
Reimagining the Internet
Reimagining the Internet is a production of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst, asking scholars, activists, journalists, and artists what is broken on the internet and how to fix it.
Latest episodes

May 17, 2023 • 36min
79 Taking Stock of the Everything Store with Moira Weigel
For our first ever episode talking about Amazon (somehow?), Logic Magazine co-founder Moira Weigel tells us what she learned about Amazon by spending years interviewing its third-party sellers. From hand sanitizer hoarding to Chinese vendors getting “dragon boated,” Moira gives us a fascinating look at a massive, unregulated economy. Moira Weigel is assistant professor in […]

May 11, 2023 • 29min
78 We Mapped Reddit with Jasmine Mangat and Virginia Partridge
We’re thrilled to launch a new tool today: a big interactive map of Reddit, showing how biggest subreddits on the site are connected with each other. Mike is joined by iDPI’s very own Jasmine Mangat and Virginia Partridge for a riveting tell-all about RedditMap.Social. You can visit the tool at RedditMap.Social, talk to other redditors […]

Apr 26, 2023 • 29min
77 Lawful But Awful and the Future of Social Media with Daphne Keller (part 2)
Legal expert Daphne Keller discusses EU Internet regulations and their impact on social media. Topics include content moderation, transparency, platform audits, concerns about government control, and balancing user protections with platform operations. The conversation also explores contrasting US and European approaches to content regulation, challenges for smaller online platforms, combating CSAM, and potential solutions like middleware for decentralized content moderation.

Apr 19, 2023 • 28min
76 Platforms v. Supreme Court with Daphne Keller (part 1)
If you want to understand anything about global Internet regulation, you’d be lucky to get Daphne Keller’s perspective on it. We’re thrilled to have the director of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center on for a two-parter about regulating social media platforms. First off, a speed run through the Supreme Court cases that were designed to reshape […]

Apr 5, 2023 • 38min
75 iDPI’s New Manifesto: The Three-Legged Stool
We talk a lot about reimagining the internet here at iDPI, and that’s because it’s something we spend most of our time at the lab doing. We’re thrilled to share our new, banner white paper with you, and we hope you’re excited by our call to widen your own imagination if what’s possible in social […]

Mar 22, 2023 • 48min
74 Do You Trust that Justice is Just? with Nathan Matias, Tracey Meares, and Tom Tyler (Trust episode 4)
Trusting justice means making it feel meaningful—people have to trust that justice systems are themselves just. To conclude our miniseries on Trust, we talk to Nathan Matias about how exactly people lost trust in Elon Musks’ Twitter, and revisit our recent interview with Tracey Meares and Tom Tyler about how procedural justice can convince can […]

Mar 15, 2023 • 43min
73 How to Start a Guild with Kei Kreutler and T.L. Taylor (Trust episode 3)
Almost two decades ago, World of Warcraft gamers started gathering in guilds to share resources and organize raids. Did they create one of the most trustful types of communities on the entire Internet? This week on our trust mini-series, we talk about how artist and gaming communities cooperate with artist Kei Kreutler and sociologist of […]

Mar 8, 2023 • 37min
72 Why Would People Trust Crypto? with Finn Brunton and Molly White (Trust episode 2)
Cryptocurrency is supposedly the basis of trustless economy, but in the past few years there were a lot of everyday people who entrusted it with everything. How did this happen? In this episode of our miniseries on trust, we talk to Finn Brunton about the deep history of crypto and Molly White about how the […]

17 snips
Mar 1, 2023 • 50min
71 Do We Trust the Internet? with evelyn douek and Primavera de Filippi (Trust episode 1)
Should governments regulate how Facebook moderates speech? Can you sanction an automated smart contract that’s used for international money laundering? Was it a coincidence that every social media platform banned Donald Trump at the same time? In the first part of our 4-part miniseries looking at trust online, we welcome evelyn douek, host of the […]

Feb 22, 2023 • 32min
70 The Mars Rover Isn’t Stealing Our Data, with Janet Vertesi
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.