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 Law School.

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 of this without developing a business model.

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.