00:00:09
Speaker 1: In the nineteen nineties, we had this idea that the Internet was just this open space and we could try all sorts of nonsense there. Piero Midjar wants to sell his pez collection, and you end up with eBay, and then people realize that people are ripping each other off on eBay, and so you end up with an escro service, and that turns into PayPal, and like, all these things happen, and they happen really really fast. I want us to get back to that moment of thinking things are possible.
00:00:41
Speaker 2: Ethan Zuckerman is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He's also something of an Internet activist, and.
00:00:47
Speaker 1: I work on a whole lot of projects trying to make the Internet a better place, which I still believe can happen despite all the evidence of the contrary.
00:00:56
Speaker 2: You know what, you may be one of the last soldiers standing on that battlefield.
00:00:59
Speaker 1: I know, man, I know, I know it's a lonely place to be. But you know, the great thing about being a professor is that I can try to win over students to the cause, and every so often, you know, we get a win. Every so often. People are excited about this idea that things actually can change, and I think a lot of it just hass to do with reframing our thinking.
00:01:21
Speaker 2: Ethan is one of the most unusual professors I've ever spoken to. So, first off, if you're of a certain age, I guarantee you that you've seen his work. It might have made you mad, It might have made you money, it might have done both at the same time. The second, Ethan really really likes Facebook, so much so that he sued Facebook, and you know what, after listening to what he has to say, you might want him to win from Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is kill Switch. I'm Dexter Thomas.
00:02:04
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Good bye.
00:02:46
Speaker 2: Ethan Zuckerman wants to fix the Internet. But before we could talk about how he would do that, we need to understand how we got here. We've talked about this here before on the show, but early on the Internet was a much more optimistic place until money basically ruined it. If you haven't caught our episode with Tim, we'll definitely check that one out too. So Ethan started his career during those early dot com days. He was one of the first employees at a company called Tripod, and Tripod was most well known for being a place where you could build your own homepage, which back then was a really exciting thing. There were all kinds of communities popping up online and Tripod was helping to foster that. But in order to do that, they needed money, and so they started looking at advertising. I was a GeoCities person. Yep, that's what I was on. We're talking pre my Space here, but I remember.
00:03:36
Speaker 1: We're talking pre my Space and that was our leading competitor at Tripods. So I'm not going to hold that against you, Dexter, but you know, that is a bit of a you know, you did just a little bit of a Yankees Mets thing there. You gotta be careful about.
00:03:48
Speaker 2: God, Hey, listen, I'm just trying to be honest with you.
00:03:51
Speaker 1: I'm just fair enough. That's where I went.
00:03:53
Speaker 2: But you know, I mean, as I was entering this phase of Wow, there's all these other people made things, and I would like to make things too. Very early in that stage, I realized that that was always going to mean there's gonna be ads next to whatever I did, or on top of whatever I did, or inside of whatever I did. And that started to feel very normal.
00:04:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, So like roll back to GeoCities and I'm going to tell you what's going on a tripod.
00:04:23
Speaker 3: Right.
00:04:24
Speaker 1: So, so our biggest rival geo cities is West Coast. We're East Coast. So there's beef. We know each other, we're you know, we're in touch with one another. But we're all trying the same ideas. We try a subscription service. We've got it. You know, you can sign up, you can get extra space, you can get premium customer service. Nobody wants that. We try merch We make the tea shirts, we make the hats. We're psyched that people want to identify with Tripod. We think that's a way that we're going to go. We go with sponsorship. We actually have sponsors who are like these are probably high school and college students. You know what high school and college students really love is mutual funds. Calvert Mutual Funds comes on and says, we want to sponsor people to go and get mutual funds. The only thing that works for us dexter is advertising, and the whole industry moves there at the same time and at a certain point, if you're trying something new, if you're trying a different business model, your pitch to an investor gets very tricky. What the investors want to hear is how many page views are you getting a month and how fast is it growing? And because we have eighteen million people like you who put home pages on the site, we are getting the eighth most page views on the Internet and it's growing something like ten percent a month. And companies like Yahoo are coming and knocking on our door and saying we would like to do some business. We are like, you know, kids in our twenties in the top floor of a plastic factory in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and like Jerry Yang from Yahoo is calling us, and we're like, yeah, I guess advertising is the way to go.
00:06:12
Speaker 2: So advertising is the way to go might not be the most idealistic phrase ever, but again, advertising made Tripod work, and it also made some pretty interesting things possible.
00:06:23
Speaker 1: The other thing it's an amazing model for is for people who are unbanked, who are not part of the mainstream financial system, who are in countries where the amounts of money would be very challenging. One thing you probably did not know when you were fooling around with that Tripod homepage is that our number two country for users was Malaysia. And what was going on in Malaysia at that point was most of the political opposition was using Tripod to organize and it became the voice of the Malaysian REFORMASSEI movement, And those folks might have been able to afford official websites somewhere, but they weren't really set up for transacting with Malaysian users. They probably didn't have credit cards, they didn't have the payment mechanisms. So advertising is a great way to help out people who are coming from different parts of the world, who have different resources.
00:07:23
Speaker 2: It wasn't just Tripod. Advertising became the default model for supporting publishing on the Internet, which shouldn't be surprising. They were just adapting what print magazines and newspapers were doing.
00:07:34
Speaker 1: Ads at this point are being sold by what's called CPM, and CPM is cost per mill which you know, confusingly enough, is cost per thousand, right. It's a term coming out of the newspaper and magazine industry, And so if you want to buy a page in Wired, for instance, you're basically being told by Wired, well, here's our circulation. You know, we're reaching fifty thousand people multiply that out by the cost per thousand that's what you're gonna pay for a page. And Wired we come in nineteen ninety five and go, we are so much better than that page. And Wired you can click on our ad and it will take you to your website and people might spend hours with you, not just that moment on the page, and you can take their name and address. So we are worth so much more than that magazine ad. So we start out pricing the way that magazine ads are. We're is charging like fifty bucks for one thousand impressions. And then people realize that there's ads all.
00:08:36
Speaker 2: Over the web.
00:08:38
Speaker 1: You can go wherever you want and get ad inventory, and so suddenly it drops to like a dollar per thousand impressions. And then Overture, which is a company that's affiliated with Yahoo, comes in and says, you know, the ads that you don't click on, those shouldn't count, and so then it moves to cost per click, and that's an entirely different space. In the course of five years, we go from ads being fifty two one hundred dollars for one thousand impressions to being twenty five cents for a thousand impressions to being impressions don't matter. We will pay anywhere from a penny to ten bucks per collect depending on what the ad is.
00:09:22
Speaker 2: And you know where this goes. Ads not only became an escapable on the Internet, but as clicks become the metric of success, you have to start listening to what the advertisers want. And so here's the thing about Ethan. He wasn't just a pioneer in the early dot com boom. He helped facilitate it by figuring out a way to keep those advertisers shilling out that money for our websites. He essentially invented was now known as the pop up ad. To be clear, he regrets that he did this the innovation of pop up ads, and we should call it an innovation.
00:09:54
Speaker 1: I think I'm not going to let you get away with innovation. First of all, come up ads no, no, no, no, sorry, I'm sorry. Pop up ads are, to use a technical term, a Cluegi hack. It is an inelegant solution to a problem, and unfortunately, like a lot of cluegi hacks, it still persists, although thank god, not as much as it used to. So here's the story on the pop up bed. Let's go back to nineteen ninety six. We've got an increasing number of user homepages. They have become the center of our business. Tripod thought it was going to be like a magazine and educational site for young people. My friend Jeff Vanderklute, without my permission, I should add, puts up a homepage builder. We discover a couple months later, when our bandwidth bill has gone through the ceiling, that it is the most popular thing on our site. So it's completely accidental. We get into the business completely by accident. But by nineteen ninety six, my boss Bo Peebet understands that this is the tail that's wagging the dog. He understands that this is where our growth is coming from. And he's trying to sell ad inventory on this. And we've got ad execs going out and they are showing random homepages with ads on them, and often those ads are showing up on content that the advertisers do not want to be associated with. Sometimes it's extremism, sometimes it's pornography. It is the web, right and unfortunately, you know, the Internet has been an if he placed going back into the nineteen seventies, so Bo comes to me and says, look, we got to run ads against the homepages. But as long as the ad is on the homepage, the advertiser feels like they're endorsing them. What can you do? And I invent the nav bar. The navbar is a vertical panel. It has a two hundred by two hundred add on it, It has Tripod branding, it has some navigation links, and so it's like, hey, here's Dexter's homepage, but also here's some Tripod branding, some navigation. Oh and by the way, an ad. And they're separate windows. So it's very clear that the ad is against Tripod and your homepage is your space.
00:12:10
Speaker 2: So the pop up ad was created to solve a problem. Advertisers were scared that their ads would show up somewhere unsavory, and the pop up helped to alleviate that fear by creating that separation so that they would keep that money flowing.
00:12:23
Speaker 1: And I'm like, this is great, I've worked it out. It's a solution. We put up the little piece of JavaScript, we insert it into every one of the homepages that's out there. We got a little pushback. People are sort of like, you know, what's going on? Why is there this extra weird window here, But we don't get a ton of pushback. Your guys at GeoCities take my code, they turn it from vertical into horizontal. They take my polite little two hundred by two hundred AD and they turn it into you a full withd like seven hundred pixel AD and there's no branding or anything. It's just an AD. So I do the first pop up, and it is a pop up AD. So I'm absolutely owning up to it. But it was trying to be maybe a bit more than that. The essence of it gets stripped down to a pop up AD, and then it's off to the races, right like then people are doing these pop unders. They're doing pop ups that can't be minimized, so on and so forth, and you have really the scourge of the nineteen nineties and early two thousands internet. And let me just say just to be clear on this. When we were talking before this interview, I told you I did not want to do an interview on pop up ads. And part of it is that it's a little too easy. It's a little like you know, look, it's the Robert Oppenheimer of the Internet who hates his creation. Let me be honest with you, Dexter, I get hate mail. Every time someone writes a story. I get death threats. I have a relationship with my local police department in this small town in western Massachusetts where they know not to call a swap team to my residence because almost every time I do an interview on pop ups that gets some exposure, we get an arm response call. So it's a thing, and it's interesting. It's definitely the sort of thing that I did not anticipate, either when building the pop up or twenty years later, owning up to building the pop up and talking about it as a problem.
00:14:26
Speaker 2: Seeing all the anger that gets directed in Ethan is. Aside from being really terrifying, it's also kind of confusing because really you're mad about pop ups in twenty twenty six, like, are you still dialing up from your mom's dell in the living room?
00:14:40
Speaker 1: Yell?
00:14:40
Speaker 2: Are mad at the wrong dude? Because first off, pop ups didn't even last that long. We're going to come back to that later, but the industry has long since moved on to something that has zero to do with what anyone at tripod dot com could ever even thought of back then. Traditional banner ads, which again, this is the thing that Ethan was trying to replace. Those came back, and they came back stronger. Remember, the original problem was that banner ads might be irrelevant to the website that they were on, and thus irrelevant to you, the user. But the industry figured out how to make those ads much more relevant to you by watching everything you do on the Internet. And this is where Ethan started thinking a little differently.
00:15:22
Speaker 1: The problem with advertising, as I see it, is that the people who have been trying to make money out of advertising have tried to add every possible piece of information to the equation. They want to know where you are, They want to know where else on the Internet that you've been, They want to know what you've done, what you've searched for previously. And so they turned this Internet, this super exciting space that we're building in the nineteen nineties, into a surveillance machine. My friend Chan Regenda Nikolucci, and I started looking at this and saying, what if you could get eighty percent of what you wanted with so much less of the surveillance.
00:16:08
Speaker 2: Suddenly Ethan had a new mission to keep the lights on the Internet without having to sell out your audience. That's after the break. So years later, Ethan sees how the Internet has grown into a surveillance machine, partially in service of the advertising that still drives the Internet, and he started to think, could we do anything about this?
00:16:37
Speaker 1: My attitude in some ways is, well, can't we just end advertising?
00:16:41
Speaker 3: Right? Like?
00:16:42
Speaker 1: Advertisings a terrible model. We're paying with our attention. But here's the thing about ads. Ads turn out to be a fantastic model for a product or service that you don't know that you're willing to pay for yet. So imagine that someone is launching something new. Right, Someone in Western Massachusetts where I live, says, I don't like the way local media is working. I'm going to create a new news product. It's going to be video first, and it's going to be put together by citizens. And I'm like, well, that might be interesting, but I'm not ready to put up ten bucks a month for it. Let me see how it's going first, and under the let me see how it's going first. Advertising is a great model.
00:17:27
Speaker 2: Okay, It's probably not realistic to think that the Internet could ever be totally free of ads, especially if the content is being provided for free. I mean, somebody has to get paid, right. So a few years ago, Ethan and a colleague came up with a new proposal. If ads are going to be on the Internet, and they're crucial for it to function, could we make them somehow more ethical.
00:17:47
Speaker 1: And I'm going to get very personal about this for a moment, because it's the example that we actually use in the paper. I am an alcoholic. I am nine years sober, but well through my twenties, thirties, forties, I drank all and I was one of those drinkers where it was like part of my personality, Like I collected scotches and you know, I researched the interesting bourbons, and so there's a whole digital trail associated with me as a drinker. I go on to Twitter, and Twitter loves advertising booze to me. They love putting up ads trying to get me to buy a nice, high end bourbon. I can't escape that data doppelganger. I can't escape that other drunk version of myself, even though I'm now off into the future. What we end up saying is that you do have a right to be forgotten, not in the sense of like you have a right necessarily be scrubbed off the Internet. But you have a right to change your mind. And so what we end up proposing is forgetful advertising, and forgetful advertising basically says you can know anything about me in this one session. You can look at the different pages that I go to on the website. You can look at the time, you can look at the date, you can look at the location, you can look at what I'm searching for. You can look at the context of those pages and use that to target an ad. What you cannot do is look at what I was looking at a month ago, a year ago, ten years ago. And we think that, yeah, it'll be less accurate, but we think it's a more ethical way to do it. And we end up suggesting that it's something like free trade coffee. There are some percentage of people who are willing to pay the money to make sure that human beings aren't being exploited, you know, for the product that we're drinking every morning. And so what we were thinking was maybe there will be websites that are willing to say we're going to do this. I'll tell you my first attempt on this was The Guardian, the British newspaper. They run all of these expos's on online surveillance, they run all the stuff about Edward Snowden, and I end up in a session with the publisher there, Alan Russbritcher, and I say, Alan, I'm looking at these stories on the Guardian and here are sixty trackers that are sending the information. Then I'm looking at this on the Guardian like it's time for you to get rid of these things. You reading the Edward Snowden article and there's trackers again. Yeah, but just the irony of that, Like it feels like if you're going to be The Guardian and a validly progressive publication, you might decide I might opt out of this form of advertising and into a more ethical form of advertising.
00:20:38
Speaker 2: Okay, so I just want to echo the last thing you said, ethical form of advertising. Might have remind you that those are not.
00:20:47
Speaker 1: Where it's the go together very often.
00:20:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, ethical and advertising. I can't think of the last time somebody said that to me.
00:20:53
Speaker 1: Let's explore it for half a second, right, So let's go and be Google for a bit. Okay, it's the middle of winter here in western Massachusetts. My roof is leaking, because everybody's roof is leaking. I go onto Google and I search roof repair Pittsfield, Massachusetts. There are a whole bunch of roofing contractors who really want my phone call, and they want my phone call because so I call them up. There's a decent chance that they're going to make five to ten thousand dollars fixing my roof. That ad click is worth anywhere between five and fifty bucks in cost per customer acquisition. Google loves that ad click, and frankly, some of the advertisers, the advertisers are like, man, here is a qualified lead outside of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to go repair a roof. That's ethical advertising, right, That is advertising that actually helps both me, somebody looking for a service, someone trying to provide a service, and the broker in the middle of those things. It is surveillance. It is aware that I am near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, so there is a certain amount of surveillance, but it's actually meeting a need.
00:22:10
Speaker 2: In their paper on Forgetful Advertising, Ethan and his colleague talk about what they call a DPI, a digital public infrastructure. So think of it like this, Facebook and Google ad Sense might just started out as little tools that could help you talk to your college friends or maybe help you sell t shirts. But nowadays, if you want to sell anything online you have to use those platforms. There really is no alternative. I mean, imagine if the only way to drive from Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles was to take a toll road. You can't bike, you can't walk, you can't take a bus, you can't take a train, You can only take that expensive toll road. There should be an alternative Forgetful advertising is just alternative infrastructure. Again, they're not saying that they want to abolish Google ad Sense, They're just building another option for people who prefer something, as Ethan would put it, more ethical. But Ethan's work on fixing the Internet doesn't stop there. He's got another idea, and believe it or not, it kind of goes back to that hack that he's most famous for.
00:23:12
Speaker 1: Here's the interesting thing. Unless you are hanging out in certain corners of the Internet and man that's between you and your browser, you are probably not seeing a lot of pop up ads these stays. And there's a couple of reasons behind that. The first one is that every modern web browser has a feature to allow you to block pop up ads, and that is the simplest example of middleware that we know of. So middleware is software that you, as a user can install on your web browser or potentially on your phone to give you more control over a service. So the classic piece of middleware is a pop up blocker, which is, hey, this site wants to open a window. You can choose not to have that opened if you prefer. So, first of all, it actually shows us that things can get better. We're not so much drowning and pop ups. We're now drowning and other stuff. We're drowning in video AutoPlay ads. Sites like Facebook work very actively to disable ad blockers, but pop ups and ads in general were really the first time that users were sort of like, you know what, we actually need some more control in this situation. So let's start building the software that gives us increasing amounts of control.
00:24:42
Speaker 2: And even once you use this concept of middleware to fix social media, we'll explain how after the break. So I just want to read back to you a headline of an article that you wrote in twenty twenty four. The headline reads, I love Facebook. That's why I'm suing Meta. Yeah, either, please explain this to me. I guess I can come across as kind of aggressive every so often.
00:25:19
Speaker 1: So I'm a Facebook user. I use it pretty much every day. I got married thanks to Facebook. Tenish years ago. I was divorced. I reconnected with a college friend of mine. She was living in Houston, Texas. I was out in western Massachusetts. But I looked her up on Facebook and we started chatting and I invited her to talk that I was giving down at Rice University. Seven years later, we're married. So thank you Facebook. You know, I appreciate that, and I think as far as keeping people loosely in touch with one another, particularly you know, for me as a gen xer, it's actually been an incredible tool. However, Comma, like everything else, it is becoming more and more algorithmically driven. And these days on Facebook, I am a lot less likely to be seeing updates from my friends about their kids. I instead get a lot of reels just trying to capture as much of my attention as possible. And so I got really interested in this idea that maybe I could have more control over Facebook. Friend of mine in the UK, guy named Louis Barclay, wrote a piece of software called unfollow everything. It did something super simple. It went into Facebook. It kept your whole friend's graph. It just said I'm going to unfollow all of them, and eventually what you end up with is an empty feed. You just don't have anyone that you're following anymore. People liked it, Louie liked it, other people started using it, and Facebook said, Louis, you got to take this down otherwise we're going to come after you and you court. And by the way, that long click rap agreement that you signed onto makes you responsible for our legal fees. So what Facebook's contract in the UK says that if you lose litigation against them, you are responsible for the legal fees incurred by Facebook. Wow. So Louis looks at this and says, yeah, I'm not taking that gamble. I could be financially ruined. But he goes to a group called the Night First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and they say, what if we tried to do this again in the United States? And I said, you know, I love this idea because this is an example of middleware. So Night First Amendments that comes to me and says, do you want to try to put this in front of a federal court, and the idea is, I will put together an experiment. The experiment is we will recruit a whole bunch of users, they will try using an updated version of unfollow Everything, and they will let us know whether they like that experience, and we will study whether it changes how much they use Facebook. We then brought it to a federal court and said, hey, we want to do this. The last time someone did this, Facebook came down on them like a ton of bricks. Before we invest our time and money on this, we'd like a ruling that this is legal. The federal court said, nice, tryprof You're asking us to rule on something that hasn't happened yet. That's not how the US court system works. Build something and we'll let you know what happens. So I have now been in the process of trying to figure out how to build what my friend Louie built. The trick is in the couple of years since Louie built that software, Facebook has put a lot of people working on making middlewhere impossible. Specifically, the middleware that they care about is ad blockers, and they have a whole team working to make it almost impossible to block ads. On Facebook, and the same techniques that I need to use to do and follow everything are the same techniques that ad blockers use. So we're still very much engaged in battle. But it's me and a couple of brave students that ums Amherst versus Facebook, all of its resources and all of its lawyers.
00:29:37
Speaker 2: I don't know too many people who are willing to go against Meta like that, but if this thing that Ethan is working on comes out, I would try it. I mean, this would be the one thing that could bring me back to Facebook. But Ethan isn't advocating for everyone to just sit back and wait for him to swoop in and save the day. There are things that you and me can do right now for ourselves. It's just going to take some work.
00:29:59
Speaker 1: So the funny thing is you can do things about it right So here's a couple of things you can do about it. A lot of people have gotten off of Twitter because Twitter is now controlled by a right wing extremist troll and it is not the community that.
00:30:17
Speaker 3: It used to be.
00:30:18
Speaker 1: When people get off Twitter, they tend to go one of two different places, and they actually have both really good things to talk about with them. Blue Sky has a lot of the functionality that Twitter used to have, and it's got some very cool functionality around being able to do custom feeds. You can go into Blue Sky and you can actually have a lot of control, very much like middleware, except that it's actually built into the tool. It's built in as a function. People are using their ability to do feeds to do very focused collections. There's a collection called Black Sky for people who are trying to get more color in their Twitter feeds. There are people doing it to push women, to push voices from the developing world. It's a really exciting set of tools and I'm a huge supporter of it. The trick is Blue Sky is still run by a corporation. They're subject to the laws of capitalism, so on and so forth. So let me introduce you to mastadon. Mastodon is an open source alternative to Twitter. You can run a mast it on server on your own server. You probably don't want to. It's a decent amount of work, but I am part of a group called social dot co Op. This is a masked it on server that is run as a co op. I pay seventy five bucks a year for my membership to it. The leadership of it, the people who do moderation. It is elected out of the community. People are asked to put in volunteer time to take on moderation duties at different points. It is a different model for doing this. The trick is these models are small. They're getting used by a couple million people, not by two billion people. These models don't have ad budgets. They're not going out and buying Super Bowl ads. And we got to tell the story. We got to get on podcasts and tell people that there's another way to do this. It doesn't have to suck as bad as it does. It really doesn't. So here are three things that we can do. We need to force these big platforms to allow for middlework. We need to make it a law that you can use something to give you more control over TikTok or Facebook or something along those lines. Second, we would do interoperability, so if you don't want to use TikTok's app to see TikTok, you can still get the content out of it, but you can do it through a browser on your phone that you control. And then third, we got to get people psyched about building and governing their own online spaces. Right now, social dot co op is not a good alternative to Twitter or to blue Sky. There just aren't enough people on mastadon. But if I have a client on my phone that I control and I can merge them all together, Hey, let me see what people are talking about on Twitter, let me see Facebook, let me see Insta, let me see all of it and my own little social network at the same place. And I can go in and say, you know what, and prioritize my local news and you know what, I'm probably not hearing enough from women in the global South, So you know, adding a feed like that, now I've got my custom feed. It's local, it's prioritizing the voices I want to hear, it's incorporating all of these things. This is technically possible. We have shown we can do it. It is a policy issue, and it is a policy issue that's very hard to make progress on in the United States because these very powerful platforms are run by men who are sitting with Donald Trump at his inauguration period. These companies figured out that they needed to stay on the right side of the most powerful person in the United States right now, so that we don't get a better internet.
00:34:24
Speaker 2: What you're talking about is I mean even the phrase a better Internet. I mean, I'm sure you've seen that a lot of people's solution is just get off of social media. It's really interesting to me that you're actually advocating for in some ways basically saving social media for people who are trying to leave it.
00:34:44
Speaker 1: Social media is worth saving. I'm a Type one diabetic. I'm an insulin dependent diabetic. I've had diabetes since I was thirteen years old. I'm fifty three years old. Now my body's changing. I'm trying to figure out how to manage my diabetes, lose way, keep up my running. And one of the things that I rely on to do this is the t one D community on Reddit, where I can come on and say, hey, I go for runs in the morning and my blood sugar goes up. What's up with that? And someone comes in and says, it's called a cortisol dump. Here's the scientific paper on it. Find out more about it. That is the Internet that I fell in love with in nineteen eighty nine when I showed up at my university and discovered that I could log onto incredible amounts of information out there. The Internet I love is the Internet that I was able to turn to and say, hey, I wonder where Amy is these days, and reconnect with her and seven years later get married. It is the internet where queer and trans kids in my community can go online and find people who are going through the same experiences that they're going through in high school, find out about the summer camps that they can go to, and they can bond with other trans us. This is what social media should be about. Social media doesn't have to be terrible, and it is not our fault. It has become terrible because some very powerful people with some very good financial motivations have figured out how to make money off it being terrible. But it will continue to be terrible until we take responsibility for it not being terrible.
00:36:34
Speaker 2: I have started to hate social media. I've basically stopped using it, which has been pretty good for my mental health, but it also means that it's much harder for me to stay in tune what my parents or my other family members are into. So what if we could just plug something into social media and make it a little bit better. What if Ethan's middleware project could make you say, you know what, I can tolerate Facebook now It's probably not the only solution, and it might not be for everyone, but I do think that it's an option that, at the very least we should be allowed to try. Anyway, that's it for this one. And by the way, if you like this episode and you want to know more about why it is that the Internet got so bad, check out my interview with Tim Woo. The link for that, plus links to Ethan's work, is in the show notes. Thank you again to Ethan for breaking all this down for us, and thank you once again for listening to another episode at kill Switch. If you want to talk, you can email us at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC, or on Instagram. We're at kill switchpod. And if you dug this one, I think someone else might like it too, you could send it to them, or if you're too shy to share us with your friends, you could write a review. It helps other people find the show, which helps us keep doing our thing. Kill Switch is hosted by Me Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Shena Ozaki, dar Luck Potts, and Julia Nutter. A theme song is by me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixed the show. From Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Oswa Lashin One Guest Shot to Gadur and Kate Osborne from iHeart. Our executive producers are Katrina Norville and Nikki Detour. Catch on the next one, Goodbye,
Speaker 1: In the nineteen nineties, we had this idea that the Internet was just this open space and we could try all sorts of nonsense there. Piero Midjar wants to sell his pez collection, and you end up with eBay, and then people realize that people are ripping each other off on eBay, and so you end up with an escro service, and that turns into PayPal, and like, all these things happen, and they happen really really fast. I want us to get back to that moment of thinking things are possible.
00:00:41
Speaker 2: Ethan Zuckerman is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He's also something of an Internet activist, and.
00:00:47
Speaker 1: I work on a whole lot of projects trying to make the Internet a better place, which I still believe can happen despite all the evidence of the contrary.
00:00:56
Speaker 2: You know what, you may be one of the last soldiers standing on that battlefield.
00:00:59
Speaker 1: I know, man, I know, I know it's a lonely place to be. But you know, the great thing about being a professor is that I can try to win over students to the cause, and every so often, you know, we get a win. Every so often. People are excited about this idea that things actually can change, and I think a lot of it just hass to do with reframing our thinking.
00:01:21
Speaker 2: Ethan is one of the most unusual professors I've ever spoken to. So, first off, if you're of a certain age, I guarantee you that you've seen his work. It might have made you mad, It might have made you money, it might have done both at the same time. The second, Ethan really really likes Facebook, so much so that he sued Facebook, and you know what, after listening to what he has to say, you might want him to win from Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is kill Switch. I'm Dexter Thomas.
00:02:04
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Good bye.
00:02:46
Speaker 2: Ethan Zuckerman wants to fix the Internet. But before we could talk about how he would do that, we need to understand how we got here. We've talked about this here before on the show, but early on the Internet was a much more optimistic place until money basically ruined it. If you haven't caught our episode with Tim, we'll definitely check that one out too. So Ethan started his career during those early dot com days. He was one of the first employees at a company called Tripod, and Tripod was most well known for being a place where you could build your own homepage, which back then was a really exciting thing. There were all kinds of communities popping up online and Tripod was helping to foster that. But in order to do that, they needed money, and so they started looking at advertising. I was a GeoCities person. Yep, that's what I was on. We're talking pre my Space here, but I remember.
00:03:36
Speaker 1: We're talking pre my Space and that was our leading competitor at Tripods. So I'm not going to hold that against you, Dexter, but you know, that is a bit of a you know, you did just a little bit of a Yankees Mets thing there. You gotta be careful about.
00:03:48
Speaker 2: God, Hey, listen, I'm just trying to be honest with you.
00:03:51
Speaker 1: I'm just fair enough. That's where I went.
00:03:53
Speaker 2: But you know, I mean, as I was entering this phase of Wow, there's all these other people made things, and I would like to make things too. Very early in that stage, I realized that that was always going to mean there's gonna be ads next to whatever I did, or on top of whatever I did, or inside of whatever I did. And that started to feel very normal.
00:04:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, So like roll back to GeoCities and I'm going to tell you what's going on a tripod.
00:04:23
Speaker 3: Right.
00:04:24
Speaker 1: So, so our biggest rival geo cities is West Coast. We're East Coast. So there's beef. We know each other, we're you know, we're in touch with one another. But we're all trying the same ideas. We try a subscription service. We've got it. You know, you can sign up, you can get extra space, you can get premium customer service. Nobody wants that. We try merch We make the tea shirts, we make the hats. We're psyched that people want to identify with Tripod. We think that's a way that we're going to go. We go with sponsorship. We actually have sponsors who are like these are probably high school and college students. You know what high school and college students really love is mutual funds. Calvert Mutual Funds comes on and says, we want to sponsor people to go and get mutual funds. The only thing that works for us dexter is advertising, and the whole industry moves there at the same time and at a certain point, if you're trying something new, if you're trying a different business model, your pitch to an investor gets very tricky. What the investors want to hear is how many page views are you getting a month and how fast is it growing? And because we have eighteen million people like you who put home pages on the site, we are getting the eighth most page views on the Internet and it's growing something like ten percent a month. And companies like Yahoo are coming and knocking on our door and saying we would like to do some business. We are like, you know, kids in our twenties in the top floor of a plastic factory in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and like Jerry Yang from Yahoo is calling us, and we're like, yeah, I guess advertising is the way to go.
00:06:12
Speaker 2: So advertising is the way to go might not be the most idealistic phrase ever, but again, advertising made Tripod work, and it also made some pretty interesting things possible.
00:06:23
Speaker 1: The other thing it's an amazing model for is for people who are unbanked, who are not part of the mainstream financial system, who are in countries where the amounts of money would be very challenging. One thing you probably did not know when you were fooling around with that Tripod homepage is that our number two country for users was Malaysia. And what was going on in Malaysia at that point was most of the political opposition was using Tripod to organize and it became the voice of the Malaysian REFORMASSEI movement, And those folks might have been able to afford official websites somewhere, but they weren't really set up for transacting with Malaysian users. They probably didn't have credit cards, they didn't have the payment mechanisms. So advertising is a great way to help out people who are coming from different parts of the world, who have different resources.
00:07:23
Speaker 2: It wasn't just Tripod. Advertising became the default model for supporting publishing on the Internet, which shouldn't be surprising. They were just adapting what print magazines and newspapers were doing.
00:07:34
Speaker 1: Ads at this point are being sold by what's called CPM, and CPM is cost per mill which you know, confusingly enough, is cost per thousand, right. It's a term coming out of the newspaper and magazine industry, And so if you want to buy a page in Wired, for instance, you're basically being told by Wired, well, here's our circulation. You know, we're reaching fifty thousand people multiply that out by the cost per thousand that's what you're gonna pay for a page. And Wired we come in nineteen ninety five and go, we are so much better than that page. And Wired you can click on our ad and it will take you to your website and people might spend hours with you, not just that moment on the page, and you can take their name and address. So we are worth so much more than that magazine ad. So we start out pricing the way that magazine ads are. We're is charging like fifty bucks for one thousand impressions. And then people realize that there's ads all.
00:08:36
Speaker 2: Over the web.
00:08:38
Speaker 1: You can go wherever you want and get ad inventory, and so suddenly it drops to like a dollar per thousand impressions. And then Overture, which is a company that's affiliated with Yahoo, comes in and says, you know, the ads that you don't click on, those shouldn't count, and so then it moves to cost per click, and that's an entirely different space. In the course of five years, we go from ads being fifty two one hundred dollars for one thousand impressions to being twenty five cents for a thousand impressions to being impressions don't matter. We will pay anywhere from a penny to ten bucks per collect depending on what the ad is.
00:09:22
Speaker 2: And you know where this goes. Ads not only became an escapable on the Internet, but as clicks become the metric of success, you have to start listening to what the advertisers want. And so here's the thing about Ethan. He wasn't just a pioneer in the early dot com boom. He helped facilitate it by figuring out a way to keep those advertisers shilling out that money for our websites. He essentially invented was now known as the pop up ad. To be clear, he regrets that he did this the innovation of pop up ads, and we should call it an innovation.
00:09:54
Speaker 1: I think I'm not going to let you get away with innovation. First of all, come up ads no, no, no, no, sorry, I'm sorry. Pop up ads are, to use a technical term, a Cluegi hack. It is an inelegant solution to a problem, and unfortunately, like a lot of cluegi hacks, it still persists, although thank god, not as much as it used to. So here's the story on the pop up bed. Let's go back to nineteen ninety six. We've got an increasing number of user homepages. They have become the center of our business. Tripod thought it was going to be like a magazine and educational site for young people. My friend Jeff Vanderklute, without my permission, I should add, puts up a homepage builder. We discover a couple months later, when our bandwidth bill has gone through the ceiling, that it is the most popular thing on our site. So it's completely accidental. We get into the business completely by accident. But by nineteen ninety six, my boss Bo Peebet understands that this is the tail that's wagging the dog. He understands that this is where our growth is coming from. And he's trying to sell ad inventory on this. And we've got ad execs going out and they are showing random homepages with ads on them, and often those ads are showing up on content that the advertisers do not want to be associated with. Sometimes it's extremism, sometimes it's pornography. It is the web, right and unfortunately, you know, the Internet has been an if he placed going back into the nineteen seventies, so Bo comes to me and says, look, we got to run ads against the homepages. But as long as the ad is on the homepage, the advertiser feels like they're endorsing them. What can you do? And I invent the nav bar. The navbar is a vertical panel. It has a two hundred by two hundred add on it, It has Tripod branding, it has some navigation links, and so it's like, hey, here's Dexter's homepage, but also here's some Tripod branding, some navigation. Oh and by the way, an ad. And they're separate windows. So it's very clear that the ad is against Tripod and your homepage is your space.
00:12:10
Speaker 2: So the pop up ad was created to solve a problem. Advertisers were scared that their ads would show up somewhere unsavory, and the pop up helped to alleviate that fear by creating that separation so that they would keep that money flowing.
00:12:23
Speaker 1: And I'm like, this is great, I've worked it out. It's a solution. We put up the little piece of JavaScript, we insert it into every one of the homepages that's out there. We got a little pushback. People are sort of like, you know, what's going on? Why is there this extra weird window here, But we don't get a ton of pushback. Your guys at GeoCities take my code, they turn it from vertical into horizontal. They take my polite little two hundred by two hundred AD and they turn it into you a full withd like seven hundred pixel AD and there's no branding or anything. It's just an AD. So I do the first pop up, and it is a pop up AD. So I'm absolutely owning up to it. But it was trying to be maybe a bit more than that. The essence of it gets stripped down to a pop up AD, and then it's off to the races, right like then people are doing these pop unders. They're doing pop ups that can't be minimized, so on and so forth, and you have really the scourge of the nineteen nineties and early two thousands internet. And let me just say just to be clear on this. When we were talking before this interview, I told you I did not want to do an interview on pop up ads. And part of it is that it's a little too easy. It's a little like you know, look, it's the Robert Oppenheimer of the Internet who hates his creation. Let me be honest with you, Dexter, I get hate mail. Every time someone writes a story. I get death threats. I have a relationship with my local police department in this small town in western Massachusetts where they know not to call a swap team to my residence because almost every time I do an interview on pop ups that gets some exposure, we get an arm response call. So it's a thing, and it's interesting. It's definitely the sort of thing that I did not anticipate, either when building the pop up or twenty years later, owning up to building the pop up and talking about it as a problem.
00:14:26
Speaker 2: Seeing all the anger that gets directed in Ethan is. Aside from being really terrifying, it's also kind of confusing because really you're mad about pop ups in twenty twenty six, like, are you still dialing up from your mom's dell in the living room?
00:14:40
Speaker 1: Yell?
00:14:40
Speaker 2: Are mad at the wrong dude? Because first off, pop ups didn't even last that long. We're going to come back to that later, but the industry has long since moved on to something that has zero to do with what anyone at tripod dot com could ever even thought of back then. Traditional banner ads, which again, this is the thing that Ethan was trying to replace. Those came back, and they came back stronger. Remember, the original problem was that banner ads might be irrelevant to the website that they were on, and thus irrelevant to you, the user. But the industry figured out how to make those ads much more relevant to you by watching everything you do on the Internet. And this is where Ethan started thinking a little differently.
00:15:22
Speaker 1: The problem with advertising, as I see it, is that the people who have been trying to make money out of advertising have tried to add every possible piece of information to the equation. They want to know where you are, They want to know where else on the Internet that you've been, They want to know what you've done, what you've searched for previously. And so they turned this Internet, this super exciting space that we're building in the nineteen nineties, into a surveillance machine. My friend Chan Regenda Nikolucci, and I started looking at this and saying, what if you could get eighty percent of what you wanted with so much less of the surveillance.
00:16:08
Speaker 2: Suddenly Ethan had a new mission to keep the lights on the Internet without having to sell out your audience. That's after the break. So years later, Ethan sees how the Internet has grown into a surveillance machine, partially in service of the advertising that still drives the Internet, and he started to think, could we do anything about this?
00:16:37
Speaker 1: My attitude in some ways is, well, can't we just end advertising?
00:16:41
Speaker 3: Right? Like?
00:16:42
Speaker 1: Advertisings a terrible model. We're paying with our attention. But here's the thing about ads. Ads turn out to be a fantastic model for a product or service that you don't know that you're willing to pay for yet. So imagine that someone is launching something new. Right, Someone in Western Massachusetts where I live, says, I don't like the way local media is working. I'm going to create a new news product. It's going to be video first, and it's going to be put together by citizens. And I'm like, well, that might be interesting, but I'm not ready to put up ten bucks a month for it. Let me see how it's going first, and under the let me see how it's going first. Advertising is a great model.
00:17:27
Speaker 2: Okay, It's probably not realistic to think that the Internet could ever be totally free of ads, especially if the content is being provided for free. I mean, somebody has to get paid, right. So a few years ago, Ethan and a colleague came up with a new proposal. If ads are going to be on the Internet, and they're crucial for it to function, could we make them somehow more ethical.
00:17:47
Speaker 1: And I'm going to get very personal about this for a moment, because it's the example that we actually use in the paper. I am an alcoholic. I am nine years sober, but well through my twenties, thirties, forties, I drank all and I was one of those drinkers where it was like part of my personality, Like I collected scotches and you know, I researched the interesting bourbons, and so there's a whole digital trail associated with me as a drinker. I go on to Twitter, and Twitter loves advertising booze to me. They love putting up ads trying to get me to buy a nice, high end bourbon. I can't escape that data doppelganger. I can't escape that other drunk version of myself, even though I'm now off into the future. What we end up saying is that you do have a right to be forgotten, not in the sense of like you have a right necessarily be scrubbed off the Internet. But you have a right to change your mind. And so what we end up proposing is forgetful advertising, and forgetful advertising basically says you can know anything about me in this one session. You can look at the different pages that I go to on the website. You can look at the time, you can look at the date, you can look at the location, you can look at what I'm searching for. You can look at the context of those pages and use that to target an ad. What you cannot do is look at what I was looking at a month ago, a year ago, ten years ago. And we think that, yeah, it'll be less accurate, but we think it's a more ethical way to do it. And we end up suggesting that it's something like free trade coffee. There are some percentage of people who are willing to pay the money to make sure that human beings aren't being exploited, you know, for the product that we're drinking every morning. And so what we were thinking was maybe there will be websites that are willing to say we're going to do this. I'll tell you my first attempt on this was The Guardian, the British newspaper. They run all of these expos's on online surveillance, they run all the stuff about Edward Snowden, and I end up in a session with the publisher there, Alan Russbritcher, and I say, Alan, I'm looking at these stories on the Guardian and here are sixty trackers that are sending the information. Then I'm looking at this on the Guardian like it's time for you to get rid of these things. You reading the Edward Snowden article and there's trackers again. Yeah, but just the irony of that, Like it feels like if you're going to be The Guardian and a validly progressive publication, you might decide I might opt out of this form of advertising and into a more ethical form of advertising.
00:20:38
Speaker 2: Okay, so I just want to echo the last thing you said, ethical form of advertising. Might have remind you that those are not.
00:20:47
Speaker 1: Where it's the go together very often.
00:20:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, ethical and advertising. I can't think of the last time somebody said that to me.
00:20:53
Speaker 1: Let's explore it for half a second, right, So let's go and be Google for a bit. Okay, it's the middle of winter here in western Massachusetts. My roof is leaking, because everybody's roof is leaking. I go onto Google and I search roof repair Pittsfield, Massachusetts. There are a whole bunch of roofing contractors who really want my phone call, and they want my phone call because so I call them up. There's a decent chance that they're going to make five to ten thousand dollars fixing my roof. That ad click is worth anywhere between five and fifty bucks in cost per customer acquisition. Google loves that ad click, and frankly, some of the advertisers, the advertisers are like, man, here is a qualified lead outside of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to go repair a roof. That's ethical advertising, right, That is advertising that actually helps both me, somebody looking for a service, someone trying to provide a service, and the broker in the middle of those things. It is surveillance. It is aware that I am near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, so there is a certain amount of surveillance, but it's actually meeting a need.
00:22:10
Speaker 2: In their paper on Forgetful Advertising, Ethan and his colleague talk about what they call a DPI, a digital public infrastructure. So think of it like this, Facebook and Google ad Sense might just started out as little tools that could help you talk to your college friends or maybe help you sell t shirts. But nowadays, if you want to sell anything online you have to use those platforms. There really is no alternative. I mean, imagine if the only way to drive from Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles was to take a toll road. You can't bike, you can't walk, you can't take a bus, you can't take a train, You can only take that expensive toll road. There should be an alternative Forgetful advertising is just alternative infrastructure. Again, they're not saying that they want to abolish Google ad Sense, They're just building another option for people who prefer something, as Ethan would put it, more ethical. But Ethan's work on fixing the Internet doesn't stop there. He's got another idea, and believe it or not, it kind of goes back to that hack that he's most famous for.
00:23:12
Speaker 1: Here's the interesting thing. Unless you are hanging out in certain corners of the Internet and man that's between you and your browser, you are probably not seeing a lot of pop up ads these stays. And there's a couple of reasons behind that. The first one is that every modern web browser has a feature to allow you to block pop up ads, and that is the simplest example of middleware that we know of. So middleware is software that you, as a user can install on your web browser or potentially on your phone to give you more control over a service. So the classic piece of middleware is a pop up blocker, which is, hey, this site wants to open a window. You can choose not to have that opened if you prefer. So, first of all, it actually shows us that things can get better. We're not so much drowning and pop ups. We're now drowning and other stuff. We're drowning in video AutoPlay ads. Sites like Facebook work very actively to disable ad blockers, but pop ups and ads in general were really the first time that users were sort of like, you know what, we actually need some more control in this situation. So let's start building the software that gives us increasing amounts of control.
00:24:42
Speaker 2: And even once you use this concept of middleware to fix social media, we'll explain how after the break. So I just want to read back to you a headline of an article that you wrote in twenty twenty four. The headline reads, I love Facebook. That's why I'm suing Meta. Yeah, either, please explain this to me. I guess I can come across as kind of aggressive every so often.
00:25:19
Speaker 1: So I'm a Facebook user. I use it pretty much every day. I got married thanks to Facebook. Tenish years ago. I was divorced. I reconnected with a college friend of mine. She was living in Houston, Texas. I was out in western Massachusetts. But I looked her up on Facebook and we started chatting and I invited her to talk that I was giving down at Rice University. Seven years later, we're married. So thank you Facebook. You know, I appreciate that, and I think as far as keeping people loosely in touch with one another, particularly you know, for me as a gen xer, it's actually been an incredible tool. However, Comma, like everything else, it is becoming more and more algorithmically driven. And these days on Facebook, I am a lot less likely to be seeing updates from my friends about their kids. I instead get a lot of reels just trying to capture as much of my attention as possible. And so I got really interested in this idea that maybe I could have more control over Facebook. Friend of mine in the UK, guy named Louis Barclay, wrote a piece of software called unfollow everything. It did something super simple. It went into Facebook. It kept your whole friend's graph. It just said I'm going to unfollow all of them, and eventually what you end up with is an empty feed. You just don't have anyone that you're following anymore. People liked it, Louie liked it, other people started using it, and Facebook said, Louis, you got to take this down otherwise we're going to come after you and you court. And by the way, that long click rap agreement that you signed onto makes you responsible for our legal fees. So what Facebook's contract in the UK says that if you lose litigation against them, you are responsible for the legal fees incurred by Facebook. Wow. So Louis looks at this and says, yeah, I'm not taking that gamble. I could be financially ruined. But he goes to a group called the Night First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and they say, what if we tried to do this again in the United States? And I said, you know, I love this idea because this is an example of middleware. So Night First Amendments that comes to me and says, do you want to try to put this in front of a federal court, and the idea is, I will put together an experiment. The experiment is we will recruit a whole bunch of users, they will try using an updated version of unfollow Everything, and they will let us know whether they like that experience, and we will study whether it changes how much they use Facebook. We then brought it to a federal court and said, hey, we want to do this. The last time someone did this, Facebook came down on them like a ton of bricks. Before we invest our time and money on this, we'd like a ruling that this is legal. The federal court said, nice, tryprof You're asking us to rule on something that hasn't happened yet. That's not how the US court system works. Build something and we'll let you know what happens. So I have now been in the process of trying to figure out how to build what my friend Louie built. The trick is in the couple of years since Louie built that software, Facebook has put a lot of people working on making middlewhere impossible. Specifically, the middleware that they care about is ad blockers, and they have a whole team working to make it almost impossible to block ads. On Facebook, and the same techniques that I need to use to do and follow everything are the same techniques that ad blockers use. So we're still very much engaged in battle. But it's me and a couple of brave students that ums Amherst versus Facebook, all of its resources and all of its lawyers.
00:29:37
Speaker 2: I don't know too many people who are willing to go against Meta like that, but if this thing that Ethan is working on comes out, I would try it. I mean, this would be the one thing that could bring me back to Facebook. But Ethan isn't advocating for everyone to just sit back and wait for him to swoop in and save the day. There are things that you and me can do right now for ourselves. It's just going to take some work.
00:29:59
Speaker 1: So the funny thing is you can do things about it right So here's a couple of things you can do about it. A lot of people have gotten off of Twitter because Twitter is now controlled by a right wing extremist troll and it is not the community that.
00:30:17
Speaker 3: It used to be.
00:30:18
Speaker 1: When people get off Twitter, they tend to go one of two different places, and they actually have both really good things to talk about with them. Blue Sky has a lot of the functionality that Twitter used to have, and it's got some very cool functionality around being able to do custom feeds. You can go into Blue Sky and you can actually have a lot of control, very much like middleware, except that it's actually built into the tool. It's built in as a function. People are using their ability to do feeds to do very focused collections. There's a collection called Black Sky for people who are trying to get more color in their Twitter feeds. There are people doing it to push women, to push voices from the developing world. It's a really exciting set of tools and I'm a huge supporter of it. The trick is Blue Sky is still run by a corporation. They're subject to the laws of capitalism, so on and so forth. So let me introduce you to mastadon. Mastodon is an open source alternative to Twitter. You can run a mast it on server on your own server. You probably don't want to. It's a decent amount of work, but I am part of a group called social dot co Op. This is a masked it on server that is run as a co op. I pay seventy five bucks a year for my membership to it. The leadership of it, the people who do moderation. It is elected out of the community. People are asked to put in volunteer time to take on moderation duties at different points. It is a different model for doing this. The trick is these models are small. They're getting used by a couple million people, not by two billion people. These models don't have ad budgets. They're not going out and buying Super Bowl ads. And we got to tell the story. We got to get on podcasts and tell people that there's another way to do this. It doesn't have to suck as bad as it does. It really doesn't. So here are three things that we can do. We need to force these big platforms to allow for middlework. We need to make it a law that you can use something to give you more control over TikTok or Facebook or something along those lines. Second, we would do interoperability, so if you don't want to use TikTok's app to see TikTok, you can still get the content out of it, but you can do it through a browser on your phone that you control. And then third, we got to get people psyched about building and governing their own online spaces. Right now, social dot co op is not a good alternative to Twitter or to blue Sky. There just aren't enough people on mastadon. But if I have a client on my phone that I control and I can merge them all together, Hey, let me see what people are talking about on Twitter, let me see Facebook, let me see Insta, let me see all of it and my own little social network at the same place. And I can go in and say, you know what, and prioritize my local news and you know what, I'm probably not hearing enough from women in the global South, So you know, adding a feed like that, now I've got my custom feed. It's local, it's prioritizing the voices I want to hear, it's incorporating all of these things. This is technically possible. We have shown we can do it. It is a policy issue, and it is a policy issue that's very hard to make progress on in the United States because these very powerful platforms are run by men who are sitting with Donald Trump at his inauguration period. These companies figured out that they needed to stay on the right side of the most powerful person in the United States right now, so that we don't get a better internet.
00:34:24
Speaker 2: What you're talking about is I mean even the phrase a better Internet. I mean, I'm sure you've seen that a lot of people's solution is just get off of social media. It's really interesting to me that you're actually advocating for in some ways basically saving social media for people who are trying to leave it.
00:34:44
Speaker 1: Social media is worth saving. I'm a Type one diabetic. I'm an insulin dependent diabetic. I've had diabetes since I was thirteen years old. I'm fifty three years old. Now my body's changing. I'm trying to figure out how to manage my diabetes, lose way, keep up my running. And one of the things that I rely on to do this is the t one D community on Reddit, where I can come on and say, hey, I go for runs in the morning and my blood sugar goes up. What's up with that? And someone comes in and says, it's called a cortisol dump. Here's the scientific paper on it. Find out more about it. That is the Internet that I fell in love with in nineteen eighty nine when I showed up at my university and discovered that I could log onto incredible amounts of information out there. The Internet I love is the Internet that I was able to turn to and say, hey, I wonder where Amy is these days, and reconnect with her and seven years later get married. It is the internet where queer and trans kids in my community can go online and find people who are going through the same experiences that they're going through in high school, find out about the summer camps that they can go to, and they can bond with other trans us. This is what social media should be about. Social media doesn't have to be terrible, and it is not our fault. It has become terrible because some very powerful people with some very good financial motivations have figured out how to make money off it being terrible. But it will continue to be terrible until we take responsibility for it not being terrible.
00:36:34
Speaker 2: I have started to hate social media. I've basically stopped using it, which has been pretty good for my mental health, but it also means that it's much harder for me to stay in tune what my parents or my other family members are into. So what if we could just plug something into social media and make it a little bit better. What if Ethan's middleware project could make you say, you know what, I can tolerate Facebook now It's probably not the only solution, and it might not be for everyone, but I do think that it's an option that, at the very least we should be allowed to try. Anyway, that's it for this one. And by the way, if you like this episode and you want to know more about why it is that the Internet got so bad, check out my interview with Tim Woo. The link for that, plus links to Ethan's work, is in the show notes. Thank you again to Ethan for breaking all this down for us, and thank you once again for listening to another episode at kill Switch. If you want to talk, you can email us at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC, or on Instagram. We're at kill switchpod. And if you dug this one, I think someone else might like it too, you could send it to them, or if you're too shy to share us with your friends, you could write a review. It helps other people find the show, which helps us keep doing our thing. Kill Switch is hosted by Me Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Shena Ozaki, dar Luck Potts, and Julia Nutter. A theme song is by me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixed the show. From Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Oswa Lashin One Guest Shot to Gadur and Kate Osborne from iHeart. Our executive producers are Katrina Norville and Nikki Detour. Catch on the next one, Goodbye,
