How to Fix the Internet

There’s a weird belief out there that tech critics hate technology. But do movie critics hate movies? Do food critics hate food? No! The most effective, insightful critics do what they do because they love something so deeply that they want to see it made even better. The most effective tech critics have had transformative, positive online experiences, and now unflinchingly call out the surveilled, commodified, enshittified landscape that exists today because they know there has been – and still can be – something better.That’s what drives Molly White’s work. Her criticism of the cryptocurrency and technology industries stems from her conviction that technology should serve human needs rather than mere profits. Whether it’s blockchain or artificial intelligence, she’s interested in making sure the “next big thing” lives up to its hype, and more importantly, to the ideals of participation and democratization that she experienced. She joins EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley to discuss working toward a human-centered internet that gives everyone a sense of control and interaction – open to all in the way that Wikipedia was (and still is) for her and so many others: not just as a static knowledge resource, but as something in which we can all participate.In this episode you’ll learn about:Why blockchain technology has built-in incentives for grift and speculation that overwhelm most of its positive usesHow protecting open-source developers from legal overreach, including in the blockchain world, remains criticalThe vast difference between decentralization of power and decentralization of computeHow Neopets and Wikipedia represent core internet values of community, collaboration, and creativityWhy Wikipedia has been resilient against some of the rhetorical attacks that have bogged down media outlets, but remains vulnerable to certain economic and political pressuresHow the Fediverse and other decentralization and interoperability mechanisms provide hope for the kind of creative independence, self-expression, and social interactivity that everyone deserves Molly White is a researcher, software engineer, and writer who focuses on the cryptocurrency industry, blockchains, web3, and other tech in her independent publication, Citation Needed. She also runs the websites Web3 is Going Just Great, where she highlights examples of how cryptocurrencies, web3 projects, and the industry surrounding them are failing to live up to their promises, and Follow the Crypto, where she tracks cryptocurrency industry spending in U.S. elections. She has volunteered for more than 15 years with Wikipedia, where she serves as an administrator (under the name GorillaWarfare) and functionary, and previously served three terms on the Arbitration Committee. She’s regularly quoted or bylined in news media, speaks at major conferences including South by Southwest and Web Summit; guest lectures at universities including Harvard, MIT, and Stanford; and advises policymakers and regulators around the world.

Now more than ever, we need to build, reinforce, and protect the tools and technology that support our freedom. EFF’s How to Fix the Internet returns with another season full of forward-looking and hopeful conversations with the smartest and most creative leaders, activists, technologists, policy makers, and thinkers around. People who are working to create a better internet – and world – for all of us. Co-hosts Executive Director Cindy Cohn and Activism Director Jason Kelley will speak with people like journalist Molly White, reproductive rights activist Kate Bertash, press freedom advocate Harlo Holmes, the Tor Project’s Isabela Fernandes and computer scientist and AI skeptic Arvind Narayanan, among many others.

This episode was first released on May 2, 2023. Dr. Seuss wrote a story about a Hawtch-Hawtcher Bee-Watcher whose job it is to watch his town’s one lazy bee, because “a bee that is watched will work harder, you see.” But that doesn’t seem to work, so another Hawtch-Hawtcher is assigned to watch the first, and then another to watch the second... until the whole town is watching each other watch a bee. To Federal Trade Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, the story—which long predates the internet—is a great metaphor for why we must be wary of workplace surveillance, and why we need to strengthen our privacy laws. Bedoya has made a career of studying privacy, trust, and competition, and wishes for a world in which we can do, see, and read what we want, living our lives without being held back by our identity, income, faith, or any other attribute. In that world, all our interactions with technology —from social media to job or mortgage applications—are on a level playing field. Bedoya speaks with EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley about how fixing the internet should allow all people to live their lives with dignity, pride, and purpose.

The early internet had a lot of “technological self-determination" — you could opt out of things, protect your privacy, control your experience. The problem was that it took a fair amount of technical skill to exercise that self-determination. But what if it didn’t? What if the benefits of online privacy, security, interoperability, and free speech were more evenly distributed among all internet users?This is the future that award-winning author and EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow wants us to fight for. His term “enshittification” — a downward spiral in which online platforms trap users and business customers alike, treating them more and more like commodities while providing less and less value — was selected by the American Dialect Society as its 2023 Word of the Year. But, he tells EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley, enshittification analysis also identifies the forces that used to make companies treat us better, helping us find ways to break the cycle and climb toward a better future.In this episode you’ll learn about: Why “intellectual property” is a misnomer, and how the law has been abused to eliminate protections for societyHow the tech sector’s consolidation into a single lobbying voice helped bulldoze the measures that used to check companies’ worst impulsesWhy recent antitrust actions provide a glimmer of hope that megacompanies can still be forced to do better for usersWhy tech workers’ labor rights are important to the fight for a better internetHow legislative and legal losses can still be opportunities for future changeCory Doctorow is an award-winning science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger, and a Special Advisor to EFF. He is the editor of Pluralistic and the author of novels including “The Bezzle” (2024), “The Lost Cause” (2023), “Attack Surface” (2020), and “Walkaway” (2017); young adult novels including “Homeland” (2013) and “Little Brother” (2008); and nonfiction books including “The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation” (2023) and “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism” (2021). He is EFF's former European director and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.

Collaging, remixing, sampling—art always has been more than the sum of its parts, a synthesis of elements and ideas that produces something new and thought-provoking. Technology has enabled and advanced this enormously, letting us access and manipulate information and images in ways that would’ve been unimaginable just a few decades ago. For Nettrice Gaskins, this is an essential part of the African American experience: The ability to take whatever is at hand—from food to clothes to music to visual art—and combine it with life experience to adapt it into something new and original. She joins EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley to discuss how she takes this approach in applying artificial intelligence to her own artwork, expanding the boundaries of Black artistic thought. In this episode you’ll learn about: Why making art with AI is about much more than just typing a prompt and hitting a button How hip-hop music and culture was an early example of technology changing the state of Black art Why the concept of fair use in intellectual property law is crucial to the artistic process How biases in machine learning training data can affect art Why new tools can never replace the mind of a live, experienced artist Dr. Nettrice R. Gaskins is a digital artist, academic, cultural critic, and advocate of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) fields whose work she explores "techno-vernacular creativity" and Afrofuturism. She teaches, writes, "fabs,” and makes art using algorithms and machine learning. She has taught multimedia, visual art, and computer science with high school students, and now is assistant director of the Lesley STEAM Learning Lab at Lesley University. She was a 2021 Ford Global Fellow, serves as an advisory board member for the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, and is the author of “Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation” (2021). She earned a BFA in Computer Graphics with honors from Pratt Institute in 1992; an MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994; and a doctorate in Digital Media from Georgia Tech in 2014.MUSIC CREDITSXena's Kiss / Medea's Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license._________________lostTrack by Airtone (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft. mwic

Blind and low-vision people have experienced remarkable gains in information literacy because of digital technologies, like being able to access an online library offering more than 1.2 million books that can be translated into text-to-speech or digital Braille. But it can be a lot harder to come by an accessible map of a neighborhood they want to visit, or any simple diagram, due to limited availability of tactile graphics equipment, design inaccessibility, and publishing practices. Chancey Fleet wants a technological future that’s more organically attuned to people’s needs, which requires including people with disabilities in every step of the development and deployment process. She speaks with EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley about building an internet that’s just and useful for all, and why this must include giving blind and low-vision people the discretion to decide when and how to engage artificial intelligence tools to solve accessibility problems and surmount barriers. In this episode you’ll learn about: The importance of creating an internet that’s not text-only, but that incorporates tactile images and other technology to give everyone a richer, more fulfilling experience. Why AI-powered visual description apps still need human auditing. How inclusiveness in tech development is always a work in progress. Why we must prepare people with the self-confidence, literacy, and low-tech skills they need to get everything they can out of even the most optimally designed technology. Making it easier for everyone to travel the two-way street between enjoyment and productivity online. Chancey Fleet’s writing, organizing and advocacy explores how cloud-connected accessibility tools benefit and harm, empower and expose communities of disability. She is the Assistive Technology Coordinator at the New York Public Library’s Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library, where she founded and maintains the Dimensions Project, a free open lab for the exploration and creation of accessible images, models and data representations through tactile graphics, 3D models and nonvisual approaches to coding, CAD and “visual” arts. She is a former fellow and current affiliate-in-residence at Data & Society; she is president of the National Federation of the Blind’s Assistive Technology Trainers Division; and she was recognized as a 2017 Library Journal Mover and Shaker. Music credits:Probably Shouldn't by J.Lang (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Mr_YesterdaycommonGround by airtone (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.Klaus by Skill_Borrower (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Klaus_NeumaierChrome Cactus by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: Javolenus

Imagine an internet in which economic power is more broadly distributed, so that more people can build and maintain small businesses online to make good livings. In this world, the behavioral advertising that has made the internet into a giant surveillance tool would be banned, so people could share more equally in the riches without surrendering their privacy. That’s the world Tim Wu envisions as he teaches and shapes policy on the revitalization of American antitrust law and the growing power of big tech platforms. He joins EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley to discuss using the law to counterbalance the market’s worst instincts, in order to create an internet focused more on improving people’s lives than on meaningless revenue generation. In this episode you’ll learn about: Getting a better “deal” in trading some of your data for connectedness. Building corporate structures that do a better job of balancing the public good with private profits. Creating a healthier online ecosystem with corporate “quarantines” to prevent a handful of gigantic companies from dominating the entire internet. Nurturing actual innovation of products and services online, not just newer price models. Timothy Wu is the Julius Silver Professor of Law, Science and Technology at Columbia Law School, where he has served on the faculty since 2006. First known for coining the term “net neutrality” in 2002, he served in President Joe Biden’s White House as special assistant to the President for technology and competition policy from 2021 to 2023; he also had worked on competition policy for the National Economic Council during the last year of President Barack Obama’s administration. Earlier, he worked in antitrust enforcement at the Federal Trade Commission and served as enforcement counsel in the New York Attorney General’s Office. His books include “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age” (2018), "The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads” (2016), “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires” (2010), and “Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World” (2006). MUSIC CREDITSPerspectives *** by J.Lang (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Sackjo22 and Admiral Bob_________________Warm Vacuum Tube by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: starfrosch

Imagine a world in which the internet is first and foremost about empowering people, not big corporations and government. In that world, government does “after-action” analyses to make sure its tech regulations are working as intended, recruits experienced technologists as advisors, and enforces real accountability for intelligence and law enforcement programs. Ron Wyden has spent decades working toward that world, first as a congressman and now as Oregon’s senior U.S. Senator. Long among Congress’ most tech-savvy lawmakers, he helped write the law that shaped and protects the internet as we know it, and he has fought tirelessly against warrantless surveillance of Americans’ telecommunications data. Wyden speaks with EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley about his “I squared” —individuals and innovation—legislative approach to foster an internet that benefits everyone. In this episode you’ll learn about: How a lot of the worrisome online content that critics blame on Section 230 is actually protected by the First Amendment Requiring intelligence and law enforcement agencies to get warrants before obtaining Americans’ private telecommunications data Why “foreign” is the most important word in “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” Making government officials understand national security isn’t heightened by reducing privacy Protecting women from having their personal data weaponized against them U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-OR, has served in the Senate since 1996; he was elected to his current six-year term in 2022. He chairs the Senate Finance Committee, and serves on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the Budget Committee, and the Select Committee on Intelligence; he also is the lead Senate Democrat on the Joint Committee on Taxation. His relentless defiance of the national security community's abuse of secrecy forced the declassification of the CIA Inspector General's 9/11 report, shut down the controversial Total Information Awareness program, and put a spotlight on both the Bush and Obama administrations’ reliance on "secret law." In 2006 he introduced the first Senate bill on net neutrality, and in 2011 he was the lone Senator to stand against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), ultimately unsuccessful bills that purportedly were aimed at fighting online piracy but that actually would have caused significant harm to the internet. Earlier, he served from 1981 to 1996 in the House of Representatives, where he co-authored Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 —the law that protects Americans’ freedom of expression online by protecting the intermediaries we all rely on.