Reimagining the Internet

Nearly as soon as COVID-19 lockdowns began in March 2020, people started throwing livestream concerts. This week, our producer Mike chats with two of the organizers the Quarantine Concerts, a series that ran on Twitch nightly for months and raised nearly $100,000 for performers, bringing in performers and organizers from all over the world.

en you think about early Internet users, do you picture French people trying to find love and teens in after-school programs? Kevin Driscoll joins us for this edition of our history series "How They Imagined the Internet" to tell us about France's nation-wide public Internet that ran for decades and how BBS laid the groundwork for the web to be a social place.

Casteism pervades the Hindu diaspora, not just across borders, but across the Internet too. This week, Dalit activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan offers us a look at how Dalits face discrimination and inequity on social media and in the ranks of Silicon Valley tech companies.

livery services to music streaming. Trebor is a professor at the New School, where he helms the Platform Cooperativism Consortium. It’s a fascinating listen about the variety of ways coops can aid local communities, labor unions, and freelancers, empowering communities of workers to govern themselves and more equitably distribute revenue.

scheme? In Part 2 of our interview with Nathan Schneider, he tells us about the flurry of experiments in democracy that get drowned out by NFT hype.

hy don't users get a say in how platforms operate? Nathan Schneider thinks it might be because we don't own them. In Part 1 of this week's interview, Nathan tells us about how online spaces could be cooperatively owned, and what the US government could do to help.

We celebrate our 50th episode with a holiday special, where Ethan is visited by the Reimagining the Internet producers of past, present, and future to remember some of our favorite interviews from 2021. Tune in for highlights with Omar Wasow, Fred Turner, Heather Ford, Michael Wood Lewis, Lola Hunt and Eliza Sorensen, Damon Krukowski, Elizabeth Hansen-Shapiro, and Tracy Chou.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales joins us for a thrilling chat about what we can learn from social media and what’s anti-social about a lot of social media today. Jimmy has recently launched the the social network WT.Social, designed to as a non-addictive, thoughtful online space, and has lots of thoughts about the type of communities that we might be able to start cultivating online.

talk about the thousands of volunteers building it together? Heather Ford, an ethnographer of Wikipedia, joins us to talk about the power struggles and community governance that makes the site one of the most trusted information sources on the web.

How did hippies living on communes help create the Internet? Is Mark Zuckerberg today's PT Barnum? What can we learn from 17th Century Protestantism about inequality in Silicon Valley? Fred Turner, perhaps the definitive historian of the Internet and counterculture, joins us for a thrilling conversation about how we need to shake post-WWII politics to make not just a better Internet, but a better world. For links to projects mentioned and a full transcript of this episode, please visit https://publicinfrastructure.org/podcast/47-fred-turner Key takeaways: 1. Communes were insular, and so was the first Internet community created by back-to-land hippies. 2. Silicon Valley's cult of personality follows from Protestants' belief that wealth is a sign of godliness. 3. "Seeing Silicon Valley" documents the inequality that fuels tech with portraits of the rich and poor. 4. We need to reckon with issues of class that started during the Vietnam War. 5. Institutions that bring people to come together despite identity and ideology differences are crucial.