One of the most troubling things about this era in American history is the number of institutions that have caved to Trump's bullying and given him what he wants, especially when it comes to media organizations. The folks over at the non-profit Free Press have done a lot of research and put together the new Media Capitulation Index, which aims to track and dissect this distressing phenomenon. This week, Free Press's Nora Benavidez and Timothy Karr join the podcast to talk about how they made the Index and what it can teach us.

We've got a bunch of brand new episodes of the Techdirt podcast coming over the next few weeks, but first we've got one special cross-post from our other podcast made in partnership with Ben Whitelaw from Everything in Moderation: Ctrl-Alt-Speech. As we take a little break from that podcast for the month of August, we're posting a few special episodes, starting with this conversation about how it got started, how we create the episodes, our philosophy about sponsorship, and what we need to make Ctrl-Alt-Speech sustainable in the long run. We're cross-posting it here on the Techdirt podcast feed, and we hope you enjoy it!

We've got one more cross-post episode for you this week! A few weeks ago, Mike joined host Aaron Ross Powell on the ReImagining Liberty podcast for a discussion that digs into the the philosophy and principles underlying the push for internet decentralization and protocols over platforms, and why this shift is both desirable and, in the long term, likely. You can listen to the whole conversation here on this week's episode.

This week, we've got a cross-post episode of Mike's appearance on Kevin Williamson's How The World Works podcast. Kevin conducted a wide-ranging interview that covers some of the earliest days of Techdirt, the blog's evolution, and many of the important topics we cover today — and you can listen to the whole conversation here on this week's episode.

In a world awash with misinformation and disinformation, those who spread and benefit from the chaos have worked hard to brand fact-checking and counterspeech as a form of censorship — and it's a worryingly effective tactic. But there's one type of counterspeech that is very hard to evade: mockery and satire. One person who knows that very well is Ben Collins, CEO of Global Tetrahedron, which purchased The Onion last year. This week, Ben joins us on the podcast to talk about the incredible power of mockery in the social and political landscape.

Way, way back during the SOPA/PIPA fight, a very important part of the resistance against the bills was coming from infrastructure operators who explained how they were technically incoherent and dangerous. One prominent group was the Internet Infrastructure Coalition, co-founded by Christian Dawson. Today, with legislative amnesia setting in and new requirements for infrastructure-level site blocking rearing their heads, the Coalition has released a new report: DNS At Risk. This week, he joins us on the podcast to talk about the report and the ongoing dangers of attacks on the internet infrastructure.

We've got a cross-post episode for you this week, courtesy of the Tech Policy Podcast by TechFreedom, hosted by Corbin Barthold. Both TechFreedom and The Copia Institute submitted comments on the FTC's inquiry into social media censorship, Corbin invited Mike and TechFreedom's Santana Boulton for a discussion all about what's going on. You can listen to the whole conversation here on this week's episode.

Copia Comment: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/05/22/we-shouldnt-have-to-explain-to-the-ftc-why-content-moderation-is-so-crucial-to-free-speech-but-we-did/

TechFreedom Comment (pdf): https://techfreedom.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/TechFreedom-Comments-FTC-Political-Bias-Inquiry.pdf

In something of a followup to our last episode about Elon Musk's playbook, today we're digging deeper into the comparison between Washington and Silicon Valley and what it tells us about DOGE. Johns Hopkins International Affairs professor Henry Farrell has been looking specifically at the concept of "blitzscaling", and this week he joins us on the podcast to talk about how Elon Musk and DOGE are bringing blitzscaling to government.

"Blizscaling for Tyrants" on Substack: https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/blitzscaling-for-tyrants

We've written a lot about how understanding the playbook Elon Musk used at Twitter is key to understanding his current playbook with DOGE. The people who literally wrote the book on said playbook are New York Times journalists Ryan Mac and Kate Conger (the latter of whom joined the podcast last year to discuss the book), and this week they both join us to dig deeper into the ways Musk is reusing his Twitter methods on the entire federal government.

Though the original promise of the internet has been twisted and distorted, today we're seeing more and more people working to restore decentralization and user power online. One such person who sees the problem better than most is Flipboard founder and former Twitter board member (among many other things) Mike McCue, whose new application Surf is a kind of browser for the open social web. Mike joins us on this week's episode to talk all about Surf and the future of the internet.