Archives: Episode

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.

Wendy Liu, author of the memoir Abolish Silicon Valley and former start-up founder, joins us to talk about the structural issues of our current tech industry under capitalism. Wendy walks us through a left perspective on Silicon Valley, including the push to organize labor and the toxic incentive structure that values profit and exploitation over public and social good. In addition to publishing her memoir last year, Wendy has been published in Logic Magazine, The Guardian, New Socialist, and Notes from Below.

Trebor Scholz, a scholar and activist at the forefront of the bustling platform cooperativism movement, joins us to talk about how coops can shape everything from ride share apps to data ownership, from local delivery services to music streaming. 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.

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.

For this very special episode of Reimagining the Internet, Ethan is joined by Knight First Amendment Initiative research fellow Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and producer Mike Sugarman to celebrate 12 days of reimagining the internet. We talk about our favorite stuff on the internet this year, and what we’re looking forward to in 2021. We share our holidy cheer talking about Zoom class fails, livestreaming concerts, and a speculative West African recipe war.

Critic and music journalist Liz Pelly joins us for a fascinating interview about why the Spotify model is so bad for musicians and what that might mean for podcasters. Liz is a veteran of the DIY music community as a former member of the Silent Barn collective in Brooklyn, and a stalwart of independent journalism with her own publication The Media, and pieces published Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and the New York Times.

We’re delighted to welcome Tim Hwang to the podcast, author of the recently published “Subprime Attention Crisis, Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet” and the brains a great number of eclectic, eccentric tech-related ventures. Tim talks with us about unchecked fraud in the programmatic advertising industry and who he’s successfully managed to infuriate with his new book.

Scholar and artist Kate Crawford joins the podcast to talk about why we don’t just need to imagine how to fix the internet, but how we want to change society. Kate is a co-founder of the AI Now Initiative at NYU and author of the Atlas of AI, coming April 2021 on Yale University Press. She walks us through the extractive nature of AI, talks about her collaborations with Vladan Joler (recently acquired by MoMA) and Trevor Paglan, and a fascinating history of classification. Visit the episode page for a transcript of the interview and links to work mentioned in the interview.

We welcome Kevin Roose to the podcast — tech reporter for The New York Times and thorn in the side of Facebook — to talk to us about how platforms’ laser focus on growth resulted in building a misinformation ecosystems and algorithms that they don’t really understand. Kevin and Ethan talk about what’s really the healthiest social media platform of them all, and what Wall Street-style regulation might look like for major platforms. Visit the episode page for show notes and a full transcription of the interview.

Safiya Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression and co-founder of the Center for Critical Internet Studies at UCLA, outlines her abolitionist framework for Big Tech. Recorded the day after Jacob Blake was shot by Kenosha, WI police in August, Noble joins us to talk about what it might look like to hold social media platforms accountable for the dangerous speech they help disseminate.