Why don’t we own our social media audience?

Welcome to another Public Good App House Maker interview, hosted by TechSoup’s Billy Bicket.
This week Billy speaks with Samir Al-Battran, founder of Fedica, about a question that's become increasingly urgent in our digital age:
How do we ensure technology serves the genuine interests of humanity?
What makes this conversation especially interesting is how it challenges our conventional thinking about technology development. Billy explores the often-overlooked tension between rapid innovation and public good, and Samir offers some surprisingly counterintuitive insights about how decentralized technologies might reshape our social institutions.
We also tackle the thorny question of whether technologists have a moral obligation to consider public impact in their work, and Samir's answer might not be what you expect. This leads into a fascinating discussion about the real-world trade-offs between idealism and pragmatism in building technology for public benefit.
For those of you interested in pursuing these ideas further, we've developed several resources that we think you'll find valuable. The first is our Public Good Technology Rubric - a framework that emerged from exactly the kind of thinking we explored in this conversation. It's designed to help technologists navigate the ethical implications of their work in a systematic way.
We've also created a comprehensive database of real-world applications through our "Accelerating Makers" DWeb initiative. The database is unique for its focus on actual implementations rather than theoretical possibilities. You'll find case studies of how nonprofits and civil society groups are using decentralized technologies to solve concrete problems.
Making sense of the relationship between technology and public good is one of the defining challenges of our time, and I hope this discussion has helped illuminate some of the key considerations. Thank you for listening.
LINKS
Fedica: fedica.com/
Public Good App House: www.publicgood...
Accelerating Makers: acceleratingma...
Public Good Technology Rubric: github.com/Car...
DWeb for Impact Use Case Database: acceleratingma...