For the final episode of our Good Web series, artist, designer, and educator Laurel Schwulst joins Mike to talk through her proposal for a PBS of the Internet. She describes how a PBS-like body that intentionally crafts the spaces, software, and information for a public good could crucial for creating an environment that rewards curisoity and fosters joy online.

Laurel Schwulst is a practicing artist, the founder of Fruitful School, and director of the gift shop at Are.na. She currently teaches at Princeton University.

Mentioned in this episode:

• The Fruitful School Ultralight workshop
• “How to Build a Bird Kite” by Laurel Schwulst (New York Times)
• Cory Arcangel’s “Year in the Internet 2020” project
• PBS of the Internet: On Your Phone
• Flight Simulator app

Transcript

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to reimagining the Internet. I am Mike Sugarman. You are joining us for another episode in the Good Web series where I’ve been more or less going around in person to interview a lot of our close friends who are working on building a better, smaller, more user-oriented Internet that’s nice for humans to use.

Today I’m in Columbia Waterfront District in Brooklyn with Laurel Schwulst. Laurel, the most direct relation that you have to our podcast is we’ve now talked to Are.na twice, including Charles for this Good Web series. Laurel is the director and shopkeeper of the gift shop at Arena, as well as the founder of the Fruitful School Program, which we’ll talk about more in a second. Laurel was creative director at Kickstarter for the Creative Independent project.

Just more generally, educator, artist, designer, technologist, you’ve done a lot of really cool work in the general space of art and the Internet and all of that. You also have taught other people in this realm. I think you said for 12 years at Princeton and Yale. Yeah, you’re really someone who is making a lot of really beautiful and cool things and teaching other people how to do the same. Laurel, welcome to the show.

LAUREL SCHWULST:

Thanks, Mike. It’s great to be here.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

That was a lot. Did I miss anything?

LAUREL SCHWULST:

No, I think you totally got it. Thank you.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

So Laurel, you and I are really here to talk today about your proposal for a PBS of the Internet. But I think first we should talk about how we met.

We met because in January, somewhat on behalf of IDPI, I took the Fruitful School Workshop, the theme, “Ultralight,” which I’m going to do my best to describe what “Ultralight” is, and then you can come and be like, “This is what you missed,” but basically, “Ultralight,” I think is kind of, actually, why don’t you describe what “Ultralight” is?

LAUREL SCHWULST:

Sure. Yeah. So, Mike, you took my workshop called “Ultralight Lightweight Websites and Time and Place.” I think that’s what we called it. And it was broadly about how do we take a lightweight approach to the web?

I’ve been making things for the web for, I realize, over 20 years, dating back to when I was a kid in the ’90s. Obviously, the web and the internet was very different then. And kind of since then, it’s gotten more and more in both good and terrifying ways. And I find that many websites or many things are quite heavy-feeling, both from a literal standpoint. Like, literally, if I’m on a slow bandwidth connection, some websites just will fail to load because they have a lot of, for example, JavaScript or heavy images, things like this. But also kind of heavy in other ways too, maybe heavy on our demands for attention, heavy and maybe a fixed worldview.

And so, yeah, I had found these websites of some developers, like, for example, 512kb.club, which is a collection of websites that feel full but are still lightweight under, you know, half a megabyte. But most of these websites were made by developers, and so they kind of had a set sort of style and content. And after seeing this, I mean, I thought it was really awesome that people were literally trying to minify the web. But I was interested in a more, like, broad idea of what lightweight could be.

And so, this workshop invited, yeah, about 12 participants, you included, to come meet once a week for a month in New York. And we had two wonderful guests, Marie Otsuka and Benjamin Earl. And Marie talked about websites that could be time specific. Maybe they open or close depending on the sunrise or sunset, or maybe, you know, we looked at websites like B&H Photo that is actually linked to the Shabbat based on their religious views. And like, literally, you can’t check out certain times. And also Marie designed the solar Low-Tech Magazine website, which is a website that goes online or offline depending on the solar power because it’s a self-hosted website in Barcelona, Spain.

And then Benjamin Earl led a workshop called “Coding in Situ,” where we thought about websites which would be location specific. And this is a very specific workshop where we made websites that were under one megabyte in size because that’s all that this little ESP32 module, which is like a kind of tiny computer, could hold. And Ben set it up with some Arduino code that basically fired up a Wi-Fi network. And when you connect it to the Wi-Fi network, your website would appear. So it was an experiment in what would like a very place specific website be, and literally just following the constraints of the size of that module. And then Ben also has a practice of like, what does it look like to actually create a website for a specific place by like going to that place and being in conversation with both the people in that space and its like environmental particularities. So yeah, maybe that’s basically what the workshop was about as far as I can tell. Does that sound about right to you?

MIKE SUGARMAN:

That does sound right. I would say maybe my favorite thing about this workshop is that the 12 people who came, you know, all different backgrounds, I would definitely say there’s a condition of artists. There’s journalists. I think there was someone who recently quit her job as a middle school principal or a high school principal. And I think for some people there, it was probably the first time they had taken some kind of like class about coding.

I think what’s kind of really beautiful about that is it was a workshop that was like focused on the not just like the creativity first, but also what responds to people’s lives. What can be like the expressive capacity of the web? How would they like make a tiny quarter of the web that reflects their experience? And I think it’s a really wonderful way to position introducing people to technology, to position like giving people tools to build things with computers because it’s very different than the idea that there’s like some standard and that that’s how we should all be making our living.

LAUREL SCHWULST:

Yeah. Yeah, totally. I mean, I’ve been thinking recently about how maybe a purpose of a website is simply to exist. And maybe what you’re saying is that people who participated in the workshop were coming with that goal in mind, like, Oh, I have an idea of something I want to contribute to this space. And do it in a way that feels true to me.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Right. Yeah. And you know, to make that really concrete, like sometimes it was, there was one person, I mean, I really loved this one. Someone has been keeping this list of dog names for like years and years and years and years and found a way to like represent this list on a website, color coded by the type of dog, the type of color the dog could be that sort of thing. There were people who kind of, there’s one person who made a website dedicated to a bodega that she grew up going to and kind of like formed this like very personal like, yeah, neighborhood relationship with. I mean, it really felt like it kind of really, really ran the gamut.

LAUREL SCHWULST:

Yeah. Also someone made a time specific website that just showed the current fruits or vegetables that are in season. And so they can like pull it up when they go to the grocery store and like, yeah.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

It’s a really nice idea. It’s like a different idea of the web is like, “Oh, this network can have a bunch of pages.” That like, yeah, it’s like a place to be curious.

LAUREL SCHWULST:

Yeah. And I love how hyper specific each project was. And maybe the title, “Ultralight” also encouraged people to think of things like quite specifically. I know another person came with this, maybe what they would call like an ultralight format. They’ve been creating two song playlists for a while and that might sound a little counterintuitive, but when you think about it, a playlist just needs to be at least more than one song. Yeah, that’s great. But yeah, like finding a way to publish this idea, but it’s also kind of an invitation to create your own two song playlists. Like a playlist couplet.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

And like to get really concrete about ultralight, when Benjamin led his workshop with the ESP32, it was on a little solar powered ESP32, which is a tiny Arduino based computer that is light enough that someone was able to install it by putting it in a Ziploc sandwich bag and taping it to the window. And then that’s where that website lived. Very different than a giant server farm that serves, I don’t know, I think about IDPI’s WordPress blog, which is heavy.

LAUREL SCHWULST:

And I guess we taped it to the window because that one in particular was connected to a solar panel, a mini solar panel that literally powered the mini computer. Yeah.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

And I guess the ultralight idea came out of research that you had been doing, or you’ve been talking in an art practice of yours, and I think an event you organized around ultralight kites, which you wrote a really great piece in New York Times Magazine about. I’ll link it in the show notes. So tell us a little bit about this ultralight kite project, how this ties into everything.

LAUREL SCHWULST:

Yeah, totally. So I guess backtrack to the pandemic, you know, we’re all in our homes a little bit too much, probably all on our screens a bit too much. And a friend’s birthday was coming up, and I couldn’t help but think, “Oh, it’d be really nice to create a kite for this friend as a surprise.” Probably this friend had some love of crows specifically, and I was thinking, “Oh, crows are kind of fun because they’re very like a COVID core, like kind of black, but like they still fly, they’re really smart.”

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Are crows the one that make friends and enemies with humans?

LAUREL SCHWULST:

Yeah, they recognize human faces. Yeah, so I was like, “I’m going to make a crow kite.” And I did, just kind of in a morning, I looked up some tutorials, and we brought to the park because my friend was having a birthday picnic, and it flew, but like barely. But anyway, after that, I kind of recorded some of my results in an arena channel. Arena is this website and platform maybe you all know about, but I guess I think of it as a human-powered search, or like, I guess sometimes people call it like Pinterest for more artists or academic types.

I feel like all of my projects kind of weave together. And so essentially this artist, Cory Arcangel, who’s a very famous, very funny internet artist for a long time, asked everyone to create an Are.na channel called “My Year in the Internet 2020,” because we were so on our computers. And so I really appreciated this invitation and decided, yeah, I would add some things I loved on the internet, but it also included things I did outside because that was so much part of my existence and like, you know, learning things from the internet, but then taking them outside.

So this kite, so I popped some kite things in that channel. And then I receive an email one day from Tracy Ma, senior visual editor at the New York Times, who’s my friend that a very talented designer now works for Frank Ocean, but I had invited into my Yale class many years ago.

Anyway, she was like, Laurel, I’d love to do something with you for the times. So I was like, that’d be great. Like here’s an Are.na channel of what I’ve been up to this year. Did any of this resonate with you? And she saw the kites and immediately thought, wow, like I know you’ve done it. You’ve done tutorials about how to code HTML and CSS. What if you did a tutorial on how to make this kite for the times? And I was like, yes, like let’s definitely do it.

So anyway, the, and the tutorial ended up being this, actually it’s like a 46 minute long film, but it’s designed in a story format, kind of like Instagram or TikTok or Snapchat where you can tap through just to go to the most important parts. So like the, my favorite parts of the web, it kind of has Easter eggs if you wait around, like kind of hidden things. But essentially it just teaches you very pragmatically how to make my bird kite design. And I was able to figure out how to actually make it fly a bit better since my initial crow prototype.

But yeah, I guess in general, one other thing about this project is that I was able to weave in my thoughts about the wind and how I find wind a really useful metaphor also for talking about the internet, which I guess I would say the internet has many winds and maybe defining a wind as an invisible force. Wind is invisible, but has visible effects on our world. And so I feel like my engagement with the wind through this kite project is a way of starting to tune in to those invisible sensitivities or winds.

And I have also been thinking about how kites are actually a form of technology that is very old, like over 3000 years old, like started in Asia, I think in China in early BC times. And you know, have had many, many thousands of years of iteration, but meanwhile the internet is like a very young medium. And I think we’d all agree that like needs a lot more iteration to kind of fit well within our lives.

And so my proposal is like, let’s think about the winds of the internet and how they’re affecting us. And I think one thing that’s difficult about the internet is that it’s so quote unquote invisible or like intentionally obfuscated, but really pay attention to these invisible forces that are having palpable effects on our world.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

So our first ever podcast guest, Talia Stroud, who was also on in September she did some really important research on Facebook and elections. She has this project called Civic Signals. Basically what Civic Signals studies is like what are different like, yeah, like things that encourage people to have specific types of civic conversations online, which are either like well-informed or not well-informed. What encourages people to harass other people or be nice to each other on the internet, that sort of stuff. And that’s what I think is really important.

But I think that something that PBS of the Internet proposal and we’ll get into this like really touches on is the idea that it’s like maybe there can be a really explicit body on the internet that like helps, yeah, like put some of those like signals out there helps kind of like direct the wind in a certain way.

One of the things I remember from the Ultralight workshop is the wind sock, which I didn’t realize what a wind sock is until the workshop, which is like each ring on the wind sock shows what speed the wind is going. It’s an interesting idea in terms of like what the internet is, is like a kind of wind sock for like what the winds online are.

LAUREL SCHWULST:

Yeah, totally. The wind sock, like it looks like just a decorative striped sock, but you learn that if you can read it correctly, it’s extremely accurate mathematical depiction of how fast or slow the wind is going. And I guess you could say that about a lot of things. I mean, if you learn to read your environment, like any shadow could be a sundial kind of thing. And I think it just takes a special type of attunement to environments to be able to kind of read these kind of more hidden like meanings.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Let’s talk more about environments because I’ve heard you use that term like several times outside of this podcast interview. I know it’s something that you’re really interested in as an artist. And as a designer is creating environments, creating environments online, we’re currently in the environment of your living room, which is a nice environment.

Yeah, I’d be curious to hear what that means and what that means to you in terms of all this stuff.

LAUREL SCHWULST:

Yeah, totally. I mean, maybe it’s useful to say that after I published this piece in the Times, I mean, I was very excited about it and just proud it existed, but it started to paint a picture for me. And I would love to experience more things like this on the internet. And what does it mean to be like this? I mean, I meant like, oh, that’s one thing. I would love to have more so that there’s like an environment or an ecosystem of these sorts of things. And I guess I started to describe these things having PBS energy or public broadcasting system energy, you know, harkening back to the old days of Bob Ross or Mr. Rogers on PBS, obviously many other programs. But I guess I have this feeling like the internet just as a broad system has really been lacking this type of humanity that advertising strips away.

And also, I mean, there’s many other properties of what made PBS like I thought it was educational but not didactic, like almost created an environment that you felt good at, good within and then you could like learn some things. You know, even like how calming Bob Ross was and inviting. And then, you know, it’s human. It’s also like tasteful. Like they actually kind of like make decisions about what’s good for humanity instead of like just having a filter bubble like serve you things. Not saying that like some things from the filter bubble aren’t useful.

But I think in general, me wanting more PBS energy on the internet is like kind of a way of rebalancing what I feel is very out of balance right now in this kind of environment we might call like the internet at large, you know, mostly dictated by things like social media and algorithmic feeds, which seem to like kind of seep into every part nowadays. I mean, not completely, but yeah.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

I can just give a little snapshot of history that I’m barring from this shows typical host Ethan Zuckerman. Ethan gave this talk, it’s actually right when I started working with him about five years ago is like the talk he was giving. Maybe that talk was called something like “Fixing Social Media,” which is also a class that Ethan’s been teaching for a while, but he has a little history of PBS in there, which is fascinating. And I think this touches it like ties into what you’re driving at here also.

So PBS comes out of these congressional hearings in the 60s that the start of these congressional hearings was this guy with an incredible name, Newt Minow, which it’s like so rare that someone’s name is like the animal. And then their last name is like the baby version of the animal. It’s a great name, but he was someone who is like incensed by the quality of what’s being broadcast on television.

This is the 1960s. So this is well after other places in the world have public broadcasting. Britain’s had the BBC basically since the beginning of broadcasting there, Soviet Russia. You could get a radio station or You could get a radio in the early days of Soviet Russia, which basically had like a switch. It was one part of the switch was one state run station. The other part of the switch was another state run station. America didn’t have this though. And he was basically decrying the man. I forget the specific phrase, but basically, yeah, the debased nature of like television in America saying we need a public alternative. We need to actually fund something that is like for the public good.

That is the genesis of PBS. It’s like an idea that it’s like if we think about television that’s not made for advertisers, who are trying to get people to watch a lot of TV and then buy things, but television that’s made for the well-being of our children, television that’s made for the well-being of like American culture, for educating people, for reforming people, for giving them a good alternative to the bad stuff, we might do television very differently. And I think that’s kind of what you’re driving at with PBS that I mean, I will go on the record of saying I think the internet writ large is like pretty awful to use at the moment. In a way, it would be nice to have easy access, like really easy access, as easy as like if I go on YouTube and it feeds me a bunch of like recommended videos.

LAUREL SCHWULST:

Yeah, totally. I’ve also been inspired by learning more about like how before PBS with television, this started I guess in the 1920s with radio. Just in some of my research was learning about the Federal Radio Commission, which was established then kind of helped ramp up for PBS later in the 60s, you said.

And so I guess what makes me excited, even though the current internet feels quite doomy, is that there has been a real history of this throughout media evolution.

And so yeah, and you also mentioned kids, which I think is really notable because kids are these type of people who don’t have all of their systems developed, so they’re more vulnerable and literally more sensitive. And I guess I’ve been thinking about myself as an artist and artists are also quite sensitive to like the fluctuations of our world and also like environments. And so I’m not saying like I want to be the person literally building the PBS of the Internet, but more like I’m someone who can raise attention and awareness and kind of paint a vision so that others can kind of, we can kind of work on this together sort of thing.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Yeah, I mean basically I think what you’re describing is, I mean in terms of as like an art project, where maybe we can talk about this as like a curatorial project even as something that doesn’t use art to make an example, like not to like literally paint a picture or even use art to like make a specific like separate space, like an installation or something, but to actually involve people in kind of like a creative space and give them an opportunity to harness that environment that you’d be creating.

I mean, I do, it makes a lot of sense to me, someone who participated in one of your workshops, how this would work, you know, is, I think it would be something along the lines of you get a group of people together who come from a lot of different walks of life, you get them thinking about a similar set of things, then you say, go try it. Right?

I am curious how that is also kind of curatorial, partially because I think we heard the word curation a lot in terms of things like algorithmic recommendation, which I know people in art curators and that sort of stuff kind of bristle at that use of curation because it’s like a really kind of like utilitarian idea of what curating is. It’s like none of the like intellect, none of the soul, you can reduce this to like a mathematical operation that will feed you stuff, which is totally different than I think what you’re describing.

LAUREL SCHWULST:

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I guess it feels like it needs to be a human led curation, but also not to get too galaxy brain, but we also need to think about curating the curators or like, I mean, in a sense of like, yeah, bring this diverse group of people together who are united under similar mission or values for like what this PBS of the Internet can and should be. Yeah.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Who’s your dream team? Like, who would you want to get involved with this? And what are like some potential PBS of the internet projects? Right? Because I think there’s not really the equivalent of just making a TV station for the internet, right?

LAUREL SCHWULST:

No, yeah. And in, I guess one thing that’s notable about PBS is that PBS doesn’t produce its programs, but rather acts as a curator and distributor for its member stations. And so similarly, I was imagining a PBS of the internet to like establish this vision and conversation. I don’t know, maybe it becomes a nonprofit and raises a fund and then it could commission projects that fit its mission and ultimately act as a curator and distributor. And in a sense, maybe we could call this like this project like re-wholing the internet where whole is W-H-O-L-E. Like I talked about the internet being out of balance.

But I guess, yeah, good question about who would be on the team and what kind of projects we might do. I mean, I love talking about this idea with people because so many people have ideas immediately, even when I tell them the title PBS of the Internet. One person was like, “Oh, it’d be great if when you opened a new browser tab,” you know, there was just, it was almost like PBS of the internet was your newspaper in a sense and like curated things from the internet and it was there. It wasn’t like this is different for each person. It was like selected by a group of people. So I guess just like a simple curation of the Internet when you open a new browser tab. It’s like an experimental project maybe to raise awareness.

Another question I’ve been thinking about is, “Who is the Mr. Rogers of today?” And maybe the answer is that there is no one Mr. Rogers. Instead, we have many influencers online and some of them are doing really great and incredible work in literally saving lives.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

You’re talking about, for instance, like a medical influencer, like a doctor who has quality medical information about vaccines or whatever.

LAUREL SCHWULST:

Yeah, yeah, totally. Or someone who has just like lots of wisdom about life and is able to kind of share a sort of pragmatic positivity with the world or ways to even think—I think a lot of people these days feel isolated and need kind of wise elder figures in their lives not to say that there’s some young influencers who are also great.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

If you had to take one of your projects right now, if you had to take one of your workshops or if you had to take one of something from your artistic practice at the moment, like what’s the PBS of the Internet project that you would try to get some people together to work on?

LAUREL SCHWULST:

Yeah, I’ve been talking about PBS of the internet for a couple of years now and it’s such a big idea that it’s a little scary, but it’s such a powerful idea that it makes me excited. And specifically Charles from Are.na who I work with has encouraged me to keep exploring it because he sees Are.na as maybe like one node in the PBS of the Internet, maybe like Wikipedia is another node, you know, these like lone parks in an Internet of shopping malls and casinos kind of thing. And like if we’re to kind of create maybe it’s a map or a two-by-two of PBS of the Internet, literally, we only have a couple points on it. And literally, we just need more points on this map and to kind of diagram out this space.

But I guess I appreciate you asking like if there’s any one project, which one would I want to make real? In my artistic practice, I find that there are these umbrellas that have started to exist that almost feel like mantras for me in the sense that they’re a word or a phrase that when I come back to them, they’re kind of like never ending. And I find PBS of the Internet to be one, I mean, it’s a kind of hefty one, but I like to pair it with ultralight because ultralight inspires me to work in an ultralight way. And then another one that I’m working on with Are.na is gifting and generosity. Like, I’ve been… it’s still in progress right now, but I’m really curious what would it mean to not publish gift guides, but to publish gifting guides, to think about a gift as a verb versus a singular object, which the Internet likes to make viral. I think arena is very interested in generosity in general, and maybe PBS of the Internet to me feels like a gift to the world if it were able to live, a gift to humanity that humanity desperately needs.

And so I’m not sure which project should exist, but I guess whatever project exists, I hope that it feels like a gift that is very needed and very appreciated.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Yeah, and like gifting is very different than sharing, right? Like sharing is… well, we do a lot of sharing intentionally and inadvertently, right? Again, the kind of like COVID analogy we share pathogens, we share viruses, but also we share stuff on the internet. What that means is like we become kind of like node in something getting distributed, but a gift is really about a relationship and not just about any relationship, but about one where each person that you’re gifting to, we’re getting gift from, and there’s like some like intention there about what’s specific between you two.

Something that we’ve been talking a lot about at the lab is what’s really depressing about the kind of rise of like the AI fueled internet is that it takes humans out of the equation. And we’re really interested in trying to find what’s the future of the internet that’s for humans to talk to each other and have relationships with each other. And yeah, maybe gifting is a really important mechanic within that.

LAUREL SCHWULST:

And it circles back a little bit to my kite project, which started as a gift. And you know, I was interested in kites, my friend interested in crows, so there’s like an overlap.

And I guess it’s also maybe there’s a concept in psychology, not that I’m an expert at this, but the idea of when two people come together, there’s always like an environment that’s created between those two people, like a third space in a way. And so even sitting in this room right now, there are specific things in this room that I couldn’t have created by myself. I mean, I share this home with a friend and we’ve been excited that there are certain things that only exist because only us together could have created them. And maybe more of that energy or intention is needed on the internet at large.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

I think so much of what you’re talking about and so much of what I’m aware of that you do is really driving towards bringing creativity into people’s daily practice on the internet, which is like different than really a lot of what my daily practice on the internet is, which so much of my use of the internet is like, when I’m just I need a moment of distraction, without thinking about it, I open my phone and I’m like checking notifications and scrolling. There’s not a lot of creativity there. It’s almost like forfeiting a lot of my consciousness.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

You showed me a presentation that you gave to the internet a couple of years ago. And there’s a slide on there that was like really effective, which was a picture of Google Chrome when you open it. And there’s your most visited websites right there. And the thing that you’ve actually sparked is people creating their own little intentional PBS of the Internet dock on their phone, similar to what Chrome does. But it’s like, I think people upload this to Are.na. They upload a little picture of like the four icons that are like the apps that they use that feel like their personal PBS of the Internet.

But just to explode that a little bit. It really interesting to just in a simple way say, hey, these are some things that are worth thinking about on the internet today. Because it like introduces something really intentional about logging onto the computer as opposed like, I’m just going to do this for work and to distract myself.

LAUREL SCHWULST:

Yeah. Totally. Yeah. That was a really effective experiment in asking people to upload four apps on their phone that feel like their own PBS. I think mine were Are.na, the I-Ching app, my app called flight simulator, and then Wikipedia.

And it was cool because after people uploaded their screenshot of their four apps, there were many of the apps I didn’t know about. So just even traversing them was already like starting to create a larger map, even just within the smartphone, which feels like such a difficult space almost like each app feels like candy, but not all of the apps are candy.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

You know what I really love about this. And I guess it is what’s so cool about Are.na at the end of the day, but is the idea that one way to connect people online is to learn about how they think. And that’s really exciting. And like I find it exciting because I’m just fascinated by how people think. I love to see how people organize things, mainly because I’m a deeply disorganized person and I can take a little inspiration from it.

But it’s like, it’s such a different way to present yourself than how are you composing a picture of yourself? Or how are you like filling a feed on a major social media network with whatever kind of content is the person who you want to be or the world, we want the world to think who you are. But an internet that helps us understand how other people think is actually a really cool thing.

Here’s what I really like about having you on is that you are creating an environment for a podcast that is super different than what we’ve had on this podcast before. I mean, we’ve had a lot of academics. We’ve had some people who have built some tools. We’ve had a lot of ideas. We’ve had a lot of like, let’s reframe things or let’s talk about like how policy could work differently.

But something that I think we have sorely needed on this podcast is an episode where listeners have the ability to start to think a different way to sense the kind of creativity that actually goes into all of the work featured on this show. And I think that that’s what’s so cool about the PBS of the Internet proposal is that this is like a proposal about taking a different mindset in a different mode.

LAUREL SCHWULST:

It’s like a lightweight—in Italo Calvino’s way of thinking about lightness. It’s about shifting your perspective. So maybe this is a lightweight reframing of the internet.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

I really love that. Yeah. A lightweight reframing of the internet. I really mean this when I say it like thank you for joining this show for this good web series because it’s really a reminder that like there’s a different way of like connecting with other people on the Internet, but that like the Internet doesn’t have to be this ultra heavy thing, that’s just where we get all of our constant updates about the news and where we log on to do our jobs.

Yeah, it is those things, but that it can be this place of curiosity and joy and exploration. And it can be a place where we actually like learn to be creative in the same way that we can like learn to be creative in a lot of spaces that we inhabit in other places too.

You mentioned your app flight simulator. Everybody should download this app flight simulator.

LAUREL SCHWULST:

Yeah. It lets you take imaginary flights as long as you’re in airplane mode the whole time.

But yeah, in general, jumping onto what you said, I would say like if the internet were a place we’ve talked about, maybe right now it’s mostly like this kind of labyrinth mall or casino, maybe sometimes a library, which is great. But overall, it’s like very information dense and very like pragmatic. But maybe this PBS of the Internet literally has more negative space, kind of like my app flight simulator where you’re in airplane mode, which encourages like this time and space to wander and imagine. Like maybe it feels more like a school or a garden with like some sunlight streaming through the windows rather than like a library inside with lots of books all around, which is great too, but just more open, open space.

And so right now, PBS of the internet is an artistic project, but I feel like it’s an essential step towards cultivating a more human Internet in the future.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

I think that is a wonderful place to end. Laurel Schwulst, a fruitful school, arena teaches at Princeton. If you’re a student at Princeton, you should take Laurel classes. You should also sign up for some fruitful school stuff. And Laurel, you have, where can people follow you, find you, find out more about what you’re up to?

LAUREL SCHWULST:

Yeah, totally. So I have a website, Laurel.world, which redirects to my full name, LaurelSchulst.com. I have a newsletter, probably the best place, but also on some social media networks as RoombaGhost.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

That’s really good.

LAUREL SCHWULST:

Thanks, Mike.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Find RoombaGhost wherever you are on your social media.

LAUREL SCHWULST:

Exactly. Well, yeah, thanks for having me on the pod.