Kremlin-friendly troll farms swamp the world with disinformation. Autocrats, both aspiring and actual, manipulate algorithms and use fake accounts to distort, harass, and spread “alternative facts.” The United States has no real answer to these challenges, and no wonder: We don’t have an internet based on our democratic values of openness, accountability, and respect for human rights. An online system controlled by a tiny number of secretive companies in Silicon Valley is not democratic but rather oligopolistic, even oligarchic.
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The buttons we press and the statements we make online are turned into data, which are then fed back into algorithms that can be used to profile and target us through advertising. Self-expression no longer necessarily leads to emancipation: The more we speak, click, and swipe online, the less powerful we are. Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emerita at Harvard Business School, coined the term surveillance capitalism to describe this system. The scholars Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias have called it “data colonialism,” a term that reflects our inability to stop our data from being unwittingly extracted.
- View Highlight
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Right now companies fight intensely to retain their exemption from “intermediary liability,” guaranteed to them by the now-infamous Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This frees them from legal responsibility for nearly all content posted on their platform.
- View Highlight
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Matias has his own lab, the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell, dedicated to making digital technologies that serve the public and not just private companies.
- View Highlight
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Inspired by the philosopher Karl Popper, the doyen of “open society” and a critic of untransparent social engineering, Matias thinks we have to not just take control of our own data, but also help oversee the design of algorithmic experiments, with “individual participation and consent at all decision levels possible.” For example, victims of prejudice should be able to help create experiments that explore how algorithms can reduce racism. Rohingya in Myanmar should be able to insist on social-media design that doesn’t facilitate their oppression. Russians, and for that matter non-Russians, should be able to limit the amount of government propaganda they see.
- View Highlight
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Perhaps the most apt historical model for algorithmic regulation is not trust-busting, but environmental protection. To improve the ecology around a river, it isn’t enough to simply regulate companies’ pollution. Nor will it help to just break up the polluting companies. You need to think about how the river is used by citizens—what sort of residential buildings are constructed along the banks, what is transported up and down the river—and the fish that swim in the water. Fishermen, yachtsmen, ecologists, property developers, and area residents all need a say. Apply that metaphor to the online world: Politicians, citizen-scientists, activists, and ordinary people will all have to work together to co-govern a technology whose impact is dependent on everyone’s behavior, and that will be as integral to our lives and our economies as rivers once were to the emergence of early civilizations.
- View Highlight
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- [note::Laws to regulate the (digital) commons can take a page from laws to regulate the (physical) commons.]

(highlight:: In Britain, John Reith, the visionary son of a Scottish clergyman, began to look for an alternative: radio that was controlled neither by the state, as it was in dictatorships, nor by polarizing, profit-seeking companies. Reith’s idea was public radio, funded by taxpayers but independent of the government. It would not only “inform, educate and entertain”; it would facilitate democracy by bringing society together: “The voice of the leaders of thought or action coming to the fireside; the news of the world at the ear of the rustic … the facts of great issues, hitherto distorted by partisan interpretation, now put directly and clearly before them; a return of the City-State of old.” This vision of a radio broadcaster that could create a cohesive yet pluralistic national conversation eventually became the BBC, where Reith was the first director-general.
Reith’s legacy lives on in a new generation of thinkers, among them Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a tech wizard who wrote the code that underlies the pop-up ad, one of the biggest milestones in the growth of online advertising. Partly as penance, Zuckerman now dedicates his time to thinking about nonprofit online spaces that could compete with the online commercial world he helped create. Social media, he told us, is broken: “I helped break it. Now I am interested in building new systems from scratch. And part of what we should be building are networks that have explicit social promise.”)
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A Vermont-based site, Front Porch Forum, is used by roughly a quarter of the state’s residents for all sorts of community activity, from natural-disaster response to job-hunting, as well as civic discussion. Instead of encouraging users to interact as much and as fast as possible, Front Porch slows the conversation down: Your posts come online 24 hours after you’ve written them. Sometimes, people reach out to the moderators to retract something said in anger. Everyone on the forum is real, and they have to sign up using real Vermont addresses. When you go on the site, you interact with your actual neighbors, not online avatars.
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(highlight:: Peixoto has developed projects that could, for example, allow citizens to help put together a city budget. But those would require politicians to cede real power, which is not something many politicians like to do. Even beyond that, some skepticism about the attraction of the forums is surely warranted: Aren’t we all addicted to the rage and culture wars available on social media? Don’t we use social media to perform, or to virtue signal, or to express identity—and don’t we like it that way?
Maybe. Or maybe we think that way only because we lack the imagination to think differently. That’s the conclusion drawn by Eli Pariser, a co-founder of Avaaz and Upworthy, two websites designed to foster online political engagement, and Talia Stroud, the director of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin.)
- View Highlight
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Nobody wants to live in a city where everything is owned by a few giant corporations, consisting of nothing but malls and billboards—yet that is essentially what the internet has become. To flourish, democratic cities need parks and libraries, department stores and street markets, schools and police stations, sidewalks and art galleries. As the great urban thinker Jane Jacobs wrote, the best urban design helps people interact with one another, and the best architecture facilitates the best conversation. The same is true of the internet.
- View Highlight
-

Kremlin-friendly troll farms swamp the world with disinformation. Autocrats, both aspiring and actual, manipulate algorithms and use fake accounts to distort, harass, and spread “alternative facts.” The United States has no real answer to these challenges, and no wonder: We don’t have an internet based on our democratic values of openness, accountability, and respect for human rights. An online system controlled by a tiny number of secretive companies in Silicon Valley is not democratic but rather oligopolistic, even oligarchic.
- View Highlight
-

The buttons we press and the statements we make online are turned into data, which are then fed back into algorithms that can be used to profile and target us through advertising. Self-expression no longer necessarily leads to emancipation: The more we speak, click, and swipe online, the less powerful we are. Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emerita at Harvard Business School, coined the term surveillance capitalism to describe this system. The scholars Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias have called it “data colonialism,” a term that reflects our inability to stop our data from being unwittingly extracted.
- View Highlight
-

Right now companies fight intensely to retain their exemption from “intermediary liability,” guaranteed to them by the now-infamous Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This frees them from legal responsibility for nearly all content posted on their platform.
- View Highlight
-

Matias has his own lab, the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell, dedicated to making digital technologies that serve the public and not just private companies.
- View Highlight
-

Inspired by the philosopher Karl Popper, the doyen of “open society” and a critic of untransparent social engineering, Matias thinks we have to not just take control of our own data, but also help oversee the design of algorithmic experiments, with “individual participation and consent at all decision levels possible.” For example, victims of prejudice should be able to help create experiments that explore how algorithms can reduce racism. Rohingya in Myanmar should be able to insist on social-media design that doesn’t facilitate their oppression. Russians, and for that matter non-Russians, should be able to limit the amount of government propaganda they see.
- View Highlight
-

Perhaps the most apt historical model for algorithmic regulation is not trust-busting, but environmental protection. To improve the ecology around a river, it isn’t enough to simply regulate companies’ pollution. Nor will it help to just break up the polluting companies. You need to think about how the river is used by citizens—what sort of residential buildings are constructed along the banks, what is transported up and down the river—and the fish that swim in the water. Fishermen, yachtsmen, ecologists, property developers, and area residents all need a say. Apply that metaphor to the online world: Politicians, citizen-scientists, activists, and ordinary people will all have to work together to co-govern a technology whose impact is dependent on everyone’s behavior, and that will be as integral to our lives and our economies as rivers once were to the emergence of early civilizations.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::Laws to regulate the (digital) commons can take a page from laws to regulate the (physical) commons.]

(highlight:: In Britain, John Reith, the visionary son of a Scottish clergyman, began to look for an alternative: radio that was controlled neither by the state, as it was in dictatorships, nor by polarizing, profit-seeking companies. Reith’s idea was public radio, funded by taxpayers but independent of the government. It would not only “inform, educate and entertain”; it would facilitate democracy by bringing society together: “The voice of the leaders of thought or action coming to the fireside; the news of the world at the ear of the rustic … the facts of great issues, hitherto distorted by partisan interpretation, now put directly and clearly before them; a return of the City-State of old.” This vision of a radio broadcaster that could create a cohesive yet pluralistic national conversation eventually became the BBC, where Reith was the first director-general.
Reith’s legacy lives on in a new generation of thinkers, among them Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a tech wizard who wrote the code that underlies the pop-up ad, one of the biggest milestones in the growth of online advertising. Partly as penance, Zuckerman now dedicates his time to thinking about nonprofit online spaces that could compete with the online commercial world he helped create. Social media, he told us, is broken: “I helped break it. Now I am interested in building new systems from scratch. And part of what we should be building are networks that have explicit social promise.”)
- View Highlight
-

A Vermont-based site, Front Porch Forum, is used by roughly a quarter of the state’s residents for all sorts of community activity, from natural-disaster response to job-hunting, as well as civic discussion. Instead of encouraging users to interact as much and as fast as possible, Front Porch slows the conversation down: Your posts come online 24 hours after you’ve written them. Sometimes, people reach out to the moderators to retract something said in anger. Everyone on the forum is real, and they have to sign up using real Vermont addresses. When you go on the site, you interact with your actual neighbors, not online avatars.
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Peixoto has developed projects that could, for example, allow citizens to help put together a city budget. But those would require politicians to cede real power, which is not something many politicians like to do. Even beyond that, some skepticism about the attraction of the forums is surely warranted: Aren’t we all addicted to the rage and culture wars available on social media? Don’t we use social media to perform, or to virtue signal, or to express identity—and don’t we like it that way?
Maybe. Or maybe we think that way only because we lack the imagination to think differently. That’s the conclusion drawn by Eli Pariser, a co-founder of Avaaz and Upworthy, two websites designed to foster online political engagement, and Talia Stroud, the director of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin.)
- View Highlight
-

Nobody wants to live in a city where everything is owned by a few giant corporations, consisting of nothing but malls and billboards—yet that is essentially what the internet has become. To flourish, democratic cities need parks and libraries, department stores and street markets, schools and police stations, sidewalks and art galleries. As the great urban thinker Jane Jacobs wrote, the best urban design helps people interact with one another, and the best architecture facilitates the best conversation. The same is true of the internet.
- View Highlight
-