"have you ever heard of a penny strike?"
Everything They Know
There will be time to organize, to fight back, to feel secure in the knowledge that your data, the information that represents your life and your loves and your thoughts and feelings, is not commoditized and weaponized.
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"We can find anybody within three square meters"
Everything They Know
We’ve given the algorithms control, and every day we give them more. In the name of more efficient solutions, more efficient uses of our time, more productivity, more shareholder value, our humanity has been forced to squeeze itself into these narrow pathways of digital interaction.
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"This Will Change Everything"
Everything They Know
As the Coronavirus has upended every aspect of life as we know it, and the world already seems a little darker, it felt untimely to release an episode about a dark, dystopian tech-reliant future. Instead, I decided to have a special conversation with one of our previous guests, and friend of the podcast, Judy Estrin, about how Covid-19 is deepening our reliance on technology, and what might emerge when all this is over.
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"Is Twitter the same as what you do?"
Everything They Know
In previous episodes we’ve looked at this issue of tech dominance from several angles. We’ve seen how they gather data, what they can do with it, how they make money from it, and how social media allows them to muddy the water and shape the narrative. You may have asked yourself along the way, “how can they do this? Why doesn’t the government do anything about it?”
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"I sold. I'm out. I don't want anyone to remember I was doing that."
Everything They Know
In the preparation for this episode, I asked a colleague for an introduction to a friend of his who I wanted to interview for this podcast, a former senior executive at a social media company.
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“How much do they really know?”
Everything They Know
We hear “data breach” or “data leak” or “they’re gathering our data” and don’t stop to consider what that really means. We’ve accepted that there’s nothing really we can do about it anyway, so why fuss?
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“Extraordinary Levels of Specificity”
Everything They Know
We seem to have collectively accepted that we’re going to keep playing this rigged game of data harvesting because the playing of the game itself placates us, giving us just enough of that beautiful dopamine-serotonin-oxytocin combo to get us to keep pulling the lever on the slot machine.
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“All Your Data Are Belong To Us”
Everything They Know
This episode, I sat down with Tim Shea, a data scientist with a political background, to understand what it actually means when we say “they’re taking our data.” Then, I flew out to D.C. to speak to Bryan Lane, a data expert and senior government official, to learn more about how data is captured and indexed, and to start to hear about how it’s being used against our interests.
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“While We Were Looking Over There”
Everything They Know
With modern smartphones, we have more technology in our pocket than what NASA had to send humans to the moon. We have more information at the tip of our fingers than all the libraries of the ancient world. We can make a few taps and gestures and food or drugs or people show up to where we are.
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“Don’t Be Evil”
Everything They Know
Before Big Tech was the bad guy, we all had dreams of a digital utopia brought about by the democratizing power of the Internet.
info_outlineBefore Big Tech was the bad guy, we all had dreams of a digital utopia brought about by the democratizing power of the Internet.
What happened?
I spoke to Judy Estrin about her decades of experience as an innovator in Silicon Valley, and what she thinks might have happened to lead us astray.
Then, I sat down with Andrew Keen, one of the earliest Internet naysayers, to understand why he saw (and was willing to call out) such a big potential problem and when others did not.
Featured guests this episode:
Judy Estrin is an Internet pioneer, entrepreneur, business executive, and author in the United States. Estrin worked with Vinton Cerf on the Transmission Control Protocol project at Stanford University in the 1970s, often looked at as the project that our modern e-mail emerged from. Estrin is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded eight technology companies. She was the chief technology officer of Cisco Systems from 1998 to 2000.
Estrin served on the boards of FedEx Corporation (1989-2010), Rockwell Automation (1994-1998), Sun Microsystems (1995-2003), as well as the being the first woman to serve on the board of Walt Disney Company, where she served for fifteen years (1998-2014). She served on the advisory boards of Stanford University School of Engineering and the Bio-X interdisciplinary program, and is a member of the University of California President’s Science and Innovation Advisory Board.
Andrew Keen is a British-American entrepreneur and author.
In his book The Internet Is Not the Answer, Keen presents the history of the internet and its impact on psychology, economy, and society. He argues that the more the internet develops, the more detrimental it is to those who use it.
Keen writes: “It is more like a negative feedback loop, a digital vicious cycle in which it is us, the Web’s users, who are its victims rather than beneficiaries.” Keen goes on to argue that the internet has allowed for the emergence of “new, leviathan-like monopolists like Apple, Google, and Amazon,” impeding economic competition and economic justice between the rich and poor.