This episode is a continuation of a mini season of RadicalxChange(s) titled A New Era of Democracy.

In today’s episode, we welcome Professor of Communications and Political Science Zizi Papacharissi who discusses her latest book, After Democracy with host Matt Prewitt. In this thought-provoking conversation, they examine how social media affects our culture, our relationships, and consequently our democratic processes, while exploring potential ways to imagine new and better forms of democracy by “living with technology, not through technology.”

Zizi Papacharissi, PhD, is Professor and Head of the Communication Department, Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and a University Scholar at the University of Illinois System. Her work focuses on the social and political consequences of online media. She has published nine books, over 70 journal articles and book chapters, and serves on the editorial board of fifteen journals. Zizi is the founding and current Editor of the open access journal Social Media & Society. She has collaborated with Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Oculus, and has participated in closed consultations with the Obama 2012 election campaign. She sits on the Committee on the Health and Well-Being of Young Adults, funded by the National Academies of Science, the National Research Council, and the Institute of Medicine in the US, and has been invited to lecture about her work on social media in several Universities and Research Institutes in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Her work has been translated in Greek, German, Korean, Chinese, Hungarian, Italian, Turkish, and Persian. Her 10th book, titled After Democracy: Imagining our Political Future, is out now, from Yale University Press.

• Zizi Papacharissi’s Professional Website

Matt Prewitt is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is President of the RadicalxChange Foundation. 

Production Credits

• Originally produced by G. Angela Corpus and Aaron Benavides for 2021 RxC Annual Conference RxC TV program.
• Produced by G. Angela Corpus.
• Co-Produced and Audio Engineered by Aaron Benavides.
• Executive Produced by G. Angela Corpus, Jennifer Morone, and Matt Prewitt.
• Intro/Outro music by MagnusMoone, “Wind in the Willows,” is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

This is a RadicalxChange Production.

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In this exciting episode, Matt Prewitt speaks with the inquisitive and captivating Christine Lemmer-Webber, who is CTO of the Spritely Institute and whose lifelong work focuses on advocating user freedom. This philosophical and technical discussion focuses on the many ways to look at ethical methods of building technology without usurping the free agency of others; a pluralistic view of examining technical design with different lenses. 

NOTE: This is a regular season episode of the RadicalxChange(s) podcast. Our mini season of "A New Era of Democracy" will continue following this episode.

Things Mentioned: 

• Spritely Institute
• Scheme Primer from Spritely Institute
• Randy Farmer!
• FOSS and Crafts podcast (hosted by Christine Lemmer-Webber and Dr. Morgan Lemmer-Webber)
• The terms "context collapse" and "collapsed contexts" (the latter coined by technology and social media scholar danah boyd in the early 2000s).
• Neohabitat game
• Christine gives a shout-out to Leilani Gilpin's paper on  accountability layers (re: machine learning systems)
• Donate to the Spritely Institute! Funders email [email protected].

Christine Lemmer-Webber (she/they) has devoted her life to advancing user freedom. She founded the MediaGoblin project because she believes that in order to allow people to express their agency, putting networking technology in the hands of users in a way that empowers them is fundamental. Realizing that the federated social web was fractured by a variety of incompatible protocols, she co-authored and shepherded ActivityPub's standardization, which as of 2020, is the most popular and widely deployed web-based decentralized social network protocol to date. Christine established the open-source Spritely Project to solve known problems in existing centralized and decentralized social media platforms and to re-imagine the way we build networked applications - work that now continues here at the Spritely Institute under her guidance as CTO.

Matt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.

Production Credits

• Produced by G. Angela Corpus.
• Co-Produced and Audio Engineered by Aaron Benavides.
• Executive produced by G. Angela Corpus, Jennifer Morone, and Matt Prewitt.
• Intro/Outro music by MagnusMoone, “Wind in the Willows,” is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

This is a RadicalxChange Production.

Feedback or ideas for future episodes? Email us at [email protected].

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This episode is part of a mini season of RadicalxChange(s) titled A New Era of Democracy.

Lauded poet, author, and activist Anasuya Sengupta joins Matt Prewitt on this episode to discuss the culture of Wikipedia, the embedded power dynamics of digital technologies, and how plurality plays a role in empowering the global South's presence on the internet.

Links:

• State of the Internet’s Languages Report | Whose Knowledge?
• State of the Internet’s Languages website

Anasuya Sengupta (@anasuyashh) is Co-Founder and Co-Director of Whose Knowledge?, a global multilingual campaign to center the knowledge of marginalized communities (the minoritized majority of the world) online. She’s led initiatives across the global South, and internationally for over 20 years, to collectively create feminist presents and futures of love, justice, and liberation. She is committed to unpacking issues of power, privilege, and access, including her own as an anti-caste savarna woman. Anasuya is the former Chief Grantmaking Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation and former Regional Program Director at the Global Fund for Women. She was a 2017 Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow and received a 2018 Internet and Society award from the Oxford Internet Institute. She is on the Scholars’ Council for UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, and the advisory committee for MIT’s Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS).

Matt Prewitt (@m_t_prewitt) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.

Credits

• Originally produced by Aaron Benavides for 2021 RxC Annual Conference RxC TV program.
• Produced by G. Angela Corpus.
• Co-Produced and Audio Engineered by Aaron Benavides.
• Executive produced by G. Angela Corpus, Jennifer Morone, and Matt Prewitt.
• Intro/Outro music by MagnusMoone, “Wind in the Willows,” is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

This is a RadicalxChange Production.

Feedback or ideas for future episodes? Email us at [email protected].

Connect with RadicalxChange Foundation:

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This episode is part of a mini season of RadicalxChange(s) titled A New Era of Democracy.

Rosa O’Hara moderates a discussion between Audrey Tang and Jo Guldi on Taiwan’s expeditious response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the history of the g0v movement, the democratic power of embracing new forms of civic technology, and more.

Audrey Tang (@audreyt) is Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of Social Innovation. She is known for revitalizing the computer languages Perl and Haskell, as well as for building the online spreadsheet system EtherCalc in collaboration with Dan Bricklin. In the public sector, she has served on the Taiwan National Development Council’s open data and K-12 curriculum committees and has led the country’s first e-Rulemaking project. In the private sector, Audrey has worked as a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics, with Oxford University Press on crowd lexicography, and with Socialtext on social interaction design. In the social sector, Audrey actively contributes to g0v (“gov zero”), a vibrant community focusing on creating tools for the civil society, with the call to “fork the government.”

Jo Guldi, PhD. (@joguldi) is an Associate Professor of History at Southern Methodist University, where she teaches courses on the history of Britain, the British Empire, modern development policy, and property law. She has published many articles about digital history methods, participatory mapping, and the history of eviction and rent control in Britain and its empire. She is a former Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of History, Brown University. Her latest book The Long Land War is about the definitive history of ideas about land redistribution, allied political movements, and their varied consequences around the world. She lives in Richardson, Texas.

Rosa O’Hara (@RosaO_Hara) is a staff writer for Noema Magazine. She previously worked had staff jobs editing for The Washington Post and HuffPost, was a contributing reporter for Newsday (NYC), and reported for The Jakarta Globe (Indonesia). She is based in Brooklyn, NY.

Credits

• Originally produced by Paula Berman and Rachel Knoll for 2021 RxC Annual Conference RxC TV program.
• Produced by G. Angela Corpus, Jennifer Morone, and Matt Prewitt.
• Co-Produced and Audio Engineered by Aaron Benavides.
• Intro/Outro music by MagnusMoone, “Wind in the Willows,” is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

This is a RadicalxChange Production.

Feedback or ideas for future episodes? Email us at [email protected].

Connect with RadicalxChange Foundation:

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In this conversation with James A. Evans,  we examine the relationship between artificial intelligence and democracy, the tradeoffs between hybridization and speciation, and much more.

James is a professor at the University of Chicago, director of its Knowledge Lab, and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His research focuses on the collective system of thinking and knowing, ranging from the distribution of attention and intuition, the origin of ideas and shared habits of reasoning to processes of agreement (and dispute), accumulation of certainty (and doubt), and the texture—novelty, ambiguity, topology—of understanding. James is especially interested in innovation—how new ideas and practices emerge—and the role that social and technical institutions (e.g., the Internet, markets, collaborations) play in collective cognition and discovery. Much of his work has focused on areas of modern science and technology. Still, he is also interested in other knowledge domains—news, law, religion, gossip, hunches, machine and historical modes of thinking and knowing. He supports the creation of novel observatories for human understanding and action through crowdsourcing, information extraction from text and images, and the use of distributed sensors (e.g., RFID tags, cell phones). He uses machine learning, generative modeling, social and semantic network representations to explore knowledge processes, scale up interpretive and field methods, and create alternatives to current discovery regimes.

Before Chicago, he received his doctorate in sociology from Stanford University, served as a research associate in the Negotiation, Organizations, and Markets group at Harvard Business School, started a private high school focused on project-based arts education, and completed a B.A. in Anthropology at Brigham Young University.

Credits

• Production by Jennifer Morone, Leon Erichsen, and Matt Prewitt
• Editing and Sound Engineering by Jennifer Morone
• Intro/Outro music by MagnusMoone, “Wind in the Willows,” is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

Feedback or ideas for future episodes? Email us at [email protected].

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This episode ended up being a wide-ranging discussion that surfaced essential ideas about getting more thoughtful about the boundary between public and private power by understanding what’s infrastructure and what isn’t. The seed for this conversation was whether we should understand Google’s index of pages as a form of public infrastructure and, if so, why. This question could hardly be more relevant as public infrastructure investments dominate the conversation in the United States. But perhaps we need to broaden our view from physical infrastructure to informational infrastructure, which might indeed be even more critical.

Jo Guldi is a scholar of the history of Britain and its empire who is especially involved in questions of state expansion, the contestation of property under capitalism, and how state and property concepts are recorded in the landscape of the built environment. These themes informed her first book, Roads to Power, which examined Britain’s interkingdom highway and its users from 1740 to 1848. They also inform her current research into rent disputes and land reform for her next monograph, The Long Land War, which profiles three moments in the history of property: the Irish Land Court of 1881 and its invention of rent control; the ideology of “squatting” in post-1940 Britain; and the creation of the “participatory map” for contesting legal boundaries in Britain and India in the 1970s and 80s.

Brent J. Hecht received a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University, a Master’s degree in geography from UC Santa Barbara, and a Bachelor’s degree in computer science and geography from Macalester College. At Northwestern, Dr. Hecht holds appointments in the Department of Computer Science and the School of Communication. He is the recipient of a CAREER award from the U.S. National Science Foundation. He has received awards for his research at top-tier publication venues in human-computer interaction, data science, and geography (e.g., ACM SIGCHI, ACM CSCW, ACM Mobile HCI, AAAI ICWSM, COSIT). Dr. Hecht also serves on the Executive Committee of ACM FAccT (formerly ACM FAT*), the premier publication venue for understanding and mitigating societal biases in artificial intelligence systems. Dr. Hecht has collaborated with Google Research, Xerox PARC, and Microsoft Research. His work has been featured by The New York Times, the Washington Post, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and various other TV, radio, and Internet outlets.

Book links

- Algorithms of oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble

- Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein

Credits

• Production by Jennifer Morone, Leon Erichsen, and Matt Prewitt
• Editing and Sound Engineering by Jennifer Morone
• Intro/Outro music by MagnusMoone, “Wind in the Willows,” is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

Feedback or ideas for future episodes? Email us at [email protected].

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The backstory to this episode is a lengthy research collaboration focused on how the value of data gets captured. With that in mind, how to design a tax that would fairly redistribute it. You can see the collaboration results at Datadividends.org -- a proposal for a simple, eminently implementable tax that would go to the heart of the economic distortion caused by the data economy. In this conversation with Yakov Feygin and Nick Vincent, we focus on how data and other assets get their value; compare data policy to the industrial policy of the depression era; and much more.

Yakov Feygin is responsible for developing the research plan, projects, initiatives, and partnerships for the Future of Capitalism program at the Berggruen Institute. Before joining the Berggruen Institute, Yakov was a fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government and managing editor of The Private Debt Project. Yakov holds a Ph.D. in History with a focus on economic history from the University of Pennsylvania. His forthcoming book, Building a Ruin: The International and Domestic Politics of Economic Reform in the Soviet Union, will be published by Harvard University Press. He has taught courses in international political economy, money and banking, and business history and held fellowships from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, The Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Nick Vincent is a Ph.D. student in Northwestern University's Technology and Social Behavior program and is part of the People, Space, and Algorithms Research Group. His broad research interests include human-computer interaction, human-centered machine learning, and social computing. His research focuses on studying the relationships between human-generated data and computing technologies to mitigate the negative impacts of these technologies. His work relates to concepts such as "data dignity," "data as labor," "data leverage," and "data dividends."

Credits

• Production by Jennifer Morone, Leon Erichsen, and Matt Prewitt
• Editing and Sound Engineering by Jennifer Morone
• Intro/Outro music by MagnusMoone, “Wind in the Willows,” is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

Feedback or ideas for future episodes? Email us at [email protected].

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Tom Atlee is the founder of the nonprofit Co-Intelligence Institute, author of The Tao of Democracy and Reflections on Evolutionary Activism, and creator of the Wise Democracy Pattern Language. He has published many articles in alternative journals, collaborated on numerous projects and books, been on several nonprofit boards, and consulted on social change projects internationally. 

Born in 1947, Atlee was raised as a Quaker peace and social justice activist. On the 1986 Great Peace March, a nine-month cross-country US trek undertaken by four hundred ordinary people, he experienced bottom-up self-organization and palpable collective intelligence for the first time. This watershed experience changed his life into a search for how to evoke these collective capacities in activist groups, communities, and whole societies. Starting in the mid-1990s, his activist instincts led him to apply his discoveries to the creation of wiser forms of democracy and governance. In 2005 he began a study of evolutionary dynamics that could be used to transform social systems and is currently exploring new forms of collective sense-making and grassroots participatory democracy and economics.

Tom lives simply in a nine-bedroom, consensus-based co-op house in Eugene, Oregon, with a changing population of friends, dogs, cats, chickens, plants, books, and chores. While he spends most of his time glued to his computer, talking passionately with colleagues, or hanging out with his beloved partner, he also enjoys reading, walking, watching movies, decorating leaves, and creating poetic collages. His daughter and granddaughter live in New England.

He can be reached at [email protected].  His ideas can be explored on co-intelligence.org, tomatleeblog.com, and wd-pl.com.

An expert in the field of dialogue and deliberation, Tom has thought long and hard about the impact collective intelligence could have on democracy. His conversation with Jennifer covers several subjects, including the influence of his upbringing in the Quaker community, experiments in democratic deliberation, and how we might begin to listen to each other again during this time of extreme polarization. 

Production by Jennifer Morone, Leon Erichsen and Matt Prewitt

Intro/Outro music by MagnusMoone “Wind in the Willows”

is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License

(CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

Feedback or ideas for future episodes? Email us at [email protected].

Connect with RadicalxChange Foundation:

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Jo Guldi is a scholar of Britain's history and empire who is especially involved in questions of state expansion, the contestation of property under capitalism, and how state and property concepts are recorded in the built environment's landscape. These themes informed her first book, Roads to Power, which examined Britain’s interkingdom highway and its users from 1740 to 1848. They also inform her current research into rent disputes and land reform for my next monograph, The Long Land War, which profiles three moments in the history of property: the Irish Land Court of 1881 and its invention of rent control, the ideology of “squatting” in post-1940 Britain, and the creation of the “participatory map” for contesting legal boundaries in Britain and India in the 1970s and 80s.

This conversation between Jo and Matt Prewitt from RadicalxChange Foundation focuses on infrastructure and its role in economies and history.

This is a RadicalxChange Production.

Credits:

• Production by Jennifer Morone, Leon Erichsen and Matt Prewitt
• Editing and Sound Engineering by Jennifer Morone
• Intro/Outro music by MagnusMoone “Wind in the Willows” is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)
• Interlude music by Podington Bear “Floating in Space” | LICENSE: Podcast Sync License (includes streaming and downloadable content.) | Single Use | Term: In perpetuity | Territory: Worldwide

Feedback or ideas for future episodes? Email us at [email protected].

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Meet the RadicalxChange(s) podcast and its hosts Jennifer Morone and Matt Prewitt.
 

Jennifer Lyn Morone is RadicalxChange Foundation’s CEO and a multidisciplinary visual artist, activist, and filmmaker. Her work focuses on the human experience with technology, economics, politics, and identity, and the moral and ethical issues that arise from such systems. Her interests lie in exploring ways of creating social justice and equal distribution of the future. Morone is a trained sculptor with BFA from SUNY Purchase and earned her MA in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London with Dunne and Raby. Her work has been presented at institutions, festivals, museums, and galleries around the world, including ZKM, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Ars Electronica, HEK, the Martin Gropius Bau, the Science Gallery, Transmediale, SMBA, Carroll/Fletcher Gallery, panke.gallery, Aksioma, Drugo more, and featured extensively on international media outlets such as The Economist, WIRED, WMMNA, Vice, the Guardian, BBC World News, Tagesspiegel, Netzpolitik, the Observer.

Matt Prewitt is RadicalxChange Foundation’s president, a writer and blockchain industry advisor, and a former plaintiff’s side antitrust and consumer class action litigator and federal law clerk.

This trailer featured RadicalxChange(s) interviews with Fred Turner, Jo Guldi, and Tom Atlee.

Credits

• Production by Angela Corpus and Jennifer Morone

• Editing and Sound Engineering by Jennifer Morone

• Music by MagnusMoone “Wind in the Willows” is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

If you like this podcast you might also like our other series called “RadicalxChange Replayed.” 
 

RadicalxChange is a global movement for next-generation political economies. It advances plurality, equality, community, and decentralization through upgrades of democracy, markets, the data economy, the commons, and identity. Find out more about RadicalxChange at www.radicalxchange.org. 
 

Founded by Glen Weyl during the wake of public discussion about his book “Radical Markets” in 2018, RadicalxChange Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to advancing the RxC movement, building community, and educating about democratic innovation. Please support RadicalxChange Foundation and productions like this with a crypto or PayPal donation.

Feedback or ideas for future episodes? Email us at [email protected].

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