It happens that I talk about the Wizard of Oz method with our students, but even more interesting is the phenomenon where you experience that exact feeling of for the first time seeing the world for what it really is (plural intended). This has happened a couple of times now over the past two months, and yesterday it happened exactly when I realized just how much of my interaction with my phone that is dictated by someone else or some other entity. It’s not that I don’t ”trust” BigTech, but their commitment to fairness and openness seems to be conditioned by securing their prosperity first and foremost. After all, they are enormous conglomerates that have boards and shareholders that comes with certain expectations. Behind the curtain I saw potential for something different, something that we should build together.
Second issue is that I’m now almost certain that we as consumers and users are held back by this. We perform their bidding every time we don’t challenge it – at least a little bit! I have been following the case regarding Skolplattformen and how a group of parents took the available API and made a much better app themselves and released it as open source. The municipality somehow felt threatened by this and filed a police report issuing a takedown. It really pinpointed that open API’s and open standards is widely misunderstood technically and at the same time a very good thing signalling that innovation comes from unconditional openness. After this debacle, the developers continued the dialogue by educating the municipality and our government about these issues. As a result it appears that it will now be written into policy and law that every procurement around systems must include open API’s where applicable.
Why now? AI as a power-tool can liberate us and focus our energy to create something that will last and be more democratic.