RAMESH SRINIVASAN: In the United States, we're in the middle of an election season and as a voter in the United States I would ask our candidates to actually acknowledge and provide proposals that are realistic about how they are going to take care of workers and the middle class in the midst of these massive economic transformations that are aided by private, corporate-run technology that we're witnessing all around us. I would ask our candidates, again, in the United States election, to explain to us how they are going to maintain economic security in a country that becomes more and more economically unequal. How they are going to ensure that technological transitions are ones that benefit all of us. And how they can introduce work of the future where the digital economy actually works for everybody.

For technology users and workers of the future, there are a number of different steps that we can take. They aren't sufficient to overcome these inequalities that I'm writing about in Beyond the Valley but they are really important, nonetheless. First of all, one of the most powerful aspects of the internet which still exists is the ability to learn from lots of different streams of content. And I, as a university professor, a bunch of the places I went to university at, both my undergrad and graduate degrees, offer free online and open courses—completely free, taught by professors at Stanford, at MIT. And it doesn't have to just be those universities. It could be almost anywhere. So I would really encourage everybody to take, you know, no need to be scared about the technical side of things, but to take the right types of classes on data literacy, technological literacy, artificial intelligence and ethics. Not because you have to be a geek or you want to become a techie but because these are the new languages by which human possibilities and actually human sociality, like our ability to communicate, are being expressed as we've spoken about before. So that's part one, like take advantage of the open internet.

But part two is be really, as much as possible, try to be critical. Play with different kinds of platforms. So what if you use DuckDuckGo instead of Google. How would the results be different? What if you deleted—just play—what if you deleted your cache in your search history? Would that impact anything on Google? Develop a literacy through playfulness. Try to understand in a more relational or experiential sense what digital pathways might look like. That's a second point.

The third I would say is there are a number of good books and writers and talks and TED talks, et cetera. I hope I'm one of them with my book Beyond the Valley, but there are a number of others who are writing for a completely mainstream public about these digital transformations. And I would really encourage everybody to look at some of these books and I'd be happy to suggest some as well. Cathy O'Neil. She's pretty incredible. She wrote a book called Weapons of Math Destruction—it's a really cute title—and it's just a really, really good book and it's an important book. But there are other books as well that we can consider.

And last, and I think very importantly, is to look at the right journalistic sources that are also reporting on these issues. ProPublica has done great work on this. The Intercept has done some work on this. The Guardian has done some work on this. There are a lot of different kinds of platforms. Wired, of course, had done great work on this. And more than anything we need to pressure our companies that are making labor and work obsolete in the interest of "innovation"—it's innovation for whom, is really the question—we have to ask them for all the jobs, for all the economic security you take away, you need to provide us with something, too. And here are all these different possibilities we can engage with, from thinking about universal basic income ideas to worker-owned cooperative ideas to regulatory ideas to competitive market ideas. There's a lot out there and I ask us all to maintain a little bit of optimism but push. You know, we've got to push on all fronts.

We are at an inflection point when it comes to top-down control over very many different aspects of our lives through privatized corporate power over technology. We can work with these guys and try to push them to make sure that they restore balance in our lives.