Ho ho ho, five years of Reimagining the Internet holiday specials! For this year’s edition we’re spreading holiday cheer by showering our dear listeners with gifts. From good Wikipedia rabbit holes to the gift of network effects, everyone here at iDPI is offering something from the heart.
Links to some gifts mentioned in this episode:
- Global Voices newsletter
- Raj Kaur on Substack
- “Bone Wars” entry on Wikipedia
- Request an invite to Freq
- screenpipe
- Opal
- Really long Ethernet cable
Transcript
Ethan Zuckerman:
Hey everybody, welcome back to Reimagining the Internet. I’m Ethan Zuckerman and I’m your regular host on this program.
Mike Sugarman:
And I’m Mike Sugarman, producer and I guess co-host on this episode. And frankly, host of a few episodes this year too.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Yeah, actually this has been a big year for you, Mike. And less so for me. It’s been a really nice change in the show.
You were reminding me earlier today, this is our fifth annual Reimagining the Internet holiday special. We have been snarky, I believe I’ve been Scrooge in the past on these episodes. This one is a downright nice one for a change of pace. What are we going to be doing today?
Mike Sugarman:
Yeah, so this year we are going to be focusing on gifting. It’s kind of a magical year when Hanukkah begins on Christmas, which means it might be one of the ultimate gift holiday seasons we’ve ever had in our entire lives.
So we went around and we asked everybody in our lab, what gift would you give to our listeners this year?
Ethan Zuckerman:
Right, I think the way to think about this is it’s been, you know, despite some things happening in the broader political environment of the world as a whole, a year that a lot of people in our lab are feeling really good about. And we wanted to figure out how to give back to you.
So we went to various people in our lab and talked to them about what gifts they would like to give from the Internet, what gifts the Internet has helped them give, what gifts they would like to give to the Internet. And in some ways, I think we can start with the perhaps the simple and the most concrete people who have turned to the Internet for the actual giving of gifts.
And let’s start with our friend Spencer Lane, who always reminds us that Wu Tang is for the children.
Spencer Lane:
A very literal gift that I gave this year was a doll to my daughter.
I purchased a used doll on Etsy from a doll surgeon. And my daughter for months before this has been saying that what she wants to be when she grows up is a doll surgeon. And I had a vague idea of what this meant, but I wasn’t sure what one would need to do in order to become a doll surgeon.
So I decided to ask this nice lady through the wonderful Etsy messaging system how one becomes a doll surgeon and what one needs to do to become a doll surgeon. And she gave a very heartfelt message in response talking about all the skills that you need to learn like sewing and painting and possibly porcelain casting. And a nice message to pass along to my daughter.
And it was an interesting and fun connection through an app that would normally be used for purchasing random objects like coasters. And it was a social connection on the shopping app. It’s an interesting case.
Mike Sugarman:
One of the things I’ve been really excited about this year at the lab is that we’ve had a researcher dedicated to studying Front Porch Forum here. Front Porch Forum is something we’ve talked about on this show a lot and we’ve interviewed Michael Wood-Lewis from Front Porch Forum a couple times. And our friend Adrien Sabathier has come to our lab in order to have a home base for conducting huge surveys of people who use the platform. And Adrien used it to find some gifts that he could give people.
Adrien Sabathier:
This year I’ve used Front Porch Forum to give a gift. I saw someone posting about their beeswax candles that they’re making and I thought that would be a perfect gift for a friend. So I ended up meeting with them and buying one, which was great.
So I’ve been studying Front Porch Forum for the past three years kind of looking at how the tool is being used not only to talk about politics but also to help community members meet and just realize that they have friendly neighbors that they can do stuff with.
It’s been really nice, especially over the past few weeks in the holidays to see how the platform has been used to connect people trying to make gifts. There have been a lot of postings about Christmas markets, people saying that they were going to be there selling their art or their crafts. And I’ve been to a few of those.
There’s also been a bunch of postings about cookie sales, people donating Christmas items, even writing holiday cards to people who are in prison or stuff like gift ideas for people with dementia. So it’s been a great tool over the holidays. I think it’s really showcasing its value for local community.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Always good to have a Vermont correspondent on the show. We also have a Korean correspondent on the show. We are super lucky to have as a member of our lab a terrific postdoctoral scholar, Jane Pyo, who works on a wide variety of social media issues, particularly social media in South Korea, which is where she’s from. It turns out that these amazing protests that have been taking over South Korea, leading to the need for the South Korean government to step down, have also involved some very interesting forms of gift giving.
Jane Pyo:
In the South Korean context, the gifting culture is that right now with the President’s impeachment protests going on in the National Assembly—in front of the National Assembly—people are buying coffee, like people who can’t be physically there are buying coffee for the protesters who would go physically there.
So in front of the National Assembly, there’s various coffee shops and people would be buying coffee on their name and then purchasing 100 cups of coffee. And then I posting on the Internet saying like, “Hey, you can buy coffee at this coffee shop, 100 people can buy it, and please use my name.”
So that’s a wonderful gifting culture that I’ve been witnessing, kind of like expressing solidarity for not being able to be there physically present, but still like as a gift and a thank you note, they will be letting protesters buy coffee. So that’s something that I really, really kind of like, I’m kind of proud of that. And also it’s really, it’s very heartwarming to witness that.
Mike Sugarman:
So Ethan, the burning question, the time has come. What gift are you giving to our listeners this year?
Ethan Zuckerman:
Well, I think it’s going to be a form of re-gifting, Mike, because it is also possibly the best gift I have recently received.
One of the reasons why my voice sounds so raw is that I’ve just come back from Kathmandu, Nepal. And I was in Kathmandu for the 20th anniversary of Global Voices.
Global Voices is an online community that I helped found along with my friend Rebecca McKinnon in late 2004. It started out as a conversation at Harvard University. It was a conversation about blogs and Rebecca and I were both really interested in this idea that the conversation about blogging needed to involve people from all over the world. And so we took advantage of Harvard, brought in people from a bunch of different countries and started this practice of amplifying bloggers from all over the world.
That project is going stronger than ever 20 years later. We just had this amazing experience of celebrating the 20th anniversary in Kathmandu. Maybe the most moving moment for me was having 31 people each take a segment of our manifesto about speaking and listening to one another and delivering it in their native language. And you can find that video online—we’ll link to it in the show notes—of people from Global Voices sharing that Global Voices manifesto in 31 different languages.
But the best ongoing gift I can give to you in the coming year is that newsletter. If you want a more global view of the Internet, you can subscribe to the Global Voices newsletter. It is now being edited by our new executive director, Malka Older, who is a magnificent sci-fi author and professor, super smart woman, getting a sense for what she is most interested in from all over the world.
And you can keep track of stories that you’re probably not going to hear anywhere else. This is something that the Internet makes possible. This is something that is really only possible because of the Internet. It is a gift that Rebecca and I tried to give the Internet 20 years ago, and it’s a gift that keeps on giving.
Mike Sugarman:
Global Voices has always been kind of this, I guess, global community project. And of course, we have some people in our lab who are interested in giving the gift of community this year.
Virginia Partridge wants to give the gift of finding your community of niche interests so you don’t bother other people in your life about it.
Virginia Partridge:
I would like to give everyone the gift of finding their own niche community for their favorite thing that their friends and family are sick of them talking about all the time. So for me, this is bike packing and bike packing gear and learning about all the cool bike routes I could be taking for long bike trips. And everyone is sick of hearing me talk about that and talk about my bike, except for my online friends in that community. So I hope everyone finds the online people who will listen to you wax poetic about your thing.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Harshi Snehi, a wonderful researcher in our community, wants to give you the gift of finding your own community online, whatever the community that ends up being. And she talks a little bit about the community that she’s finding online.
Harshi Snehi:
The internet gift that I want to give everyone this year is Raj Kaur’s Substack where she hosts this thing called a “co-swatch” where you can log in, it’s free and it happens monthly. And you basically sit around with a bunch of people and paint or the idea is just to like open up like the fancy paint that you’ve been saving for something special or like just materials you’ve never used before, or just trying a new medium. And it’s just a bunch of like amateur artists just sitting around and chatting and trying new, you know, paints and just talking about art and what brought them there.
So that’s a community that has been super important to me and I’ve really enjoyed being part of this community. It’s super wholesome, very nice to just hang out with a bunch of people just watching paint.
Ethan Zuckerman:
One of the best gifts you can give is time online that you feel good about spending. In a world with doom scrolling and internet addiction and all sorts of cases where we feel bad about the time that we’re spending in front of a screen, it’s wonderful when you feel good about the time you’ve spent online.
Our friend Reagan Keeney, a researcher in our lab talks about a Wikipedia rabbit hole that they’ve recently fallen into dating back to the bone wars in paleontology about 100 years ago.
Reagan Keeney:
Yeah, I guess my gift that I’m giving this year is a Wikipedia rabbit hole on the Bone Wars. So that took place in the late 1800s. It was between two scientists. It was also called the dinosaur rush. And it was about naming more species of the other person.
So between the two of them, they discovered over 100 different unique species of dinosaur, including like stegosaurus and allosaurus and other really recognizable species that we see now.
The main premise was that they both really hated each other’s guts. And so they were trying to name more species than the other person and dispute those species claims. And they like really hated each other. So active sabotage, destroying fossils of the other person’s, claiming sites from the other person, bribery to keep fossils away from the other person.
And when one of them died, he donated his brain to science on the premise that when his rival died, he would also donate his brain to science and they could see whose was bigger. This never happened, but does kind of like demonstrate the level of competition.
Mike Sugarman:
Okay, so I actually love Tim’s gift this year because it just feels like really classic Internet. Tim Hushcyn wants to warn you against whammy get it.
Tim Huschyn:
Okay, so my gift for everyone for the holidays is something called “Whammageddeon,” which is this phenomenon that started a couple of years ago, which is when you try to go from December 1st to December 24th, 11:59 PM without accidentally or purposefully listening to “Last Christmas” by Wham, which is kind of a funny challenge because it is so prevalent, especially in public places. Even my friend in Uzbekistan had run into Wham at a random restaurant. It’s just one of the most popular Christmas songs that there is nowadays.
And there’s variations on this as well, which is something like Wham Hunter, where instead you try to listen to as much “Last Christmas” as possible. And I think it’s interesting because it’s like there’s like been like a whole kind of thing developed around it where there’s like there’s like PvP versions of Whammy get it. And then there’s like a version where you try to Wham-sassinate your friends and send them to Wham-halla, or instead there’s just, you know, kind of like, it’s almost like a co-op mission where you try to protect each other from accidentally hearing “Last Christmas.” So it’s just an interesting Christmas little game.
Ethan Zuckerman:
So Mike, are you protected from Whammy get it so far?
Mike Sugarman:
Actually, yes. But I think it’s because I just got back from traveling all of last week and I haven’t left my house much and I have not listened to “Last Christmas” a single time yet. So I have made it 24 hours.
Ethan Zuckerman:
I have also not yet been hit with “Last Christmas,” although I have to say the one that I could really use protection from is Paul McCartney’s “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time.” And that one I am afraid I have stumbled over already.
Mike, it comes to mind that I haven’t asked you yet what gift you’re giving to the Internet or the Internet has given you. I know that you’ve been a generous sort of guy this year. What is your gift to the Internet as a whole?
Mike Sugarman:
Yeah, so I’m actually incredibly excited about this for the past few years here at the lab. I’ve been working on a project called Freq. It used to be called Disco. Freq is short for Frequency and basically it is what we would call, based on the “Three-Legged Stool” paper, a VSOP, a very small online platform dedicated to discovering music. It’s not a platform where you can upload music.
It’s not a platform where you can really listen to a lot of music, but it is a place where you can go to share what you’re listening to now with “Now Playing” posts, follow friends of yours, make collections of music along with them.
Basically, it is our attempt to build what we would call an interest-based social network. And it fits this kind of mold of how socializing online has happened basically for the entirety of the Internet. One of the most popular things that people have always done online is get together to talk about common interests of theirs. That’s what Usenet groups have been good for. That’s what BBS groups have been good for. That’s what forums have been good for. And people still do it on social media platforms like Facebook and Reddit.
But the weird thing about right now is there’s not a purpose-built space for talking about music online. My gift to the Internet in 2025 really is that purpose-built space for talking about music online that looks and functions like a typical social media platform as we know it today.
I would even say you could sign up for an invite to the platform if you would like to. You can find a link to that in the show notes. Come on and join the beta test early next year.
Ethan Zuckerman:
I am a huge Freq fan. I am a Freq freak as it were. Our whole lab has just been having an amazing time testing this out. It actually is introducing me to some interesting new music.
I’m particularly excited that, Mike, you’ve got all these contacts in the college radio community. And of course, you’re a very successful recording and touring musician. I’m hoping that this is going to help us build a community of people for whom music discovery is a big part of what they do.
I also want to say that there’s been something sort of magnificent about watching you doing this in that for your many talents, you are not a software developer. And you have built this thing from the ground up.
And it’s a really interesting example of the fact that in 2024, it is possible to do a lot of things with code that simply weren’t possible five or ten years ago. And with a lot of determination and an enormous amount of time and investment on your part, you’ve built something really unique and special. And so we’re excited to share it with everybody. I’m thrilled that it’s out there and I’m really excited to see what people will do with it.
Mike Sugarman:
Yeah, thank you. And that means a lot. And I would say the gift that you all can give me is come hang out there and have a good time talking about music.
Ethan Zuckerman:
And bug reports. Bug reports are an amazing, amazing gift. They are, in fact, we could say the gift that keeps on giving.
Mike Sugarman:
Yeah, I think I’ve developed a phobia. But yeah, I have to deal with them all the time.
There are some other folks in our lab who are also excited about some software that they’ve been using this year.
Adam Kohan has been using AI productivity tool that he has found really useful.
Adam Kohan:
The gift I would give is a tool called screenpipe. It allows you to record your computer screen and then get a summary of what you’ve been doing or what you’ve been working on, on your computer over a period of time. It also integrates with other tools like AI so you can kind of ask questions about what you’ve been doing or search for certain things.
And that’s been very helpful. It’s both good because it helps with understanding, like in terms of accountability, what you’ve been doing. But also just in terms of if you’re working on something for a long period of time and you’re wondering, you know, what are the gaps or what are you spending the most amount of time on.
And because it’s kind of application agnostic, you don’t really have to figure out a way to use it with that specific application or change it for other applications. You could just be using your computer like normal and then make this analysis afterwards or ask questions afterwards. I think since most people spend a ton of time on their computer these days, be it on their phone or on their laptops, it’s very helpful to know what you’re doing and where you’re spending that time.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Isaac Brickman is an undergrad researcher in our lab and spends a lot of time looking at powerful things that people can do with apps. And he has a screen time app that he wants to tell us about.
Isaac Brickman:
All right. Well, my gift would be an app called Opal. It’s an iOS app that I use to basically monitor and control my screen time. So Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, the regular work week, I kind of hunker down and block all my social media apps. And that is a really good way for me to sort of focus online in a world where instant gratification is so present.
Ethan Zuckerman:
So this really has been a year where folks in our lab are trying to give real tangible gifts to folks out in the world. I love how Ryan McGrady, our research director, is thinking about this.
Ryan has been trying to figure out how to quit Twitter and other social networks where he feels like they’re starting to have a negative effect on the world. He’s aware of how hard this is because of network effects. But he has a strategy in which leaving a social media platform can be a gift to everybody else who wants to overcome those network effects.
Ryan McGrady:
This holiday season, I’m giving everybody on my Twitter followers list the gift of an awareness of my absence.
So I am a fan of Twitter, or was a fan of Twitter. I get a lot out of it. I’ve never been a power user. I’ve never had a brand or something to promote, never a huge number of followers. But it’s the social media network that I’ve used most since like 2008.
And there’s a lot that I don’t like about it now. I think that the transition has been very well covered. No need to rehash that at this point. But my New Year’s resolution last year, you may remember, was to social media again. Because I was feeling rather downtrodden and disaffected with my social network of choice, and there wasn’t an immediate replacement.
And one of the things that I find that I struggle with, that a lot of people probably struggle with, is what we call network effects. The idea that a network becomes more valuable, the more connections it has. And that’s true of a social network as well.
So your social network on Twitter, Facebook, wherever, has a pull on you because of the number of connections that you have. If you don’t have a lot of connections, it’s easy to leave. If you have a lot of connections, it’s more difficult to leave because that’s where your people are.
I had several communities on Twitter, and so I had a lot of network effects. And I was feeling like I wanted to go elsewhere, but I didn’t want to leave everybody behind.
And that is kind of a classic conundrum in today’s social media age. But if I’m still on here because you’re still on here, what if you’re still on here because I’m still on here? So as a way to try to move away, I thought of making everybody very aware of my leaving. And that sounds like a melodramatic thing to do. But the idea is this. If I’m playing a teeny, tiny role of you sticking around, if I let you know that I’m leaving and that I’m following you, that is one tiny little adjustment to the network effects that you feel so that you are now free or freer to go elsewhere as well.
And across the entire network, I’m sure there will be a lot of people who don’t even notice or don’t care. But maybe for a few people that I care about, that kind of awareness that one more person is leaving feels like a pretty good internet gift to give someone and awareness that the network effects have just come down one tiny little notch of this place that they don’t actually want to stick around.
So yeah, over the past month, I’ve been thinking repeatedly of the old serenity prayer, which is that invocation to give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.
I cannot change whether my friends stick around on a particular social network. I can change my role in their networks, though. So that’s my gift, kind of abstract, not a super valuable gift to most people, but maybe tiny bit valuable to some people.
Mike Sugarman:
Okay, we did this backwards, but we saved the stocking stuffer for last. Erin Song, a graduate student researcher in our lab, wants to give you, dear listener, the gift of a crucial piece of computer hardware.
Erin Song:
For all the listeners, my gift for this year will be a really, really long Ethernet cable. And that’s because, personally, for me this semester, a 100-foot Ethernet cable from Amazon really saved my academic experience since the house I was living in had quite a few people, and the internet connection was not very good. So I was able to hook up my computer and get all my work done without any big issues.
Ethan Zuckerman:
So, Mike, this has been a very generous holiday season, a whole variety of gifts that we are giving to you, that the internet has given to us. We hope that as you enter 2025, the i=Internet and the world as a whole is good to you. And we’re wishing you a wonderful holiday season with time with friends and family and a chance to recover and rejuvenate.
Mike Sugarman:
Yeah, happy holidays from all of us here at iDPI. We’re so grateful as always that you spent another year listening to Reimagining the Internet. We’re excited to give you some great stuff next year too.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Happy holidays.
Mike Sugarman:
Happy holidays, everyone.