Reimagining the Internet

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Tracey Meares, a Yale Law professor and co-founder of the Justice Collaboratory, and Tom Tyler, a renowned expert in procedural justice, dive into the complexities of fairness in justice systems. They discuss how internal motivations can foster compliance over fear of punishment. The conversation extends to social media, where perceptions of fairness in moderation can enhance user trust. They also advocate for transparency in online platforms and the need for innovative governance to improve legal interactions, both offline and online.

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.