Looks Like New

Art has often been the vanguard of new tech. It was through art that many people got interested in the Internet to begin with, or became willing to pay for subscription services. But too often, large corporations take advantage of business models that artists work to create. What if artists owned and governed their own business models? Austin Robey is co-founder of Ampled, a platform for musicians, owned and governed by the musicians themselves, along with their supporters. He describes how building an online business looks different when artists are in charge.

Brick House is a new news organization that calls itself “the wolf-proof media cooperative.” It has emerged in part out of a failed experiment, Civil, which sought to use Bitcoin-like blockchain technology to shore up the ailing news business.

Brick House’s founder, the veteran journalist and entrepreneur Maria Bustillos, explains why she thinks a simpler, older model of cooperative ownership could be a better way forward—even while she remains hopeful about the sci-fi promise of blockchains.

This month, President Donald Trump has threatened to ban the Chinese-owned platforms TickTock and WeChat. This comes after years of China banning major US platforms like Google and Facebook, and securing the purchase of Uber’s Chinese business by a Chinese company. Chinese tech activists Katt Gu and Suji Yan speak with us about how this conflict looks from where they live in Shanghai, and they describe some of the firewalls they’re building to help protect labor and privacy rights. As the US—long used to being on the offensive in the Internet economy—moves to the defensive, our guests will help us think through what kinds of sovereignty online might be worth having.

Activist Adrienne Maree brown writes that the work of social change requires “science fictional behavior”— which is surely all the more true in the context of a global pandemic. To help us think through this crisis, we hear from Cadwell Turnbull, whose critically acclaimed first book, The Lesson, portrays an alien sort-of-invasion centered on his native US Virgin Islands. In addition to his storytelling, Turnbull is an activist working through social change through solidarity economics. He explores what it means to be a speculative fiction writer in especially science fictional times

We are haunted and mobilized by images. The cellphone video of George Floyd’s death has set cities on fire, elevated Black struggles for justice, and reminded White Americans of violence that their society is organized to blind them to. We hear from Sandra Ristovska, a scholar and filmmaker at the University of Colorado Boulder who specializes in video evidence of human rights crimes. She explores the meaning of images in courts and social movements around the world.

Often, discussions about diversity in the tech industry focus on mere representation. But in this discussion from Boulder Startup Week, we take inspiration from the Zebras Unite network, which seeks not just to change representation superficially but to change models of business and culture. We hear from information scientist Shamika Goddard, startup co-founder Corey Kohn, and neuro-engineer Shaz Zamore—each of whom is working on strategies to create a more radically inclusive relationship with technology.

How can we collaborate at a distance?

The COVID-19 pandemic has many of us rapidly changing how we work—and wondering how many of the changes will stick. To guide us through this process, we hear this month from Natalia Lombardo and Richard D. Bartlett, founders of The Hum, an organization that supports teams with self-organization and decentralized collaboration. They are already accustomed residents of the world many of us are just beginning to enter.

Today’s guest is Evan Ravitz, a proponent of direct democracy, who served on the City of Boulder’s Campaign Finance and Elections Working Group. Ravitz has been critical of the City of Boulder’s delays in rolling out a voter approved initiative allowing electronic signatures to be submitted to get an initiative on the ballot.

The cultures of computer hacking have made their way from marginal subcultures to becoming driving forces in the world as we know it. Facebook’s headquarters is on a street called Hacker Way. A hack of the Democratic National Committee’s emails helped elect the current US president. Free Software produced by volunteer hackers around the world powers the internet. Hackers have been noble whistleblowers, supporters of authoritarian states, and White supremacists. Our guide to it all is anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, who has immersed herself in these cultures for many years now, the author of several books and co-founder of a new website on hacker ephemera, Hack_Curio.