Looks Like New

The priorities of community journalism have often come into conflict with corporate priorities—something we know well in Colorado. A new publication, the Colorado Sun, has attempted to protect its mission by incorporating as a public benefit corporation. As part of the Sun’s first annual evaluation, co-founder and senior editor Dana Coffield discusses what the Sun has accomplished in its fir...

More and more people feel uncomfortable with the role of big tech companies in their everyday lives, but they don’t feel they have any other option. System76 is trying to change that. It’s a Denver-based computer company that produces its own computers, and its own open-source operating system, here in Colorado. Emma Marshall is System76’s Happiness Manager, and she talks about w...

Educators today feel pressured to keep up with the latest technology, and big tech companies are eager to turn that pressure into a market for themselves. This week’s guest, Erin Glass, is a digital scholarship librarian at the University of California, San Diego, where she works to develop student-centered, community-driven practices around educational technology. She has been involved in m...

Longmont, Colorado is considering a new way of funding news—through a proposed library-district tax. This idea builds on a model, the Community Information District, first proposed by Simon Galperin. This month on Looks Like New, Galperin describes his vision for “info districts” as not just a means of funding news but as a pathway toward a more participatory, democratic culture.

We’re in a moment of crisis for democracy around the world. But democracy doesn’t just need defense. Santiago Siri believes it needs a better offense—to evolve in order to address the shortcomings that led to the crisis in the first place. In his native Buenos Aires, he was a founder of Partido de la Red , an internet-based political party that tried to hack the representative system w...

This month’s guest is Douglas Rushkoff, one of our most prominent and provocative thinkers on technology and culture. In his latest book, a manifesto called Team Human, Rushkoff calls for mobilizing against the forces seeking to make people subservient to algorithms and other machines we have created.

This month’s guest is Nathalia Scherer of DAOstack who asks How Can We Self-Organize at Scale? Can we create big, ambitious projects without corporations, governments, and bosses? Nathalia Scherer wants to try. Her organization, DAOstack, is using Bitcoin-like blockchain technology to make tools for self-organizing. Last year DAOstack raised $30 million in a 60-second token offering, but gen...

What Is a Lab? With Lori Emerson of the Media Archaeology Lab CU Boulder’s Media Archaeology Lab is a place where artists, scholars, students, and tinkerers can come to use apparently obsolete computers and other technology. Founding director Lori Emerson, professor of English and Intermedia Art, Writing, and Performance, discusses her lab and the history of labs in general.