm Danny O'Brien.

Cindy: And I'm Cindy Cohn.

James Mickens is a professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a director at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He studies how to make distributed systems faster, more robust, and more secure; much of his work focuses on large-scale web services, and how to design principled system interfaces for those services. Before Harvard, he spent seven years as a researcher at Microsoft; he was also a visiting professor at MIT. Mickens received a B.S. from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, both in computer science.

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Computer scientists often build algorithms with a keen focus on "solving the problem," without considering the larger implications and potential misuses of the technology they're creating. That's how we wind up with machine learning that prevents qualified job applicants from advancing, or blocks...

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In this fan favorite episode, Gregory talks "inside baseball" of American English. And we revisit an episode that sparked a lot of conversation among listeners in 2021-about the global pursuit of "good English" and what it takes to change the multi-billion dollar industry built around it.

Write to us at roughtranslation@npr.org and follow Gregory's Substack.

Read more at NPR's global health and development blog, Goats and Soda.

Send us an email at roughtranslation@npr.org.

Listen to Rough Translation wherever you get your podcasts, including NPR One, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and RSS.

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Fan Favorites: How to Speak Bad English : Rough Translation

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Gregory talks "inside baseball" of American English. And we revisit an episode that sparked a lot of conversation among listeners in 2021-about the global pursuit of "good English" and what it takes to change the multi-billion dollar industry built around it.Write to us at roughtranslation@npr.org and follow Gregory's Substack.Read more at NPR's global health and development blog, Goats and Soda.Tower Of Babble: Nonnative Speakers Navigate The World Of 'Good' And 'Bad' EnglishPrepone That!

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Wherever you are, you're on Native land, and wherever you go, anti-Blackness follows

I claim travel writing because it's like cheating. I get to write about everything. Travel is a vehicle for which to explore the condition of living, how our relationships to place shape us and our experiences, how our identities and political histories inform place, how power structures inform how we migrate (or don't) and how that affects the places we pass through.

How we move through the world, whether it's how we or our ancestors came to be where we are now; a trip to the bodega as a visibly trans woman of color at night, or to countries we have no connections to but are guests in, varies phenomenally from person to person, but those journeys are all informed in some way by capitalist imperialist cishetpatriarchal white supremacy. A part of decolonizing travel culture is being real about where we came from, how we got there, where we're at, and where we're going. It is a moving conversation between the ways that we are privileged and the ways we are oppressed, because places, like identities, are not static; they are always in flux.

The industry of tourism (especially mass tourism, which cannot function without global inequality) and the colonialist tradition of the travel writing genre implicates those of us who participate in either, and if we don't have the power to do so, decolonizing travel is also a discourse, and finally, a resistance, to the barriers that keep some from moving freely and safely throughout the world. If we're going to write travel, we have to reckon with these histories; we must constantly question how our presence affects the spaces we move through and be real about how power functions. Because wherever you are, you're on Native land, and wherever you go, anti-Blackness follows.

If communities don't have sovereignty or the self-determination to shape how they want their cultures to be consumed or communicated, their economies to be governed and their environments to be treated, then tourism and travel culture are only a continuation of imperialist practices. We have to locate ourselves within the spectrum of power - which is hardly ever as linear or binary as basic white travel narratives paint them to be - to tell the truth about place.

In being real, we not only disrupt the colonial tradition of these travel narratives and who gets to tell them, but we can recenter migrations that aren't deemed worthy of the genre; we do justice to the complications of place and our relationships to them. We recenter narratives of migration to those who aren't tourists, but in fact Indigenous, displaced, stolen or forced to labor for the industry itself. And, finally, in doing this, maybe we can move closer toward the goal of ending domination.

As a broke disabled light-skinned genderqueer AFAB* first generation immigrant USian travel writer and activist of color, I know that not only is this shit complex as hell, but that the frontier regions of identity, the terra incognita on maps (or the palenques and reservations and uncontacted communities that are still resisting colonial white supremacy and Western hegemony) are the places from which when we choose to write from, we tell the most truth, the stories are just better; less comfortable, more dangerous; and we might even find Home. That's the journey I'm on. You coming with?

*Assigned female at birth
This essay was originally published as the introduction to Muchacha Fanzine Issue 12, Decolonize Travel, which you can purchase here.

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Getting Real About Decolonizing Travel Culture

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I claim travel writing because it's like cheating. I get to write about everything. Travel is a vehicle for which to explore the condition of living, how our relationships to place shape us and our...

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En 1733, Joseph-François Lafitau, missionnaire au Canada, fait paraître son Histoire des découvertes et conquestes des Portugais dans le Nouveau Monde. Pour comprendre ce nouveau monde, il évoque l'histoire de la Méditerranée, avec d'autres histoires de conquêtes : "On appelait alors Rumes ou Romains, les Turcs ou Musulmans d'Europe qui s'étaient établis sur les débris de l'Empire des Grecs, lesquels avaient affectés eux-mêmes de donner à leur capitale le nom de nouvelle Rome et de qualifier leur Empire, d'Empire Romain, comme aussi on y appelait Francs ou Franguis tous les Latins sans distinction." Des Pyrénées à l'Indus, de la Hongrie à l'Égypte, il s'agit d'une histoire mondiale dans laquelle se retrouvent l'Europe et le monde islamique.

Al-Andalus, terre d'islam en Europe

L'islam fait son apparition en Europe dans les premières décennies du VIIIe siècle. Les troupes arabo-musulmanes, renforcées par les combattants berbères d'Afrique du Nord nouvellement convertis, pénètrent dans la péninsule ibérique en 711. Ils renversent le royaume wisigoth et fondent al-Andalus.

En 750, le prince omeyyade Abd al-Rahman fuit Damas et la péninsule arabique. Il s'émancipe du pouvoir central de l'Empire islamique et installe sa dynastie en al-Andalus. La ville de Cordoue devient la capitale d'un émirat indépendant. Deux siècles plus tard, Abd al-Rahman III fonde le califat de Cordoue.

"Toutes les sources dont nous disposons sur la péninsule ibérique datent du IXe et essentiellement du Xe siècle", précise l'historienne Emmanuelle Tixier du Mesnil. "L'histoire d'al-Andalus (racontée par les chroniqueurs orientaux) n'est jamais neutre. C'est le lieu où la glorieuse dynastie des Omeyyades renaît après avoir été chassée du trône califale en Orient en 750 par les Abbassides. Les chroniqueurs accorderont toujours une importance très forte à al-Andalus, qui est une sorte d'île arabe entre chrétienté et Maghreb. C'est une histoire qui est racontée plusieurs siècles après."

L'Empire ottoman, une puissance européenne ?

La dynastie ottomane voit le jour autour de 1300 au nord-ouest de l'Anatolie, actuelle Turquie. "Ottoman vient du mot Osman", explique l'historien Benjamin Lellouche. "Ce n'est pas un terme ethnique, mais un terme politique et dynastique. Un Ottoman, c'est quelqu'un de la maison d'Osman, de sa lignée ou client de cette maison. Par extension, le (terme) désigne progressivement les sujets de l'Empire."

Les successeurs d' Osman Ier regardent vers l'Europe pour étendre leur empire. La conquête des Balkans aux XIVe et XVe siècles diffuse l'islam sur le continent et transforme l'Empire ottoman en "puissance européenne". L'avancée ottomane se poursuit avec la prise de Constantinople en 1453, qui précipite la chute de l'Empire byzantin, puis la conquête des États chrétiens au nord du Danube, qui fortifie sa frontière européenne.

L'Empire ottoman atteint son apogée sous le règne de Soliman Ier le Magnifique. Il recouvre des peuples aux spécificités linguistiques et culturelles variées comme les Arabes, les Grecs, les Hongrois, les Slaves ou encore les Turcs.

Le déclin de l'Empire ottoman au XIXe siècle ne s'opère pas de manière continue. Il s'engage ainsi dans la Première Guerre mondiale, aux côtés des Allemands, dans l'espoir d'échapper à l'isolement diplomatique.

Quelles relations le continent européen entretient-il avec le monde musulman ? Quel regard les géographes arabes ont-ils porté sur l'Europe médiévale du IXe au XIIe siècle ? En quoi l'histoire de certains pays européens est-elle liée à l'islam ?

Pour en parler

Emmanuelle Tixier du Mesnil est professeure d'histoire du Moyen Âge à l'Université Paris Nanterre. Ses recherches portent sur l'histoire d'al-Andalus et sur l'histoire de la géographie arabe médiévale. Elle a participé à l'ouvrage Atlas des mondes musulmans médiévaux dirigé par Sylvie Denoix et Hélène Renel (CNRS Éditions, 2022).

Elle a notamment publié :

Benjamin Lellouch est maître de conférences à l'Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis. Ses recherches concernent l'histoire de l'Empire ottoman, l'histoire de l'islam et du judaïsme ainsi que l'histoire de l'Europe moderne.

Il a notamment publié :

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