EFFecting Digital Freedom
by Jason Kelley
This Is How to Fix the Internet
Everywhere you look, there are dystopian stories about tech's impact on our lives. Law enforcement surveillance, data collection by big companies, the dominance of a few large platforms choking innovation, the growing pressure by authoritarian governments to control what we see and say - it can feel incredibly bleak and overwhelming. EFF - and all of us - must spend time exposing and articulating these problems.
But we also must take the time and make the effort to envision and then build a better future. That's where EFF's podcast, How to Fix the Internet, comes in.
For several seasons, we've interviewed dozens of experts in the digital rights world - from makers and hackers, to founders and researchers. These conversations aren't about what's happening in the news, or what's gone horribly wrong that particular week. Instead, we create a space to consider what the world should look like - what it looks like if we "get it right" - by asking our guests to think about the better world that we know technology can help us achieve.
This year, we launched our season by talking with researcher and hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang about how we can unite hardware and software hackers, fanfiction creators, and farmers who want to repair their tractors into a single, focused right-to-repair movement to change the future of technology. Bunnie remembers a time when "innovation was permissionless" - when you took off the cover of something and you expected to see a schematic on the inside. For bunnie, the better future in some ways looks a lot like the past - if we're willing to see how freeing people up to rip, mix, and burn their tools can move innovation forward.
We spoke with Trevor Paglen, an artist, MacArthur Fellowship "Genius Grant" winner, and writer who tackles issues like surveillance, AI, and data collection. He takes many of the issues that we're concerned with here at EFF and turns them into fine art. The week before we interviewed Trevor, I was in Boston and happened to see one of his photos in a museum. It stuck out, so distinct from the rest of the art around it. It's a photo of a strangely yellow, dusty sky with a very tiny, almost imperceptible gray dot hovering in the ominous air. You can't really even make it out until you look at the title: Untitled (Reaper Drone). It floored me.
Trevor told us that for him, art is a conversation with people who lived before us, and with the people who will live after us - a sort of artifact that shows us what the world looked like at a certain point in time. And his photo of a nearly invisible drone is what the sky looks like to him, here in the 21st century.
But Trevor's work also shows us what's often unseen. Other examples of his work include photos of underwater Internet cables that were tapped by the NSA, and flickering spy satellites seen at night. His work creates a space where people can think differently. It lets us ask: do we want this artifact to be here in a hundred years?
We talked with "disinformation" researcher (((Alice Marwick))) about the myth of the "epistemically consistent past" - the idea that before the Internet, there was a single, agreed upon set of facts. This was never true. For example, there was a "White Press" and a "Black Press," which existed because the White Press didn't cover stories that were of interest to the Black community like the so-called "Tulsa race massacre." Like those alternatives presses, the Internet broadened what narratives we have access to, and we want more of that in the future, not less, in part because one of the main amplifiers of disinformation is politicians and political elites whose platforms are basically independent of the Internet altogether.
And we spoke with science fiction author Deji Bryce Olukotun about why futurist fiction in general matters so much: because it allows us to rethink what the world can look like. Often, certain kinds of tech, and how it's used, might seem inevitable at this moment - the "metaverse," brain implants, generative AI, you name it - but science fiction lets us imagine our own futures, which might be totally different from the ones we're being sold. Those competing visions help us think about what is and is not inevitable, which should be up to us, not up to tech companies. As Deji says, if anyone is trying to stop us imagining our own futures, you have to really think about why.
I can't answer what it means to "fix the Internet."
What I can say is that the future is ours to build, but we have to be able to envision and enable that better world, or else we will be stuck with the one we're in - or something worse. We hope the podcast gives you a positive vision, and that you will join us in thinking about how we can create the future that we want. I'm co-host this season, and would love to know what you think. And if you aren't a big podcast fan, we've also got transcripts, and all the episodes are available on the Internet Archive as well.
