Her TED Talk, "Why Are You Watching Me If I'm A Nobody," exceeds 4 million views. Wielding cautionary tales about contemporary data collection that make the Stasi seem quaint, Peirano explains how the data that our phones and algorithms automatically collect about us is ripe for misuse and exploitation by the next authoritarian regime.
Marta Peirano is a renowned Spanish journalist and researcher. She has written essays and articles on technology, digital art, free software and popular culture in media such as El País, eldiario.es or La Sexta and maintains a weekly section on RNE (National Radio).
She was the founder of the newspaper ADN and has been attached to the management at eldiario.es where she was also head of the Culture and Technology sections, topics on which she has published in magazine Muy Interesante.
Her first job was at Ariadna, the mythical El Mundo technology supplement. In addition, she was the editor of the blog La Petite Claudine and founder of Elástico, a multidisciplinary collective with which she co-directed COPYFIGHT, an international festival on alternative models of Intellectual Property. Founder of Hacks/Hackers Berlin and Cryptoparty Berlin, she is also responsible for her manual, The Cryptoparty Handbook.
She has published books on automatons (The Rival of Prometheus. Lives of Illustrious Automata); collaborative models (Collaborative Futures); notation systems (On Turtles & Dragons) and technological futurism (Futurish: Thinking Out Loud About Futures).
Her work “The Little Red Book of the Network Activist” (8th edition) is the first book in the world with a foreword by Edward Snowden. It constitutes an essay-manual of cryptography for journalists, sources and the media.
In 2019 he published “The Enemy Knows the System” (11th edition), an instant best-seller on platform capitalism and its impact on the media ecosystem and online political campaigns, to understand why the technology companies that generate addiction are the same who spy on us and manipulate us. An essay on surveillance capitalism where she connects our addiction to mobile with the data mining industry and its role as a tool for mass control and manipulation.
She has traveled the world as an international speaker, from Tokyo to Lima, from Santiago de Chile to Saint Petersburg.
In 2020-2021 Marta Peirano was curator of the “Barcelona Thought Biennial”, advisor to CESEDEN (Spain’s Higher Center for National Defense Studies), has given a course on electoral security at the National Electoral Institute of Mexico and is the curator of “(re) programming ”, a cycle of conversations on technology and climate change, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Ljubljana.
