Reimagining the Internet

en you think about early Internet users, do you picture French people trying to find love and teens in after-school programs? Kevin Driscoll joins us for this edition of our history series "How They Imagined the Internet" to tell us about France's nation-wide public Internet that ran for decades and how BBS laid the groundwork for the web to be a social place.

Casteism pervades the Hindu diaspora, not just across borders, but across the Internet too. This week, Dalit activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan offers us a look at how Dalits face discrimination and inequity on social media and in the ranks of Silicon Valley tech companies.

livery services to music streaming. Trebor is a professor at the New School, where he helms the Platform Cooperativism Consortium. 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.

scheme? In Part 2 of our interview with Nathan Schneider, he tells us about the flurry of experiments in democracy that get drowned out by NFT hype.

hy don't users get a say in how platforms operate? Nathan Schneider thinks it might be because we don't own them. In Part 1 of this week's interview, Nathan tells us about how online spaces could be cooperatively owned, and what the US government could do to help.

We celebrate our 50th episode with a holiday special, where Ethan is visited by the Reimagining the Internet producers of past, present, and future to remember some of our favorite interviews from 2021. Tune in for highlights with Omar Wasow, Fred Turner, Heather Ford, Michael Wood Lewis, Lola Hunt and Eliza Sorensen, Damon Krukowski, Elizabeth Hansen-Shapiro, and Tracy Chou.

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.

talk about the thousands of volunteers building it together? Heather Ford, an ethnographer of Wikipedia, joins us to talk about the power struggles and community governance that makes the site one of the most trusted information sources on the web.

How did hippies living on communes help create the Internet? Is Mark Zuckerberg today's PT Barnum? What can we learn from 17th Century Protestantism about inequality in Silicon Valley? Fred Turner, perhaps the definitive historian of the Internet and counterculture, joins us for a thrilling conversation about how we need to shake post-WWII politics to make not just a better Internet, but a better...

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-platfo...

While some big social media companies are working to use AI to combat harassment, Tracy Chou has a simpler solution — put users in control of what and who they see on their feeds. In this week's episode, Tracy tells us about he app Block Party, a clever and radical set of tools to protect users from trolling and abuse.

Did Spotify save the music industry or simply find a way for itself to profit from a power vacuum opened up by piracy? This week, we're thrilled to welcome drummer and writer Damon Krukowski to talk to us about how Spotify became dominant and how musicians are fighting it to win a music industry that supports their livelihoods.

Talia Stroud from the University of Texas joins us to talk about her project Civic Signals, a project reimagining the Internet as a public space. She walks us through what’s wrong with the type of speech currently rewarded by Facebook and Twitter, and what it might look like to promote civic speech instead. Recorded August, 2020. Visit our episode web page for links to Civic Signals' website and n...

Maciej Ceglowski is not just the founder of one of the indie web's success stories — the modest yet long-running subscription bookmarking service Pinboard — but a prolific commentator on the world the Internet is helping to create. This week, we're thrilled to chat with Maciej about reimagining not just the Internet, but the stakes that the people using the Internet are responding to.

Are.na might be the most exciting social network for designers, artists, and curious, interdisciplinary self-educators, kind of like Pinterest or Tumblr but offering the functionality to spin a vast web of images and knowledge. The platform is currently celebrating its 10th anniversary, so we invited two of Are.na's co-founders to talk to us about the close-knit (and often paying) community that m...

Deen Freelon is one of the foremost scholars on how contemporary protest movements organize on the Internet. This week Deen joins us to talk about his work on the Black Lives Matter movement, how he's trying to understand mis- and disinformation from both the right and the left, and what fixing social media might look like when the scale of platforms like Facebook and Twitter is what makes them so...

Elizabeth Hansen-Shapiro joins Ethan to talk about “New Approaches to Platform Data Research,” the report they just published together with the NetGain Partnership. Elizabeth and Ethan talk about a variety of issues facing journalists and researchers for studying social media companies, and what sort of solutions — both small-scale and radical — could help ensure a better-studied, more accountable...

Moderation processes online should reduce harm, offer victims justice they find meaningful, and fix inequity in these social spaces. On all of these counts, the moderation systems implemented by big social media companies fail conclusively. Sarita Schoenebeck from the Living Online Lab at the University of Michigan joins us to talk about what moderation and harm reduction driven by the real-world...

How could social media systems be designed as safe places that really work for the people who use them? What can art help us understand about machine learning data sets? Caroline Sinders of Convocation Design joins us this week to talk about her research-based art practice that's trying to change perspectives about what exactly is going wrong on the Internet, and just how exciting it may be to fix...

In this bonus episode, Omar Wasow talks about his paper published last year documenting the political impact and public opinion resulting from the 1960s civil rights movement in America.

Jillian C. York, the Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, joins us to talk about censorship on social media platforms and her new book Silicon Values, out now on Verso.

Well before Facebook achieved social media dominance, Black Planet was the online home to millions of Black Americans. The site’s founder Omar Wasow joins us to talk about why it was so important to create an online space for Black people, and what a next generation of the Internet might look like for such communities.

Welcome back to Season 2 of Reimagining the Internet. We'll be running new interviews and reruns of some of our favorite past episodes, as well inviting some new voices to take over the podcast from time to time.

This episode shares a recorded talk from the 2021 Reimagine the Internet conference, a virtual conference co-hosted by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the soon-to-be-launched Initiative on Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In six sessions over five days, there will be more than a dozen speakers whose work hints at what the in...

This episode shares a recorded talk from the 2021 Reimagine the Internet conference, a virtual conference co-hosted by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the soon-to-be-launched Initiative on Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In six sessions over five days, there will be more than a dozen speakers whose work hints at what the in...