BARONESS BEEBAN KIDRON

GODMOTHER OF WEB SCIENCE

THE WORK

Baroness Beeban Kidron left school at sixteen to work for legendary photographer Eve Arnold.

After the National Film and Television School, she made her debut film in a field with the women of Greenham Common, making a film the mainstream media did not want made about women they were calling ‘monsters’. That film is now considered a seminal work of British feminism.

She entered the House of Lords in 2012. She developed the Age Appropriate Design Code, which became law. She developed the Five Rights framework for children in the digital world. She was nominated to a list of the 100 women who have had the greatest impact on British politics, lauded for her campaign on creative copyright and her foresight in predicting the technological challenges we are now living through.

She has sat across the table from the most powerful technology companies on earth.

WHY SHE’S A GODMOTHER

When she felt she wasn’t getting the necessary support from the House of Lords, she decided to remind the public that this is their fight too.

So, she wrote a book.

Users is urgent and, due to the memoire approach and years of filmmaking, incredibly entertaining. There are villains. There is tragedy. But underneath it all, there is a message of hope for the future and a reminder that we, as voters, have the power to determine our own technological future.

In it, she details a dinner for Google in May 2015, celebrating Tim Berners-Lee on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the World Wide Web, where she looked around the room and understood, with thundering clarity, what was happening and what was coming.

“The concentration of power was no longer theoretical”, she writes in her book. It was visible, embodied, seated around the table.

She has spent every year since doing something about it.