This is an entry in our Keyword series, where we try to define the terms you’ll often hear when people talk about building a better Internet and put those keywords in their current context. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, people and organizations needed a new virtual space to host all kinds of… Continue reading Keyword: Accidental Infrastructure
Blog
Otherweb Cuts Junk from Your News Diet
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 a Wonderful Internet: The 2022 Holiday Special
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.
This One Weird Trick for a Changing Society with Gal Beckerman
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.
Forgetful Advertising with Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci
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… Continue reading Forgetful Advertising with Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci
Gobo 2.0: All Your Social Media in One Place
Rather than opening one app for Twitter, another for Mastodon, and yet another for Reddit, what if you could view all three together? Furthermore, what if you could filter and prioritize your content from each platform, taking control of your own feed instead of depending on proprietary algorithms? This is what we are hoping to achieve with the next iteration of iDPI’s Gobo project.
Should You Leave Twitter for Mastodon?
What follows is the text of a tweet thread Ethan Zuckerman issued last week. Below it are some additional tweets embedded focusing on the case for leaving Twitter Long thread – buckle up. TL:DR; yes, you should join Mastodon. But you should stay on Twitter as well. What we need are more and different online… Continue reading Should You Leave Twitter for Mastodon?
Yale Journal of Law and Technology: Forgetful Advertising, Imagining a More Responsible Ad System
Chand and Ethan just published a long-in-the-making paper proposing a new system for targetted advertising that doesn’t rely on a surveillance model. Check it out in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology’s special issue “A Healthy Digital Public Sphere.”
Prospect (UK): Will AI make artists obsolete?
Ethan marvels an AI image generation software and wonders what the future of human-assisted creativity may look like.
See Through AI Hype with Arvind Narayanan
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.