Archives: Podcast

Trusting justice means making it feel meaningful—people have to trust that justice systems are themselves just. To conclude our miniseries on Trust, we talk to Nathan Matias about how exactly people lost trust in Elon Musks’ Twitter, and revisit our recent interview with Tracey Meares and Tom Tyler about how procedural justice can convince can… Continue reading Do You Trust that Justice is Just? with Nathan Matias, Tracey Meares, and Tom Tyler (Trust episode 4)

Cryptocurrency is supposedly the basis of trustless economy, but in the past few years there were a lot of everyday people who entrusted it with everything. How did this happen? In this episode of our miniseries on trust, we talk to Finn Brunton about the deep history of crypto and Molly White about how the… Continue reading 72 Why Would People Trust Crypto? with Finn Brunton and Molly White (Trust episode 2)

Should governments regulate how Facebook moderates speech? Can you sanction an automated smart contract that’s used for international money laundering? Was it a coincidence that every social media platform banned Donald Trump at the same time? In the first part of our 4-part miniseries looking at trust online, we welcome evelyn douek, host of the… Continue reading 71 Do We Trust the Internet? with evelyn douek and Primavera de Filippi (Trust episode 1)

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… Continue reading 69 The Netherlands’ most important sociologist is building the other DPI: the Dutch Public Internet

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.