"I sold. I'm out. I don't want anyone to remember I was doing that."
Release Date: 03/10/2020
"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_outlineWhen I got on Facebook in 8th grade, it was worth somewhere in the vicinity of $100 million. By the time I was a junior in college, studying abroad in Senegal and forced to have a much more limited Internet experience, it was worth $50 billion.
Today, it’s worth about $550 billion, the 5th most valuable company in the world.
How did they do it?
Well, it turns out your data is really, really valuable to advertisers. And the longer you stay on the platform, the more ads they can serve you, translating directly to more dollars in their pocket.
What happened, is that they discovered anger and fear. Anger and fear drive more engagement than positivity and hope ever could -- and so that was the content their algorithm pushed.
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.
The response?
“I sold. I’m out. I don’t want anyone to remember I was doing that.”
Featured guests this episode:
K Krasnow Waterman was the Chief Information Officer of the first post-9/11 data analytics facility established by the White House and, next, led the reorganization of the FBI's intelligence operations. She has held a multitude of roles across the government and business worlds, as well as being a Sloan Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Tim Shea is the founder and CEO of Latticework Insights.
Bryan Lane is the Director of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the General Services Administration.
Michael Slaby was the Chief Technology Officer of Obama for America in 2008. In 2012, he rejoined the campaign as Chief Integration and Innovation Officer. When the campaign finished, he began work on social impact organizations that leverage technology to create social movements. Today, he's the Chief Strategist at Harmony Labs.
Eric Yang is the Founder and Executive Director at Junto. Junto is a new breed of social media founded in the spirit of authenticity, with the goal of rebalancing our relationship with technology and inspiring agency, privacy, and free expression.
Jonathon Morgan is the founder of Yonder, a fast-growing Authentic Internet company on a mission to give the online world the same amount of authentic cultural context as the offline world. Using artificial intelligence, we help organizations identify the groups and narratives that drive conversation, revealing what matters and creating the confidence to act.