Web Summit – The future of events
#CollisionfromHome
Highlights from the week
Although times may be uncertain, one thing remains true. There’s a simple power in people coming together. We saw that this week, at our first-ever online event, Collision from Home, which just wrapped up. The last few days have been an adventure. Here a few of our highlights.
32,000+ attendees, from more than 140 different countries came to hear our 634 speakers. Learn even more about the numbers behind Collision from Home, or catch up on highlights from the whole event.
#1: Siyabulela Mandela
“In South Africa, we are still fighting the same racism that Nelson Mandela was sent to prison for almost 27 years ago, together with his generation. So the gradual move and the gradual shift that everyone has been talking about, that everyone has been hoping for – South Africa has proven that it does not work.”
Siyabulela Mandela, a peace activist with Journalists for Human Rights (and Nelson Mandela’s grandson), today said that South Africa’s failures after the abolition of apartheid prove that only radicalism can confront white supremacy worldwide.
#2: Brad Smith
“Covid-19 is the issue of the decade, but climate and racism are the issues of the century.”
Brad Smith, president at Microsoft, chatted with Steve Adler, Reuters’ editor-in-chief, about how major companies can use tech more effectively and responsibly, and how they can make this the decade in which global crises, of any form, are addressed by tech efficiently and in real time.
#3: Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus
“Ask yourself every day if the technology you’re working on will work for the poorest and most vulnerable, or the rich and privileged. Will it make the world fairer, or widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots?”
World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus today warned that Covid-19 misinformation spreads significantly quicker than truth online – and is 70 percent more likely to be shared on some social platforms.
#4: Laurent Duvernay-Tardif
“If you’re only focusing on the task at hand, you’re missing the point. I’m working with patients who haven’t seen family in 10 weeks, and the only interaction they have is with us.”
Super Bowl champion – and the first medical school graduate to play for the NFL – Laurent Duvernay-Tardif spoke with Sheinelle Jones about balancing medicine and football during the Covid-19 outbreak, and the importance of caring for others, now more than ever.
#5: Parag Agrawal
“The most dangerous fake accounts actually don’t look fake on the surface. They’re the ones that inflict the most harm. An interesting category of that is state-backed manipulation attempts. We see a pattern where we find over time these fairly sophisticated campaigns to manipulate the conversation and [we] are able to attribute them to some state.”
Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal today spoke of the challenges Twitter faces with surges in both user and fake accounts during the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests.
#6: Susan Herman
“The people who are afraid of defunding the police are the people who are fortunate enough to be in a position where the police make them feel safe… Not everyone feels safer when the police are around – some people feel more threatened.”
ACLU president Susan Herman today said a 2015 report on the Minneapolis police proved the department was “highly racist” – five years before one of its members killed George Floyd this May.
#7: Margaret Atwood
“Any emergency is likely to be exploited by a group seeking power. That is just a recurrent motif of human history. We will, however, see a certain amount of, ‘We need to control you more for your own good’. And the danger of that is, once they’ve controlled you ‘for your own good,’ there’s a likelihood that will slip over into controlling you for their good.”
Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale and Man Booker Prize winner for The Testaments, was in conversation with New Yorker editor David Remnick today, and warned the world may be facing upheaval as seismic as the fall of the Soviet Union.
