Reimagining the Internet

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 […]

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...

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...

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.

How could we curtail one of the most ambitious surveillance operations deployed in human history? This week on Reimagining, our very own Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci explains his new paper co-authored with Ethan outlining a new model for online advertising that eschews invasive data collection. Chand’s and Ethan’s paper “Forgetful Advertising: Imagining a More Responsible Digital Ad...

Arvind Narayanan is a Princeton computer science professor who wants to make it easy for you to cut through the AI. In a fascinating and plain old helpful interview, Arvid runs through all the big claims made about AI today and makes them very simple to understand.

In part 2 of our interview with Jessamyn West, the new MetaFilter owner tells us about her day job as a librarian in rural Vermont and her years spent working to close the digital divide. Inevitably, we talk about the library as a new battleground for right-wing reactionaries and its role as one of the few remaining public institutions.

Jessamyn West is not just one of the web's favorite librarians, but the new owner of Metafilter, an incredibly long-running social network that dates back to a very different Internet. In the first part of our interview with Jessamyn, she tells us just how Metafilter has kept going and stayed healthy since 1999.

What does Francesca Tripodi have in common with the Evangelical Christians she studied? They both do their own research, and they find lots of propaganda. This week on Reimagining, Francesca gives us a crash course on the sprawling conservative disinformation ecosystem.

Ben Tarnoff has a radical idea: unprivatize the Internet. The writer, Logic Magazine founder, and tech worker activist joins us to talk about his new book outlining what a truly public Internet would look like, from the fiber optic cables to the social media platforms platforms.

Google and Meta have been spending a small fortune to lay undersea cables bringing more broadband to Africa. Journalists Andrew Blum and Carey Baraka join us this week to talk about their years-in-the-making article for Rest of World asking if those companies will control what Africans can and can't access onli

Loads of stimulus, quick hits of dopamine, and no natural light: does this describe a casino or Facebook? The Danish philosopher Vincent F. Hendricks and digital media researcher Camilla Mehlsen join to walk us through their new book The Ministry of Truth, which explore how the attention economy incentivizes social media companies to make products […]

Brandy Zadrozny just made one of our favorite podcasts of the year, NBC's Tiffany Dover is Dead, so we needed to get her on the show to talk about the ins and outs of debunking conspiracy theories with gumshoe reporting.

Bruno Patino thinks the economics of the Internet are set up to give us the attention spans of goldfish. In this week's episode, Bruno tells us why France, a country such good public broadcast media, has so much trouble reigning in corporate social media.

With news that Elon Musk is purchasing Twitter, we recorded a rare hot takes episode. In addition to Ethan sharing his thoughts, we invited Deepti Doshi from New Public and Nathan Schneider on to talk about the need for platforms that bolster democracy.

Brandon Silverman developed a news analytics tool called Crowdtangle that was so good at tracking popular stories on Facebook that the company acquired it. Today on Reimagining the Internet, Brandon tells us how he’s working to regulate his former employer. Transcript Ethan Zuckerman: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Reimagining The Internet. I remain Ethan Zuckerman. […]

What the hell is "adversarial interopability"? Science fiction writer and prolific blogger Cory Doctorow thinks it's going to set you free from Facebook, letting you take your data and pictures wherever you want to go. And he believes surveillance capitalism is standing in your way.

were thrilled by her accounts of how gaming spaces are harbingers of social trends to come, online and off. Sometimes those are real problems like coordinated harassment, but sometimes those are collective solutions like distributed moderation and efforts to forge safe spaces.

this week to share an episode from our friends' podcast. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an excellent show hosted by Cindy Cohn and Danny O'Brien called How to Fix the Internet. Our show has a lot in common with theirs – in fact it has so much in common that they had Ethan on their show back in January. We're that interview today, and if you enjoy it, be sure to subscribe to How to Fix the...

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Molly White thinks web3 is going just great and this week she tells us about the wash trades, rug pulls, and the opportunity for abusive airdrops on the blockchain. In her fascinating and often hilarious account, blockchain's early days are past

What do Facebook content moderators and Rodrigo Duterte's troll armies often have in common? This week on Reimagining, Jonathan Corpus Ong lends us fascinating and surprising insights from his work interviewing members of the Phillipines' burgeoning digital working class, and how we might expect the Filipino Internet to play into the country's elections in May.

Nearly as soon as COVID-19 lockdowns began in March 2020, people started throwing livestream concerts. This week, our producer Mike chats with two of the organizers the Quarantine Concerts, a series that ran on Twitch nightly for months and raised nearly $100,000 for performers, bringing in performers and organizers from all over the world.