Stephen Damianos, Lecturer, Cornell in Washington

Stephen Damianos is a scholar and practitioner working at the intersection of public policy, ethics, and technology governance. He is Executive Director of the Neurorights Foundation, where he leads global efforts to harness neurotechnologies for social good and protect against their misuse. He is the author of the forthcoming book Asylum Is Unavailable: Absence and Absurdity at the Digital Border, publishing later this month. This fall, he is teaching PUBPOL 2830: Ethics and Public Policy at DC Start at Cornell in Washington.

Q: What drew you to a career spanning public policy, technology governance, human rights, and migration?

At the root of it, I care about dignity and belonging: these have been the core concerns animating my life and career. I started working with displaced communities as an undergraduate, first volunteering with resettled refugees in upstate New York and Philadelphia, and then providing aid to asylum seekers in Greece. This changed the trajectory of my life. I was passionate about the work, but I felt like I was bailing water out of a sinking ship: the needs were personal, but the problems were structural.

That tension pushed me to zoom out, not forgetting about individual cases, but focusing on the systems that shaped them. What policies, institutions, and governance choices were creating the conditions I was witnessing on the ground? This led me to pursue a PhD and to launch the investigation into digitally mediated violence that became the basis of my new book.

Thinking deeply about how governments use technology with little to no accountability led me to my current role running a nonprofit focused on tech regulation and responsible innovation. The intersection of technology and accountability is one of the defining issues of our time, and I’ve oriented my career toward ensuring emerging technologies are governed in ways that protect people rather than harm them.

Q: You’re the Executive Director of the Neurorights Foundation, where you work on the opportunities and risks presented by emerging neurotechnologies. Can you tell us about that work and some of the policy and ethical questions you’re thinking about right now?

Neurotechnologies are devices capable of monitoring or manipulating the brain and nervous system. They’ve existed in medical settings for decades, pioneering treatments for stroke rehabilitation, Parkinson’s, and more. But driven by their convergence with artificial intelligence, neurotechnologies are now expanding onto the consumer market for the first time. Neurotech is showing up in headbands, earbuds, wristbands, gaming systems, and athletic apparel. They are sold on Amazon. They are marketed to schools to monitor and improve student focus, to employers to track worker productivity, to athletes to optimize performance and recovery, and to anyone who wants to sleep better, focus longer, or feel less anxious. And the biggest tech giants are leading the charge.

Like all technologies, this expansion brings both promise and peril. The promise is real: neurotechnology could help treat mental health conditions, support people with disabilities, enhance cognitive performance, and expand human capability in ways we’re only beginning to imagine. But the risks are dire. Neural data is an extremely sensitive kind of data, one that has only ever been collected in medical settings and protected by rigorous health data laws. This is the most intimate data there is, capable of revealing more about you than you may even know about yourself, and the devices themselves are capable of changing the way our brains function.

We’re in a rare window of opportunity: the technology is developing but hasn’t yet scaled, and thoughtful governance can still shape what comes next. The Neurorights Foundation is working to ensure that neurotechnologies are leveraged for social good and safeguarded from misuse. We’ve been at the forefront of early policy efforts in this space, securing the first laws in history protecting neurotechnology consumers and raising awareness with key stakeholders. It’s urgent and exciting work.

Q: You teach Ethics and Public Policy for first-year students in the Brooks School’s DC Start program. What big questions do you hope DC Starters will explore as they think more deeply about ethics and public policy?

Ethics and public policy sounds like it should produce clear answers: here’s the right thing to do, here’s why. But the most important questions are often the murkiest. Questions of fairness and distribution: who gets what, and why. Questions of power: how to identify abuses when they hide in ordinary institutions and everyday decisions. Questions of obligation: what we owe each other, ourselves, and people we will never meet whose lives our choices nonetheless shape. These questions are at the center of my course.

Q: What is it like teaching these questions to students at the very beginning of their Cornell experience—and doing so in Washington, D.C., where they are surrounded by public policy in practice?

It’s really a privilege to teach students in their first semester of college. They’re eager and excited, but they’re also anxious, keenly aware that they’re stepping into a world that is uncertain and volatile. I take that seriously, and work to create a space where not knowing is okay. My classroom is a place where changing your mind is a sign of good thinking, and where grappling seriously with hard questions is the point.

Being in DC makes this particularly vivid: the policy questions we discuss are playing out in real time just outside the door. Twice per semester I assign “Ethics in Practice,” which asks students to go into the world, engage in ethical action, and then write about it using course frameworks. This is designed to promote learning outside of the classroom and remind them that the human stakes are real and immediate. Washington is the perfect backdrop for this assignment, and I find the students always return energized and with renewed purpose.

Q: Your professional work deals with many of the same questions your students encounter in the classroom. How do your experiences in research, policy, and advocacy shape the way you teach ethics and public policy?

I’ve advised governments around the world, collaborated with the United Nations, worked in refugee camps and prisons, and lectured around the world. More than any specific policy knowledge, this has given me a constant, grounding reminder that policy is about people. I try to bring that reminder into every class session. When we discuss questions of power or obligation, I’m drawing on real experiences that made those questions urgent and real to me, often while thinking of specific people or communities I know. I want my students to feel that urgency too. The goal isn’t to teach them what to think, but to give them the tools to think critically and with compassion.

Q: Your new book, Asylum Is Unavailable: Absence and Absurdity at the Digital Border, grew out of your research in Greece. What drew you to studying digital bordering, and when did you realize there was a larger story that needed to be told?

I went to Greece in 2018 as a volunteer, providing aid to asylum seekers. I kept hearing people talk about Skype: they needed to call on Skype and couldn’t get through. Could I help them connect with the Skype office? I had no idea what they meant, but I quickly learned they were calling the government and getting no reply.

For context: between 2014 and 2022, the only way to register an asylum claim on mainland Greece was to call the Greek Asylum Service on Skype during specific hour-long windows allocated by language. An Asylum Service staffer was supposed to answer, take down your details, and schedule an in-person appointment. Without that call connecting, they had no legal status, no right to work, no healthcare, and no protection from deportation to the very countries they had fled from. I started looking into it and realized this strange system was quietly obliterating access to rights without any public outrage or accountability.

I looked for news articles or books written about this system and found almost nothing. This system had been running for years but was essentially undocumented. I returned to Greece as a PhD student to investigate the system. I sat beside asylum seekers while they called and called and called, unsure if anyone would ever answer them. Out of 8,835 calls I recorded, nine received replies. 0.1%. That’s when I knew there was a book to write. This story had to be told.

The book is written as narrative nonfiction. It puts readers inside the call room alongside the asylum seekers I worked with, following specific individuals through years of calling without reply. Beyond this specific story, it explores how governments worldwide are embracing digital tools without safeguards or transparency. When technology fails, or is designed to fail, the consequences hit the most vulnerable hardest. The book is both a record of overlooked suffering and a warning of what is to come.

Q: One of the ideas you advance in the book is “digital pushback”—the ways governments can use seemingly ordinary technologies to exclude people from rights and services. What does digital pushback look like, and what does the Greek asylum system reveal about the relationship between technology and public policy?

Most conversations about technology and borders focus on how digital tools allow governments to detect and deter through surveillance. In my book, I document that sometimes governments use technology to look the other way, to deliberately not see. A digital pushback is what happens when governments use technology to keep you at a distance, even if you are already on their territory.

The term draws on the practice of pushbacks common in the Mediterranean, where boats carrying refugees and asylum seekers are intercepted and turned back to sea, often in violation of international law. I argue that similar effects can occur even when people remain within a country’s borders; if you are unable to meaningfully access protection, rights, or the state itself, you have effectively been pushed back, even if no one laid a hand on you. You exist within a country but cannot actually access it.

Sometimes digital pushbacks rely upon military-grade technology, but often they rely on mundane tools: apps that crash, portals without appointments, bureaucracy where you can never reach a human. The goal is not necessarily to detect or capture people, but to deter: to make the state unreachable and to ignore and exhaust those trying to live within it.

Q: After spending years researching and writing Asylum Is Unavailable, what do you most hope readers—and especially future policymakers—take away from the book?

My primary goal is simple: I want people to know this happened. The Skype procedure lasted for eight years in Greece, and in that time, it enacted a quiet and devastating violence. And yet, there is no knowledge of this, no accountability. As one asylum seeker said to me: “I want someone to know that I’ve been calling for all these years.”

Beyond that, I want readers to identify forms of harm that don’t always look like harm. Border violence does not always announce itself with walls or weapons. Sometimes it’s just an unanswered call accompanied by an automated message that says ‘Asylum is unavailable.’ The quieter the harm, the harder it is to see and challenge. And that isn’t a coincidence: it’s a design feature.

We are living through a rapid expansion of digital governance, and the decisions being made today about how governments use technology will shape countless lives. I want policymakers to carry this theme as a reminder that technology can harm people without paper trails or headlines. The most dangerous systems are often those that look the most ordinary. It is the job of policymakers to scrutinize the entanglement of government and big tech, and to ensure that accountability does not disappear into digital infrastructure.