The Problem With Cyberlibertarianism w/ Chris Gilliard

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What's closer to the truth is that they have been right wingers all along, and that this so-called heel turn, you know, because they haven't received enough praise is like a very convenient fiction.
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From last week.
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It seems that some listeners don't think I was equivocal enough in saying that Elon Musk was definitely doing a Nazi salute.
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So if you have any doubt about that, I just want to make it very clear that that is what I think.
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And what I was trying to get to with the comment that I was making about his Nazi salute is that I think, on the one hand, yes, he was very much doing a Nazi salute that was a message to his supporters, to MAGA supporters to show that he is on their side and that this is the kind of program that they are trying to move forward on.
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But then alongside that, he can also take advantage of that moment to start trolling the libs and saying, of course I wasn't doing a Nazi salute.
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Why would you even suggest that?
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Anyone who suggests it is clearly buying into some like conspiracy theories or whatever.
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So it works for him on both sides of this, which is not to say it wasn't a Nazi salute, but just to say that there are different ways to read it and different ways that it is useful to him, even though he has done it to use it in a certain way.
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So anyway, just so that is out of the way and you're clear on how I feel about it.
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If you want to know more, I've also written something about it that you can find in the show notes.
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So, with that said, this week my guest is Chris Gilliard.
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Chris has been on the show in the past.
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He is the co-director of the Critical Internet Studies Institute and the author of the forthcoming book, Luxury Surveillance, which will be out through MIT Press in 2026.
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Now, in this episode, we are not actually talking about some of his work specifically, but a book that came out near the end of last year called Cyber Libertarianism, The Right Wing Politics of Digital Technology, written by David Columbia.
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Now, David unfortunately passed away in 2023 of cancer, so he can't be here to actually talk about this book with us.
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And so since Chris knew him well, since they collaborated together, I felt like it would be a good opportunity to have Chris on the show to dig into this book, talk about some of its core themes, and also how it's important to think about this concept of cyber libertarianism and to think back about the ideas that we have kind of accepted about the internet for the past few decades, how they might be misleading, especially in this moment where we are seeing this very clear alignment between the tech industry, the tech billionaires, and the political far right, whether it is in the United States or increasingly in many other countries as well.
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You know, we just saw Elon Musk appear at an AF Day, Alternative for Germany, the neo-Nazi Party rally.
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And that's just one example in a very long line of things that he has been tweeting, saying, and acting on in recent months and years.
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You know, I think that this episode pairs well with my conversation with Becca Lewis from a couple of months ago, where we dug into the early years of the internet, its privatization, the policy discussions around what that was going to look like, and how so many of the ideas that we have about the internet today actually come out of these really right-wing groups, but have been kind of normalized and repositioned as things that everyone should be accepting, as these foundational aspects of like internet freedom or whatever.
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And, you know, this book, Cyber Libertarianism that David wrote, really calls a lot of that into question, goes back into these histories, goes back into the politics of the internet to look at how some of these assertions that we've had and that we've kind of accepted over the past few decades are things that, you know, it's really time to take a second look at and to consider whether they're fit for purpose for this new age and for this age where the companies who built this specific internet are really turning against us.
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So one of the things that I say in the show and that I want to reiterate here is that there's not every aspect of what David writes in the book that I completely agree with.
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I think there are places where he goes beyond what I tend to feel.
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For example, on talking about Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, you know, people whose politics I don't agree with, but who I think did important things.
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But with that said, I do think it's important to approach a book like David's with an open mind, given what is going on today, to start to seriously think what a modern internet politics looks like that begins to reject and unpack and even challenge these right-wing framings that we have had around the internet and accepted around the internet for far too long.
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So with that said, I was very happy to have Chris back on the show to discuss this book with me.
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As soon as I started to think about this book and who I wanted to talk to about it, you know, Chris was at the top of my list.
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And so I'm really happy that he was able to come on the show.
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You know, our recording got delayed a little bit because I was a bit busy and didn't get a chance to finish up the book, but I'm happy to finally be having this conversation.
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And I hope that you find it insightful and that even if you don't agree with everything that we say, that it helps you to think about where these ideas came from and why we need to reassess them.
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So, with that said, if you enjoy this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star view on your podcast platform of choice.
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Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation.
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Chris, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us.
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Oh, thank you so much for having me.
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It's good to be back.
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It's always a pleasure to chat with you.
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I think it's been like a little while since you were last on the show, which is like totally my bad, because I like talking to you a lot.
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And I feel like part of that was I would see your work on like Twitter a lot, and then there was like this shakeup of social media, and for like for a little while, I feel like I wasn't seeing your like great insights as often.
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But now, like we're both posted on Blue Sky.
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I see you all the time, and it's like I need to rekindle this like learning from Chris because I always get so much out of the engagement.
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Oh, I appreciated that.
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You know, I can I can say now I was one of the first people to leave.
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Yeah.
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I left the actual day it was is acquired.
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It's it's wild to think that that was like so long ago.
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Like it doesn't feel like that long ago.
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But we're actually not really talking about your work necessarily today.
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Listeners of the show might know.
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They might have heard my interview with David Columbia a few years ago, but he has a new book out, you know, a kind of posthumous book, the last book that he was working on before he passed away, called Cyber Libertarianism: The Right Wing Politics of Digital Technology.
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Obviously, it's really disappointing that David is not here to discuss it because I feel like so much of the work that he has been doing and so much of what he's been writing about for such a long time is really like coming to fruition in front of our eyes right now.
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But for that reason, I did want to have a discussion about the book so that we could dig into it.
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And I figured that you would be the perfect person to do that because you, you know, collaborated with David.
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You knew David, you worked with David.
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So I was wondering, you know, to start, if you could talk to us a bit about David and his work, you know, the collaboration that you had together and and why he felt that this was an important subject for us to be thinking about and for us to know about and be discussing.
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David was uh a dear friend, and almost every day I'm kind of affected and think about what he would say if he were to be here and and look at what's going on right now.
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We collaborated on on several pieces, most notably uh our stuff on luxury surveillance.
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And I think that this book is in a way a culmination of so many of the things that he's been talking and writing about for decades.
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There are pieces of it in lots of his work, right?
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But I think this is the sort of epic piece that that collects all of that in one spot.
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It's really prophetic in so many ways, which again, we used to text every day.
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We always would text memes back to each other and things like that.
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And so I often think every time there's some announcement about you know what some tech baron is doing or you know, some new policy or some weird quasi-governmental agency that people claim to be launching, you know, I think about what he would say.
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So yeah, I really miss him, but uh, I'm honored to be here to to talk about the book.
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Yeah, and I and I think we all miss out on not having that analysis and that response over him for what he would be thinking about all these developments and seeing it all come to fruition.
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And of course, this was you know a book that he had been working on, like in fits and starts and in pieces for a while, as you said, right?
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The people who listen to this show might know him best from his book about Bitcoin and crypto from 2016, the politics of Bitcoin, software is right-wing extremism.
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And at the time, I feel like that kind of analysis felt novel, felt like it was really kind of pushing a narrative of what crypto and Bitcoin were that a lot of people weren't willing to accept at the time.
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And then we see like how the crypto industry were engaging in the election last year, let alone, you know, other things that they've been doing in the past few years.
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And it's like in 2016, David was spot on about this, even though a lot of people didn't want to accept it.
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And now, you know, this book, Cyber Libertarianism, came out in November talking about these very deep linkages between tech and the far right.
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And it's like right as it drops in November, we're seeing that really come to fruition in so many ways.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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I mean, it it's it's very prophetic.
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The other thing I point to is about two and a half years ago, he wrote one of his last essays was called Chat GPT Should Not Exist.
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Again, I I cite that and refer to it pretty consistently because it named a lot of the things I think people were, again, not either ready to hear or didn't realize, but so much of it stands up to analysis even today, uh, given how the AI industry is is forming.
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Yeah, no, I I think a really important point, and I'll have to include a link to that in the show notes so people can go take a look at it.
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So let's get into the book itself, right?
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And let's start with the title, because you know, I think understanding this concept of cyber libertarianism is going to be key to you know the discussion that we're having in exploring what is in this book.
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And, you know, maybe I would say, first of all, before we dig into it, that I think that there's so much here that is important to understand as we think about and as we maybe reconceptualize how we think about technology in the tech industry in this moment, you know, seeing what the tech billionaires are doing and maybe recognizing that some of the narratives that we had about this weren't as accurate as maybe we've come to believe over the past couple of decades because of the types of ideas that we had about the internet itself.
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And so I think that is why a book like this is so important in this moment, right?
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In giving us the tools to start thinking about the notions that we had about internet policy, internet politics, you know, digital technology, the impacts that all those things were going to have on the world, and to say, wait, you know, were all these things I assume the internet was going to do?
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Like, is that really, you know, something that made sense?
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Or where did these ideas come from in the first place?
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And I feel like this book gives us that kind of history that we need to start to unpack those things, start to reassess them, and to start to say, you know, maybe I had this somewhat wrong.
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And if we're actually going to understand and be able to take on the tech industry in its current form, you know, some of this stuff needs to be looked at with fresh eyes so that we can develop a new understanding.
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One of the most important things I think we can take from the book uh is the way he talks about cyber libertarianism is that it's an analytical category, right?
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Like and and so I think that that's an important framework to even understand when we begin talking about it.
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In a lot of ways, tries to, as you said, diagnose a lot of what is going on now and forces us to question a lot of the assumptions we've had about these technologies and the people who developed them and promoted them, but also, yeah, about their capabilities and the longstanding belief by a lot of people they are inherently liberatory, which is yeah, a thing that he dices up pretty effectively.
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Yeah, and that almost seems like weird to believe in hindsight.
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Like, why would we just believe that the internet was going to be liberation and could not be like seized by the worst forces in society for their own benefit?
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It's like, why did this become what defined how we under like, you know, obviously there are particular interests that wanted us to think that way and it served them to do so?
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Let's get into cyber libertarianism.
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So, how would you define cyber libertarianism as David discussed it?
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I of course have notes here that I can pull from, but I I'm gonna see what you say first.
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I'm gonna cheat because I wrote this down.
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I knew you would ask me this.
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Uh, you know, and so I I isolated what he says, right?
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And so I'm in order to do it justice, I'm just going to read it.
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He says, in one sense, like cyber libertarianism, as it is practiced across the political spectrum, can be summarized into a single paradoxical tenet.
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Mass adoption of ubiquitous computerization produces social and political freedom.
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Therefore, in the name of freedom, society has no choice about whether to exercise its power by any means other than markets or market-like mechanisms.
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And so, since I cheated, I'll expand on a little bit, right?
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Or at least talk about how I understand that, referencing what I just mentioned, that there has been an overwhelming narrative that not only are does sort of technology equal freedom or liberation, but that the government should not have any role in curtailing that in any way, shape, or form.
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That any power the governments enact in order to place limits in the quotation marks on technology is inherently tyrannical and is something to be resisted.
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I hate to keep referring to this, right?
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But it I think it'll be a consistent theme throughout our discussion.
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I think we can see so much of that in the present moment.
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Uh we can see it uh as the tech barons they line up with this uh incoming administration.
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We can see it in the the different blogs and posts and articles that these folks have written saying these exact same things, but saying them not in a critical fashion, but asserting them as the way things ought to be.
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They might call them manifestos.
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That's the root of the argument.
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I mean, it's a 400-page book, so there's more to it than that.
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But I think that those two or three sentences kind of capture the kernel of what it is.
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Yeah, I think really well said.
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And I also pulled a quote, but it's a slightly different one than the one you pulled, but is still along the same lines, which is quote, cyber libertarianism is a commitment to the belief that digital technology is or should be beyond the oversight of democratic governance, meaning democratic political sovereignty.
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And, you know, that I think that really resonates with some of the things I've been talking a lot about lately and and writing about.
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But, you know, I think it also picks up on what you were saying, right?
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This notion that digital technology is this inherent good for society, right?
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We need to let it roll out and we need to enable its rollout so that, you know, we get all of these positive benefits that are going to come from it, the freedom and the liberation and you know, the freedom of speech and all this kind of stuff that is going to result from, you know, this like internet utopia, this digital utopia that is going to arrive as a result of the creation and the rollout of these technologies.
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And that if the government, even democratic governments, start to try to regulate those things, start to, you know, go against some of the ideas that tech engineers or these major tech companies have for how they should work and how they should roll out, then that is like an inherent breach of the freedoms and the rights that we have as people.
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It really sets out this like narrative of technology where the government and even a democratically elected government is like this inherently tyrannical force that must be fought against at every opportunity because they are never going to properly understand what technology is.
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They are never going to allow us to reap the benefits that could be gained from technology.
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And it's always like the bad actor in the kind of situations that we're presented with are always coming from the government.
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And so rarely, though a bit more often now, because of what is happening and it can't be ignored, from these private actors that are often in control of these things.
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And to me, that seems like a really key part of this as well, right?
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It's like the government is always the bad one, reflecting this kind of inherently right-wing libertarian narrative that David is writing about in the book.
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And it's not so much, you know, these massive corporations that have been able to capture and dominate everything that we do with these technologies.
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Another thing that sort of has come up with to me is the story that a lot of tech folks have started to tell about their turn towards the right wing.
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You know, I think it was Andreessen a few days ago.
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On the Barry Weiss podcast, I think.
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Yeah.
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You know, what had been understood as the deal that tech people would create something, they generate massive wealth, that the public would benefit, that the tech people would pay their taxes, and this last part is important that they would be heaped with adulation and praise, that um society has broken that deal in in their version, which has turned them into right-wingers.
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Right.
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Now I think a lot about the Matt Boris cartoon, you know, the famous Matt Morris cartoon, uh that that hopefully we can link to.
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You know, this narrative is very convenient, but I I think David's book really disintegrates that narrative, right?
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That what's closer to the truth is that they have been right-wingers all along, and that the so-called heel turn, you know, because they haven't received enough praise is like a very convenient fiction.
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Having to watch all these interviews uh that these people do and watch now, of course, because you know they're always on video podcasts, is is excruciating, right?
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To to actually hear about how they think about the world and understand it.
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But I think picking up on what you're saying there is like I feel like the other key piece of that, right?
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When you think about this notion that, you know, they haven't just become right-wingers, but they were always right-wingers, was how these like fundamentally libertarian and right-wing ideas were so long when they were associated with the internet and and technology, like reframed as even going so far as being like progressive things or at least just like non-political things, like obvious things that we should all accept about how the internet works.
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And I feel like whether it's around copyright or privacy or speech or what have you, you know, David goes through kind of one by one all of these kind of central ideas that we have that are supposed to define the internet and digital technology through the book and you know, through the past few decades, right?
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To show how these fights and these framings were initially often things that were associated with right-wing politics and our understanding of those issues and and how they were originally framed and how they were originally understood was over time kind of eroded or kind of written out of the story that we have so that you know, we all kind of come to believe these really right-wing ideas about the internet and even champion them as long as we don't learn about that past and where it came from and start to really kind of critically interrogate these things that just seem accepted about the internet and about the politics around it.
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You know, to tell a little story about how, you know, he and I became friends, I mean, part of it was, you know, I think we had early on some disagreements about things like, you know, privacy and encryption.
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And I think I, you know, ironically, we became friends through Twitter.
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And I I think I DM'd him at one point asking something about encryption.
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And I don't recall exactly what I said, but essentially I said, Hey, don't you think citizens or people should have some right to communicate in ways that the government doesn't have access to?
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And his response, I mean, and you can this is much better detail in the book, but his response was that he didn't think that there should be forms of communication that were outside of legitimate democratic processes.
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Right?
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That we have all kinds of regulations, laws, processes in place, but we have all these things ideally anyway, in place for how governments are allowed to act in regards to their citizens.
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The idea that there should be categories of things, and then again, like whether this is speech or finances or anything else, that there should be categories of these things that are completely outside of regulation is like kind of a questionable premise.
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Right.
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Um in the book, he talks about this in terms of not only uh encryption, but in terms of say finance laws as relates to crypto, things like that, in terms of communication that might be outside the law, like child sexual abuse material and things like that.
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And so that's actually how we entered into a dialogue is talking about the role of encryption in a democratic society.
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As you said, there have been lots of ways that right wing notions of of how we should exist in the world have seeped into our politics.
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When it comes to talking about digital technologies and computational tools, I feel like I've had similar difficulties with the question of encryption and so many of the other issues that David talks about in the book, right?
00:22:11.359 --> 00:23:00.880
And I found time and again that sometimes I was asking myself, like, maybe not so much now, but at times still, but certainly in the past, like, am I reacting against these framings of the issues or this description of how we came to this certain position on how digital technology should work and how it should relate to politics and to policy because I inherently believe in these positions, or just because I've heard them regurgitated and talked about so many times that if I hear something that is opposed to them or that provides a different, kind of more nuanced perspective on how these things should work, that it initially, you know, causes me to push back on it because I feel like I've been told this certain thing about how the internet should work, how digital politics, how digital technology should work, how it should relate to government.
00:23:00.960 --> 00:23:05.440
And if I hear something that goes against that, I am going to feel that it must be wrong, right?
00:23:05.519 --> 00:23:11.839
Or that there must be some kind of violation that's happening here, that my rights are gonna be violated if we go down this particular path.
00:23:12.000 --> 00:23:50.400
But I feel like the more and more that I have read about the history of where these things have come from, and I've actually thought like on a broader scale about these various issues, a number of the things that I used to believe about technology in the tech industry that were just like, you know, the common boilerplate things that we would hear from like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and these other, you know, digital rights groups are things that I now call into question much more often, not just because I'm trying to react against the mainstream narratives, but because I am trying to like critically interrogate what is going on and think about the actual long-term consequences of these policies and to understand where they come from.
00:23:50.720 --> 00:24:04.480
The other thing is that the history of politics and protest in the US, certainly, but across the world, is one that every progressive movement that there's ever been has been undermined by powerful forces.
00:24:04.559 --> 00:24:07.839
And one of the mechanisms through which that's been done is surveillance.
00:24:08.400 --> 00:24:22.880
For decades, we've been sort of having theoretical argument about what happens when a lot of these powers are in the hands of authoritarians in this country to a greater or lesser extent, they always have been.
00:24:23.759 --> 00:24:31.599
But I I think unfortunately we're about to see some of the worst-case scenarios of what heretofore had been theoretical discussions.
00:24:31.920 --> 00:24:38.799
And so it is a very thorny and difficult problem to work through, right?
00:24:38.960 --> 00:24:50.960
That and again, I I think the book does a really good job of kind of parsing some of that in ways uh I think that that most uh most works are not sort of ready to deal with.
00:24:51.200 --> 00:24:58.000
And I feel like to actually engage in a discussion like this, you need to be ready to accept that these are really nuanced discussions, right?
00:24:58.079 --> 00:25:07.599
You're often not going to find like one side is total encryption all the time, and one side is no encryption, and there's no like in-between there, just to give one example, right?
00:25:07.759 --> 00:25:23.599
I feel like in looking into the history of these things, in interrogating the politics of it, you know, there's a lot of different factors that get considered in how we have arrived at this particular place of an understanding of digital technology, the role it should play, the politics around it.
00:25:23.759 --> 00:25:47.839
And I feel like sometimes the discussions that we have around these technologies is like as soon as you start to breach, you know, one of these lines or one of these political positions that are just assumed to be the way that digital technology has to be, or, you know, this is how we must all think about encryption or copyright or or what have you, that there are a lot of people who also care really deeply about these issues, right?
00:25:48.000 --> 00:26:10.720
Who care really deeply about people's human rights and, you know, people's freedom and ability to, you know, talk and discuss things without being surveilled by some power, whether it's government or corporation, that can immediately react against these things, because, you know, like I was talking about, we've all been told that this is the way that it is with digital technologies and that there are particular risks.
00:26:10.880 --> 00:26:30.880
And that if you start to encounter a position that starts to tease those things apart and to question these like kind of foundational ideas that we have about the internet and how it works, then there can be this like reaction against it and not want to hear something that opposes it, which I think can sometimes be a difficult place to start having these discussions, right?
00:26:30.960 --> 00:26:44.640
And I feel like in the book, David calls out some of the ways that, you know, say digital rights communities or other people who make these particular arguments have made it so that it can be difficult to have criticisms legitimized, right?
00:26:44.799 --> 00:26:58.720
By saying that, oh, if you don't have a certain level of technical skill, that you can't engage in these kind of criticisms or or question these notions that have been set forward by these more technical people who told us that this is the way that it has to be.
00:26:58.880 --> 00:27:06.559
Or, you know, that democracies can never like regulate a technology, but those technologies are still inherently good for democracy.
00:27:06.640 --> 00:27:18.480
You know, these sorts of things that when you start to think about them, like they kind of fall apart, but they have also been really strong, you know, ways of framing the issues that make it so it's hard to kind of unpack them, I guess.
00:27:18.720 --> 00:27:18.960
Yeah.
00:27:19.039 --> 00:27:42.559
And one of the things I I really admire about David is his willingness to do that, despite the critiques and um personal attacks and sometimes professional challenges that have been levied against him, based on him being willing to take either unpopular positions or question things that often people demand that we not question.
00:27:42.799 --> 00:27:53.119
I was just thinking about how early in the book David kind of brings up this comparison or you know, brings up this example of President Dwight Eisenhower's warning about the military industrial complex, right?
00:27:53.200 --> 00:27:54.880
That was made decades ago now.
00:27:55.119 --> 00:28:01.039
David saying that Silicon Valley was very much part of this military industrial complex.
00:28:01.119 --> 00:28:21.440
You know, we think of Silicon Valley today as like the internet and these startups and stuff like that, but like right alongside them are like Lockheed Martin and all this kind of stuff, and all this early computation technology was to go into like bombs and military technologies and all these sorts of things before there was this like shift to the consumer and presenting these things as like, you know, consumer technologies and all this kind of stuff.
00:28:21.599 --> 00:28:46.160
And it really struck a chord with me as I was going back over my notes, you know, thinking about, you know, and we can say what you will about Biden and how he could have done a lot more, but like his kind of final address to the nation was talking about a tech military industrial complex, which is like basically the same thing that is forming and how we're seeing this like new tech oligarchy forming and the power that they have been able to build.
00:28:46.319 --> 00:28:53.359
And it feels not like that is a new thing, but it feels like we're looking back now at a problem that sort of existed in the past.
00:28:53.440 --> 00:28:56.240
You know, these people weren't as powerful back then as they are today.
00:28:56.400 --> 00:29:00.319
But it's like this has been actually a consistent issue.
00:29:00.480 --> 00:29:21.599
It just felt like for a little while they framed themselves in a different way and had a slightly different relationship to government that is now like renormalizing around this much more like conservative right wing ideology, this embrace of the military and you know, the US state, and using that relationship to enhance their power even further.
00:29:21.839 --> 00:29:28.079
It speaks to like the moment that we're in, but it also speaks to, again, like you were saying earlier, how these people have always been right wing.
00:29:28.160 --> 00:29:30.880
You know, the politics around this stuff has always been quite right wing.
00:29:31.119 --> 00:29:35.200
It's just like for a little while there, they were able to act like that was not so much the case.
00:29:35.440 --> 00:29:47.839
Yeah, I think it it's really illustrative to look now at how many of these companies and the people who run them are essentially now arms dealers in one form or another.
00:29:48.000 --> 00:29:51.920
You know, not only companies like Palantir and Andoril, right?
00:29:52.079 --> 00:29:56.880
But Facebook, OpenAI, you know, uh the list goes on and on.
00:29:57.119 --> 00:30:06.799
These companies, you know, that the story goes existed to connect people or to benefit society, things like that, right?
00:30:06.960 --> 00:30:10.160
Like if we believe the narrative they crafted about themselves.
00:30:10.799 --> 00:30:25.680
But now in some form or another, all of these companies are government contracted arms companies, you know, whether that's providing some form of artificial intelligence, drones, targeting software, on and on and on.
00:30:25.839 --> 00:30:32.160
And so I think this is really the sort of culmination of what you're talking about, and again, what David talks about in the book, right?
00:30:32.240 --> 00:30:39.440
That that the I don't want to call it the final form, and I certainly don't want to call it the sort of butterfly that came from the caterpillar, right?
00:30:39.519 --> 00:30:43.519
But like that metamorphosis has manifested, right?
00:30:43.599 --> 00:30:54.720
And I don't know if that's the right word, but that but the way that they've morphed is really come full circle in a way that I think is not good for society, uh, to put it lightly.
00:30:56.000 --> 00:31:01.440
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00:31:44.799 --> 00:31:46.799
And you know, you bring up Facebook there.
00:31:46.960 --> 00:32:26.960
I was going back through my notes before the conversation, and I found this quote where David wrote, Quote, No organization is more emblematic of cyber libertarian agitation than Facebook, you know, thinking about what Mark Zuckerberg has been saying recently, but how Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have been doing a lot of this stuff for a long time, you know, embracing these more libertarian narratives and making use of this connection between the ideas of like the internet as liberation and as freedom, and this notion that a social media platform is like by connecting people, is like inherently moving forward these values and enhancing democracy and all these sorts of things.
00:32:27.039 --> 00:32:44.079
And then comparing that to the actual real impacts, not that just that Facebook and these platforms are having today, but that they have been having for a really long time in harming democracy, in arguably harming, you know, our liberties and freedoms and all these sorts of things that we supposedly value.
00:32:44.240 --> 00:32:54.720
But because of this like narrative around the technologies and the platforms and all this kind of stuff, they were able to ride that to be able to enable all of these harms that they've been able to carry out.
00:32:54.880 --> 00:33:00.720
I wonder what you make of like what Facebook has been up to lately and how that aligns with the kind of stuff David was writing about.
00:33:01.119 --> 00:33:02.960
I have so many thoughts.
00:33:03.119 --> 00:33:16.799
You know, I think it's important to start with, you know, the discrepancy between what we know Facebook to be and what we know the origins to be, uh, versus how Zuckerberg has attempted to rewrite the narrative.
00:33:17.039 --> 00:33:28.640
At its root, it was a company that relied on illegitimately obtaining photos of women in order to judge whether or not they were deemed hot.
00:33:28.960 --> 00:33:32.559
Well, Chris, but I thought the origin of Facebook was all about free speech.
00:33:32.720 --> 00:33:33.359
Yeah.
00:33:35.119 --> 00:33:36.160
Right, right.
00:33:36.480 --> 00:33:43.599
And you know, that later on, a big part of the narrative became that it was about free speech.
00:33:43.680 --> 00:33:51.519
And, you know, he has that famous talk Zuckerberg does where he cited MLK and Frederick Douglass and things like that, and people like that.
00:33:51.839 --> 00:33:52.319
So wild.
00:33:52.400 --> 00:34:02.319
Like, you know, but the other thing is I think pretty consistently at its root, Facebook has made the claim that connecting people is an inherent good, right?
00:34:02.400 --> 00:34:20.239
And this is like cyber libertarianism at its core, too, that connecting people in itself is a good when it's connecting grandmothers to grandkids, or when it's connecting knitting groups or people who um used to go to grade school together.
00:34:20.480 --> 00:34:20.800
Okay.
00:34:21.360 --> 00:34:32.400
But we've seen that it also means connecting violent groups to one another, in some cases generating pages so for for them without even like seeking permission.
00:34:32.800 --> 00:34:38.320
We've seen it as being credibly implicated in helping facilitate a genocide.
00:34:38.559 --> 00:34:43.760
We've seen it in many cases be an authoritarian's best friend.
00:34:44.000 --> 00:34:51.679
That is, I think it's important to know where it comes from, where it's been, and now where it's going.
00:34:52.000 --> 00:35:08.480
Because Zuckerberg had his moment where he has come out and talked about all the ways that he feels the government has intruded upon or restricted Facebook's ability to be Facebook and calling it censorship.
00:35:08.559 --> 00:35:11.840
And this is another a big thing that David talks about in the book.
00:35:12.079 --> 00:35:20.079
Calling it censorship when the government may have asked them to clamp down on misinformation or hate speech or something like that.
00:35:20.320 --> 00:35:25.119
And now Zuckerberg's sort of come out in his like sort of full masculine energy.
00:35:25.280 --> 00:35:32.079
No more is Facebook going to be curtailed by anything or anyone saying what they should and shouldn't do.
00:35:32.239 --> 00:35:32.480
Right.
00:35:32.639 --> 00:35:42.239
And so uh, I mean, we've seen from 404, from The Intercept, from lots of other journalists what that means in terms of what's now going to be allowed.
00:35:42.480 --> 00:35:49.760
Transphobia, like hate speech against trans and non-binary people, uh hate speech against immigrants, all kinds of things.
00:35:50.000 --> 00:36:05.039
404 came out today with a report, I think it was by Joseph Cox, quoting some people inside Facebook who say that this reminds them a lot of the lead up to the genocide in in Myanmar.
00:36:05.599 --> 00:36:17.280
That these are the kinds of policies that leave open of the very real possibility of a you know prelude to violence against marginalized and vulnerable people in this country.
00:36:17.599 --> 00:36:26.000
And so all that to say, I think it's really important to be aware of kind of like the story that's being told about these things.
00:36:26.159 --> 00:36:41.599
And again, like how it's been very conveniently disguised right-wing narratives that uh I think unfortunately many people have have accepted without getting into the root of of what that means, right?
00:36:41.760 --> 00:36:47.920
What it means that we value connection or the a company values connection over all things.
00:36:48.000 --> 00:36:53.280
I mean, there's this longtime Facebook person, um, I think his name is Andrew Bosworth.
00:36:53.519 --> 00:37:03.039
He wrote this famous blog post where he talks about the possibility that Facebook might help facilitate in some form of violence.
00:37:03.599 --> 00:37:08.719
And what stood out to me about that is the line in there that says, and still we connect.
00:37:09.039 --> 00:37:18.960
Whatever other story about Facebook we want to tell or Zuckerberg wants to tell, that kernel, right, that is so much a cyber libertarian thing.
00:37:19.360 --> 00:37:34.239
The idea that this piece or this part of what this company values is more important than any kind of democratic function or limit on what companies might be allowed to do.
00:37:34.559 --> 00:37:36.159
Yeah, I I think really well said.
00:37:36.320 --> 00:37:40.480
And I, you know, as you say, I think we see that time and again, right?
00:37:40.639 --> 00:37:47.840
And it's like these particular ideas, whether it's that connection is an inherent good, are things that come back again and again, right?
00:37:47.920 --> 00:37:52.719
And and that we've heard them for so many decades, we come to believe that they must be true, right?
00:37:52.800 --> 00:37:53.679
They must be accurate.
00:37:53.840 --> 00:37:59.199
Why, you know, would people who we trust and we look up to be arguing these things if they weren't real, right?
00:37:59.280 --> 00:38:01.519
If if we shouldn't be believing in them.
00:38:01.760 --> 00:38:18.239
Even when you were talking about Facebook, it was bringing me back to like the Arab Spring and how these uprisings by people in various different parts of the Middle East and North Africa were being framed as like something that social media was doing, you know, not that people were organizing to do for themselves.
00:38:18.400 --> 00:38:28.639
You know, this kind of narrative like persisted even after there was reporting and research and people actually speaking out to be like, yeah, this wasn't really like a Facebook or Twitter thing, right?
00:38:30.239 --> 00:38:36.719
But I think, you know, just to maybe talk about a few more of those issues that really like stood out to me, right?
00:38:36.800 --> 00:38:50.320
Like one of the things that used to motivate me a lot in the past was the issue of copyright, you know, and I'm still someone who believes that copyright should be reformed and that copyright terms should be a lot shorter than they are today.
00:38:50.559 --> 00:38:58.400
But even with that said, I think that some of the narratives, some of the cyber libertarian narratives that we've had around copyright have been really harmful.
00:38:58.559 --> 00:39:21.760
If people are familiar with like the internet discourses around copyright, it's usually that if we're talking about copyright, it's like these evil labels and publishers who are trying to hold back this like content from us that we should be able to have for free, you know, regardless of thinking about like how you're supposed to pay people to do that stuff in a capitalist world if everything is just being given away for free.
00:39:22.000 --> 00:39:46.320
And how that narrative doesn't take into account how tech companies, from the beginning of pushing those narratives out, right, in you know the 2000s when you had like Napster and the kind of peer-to-peer sharing stuff really taking off, was like it was always beneficial to the tech companies because they wanted to get access to this content, to this information, to this art for free to not have to pay anyone for it.
00:39:46.480 --> 00:39:54.239
So arguing that like it was the labels and the publishers and the movie companies that were so bad, and that's not to like totally let them off the hook.
00:39:54.320 --> 00:39:58.400
I think that they did some really extreme things that were kind of beyond the pale, right?
00:39:58.480 --> 00:40:03.360
Like locking up regular people for downloading movies or music or whatnot, right?
00:40:03.599 --> 00:40:08.880
But now, today, we see the consequences of narratives that were set 20 years ago, right?
00:40:09.119 --> 00:40:25.760
Where these major tech companies, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, are basically scraping everything off of the web that they can get, are downloading movies and songs and things to feed into their AI models to serve these generative AI tools that they're all doing today.
00:40:25.920 --> 00:40:45.199
And we still have people who, you know, kind of formed some of those early copyright arguments, arguing that we should let these major tech companies, some of the biggest companies in the entire world, get away with stealing all these things for free to train their generative AI models that are designed to try to replace the people who are actually doing this real work.
00:40:45.360 --> 00:40:51.440
And it's like, if that doesn't show you the initial problem with a narrative like that, like what will, right?
00:40:51.679 --> 00:40:51.920
Yeah.
00:40:52.079 --> 00:40:55.440
I mean, I think we've seen sort of the logical endpoint of this.
00:40:55.599 --> 00:41:04.480
Someone at OpenAI, and again, I'm paraphrasing, but they said something to the extent of, well, we wouldn't be able to exist if we weren't allowed to do this.
00:41:04.639 --> 00:41:06.480
Like if we were not allowed to sell, right?
00:41:07.519 --> 00:41:16.400
If we weren't allowed to scrape uh massive portions of the internet and ingest them, then our company wouldn't be able to exist.
00:41:16.800 --> 00:41:20.719
My understanding of that argument is, well, I guess you shouldn't exist.
00:41:21.280 --> 00:41:45.920
But the other thing, you know, and I think this is in the book, and it's very explicitly in the essay I referenced about Chat GPT, is the extreme disdain that many of these individuals and companies have for artists, for any type of creative folk, whether that's musicians, you know, novelists, illustrators, anything like that.
00:41:46.079 --> 00:41:53.760
I mean, there was the famous thing that was or the sort of like the viral thing that was going around about a guy saying, well, people don't really enjoy creating music.
00:41:54.159 --> 00:41:54.800
Like what?
00:41:55.519 --> 00:41:55.920
Right?
00:41:56.239 --> 00:42:13.280
That you know, he was he was promoting some tool that he said would democratize, and this is another thing that comes up quite often in the book, that would democratize making music, that people didn't really enjoy making music, which is one of the more dubious claims I've I've ever encountered.
00:42:13.519 --> 00:42:18.400
And so that his AI tool was going to democratize it and make it easy.
00:42:18.800 --> 00:42:39.679
So the the extreme disdain these folks have for anything that's not computational in the way they understand it, I think is highlighted so much in some of these arguments about what they should have access to, and not only what they should have access to, but what they're going to do with these tools and who they're going to put out of a job.
00:42:39.920 --> 00:42:42.480
I mean, which is it's actually part of their pitch.
00:42:42.880 --> 00:42:56.079
You'll be able to create stories and images and music without the benefits of having writers, artists, and musicians.
00:42:56.639 --> 00:42:58.960
It's so frustrating to even like hear those things.
00:42:59.119 --> 00:43:13.199
Just as it's been really frustrating for me, you know, to see people who are really well respected in kind of tech circles be arguing in favor of some of the biggest companies in the world stealing basically any creative work they want and considering it fair use.
00:43:13.360 --> 00:43:18.639
Like I think it's just such a total violation and shows the inherent problem with these kinds of narratives.
00:43:18.800 --> 00:43:27.280
And if people weren't kind of reconsidering or or reassessing these narratives before, like I think that is yet another reason to start to do these things.
00:43:27.440 --> 00:43:51.199
And, you know, another aspect of that I would say that really stood out for me is, you know, there were times where I felt maybe David was a bit too like positive or hopeful about like the American Democratic project, you know, and like the kind of norms and ideals of American democracy, you know, which is something that I'm very critical of, and maybe sometimes throwing around the term far right a bit, you know, too liberally for me.
00:43:51.360 --> 00:43:59.760
But even then, like he can still recognize how these notions of the internet, you know, these notions of like internet freedom.
00:44:00.239 --> 00:44:04.559
And digital rights have also been very beneficial to the United States and U.S.
00:44:04.719 --> 00:44:06.159
geopolitical interests, right?
00:44:06.239 --> 00:44:21.119
On the one hand, this notion that of the internet as you know this place of inherent freedom that is going to enhance our democratic rights discourages regulation, but it has also served, and of course, this is something I've talked about on the show in the past, has really aided the U.S.
00:44:21.440 --> 00:44:24.159
geopolitical interest around the world as well, right?
00:44:24.320 --> 00:45:01.280
You know, there's this particular part of the book where David talks about how having these internet technologies that emerge from the United States and go global considered as, you know, these real ways of spreading freedom and whatever around the world, also allows the United States on its own and the linkages of digital rights with human rights and the idea that our right to access the internet is a fundamental human right and not something different from that, allows the United States to pick and choose and decide like what countries around the world it deems to be democracies and who can be cut off from access to these systems quite unilaterally, right?
00:45:01.440 --> 00:45:10.719
That is as much as I also have problems with autocracies around the world and whatnot, you know, should the US alone kind of have these sorts of powers around the world.
00:45:11.039 --> 00:45:25.199
Yeah, I think that a lot of tech folks and tech companies have become a lot more brazen about the linkages between their companies and a larger sort of imperialist project.
00:45:25.360 --> 00:45:46.960
Again, and that has been true with certain companies, but I I think that it's becoming more true when companies talk about winning AI dominance when they cynically and often racistly invoke China as this great scary thing that we have to achieve technological dominance over.
00:45:47.280 --> 00:46:07.840
Um we've seen Zuckerberg part of his hope with so closely aligning with Trump is that there'll be some degree of pushback against the idea that companies outside the US should have any role in saying how how Facebook should act in their country.
00:46:08.159 --> 00:46:09.440
We've already seen that.
00:46:09.679 --> 00:46:19.840
Yeah, as we move further down the line, I think companies have been much more brazen and much less bashful about linking themselves with like kind of a larger imperialist project.
00:46:20.159 --> 00:46:23.199
Yeah, and I think that very much links up to what we've been saying, right?
00:46:23.280 --> 00:46:31.199
About how there seemed to be this period where these criticisms and these realizations really kind of fell away, even though they were always there, right?
00:46:31.280 --> 00:46:41.360
You know, you talked about companies that were always recognizing they were kind of part of an American imperial project, like you know, Oracle, for example, and Larry Ellison has has kind of always been on that side of things.
00:46:41.519 --> 00:47:02.639
But even if you go back to like the late 80s and early 90s, you can hear Al Gore and you can hear Newt Gingrich talking about how, you know, high technology and the uh information superhighway are like going to be important tools in like spreading American power in this increasingly like post-Soviet world, right?
00:47:02.800 --> 00:47:05.679
Especially in those sorts of states and post-colonial world, of course.
00:47:05.840 --> 00:47:09.840
Like, you know, another tool to expand American dominance in the world.
00:47:10.079 --> 00:47:18.159
That stuff like starts to fade away a few years later as you have these narratives about the internet as like freedom and liberty retake them.
00:47:18.239 --> 00:47:26.239
You know, these cyber libertarian narratives take over because that's a much easier sell to people than, hey, American power, uh, if we push this out everywhere, right?
00:47:26.400 --> 00:47:29.280
Our companies are going to take over and that's gonna help the American government.
00:47:29.519 --> 00:47:42.239
This moment shows that it's undeniable that we have been living through that for three decades, even if the story that we told ourselves and that this industry wanted to tell us for so long was something completely separate from that.
00:47:42.400 --> 00:47:58.800
And I think that is like one of the things that David's book is so valuable in doing is to like ground us once again and give us this real foundation to understand what the internet is doing, what the people behind it are doing, what it has long been doing, even if we've been telling ourselves something different.
00:47:59.119 --> 00:47:59.840
Absolutely.
00:48:00.000 --> 00:48:10.159
You know, and I I think it has been a very consistent story that companies have told is that they need to be allowed to innovate, right?
00:48:10.400 --> 00:48:13.280
Their words innovate in quotation marks.
00:48:13.519 --> 00:48:18.800
They need to be allowed to innovate so that we don't lose the sort of global dominance.
00:48:19.039 --> 00:48:21.039
And it's been it's been very effective.
00:48:21.199 --> 00:48:34.000
I mean, the number of times that Zuckerberg and other people have gone before Congress and said something to that effect has been very effective in preventing any type of meaningful legislation being passed.
00:48:34.159 --> 00:48:42.800
And now, yeah, that has morphed into a much more aggressive form of American sort of exceptionalism.
00:48:42.960 --> 00:48:46.239
Yeah, unfortunately, I think we've yet to see the worst of it.
00:48:46.480 --> 00:48:52.159
It's like there is a waking up in this moment, but it feels much too late to actually kind of wield the power to try to do something.
00:48:52.320 --> 00:48:57.119
But hopefully, like at least outside the United States, you know, other countries can can start to do that.
00:48:57.199 --> 00:49:08.079
And hopefully in the United States, you know, it can be pushed back on, especially in future elections or or or you know, through movements and political movements that are outside of elections through union organizing through other things.
00:49:08.239 --> 00:49:19.039
But the power of these people has reached a point where it's difficult to unravel or or much harder than it would have been, you know, a decade ago or something when they hadn't accumulated so much power and wealth that they have now.
00:49:19.199 --> 00:49:32.320
And it was in part these narratives that we believed that were, you know, the kind of the dominant framings of the internet that helped us, you know, kind of fall for and believe that these tech companies and these tech billionaires were something that they were not for so long.
00:49:32.559 --> 00:49:49.760
And and on that point about like the political nature of this and and the threat to democracy that it presents, you know, as you've mentioned, one of the key aspects of, you know, the cyber libertarianism framing is that the internet and digital technology is inherently democratizing, right?
00:49:49.840 --> 00:49:56.559
You know, you talked about it with AI and how, you know, uh these tools are presented as democratizing our ability to create and stuff.
00:49:56.800 --> 00:50:01.440
What do you make of that framing in particular and what it does to how we understand these things?
00:50:01.760 --> 00:50:04.880
I've started to see it so much with AI.
00:50:05.039 --> 00:50:12.960
And we've seen in the past, as we've talked about with the claims that it's helped foster revolutions and things like that that social media has.
00:50:13.199 --> 00:50:32.800
But we're seeing it expressed so much more with things like chatbots, like large language models, or other things that people label as artificial intelligence, that it's going to democratize not only art, but you know, education, learning, medicine, all these different things.
00:50:33.039 --> 00:50:36.559
And I I think that that the book is is very good about this, right?
00:50:36.719 --> 00:50:54.639
That the term democratize as it's wielded by uh tech boosters and tech companies is really independent, so independent from anything that can be reasonably understood as democratic process that it almost becomes meaningless.
00:50:55.119 --> 00:51:13.280
The idea I think that they're promoting is that these tools in the hands of everyone is somehow going to make us all again more free, that we'll have access to medical care and the world's knowledge and the ability to create in ways that we've never seen.
00:51:13.440 --> 00:51:25.519
And I don't really think there's any compelling reason to believe that that is going to be true, particularly that there's not a lot of historical precedent that suggests that that's the way that that's going to play out.
00:51:25.679 --> 00:51:36.639
And again, like uh I don't think these companies in any way, shape, or form deserve the benefit of the doubt in terms of their willingness to make life better for the average person.
00:51:36.880 --> 00:51:50.960
Well, yeah, it feels like when they say democratize, it's like, I don't know, make it possible for you to make some like approximation of something without having skill, or just to make it easier for you to consume something.
00:51:51.119 --> 00:51:51.360
Yeah.
00:51:51.519 --> 00:51:54.320
You know, as though that is what democracy is.
00:51:55.599 --> 00:52:06.800
Meanwhile, you know, these people who are now some of the richest people in the world seem to be aiding political projects that are actively trying to erode democracy as we understand it.
00:52:06.880 --> 00:52:15.119
And it's not to like, you know, replace it with some, you know, more idealistic, direct democracy that's more anarchist or whatever.
00:52:15.280 --> 00:52:24.800
If you know, you even believe some of these more tech communities that claim to be more anarchistic and would like to see, you know, liberal democracy as we understand it replaced with something like that.
00:52:24.960 --> 00:52:28.159
Like we are not seeing the transition to that kind of a world.
00:52:28.320 --> 00:52:44.880
We're seeing the transition, if anything, to like a more autocratic, more totalitarian world, more oligarchic, where the richest and most powerful people in the world are trying to cement their power over us and ensure that we have fewer and fewer tools or routes to like push back against them.
00:52:45.119 --> 00:52:46.079
Yeah, absolutely.
00:52:46.159 --> 00:52:55.440
And I I mean, again, just to go back to the thesis of the book, the idea that technological objects are somehow inherently liberatory.
00:52:55.679 --> 00:53:11.920
I think in the current landscape, right, the very consistent use of that term democratize when we're talking about the use of tools that uh you know claim to be artificial intelligence is one thing to very carefully investigate.
00:53:12.239 --> 00:53:14.559
No, I I think that's an essential point for us to understand.
00:53:14.639 --> 00:53:25.119
And one of the things that is important to pull out of this book, among all the other things, that you know, we could talk about, as you said, this is like a 400-page book, and there is a lot in there, right?
00:53:25.360 --> 00:53:37.199
David discusses a lot of different concepts, a lot of the narratives that we have come to understand, you know, from engaging in discussions on and about the internet for, you know, the past few decades.
00:53:37.440 --> 00:53:46.239
So I wonder if, you know, as we wrap up our conversations, if you have any final thoughts on, you know, the book, on David's legacy, anything else you'd want to leave us with.
00:53:46.559 --> 00:54:14.719
Yeah, I guess I would say what what bears repeating is how prophetic his book is, his work overall is, and how courageous he was in being willing to identify and call out the things he saw, you know, often when it wasn't popular and he suffered, you know, both um, I think professionally and personally from the attacks, but he was willing to do that anyway.
00:54:14.960 --> 00:54:22.719
That to me, I think is how I would allocate his legacy, other than being a great friend and a really fantastic mentor.
00:54:22.960 --> 00:54:30.320
Yeah, I I didn't know him as well as you did, but it was always great to, you know, have little chats and I would check in with him every now and then and be like, David, where is the book?
00:54:30.400 --> 00:54:31.519
I can't wait to read this thing.
00:54:31.599 --> 00:54:33.679
Like, when am I finally going to be able to?
00:54:33.840 --> 00:54:39.360
And of course, I'm always sad that I can't like actually discuss it with him and you know learn more about him.
00:54:39.599 --> 00:55:01.599
I think it was really great, you know, during the crypto boom in like 2020, 2021, that there was a lot more attention, you know, put on David's work and the things that he recognized years ago about the crypto industry were things that many people kind of came to in that moment and looked to David and David's work for guidance through that and you know, for help in understanding it.
00:55:01.840 --> 00:55:04.880
And I think that was really valuable in in that moment.
00:55:05.119 --> 00:55:25.440
And I think that a book like this, you know, even though David is not here to share further insights with us, you know, and to participate in these discussions about it with us, you know, I think it's a great resource for people to turn to to help to unpack some of the things that we have come to believe about the internet and digital technology that, you know, it's long past time that we're reassessed.
00:55:25.599 --> 00:55:33.920
And I think I would just say for people who are going to pick up the book, you know, to pick up cyber libertarianism, I would say go into it with an open mind, right?
00:55:34.000 --> 00:55:40.559
There are going to be things that are going to challenge some pre-existing ideas about the internet that you might have had before.
00:55:40.800 --> 00:55:53.039
There were certainly even things that I thought were a bit too far for me and that I didn't fully agree with, but that doesn't mean that I disagree with David's inherent thesis that is happening here and how he is trying to reframe this for us.
00:55:53.199 --> 00:56:07.440
And I think it's a really valuable contribution at a time when we really need to be looking very clearly at what we've been told and what we believed about the internet for so long and about the politics that, you know, are inherent to it, which are very much not the case.
00:56:07.599 --> 00:56:17.039
Because if we're ever going to challenge these people who've built so much power on the back of it, you know, we need to rethink what we once believed about, you know, how this all works.
00:56:17.440 --> 00:56:29.519
One last thing I would say at the very end of the book, he talks about the assumption that so many of us seem to carry that we have to have these technologies, right?
00:56:29.599 --> 00:56:31.519
That we must sort of live under them.
00:56:31.760 --> 00:56:37.039
Which again is is a thing I think that really needs to be investigated and questioned, you know.
00:56:37.280 --> 00:56:42.079
Like if there was a nobility, I'm paraphrasing a bit what he says in the book.
00:56:42.239 --> 00:56:49.679
There's not really a way we can say whether they've been a net gain or loss in terms of some of these technologies.
00:56:49.920 --> 00:57:00.800
But it what is true is that they are not inevitable and that there's nothing that says that we have to keep them as an important place to end the book on.
00:57:01.119 --> 00:57:06.079
Yeah, an important uh Luddite recognition, you know, that all of our listeners will certainly agree with.
00:57:06.239 --> 00:57:08.079
Chris, really great to have you back on the show.
00:57:08.159 --> 00:57:15.039
I can't wait to have you back again to talk about some more of your work, but I really appreciate you coming on to dig into David's book and his analysis with us.
00:57:15.199 --> 00:57:26.639
I think it is something that we need to be paying attention to now more than ever, you know, and I highly recommend that people pick it up and give it a read and give a think to the ideas that you know we've had about the internet for so long.
00:57:26.880 --> 00:57:28.000
Yeah, always a pleasure.
00:57:28.320 --> 00:57:29.760
Yeah, thank you very much.
00:57:30.480 --> 00:57:36.239
Chris Gilliard is the co-director of the Critical Internet Studies Institute and is working on a forthcoming book called Luxury Surveillance.
00:57:36.320 --> 00:57:40.320
Tech Won's Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks.
00:57:40.480 --> 00:57:41.760
Production is by Eric Wickham.
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