Reimagining the Internet

Today on Reimagining, we welcome our first conscientious objector to Google—and our first ever NASA alum. Janet Vertesi joins for a fascinating conversation about her project to keep any data about her children off the web, and ties it in to tales about her old job as in-house ethnographer for the Mars Rover missions.

José van Dijck is arguably the preeminent sociologist in the Netherlands, conducting research about how online platforms have crept into public life that has proved foundational to European regulation like the Digital Services Act. Today on Reimagining the Internet, José talks to us about PubHubs, an attempt to build a decentralized, privacy-focused social media network […]

Why does the criminal justice system feel so unfair to those who interact with it? Why does Internet governance often feel so arbitrary? Legal scholars Tracey Meares and Tom Tyler believe that we need justice systems made up of fair processes designed first and foremost to help us trust that justice. This week on Reimagining, we're joined by the two cofounders of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School.

Alex Fink think we already have enough information on the web: now it's time to make sense of all of it. He's built a fantastic tool called Otherweb that uses natural language processing to aggregate news from reputable outlets and filter out the junk. It even includes a search engine that can exclude any articles with affiliate links, hateful content, or lacking references. Oh and he's built all of this without developing a business model.

It's that time for our favorite tradition here at Reimagining the Internet: the holiday special. This year, Ethan has his finger hovering over a big red button to delete the entire Internet and his guardian angel talks him down. A very special tanks to lab mates Ryan McGrady, Rebecca Curran, Kevin Zheng, Spencer Lane, Virginia Partridge, and Jasmine Mangat for joining.

Why do social movements organizing online that spawn huge protests so rarely create radical change like movements of the past? Gal Beckerman argues that it's all about The Quiet Before, a sustained discourse where activists can organize and deliberate about how to enact the change they want to see. This week on Reimagining, Gal walks us through his new book, a history of radical movements.

How could we curtail one of the most ambitious surveillance operations deployed in human history? This week on Reimagining, our very own Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci explains his new paper co-authored with Ethan outlining a new model for online advertising that eschews invasive data collection. Chand’s and Ethan’s paper “Forgetful Advertising: Imagining a More Responsible Digital Ad […]

Arvind Narayanan is a Princeton computer science professor who wants to make it easy for you to cut through the AI. In a fascinating and plain old helpful interview, Arvid runs through all the big claims made about AI today and makes them very simple to understand.

In part 2 of our interview with Jessamyn West, the new MetaFilter owner tells us about her day job as a librarian in rural Vermont and her years spent working to close the digital divide. Inevitably, we talk about the library as a new battleground for right-wing reactionaries and its role as one of the few remaining public institutions.

Jessamyn West is not just one of the web's favorite librarians, but the new owner of Metafilter, an incredibly long-running social network that dates back to a very different Internet. In the first part of our interview with Jessamyn, she tells us just how Metafilter has kept going and stayed healthy since 1999.

What does Francesca Tripodi have in common with the Evangelical Christians she studied? They both do their own research, and they find lots of propaganda. This week on Reimagining, Francesca gives us a crash course on the sprawling conservative disinformation ecosystem.

Ben Tarnoff has a radical idea: unprivatize the Internet. The writer, Logic Magazine founder, and tech worker activist joins us to talk about his new book outlining what a truly public Internet would look like, from the fiber optic cables to the social media platforms platforms.

Google and Meta have been spending a small fortune to lay undersea cables bringing more broadband to Africa. Journalists Andrew Blum and Carey Baraka join us this week to talk about their years-in-the-making article for Rest of World asking if those companies will control what Africans can and can't access onli

Loads of stimulus, quick hits of dopamine, and no natural light: does this describe a casino or Facebook? The Danish philosopher Vincent F. Hendricks and digital media researcher Camilla Mehlsen join to walk us through their new book The Ministry of Truth, which explore how the attention economy incentivizes social media companies to make products […]

Brandy Zadrozny just made one of our favorite podcasts of the year, NBC's Tiffany Dover is Dead, so we needed to get her on the show to talk about the ins and outs of debunking conspiracy theories with gumshoe reporting.

Bruno Patino thinks the economics of the Internet are set up to give us the attention spans of goldfish. In this week's episode, Bruno tells us why France, a country such good public broadcast media, has so much trouble reigning in corporate social media.

With news that Elon Musk is purchasing Twitter, we recorded a rare hot takes episode. In addition to Ethan sharing his thoughts, we invited Deepti Doshi from New Public and Nathan Schneider on to talk about the need for platforms that bolster democracy.

Brandon Silverman developed a news analytics tool called Crowdtangle that was so good at tracking popular stories on Facebook that the company acquired it. Today on Reimagining the Internet, Brandon tells us how he’s working to regulate his former employer. Transcript Ethan Zuckerman: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Reimagining The Internet. I remain Ethan Zuckerman. […]

What the hell is "adversarial interopability"? Science fiction writer and prolific blogger Cory Doctorow thinks it's going to set you free from Facebook, letting you take your data and pictures wherever you want to go. And he believes surveillance capitalism is standing in your way.

were thrilled by her accounts of how gaming spaces are harbingers of social trends to come, online and off. Sometimes those are real problems like coordinated harassment, but sometimes those are collective solutions like distributed moderation and efforts to forge safe spaces.

this week to share an episode from our friends' podcast. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an excellent show hosted by Cindy Cohn and Danny O'Brien called How to Fix the Internet. Our show has a lot in common with theirs – in fact it has so much in common that they had Ethan on their show back in January. We're that interview today, and if you enjoy it, be sure to subscribe to How to Fix the Internet for more.

Reimagining the Internet. Give us a rating wherever you're listening to this podcast right now, join our subreddit at r/publicinfrastructure, and take a survey about the podcast a https://publicinfrastructure.org/survey

Molly White thinks web3 is going just great and this week she tells us about the wash trades, rug pulls, and the opportunity for abusive airdrops on the blockchain. In her fascinating and often hilarious account, blockchain's early days are past

What do Facebook content moderators and Rodrigo Duterte's troll armies often have in common? This week on Reimagining, Jonathan Corpus Ong lends us fascinating and surprising insights from his work interviewing members of the Phillipines' burgeoning digital working class, and how we might expect the Filipino Internet to play into the country's elections in May.

Nearly as soon as COVID-19 lockdowns began in March 2020, people started throwing livestream concerts. This week, our producer Mike chats with two of the organizers the Quarantine Concerts, a series that ran on Twitch nightly for months and raised nearly $100,000 for performers, bringing in performers and organizers from all over the world.

en you think about early Internet users, do you picture French people trying to find love and teens in after-school programs? Kevin Driscoll joins us for this edition of our history series "How They Imagined the Internet" to tell us about France's nation-wide public Internet that ran for decades and how BBS laid the groundwork for the web to be a social place.

Casteism pervades the Hindu diaspora, not just across borders, but across the Internet too. This week, Dalit activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan offers us a look at how Dalits face discrimination and inequity on social media and in the ranks of Silicon Valley tech companies.

livery services to music streaming. Trebor is a professor at the New School, where he helms the Platform Cooperativism Consortium. It’s a fascinating listen about the variety of ways coops can aid local communities, labor unions, and freelancers, empowering communities of workers to govern themselves and more equitably distribute revenue.

scheme? In Part 2 of our interview with Nathan Schneider, he tells us about the flurry of experiments in democracy that get drowned out by NFT hype.

hy don't users get a say in how platforms operate? Nathan Schneider thinks it might be because we don't own them. In Part 1 of this week's interview, Nathan tells us about how online spaces could be cooperatively owned, and what the US government could do to help.

We celebrate our 50th episode with a holiday special, where Ethan is visited by the Reimagining the Internet producers of past, present, and future to remember some of our favorite interviews from 2021. Tune in for highlights with Omar Wasow, Fred Turner, Heather Ford, Michael Wood Lewis, Lola Hunt and Eliza Sorensen, Damon Krukowski, Elizabeth Hansen-Shapiro, and Tracy Chou.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales joins us for a thrilling chat about what we can learn from social media and what’s anti-social about a lot of social media today. Jimmy has recently launched the the social network WT.Social, designed to as a non-addictive, thoughtful online space, and has lots of thoughts about the type of communities that we might be able to start cultivating online.

talk about the thousands of volunteers building it together? Heather Ford, an ethnographer of Wikipedia, joins us to talk about the power struggles and community governance that makes the site one of the most trusted information sources on the web.

How did hippies living on communes help create the Internet? Is Mark Zuckerberg today's PT Barnum? What can we learn from 17th Century Protestantism about inequality in Silicon Valley? Fred Turner, perhaps the definitive historian of the Internet and counterculture, joins us for a thrilling conversation about how we need to shake post-WWII politics to make not just a better Internet, but a better world. For links to projects mentioned and a full transcript of this episode, please visit https://publicinfrastructure.org/podcast/47-fred-turner Key takeaways: 1. Communes were insular, and so was the first Internet community created by back-to-land hippies. 2. Silicon Valley's cult of personality follows from Protestants' belief that wealth is a sign of godliness. 3. "Seeing Silicon Valley" documents the inequality that fuels tech with portraits of the rich and poor. 4. We need to reckon with issues of class that started during the Vietnam War. 5. Institutions that bring people to come together despite identity and ideology differences are crucial.

Amy Zhang from the Social Futures Lab at University of Washington joins the podcast to talk about the a next version of the internet where groups of users are empowered to govern themselves and help each other to deal online harassment. Amy tells us how she’s pushing HCI and Social Computing scholarship in exciting new directions, to ask what sorts of new practices might make up a post-mega-platform internet.

While some big social media companies are working to use AI to combat harassment, Tracy Chou has a simpler solution — put users in control of what and who they see on their feeds. In this week's episode, Tracy tells us about he app Block Party, a clever and radical set of tools to protect users from trolling and abuse.

Did Spotify save the music industry or simply find a way for itself to profit from a power vacuum opened up by piracy? This week, we're thrilled to welcome drummer and writer Damon Krukowski to talk to us about how Spotify became dominant and how musicians are fighting it to win a music industry that supports their livelihoods.

Talia Stroud from the University of Texas joins us to talk about her project Civic Signals, a project reimagining the Internet as a public space. She walks us through what’s wrong with the type of speech currently rewarded by Facebook and Twitter, and what it might look like to promote civic speech instead. Recorded August, 2020. Visit our episode web page for links to Civic Signals' website and newsletter, and Eli Pariser's TED Talk.

Maciej Ceglowski is not just the founder of one of the indie web's success stories — the modest yet long-running subscription bookmarking service Pinboard — but a prolific commentator on the world the Internet is helping to create. This week, we're thrilled to chat with Maciej about reimagining not just the Internet, but the stakes that the people using the Internet are responding to.

Are.na might be the most exciting social network for designers, artists, and curious, interdisciplinary self-educators, kind of like Pinterest or Tumblr but offering the functionality to spin a vast web of images and knowledge. The platform is currently celebrating its 10th anniversary, so we invited two of Are.na's co-founders to talk to us about the close-knit (and often paying) community that makes the site vibrant and how the platform's systems of Blocks and Channels makes it an ideal tool for connecting ideas and creating trains of thought.

Deen Freelon is one of the foremost scholars on how contemporary protest movements organize on the Internet. This week Deen joins us to talk about his work on the Black Lives Matter movement, how he's trying to understand mis- and disinformation from both the right and the left, and what fixing social media might look like when the scale of platforms like Facebook and Twitter is what makes them so exciting and so difficult to moderate.

Elizabeth Hansen-Shapiro joins Ethan to talk about “New Approaches to Platform Data Research,” the report they just published together with the NetGain Partnership. Elizabeth and Ethan talk about a variety of issues facing journalists and researchers for studying social media companies, and what sort of solutions — both small-scale and radical — could help ensure a better-studied, more accountable social media ecosystem. Elizabeth is the co-founder of the National Trust for Local News.

Moderation processes online should reduce harm, offer victims justice they find meaningful, and fix inequity in these social spaces. On all of these counts, the moderation systems implemented by big social media companies fail conclusively. Sarita Schoenebeck from the Living Online Lab at the University of Michigan joins us to talk about what moderation and harm reduction driven by the real-world experiences of victims might look like.

How could social media systems be designed as safe places that really work for the people who use them? What can art help us understand about machine learning data sets? Caroline Sinders of Convocation Design joins us this week to talk about her research-based art practice that's trying to change perspectives about what exactly is going wrong on the Internet, and just how exciting it may be to fix it.

In this bonus episode, Omar Wasow talks about his paper published last year documenting the political impact and public opinion resulting from the 1960s civil rights movement in America.

Jillian C. York, the Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, joins us to talk about censorship on social media platforms and her new book Silicon Values, out now on Verso.

Well before Facebook achieved social media dominance, Black Planet was the online home to millions of Black Americans. The site’s founder Omar Wasow joins us to talk about why it was so important to create an online space for Black people, and what a next generation of the Internet might look like for such communities.

Welcome back to Season 2 of Reimagining the Internet. We'll be running new interviews and reruns of some of our favorite past episodes, as well inviting some new voices to take over the podcast from time to time.

This episode shares a recorded talk from the 2021 Reimagine the Internet conference, a virtual conference co-hosted by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the soon-to-be-launched Initiative on Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In six sessions over five days, there will be more than a dozen speakers whose work hints at what the internet could become over the next decade. evelyn douek is a lecturer on law at Harvard Law school, a research scholar at the Knight First Amendment Institute, and a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center For Internet & Society.

This episode shares a recorded talk from the 2021 Reimagine the Internet conference, a virtual conference co-hosted by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the soon-to-be-launched Initiative on Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In six sessions over five days, there will be more than a dozen speakers whose work hints at what the internet could become over the next decade. Jonathan Ong is an associate professor of global digital media in the department of communications at UMass Amhsert.