Free is a Lie — Aral Balkan to speak at The RSA

I am giving a talk titled Free is a Lie at The Royal Society of Arts in London on April 10th.

The event will take place at The RSA’s Great Room to mark the commencement of a new series of talks around the 90th anniversary of the RSA Student Design Awards. A limited number of tickets are available to see the talk live. Please do sign up early if you want to attend in London as the RSA events fill up very quickly:

Sign up to attend.

(A waiting list will be available when places fill up.)

If you cannot make it to London, the talk will be live streamed and made available for viewing after the event.

I’ll leave you with a short description of the talk:

The companies that dominate the Internet promise us free services in exchange for the right to watch and study us; to mine and farm us. Like quarries, like livestock, we are natural resources to be exploited in a brave new digital world of corporate surveillance that threatens our most fundamental freedoms.

It is time to build an alternate future where we own our own tools, services, and data. To do this, we must create a new category of technology that is design-led and experience-driven. We call this Indie Technology.

I hope to see some of you there.