Digitalisation radically and rapidly transforms our societies. Digital tools and services have the potential to contribute to a democratisation and empowerment of people. Digitalisation may improve political participation, access to information, communication, access to health services, etc. However, the way how it is currently implemented in mainstream applications and how digitalisation is regulated by governmental policies throughout Europe, it mostly benefits a limited group of entities. A small number of transnational corporations with few employees pocket big revenues while the public has to pay the bill: Erosion of labour rights through a growing share of the gig economy; Work (especially with training of AI) is increasingly outsourced to low income countries; Tax avoiding behaviour of big-tech puts pressure on the national budgets; Environmental degradation through increase of power consumption and electronic waste; Fueled by mass consumerism as a feedback from an advertisement financed industry which intrudes privacy on unprecedented scale to scrape intimate data; Growing medical costs to treat behavioural addictions triggered by intentional design choices; And erosion of democratic processes through algorithms that favour polarising and click generating contents instead of serving an open discourse based on facts and scientific evidence.
Despite the horrendous societal impacts of mainstream implementations of digital technologies, Kaamos Creations remains optimistic and continues to believe in the positive affect digitalisation can have to lead to a more sustainable future. However, at Kaamos Creations we are critic on how governmental policies allow the economic interests of few to hijack the technological capabilities of Information and Communication Technologies. At Kaamos Creations we combine our devotion to technological progress and our dedication to work towards a more just and sustainable future to promote an ethically sound utilisation of digital technologies.
As part of our mission to promote an ethically sound and sustainable digitalisation we offer
- Seminars,
- Lectures, and
- Workshops
in order to
- Introduce a critical debate towards mainstream digitalisation implementations;
- Promote a comprehensive approach to cybersecurity that builds on the concept of human security and which takes into account the societal impacts of digitalisation;
- Introduce alternative digital solutions that are designed to benefit the society and its users rather a handful of multinational corporations.
Gerald Zojer, founder of Kaamos Creations, has worked as researcher at the University of Lapland, where he currently is also doctoral candidate. His main fields of interest are science and technology studies, digitalisation, hegemony theories, and political ecology. In 2023 he has been teaching “Cybersecurity in Society” at the Department of Technology and Safety at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. His work has been published in international peer reviewed journals, and he is co-editor of the book Digitalisation and Human Security: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Cybersecurity in the European High North (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Gerald, furthermore, has over 10 years of experience with Linux desktop and server administration, and he has been offering services as freelance DevOps engineer for SMEs, NGOs, research projects, journalists, and activists.