0:00

We do tend to assume that

0:02

technology is inherently progressive. And

0:05

I think it's really difficult to take

0:08

away that facade and not only

0:10

to say that technology can have

0:12

unintended reactionary consequences, but also that

0:15

there are people who are specifically

0:17

building and using them towards reactionary

0:19

ends. Hello

0:37

and welcome to Tech Won't Say about Made in Partnership

0:39

with The Nation magazine. I'm your host Paris

0:41

Marks. Last week we celebrated 250 episodes

0:44

of the show and we had to

0:46

reckon with some political developments that have

0:48

been happening. But this week

0:50

I have such a fascinating conversation for

0:52

you that I think really gets to

0:54

the heart of what this show is

0:56

trying to do, in trying

0:59

to interrogate the politics of the tech

1:01

industry, but also understand where these things

1:03

have come from and how ideas that

1:05

have been around for a long time,

1:08

how movements that have been pushing these

1:10

particular ideas for a long time have

1:12

influenced what we're dealing with today in

1:14

ways that sometimes we don't even

1:16

recognize. And so my guest this

1:19

week is Becca Lewis. Becca just

1:21

finished her PhD. She is now

1:23

a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford

1:25

University. And so I had the

1:27

great pleasure of being able to

1:29

read Becca's dissertation, which is not

1:31

something that you usually say about

1:33

a doctoral dissertation. Let's be clear

1:35

about that. But it was absolutely

1:37

fascinating because it gets into the

1:40

right-wing movements that were organizing around

1:42

computation and digital technologies and the internet

1:44

in the 1980s and 1990s and ultimately

1:46

had a very significant

1:51

impact on the way that

1:53

we think about these technologies

1:55

and also the policy responses that

1:57

existed to them and the D-ray

1:59

regulation that happened in the 1990s

2:02

that have gone on to significantly shape

2:04

not just how we think about these

2:07

technologies today, but things that are actually

2:09

happening in this moment. And when we

2:11

look back at the types of ideas

2:13

that the leaders of these movements, people

2:15

like George Gilder and Newt Gingrich were

2:18

communicating in the 1990s, you'll hear us

2:21

say it in this interview, in this

2:24

discussion, there are so many resonances to

2:26

the types of things that the billionaires

2:28

of Silicon Valley are talking about today,

2:31

as they have started openly championing this

2:33

right wing politics in a way that

2:36

maybe they haven't done in a while.

2:38

But it shows once again that these

2:40

right wing ideas are not novel, are

2:42

not new, or something that have just

2:44

emerged in the past little while, but

2:47

rather have been around and have been

2:49

in the waters of this industry for

2:51

a very long time. I can't tell

2:53

you how thrilled I was to

2:56

read back his dissertation, to have her back on

2:58

the show and to be

3:00

able to explore this important subject

3:02

with her. Because especially

3:05

as we head into this Trump

3:07

presidency that has empowered the tech

3:09

industry and increasingly right wing tech

3:11

industry that is really seeking to

3:13

reshape so many aspects, not just

3:16

of American society, but of our

3:18

societies much more broadly, because these

3:20

ideas won't just stay in the

3:23

United States and these people will be trying

3:25

to exert their power far beyond that, that

3:27

this is an episode that really helps us

3:30

understand where these ideas came from. And knowing

3:32

that history, I think, is

3:34

really important to being able to push

3:36

back against them and to try to

3:38

limit their influence. So unfortunately,

3:40

I'm not able to share Becca's dissertation

3:43

with you because it is under embargo.

3:45

But I know that she's planning to

3:47

do some writing about the ideas that

3:49

she discussed in the dissertation. They've

3:51

not been published yet, but certainly you

3:53

can watch either of our social media

3:55

accounts on Twitter or Blue Sky. And

3:57

we'll certainly be sharing those for you

3:59

to read once they are published. So

4:01

if you enjoy this interview, if

4:04

you enjoy the work that we do here on Tech Won't

4:06

Save Us, make sure to leave a five-star view on the

4:08

podcast platform of your choice. You can also share the show

4:10

on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you

4:12

think would learn from it. And if you want to support

4:15

the work that goes into making the show that we've now

4:17

been doing for 251 episodes

4:19

to make sure we can keep having these

4:21

critical conversations about the tech industry at a

4:24

time when they're about to be championing their

4:26

power, you can join supporters like Tristan from

4:28

Calgary, Barbara from Toronto, Carl from Portland, Oregon,

4:30

and Dan and Essex in the UK by

4:33

going to patreon.com/Tech Won't Save Us where you

4:35

can become a supporter as well. Thanks so

4:37

much and enjoy this week's conversation. Becca,

4:41

welcome back to the show. Thanks

4:43

so much for having me back. I'm thrilled.

4:45

And before we get into the interview, which

4:47

is like on such a fascinating topic, I

4:50

have to say two things. First

4:52

of all, congratulations on finishing your

4:54

PhD. Such a huge feat. And

4:56

second of all, I've read your

4:58

dissertation. This is what we're talking

5:00

about in this episode. So

5:03

fantastically done. Like, you know, kudos to

5:05

you on what you've been able to

5:07

research and pull up with it. It's

5:09

just fantastic. Oh, thank

5:11

you so much for the kind words.

5:13

It is very much a Paris Marx-centric

5:15

type of dissertation. It

5:18

was made just for me personally. I

5:20

appreciate it. But yeah,

5:22

it's so fascinating. And sure if

5:24

the listeners are able to grab it somewhere, they'll

5:26

really enjoy it as well if they're really into

5:28

this stuff. But if not, you know, they'll have

5:30

an hour of us talking about it. So they'll

5:32

get some of the basics at least. And so

5:34

the dissertation and your research really digs into this

5:36

period in the 1990s. And

5:39

you know, some of the ideologies, for lack

5:41

of a better word, that have shaped how

5:43

we think about the internet today. And this

5:45

is obviously something that a lot of people

5:47

have explored. A lot of people have written

5:49

about the 1990s and what went on there.

5:51

Why did you feel it was important to

5:53

wade back into that space and that moment?

5:56

And what did you feel was missing from

5:58

the usual analysis that we have? his

10:00

name was everywhere. He was one

10:03

of the biggest techno evangelists, Silicon Valley

10:05

evangelists. He built this career up as

10:07

kind of a tech guru. He had

10:09

this newsletter where he would talk about

10:12

his preferred startup stocks and it caused

10:14

this wave that people called the Gilder

10:16

Effect where people would rush to buy

10:18

those stocks. So he was this really

10:21

influential figure in Silicon Valley

10:23

at the time. And he

10:25

actually emerged out of a very

10:28

traditional right-wing world. He

10:31

had been a longtime mentee of

10:34

William F. Buckley, the godfather of

10:36

modern conservatism. And

10:38

throughout the 70s, he was known

10:40

primarily as an anti-feminist

10:42

provocateur. And then in

10:45

the 80s, he remade

10:47

himself as a supply-side

10:49

economics guru. And

10:51

then by the 90s became this techno evangelist. And

10:54

I think it's easy to think of him as

10:56

kind of this opportunist who is flitting from world

10:58

to world. But I

11:00

see it much more as a cohesive ideology that he

11:02

formed between all of these things. Yeah.

11:04

Again, like the resonances are just wild to me

11:06

as I was reading through the dissertation and seeing

11:09

these ideas and seeing what these people are talking

11:11

about now. But I feel like one of the

11:13

things that really stood out to me as I

11:15

was reading about this was, as

11:18

you're saying, this notion of gender

11:21

in particular, how he's very concerned

11:23

about what masculinity is

11:25

looking like in that moment.

11:28

And he's pitching the entrepreneur

11:30

associated with this new rising

11:32

tech industry, associated with the

11:35

internet technologies that are coming

11:37

on and the kind

11:39

of new advanced computing technologies and all this

11:41

kind of stuff. And it's really being kind

11:44

of centered around this masculine image of what

11:46

this tech entrepreneur is going to be. Can

11:48

you flesh that out a bit more for

11:50

me? And how these

11:53

ideas that he had, as you say,

11:55

he comes out of this anti-feminist past,

11:57

get kind of melded together

11:59

with this. this tech optimism or whatnot that

12:01

you were talking about? Yeah,

12:03

absolutely. So in the 70s, he

12:05

published a few different books that

12:08

painted really this deeply pessimistic

12:10

vision of society. I mean,

12:12

his first big anti-feminist tract

12:14

was called Sexual Suicide. And

12:16

the claim was that because

12:18

humanity was no longer prioritizing

12:20

procreation within the heterosexual nuclear

12:23

family unit that we were

12:25

going to cease to populate

12:27

the world into the future.

12:29

So familiar. Also has

12:31

some artistic residences. Yeah.

12:35

But what you see as you read

12:37

his works is he was really consumed,

12:39

I think, by this crisis

12:41

of masculinity emerging at the time

12:44

that had to do

12:46

with the emergence of second wave feminism

12:48

and women's liberation and had to do

12:50

with the rise of women in the

12:53

workforce, the birth control pill, and

12:56

the rise of no-fault divorces. And

12:59

he really started to express how awful

13:01

he thought all of that was for

13:03

society, in large part because

13:06

it rendered this male breadwinner role

13:08

obsolete. And for him, that was kind of one

13:10

of the most important pieces

13:13

of society functioning as it should.

13:15

And one of his big things

13:18

that he laid blame on as

13:20

well was the welfare state, as

13:22

he called it. So, you know,

13:24

there were also racial connotations because

13:26

he said, you know, black poverty,

13:28

which was a big topic of

13:30

discussion in policy circles in the

13:32

70s, he said that emerged as

13:34

a result of welfare programs because

13:36

welfare programs were funding black mothers

13:39

so that there was no need for

13:41

black fathers to be around. And these

13:43

black men, he said, would be kind

13:45

of really restless and uprooted and they

13:47

needed that fatherhood role and the ability

13:50

to be entrepreneurial to be restored. It's

13:52

such like a backward framing, like the

13:54

complete reverse, right? The welfare programs are

13:56

the problem, not a way to try

13:59

to rectify these long-term like harms created

14:01

by slavery and the histories of American

14:04

racism and all this kind of stuff. Yeah, it's

14:06

wild. Right. It's starting from

14:08

the complete opposite point and then working

14:10

from there. And

14:13

then by the end of the decade, I mean, some

14:16

of this was due to changes in his personal life.

14:18

He got married and he either discovered

14:20

or rediscovered Christianity and started

14:22

going to church again. And he

14:24

remade himself and started publishing

14:27

actually these incredibly optimistic books.

14:30

And he found his answer in the

14:32

role of the entrepreneur and

14:34

he associated entrepreneurship with the restoration

14:36

of the male breadwinner role. And

14:38

he said, you know, if men

14:40

can be entrepreneurial enough, we'll have

14:43

no need for welfare programs. Women

14:45

can kind of return to the home. And

14:48

I think it also served as this affirmation

14:50

at a moment that was not only kind

14:52

of a crisis of the nuclear family, as

14:54

it had been known, but also a crisis

14:56

of industrialism. Right. That this was kind

14:58

of the shift from industrialism to

15:01

post-industrialism. And I think entrepreneurship was

15:03

the answer for that as well.

15:05

So he kind of started to

15:07

center all of his hopes on

15:10

this like quasi-mythological masculine figure of

15:12

the entrepreneur. That

15:14

makes so much sense. Right. Like what

15:16

is the post-industrial man now that you're

15:18

not working in the factory and, you

15:21

know, creating these things that that

15:23

is, you know, what was held up as

15:25

like masculinity in the past. So, okay, this

15:27

role of making cars or making things or

15:30

whatever is dying is going away. You know,

15:32

all these communities are losing these jobs. What's

15:34

the next thing? Okay, we're going to be

15:36

the entrepreneurs. We're going to be creating these

15:38

new companies. We're going to be changing the

15:41

world, blah, blah, blah. But you mentioned how

15:43

he kind of also picks up Christianity around

15:45

this moment as well. And I feel like

15:47

one of the important things that your dissertation

15:50

does too, which is, you know, I've had

15:52

some conversations about this on the podcast is

15:54

I feel like Silicon Valley is often treated

15:56

as this kind of secular space, right? Where

15:59

they're not very that

20:00

into a next level thing. You really

20:02

do feel with Steve Jobs, you know, the

20:04

presentation of these devices was kind of like

20:06

he was, you know, taking these things down

20:09

and presenting them to this public like he

20:11

had been gifted them from God. You know,

20:13

nobody made them. There were no engineers or

20:15

anything behind them. He was just

20:17

like showing off this magical device that was going to

20:19

do all these things through. Like it's

20:22

wild. We're going to get down from

20:24

on high. Exactly. Exactly. You know, you're

20:26

talking about how Gilder was shaping these ideas in

20:28

the 90s, right? And again, I feel like for

20:30

a lot of people who are hearing the name

20:33

George Gilder and are not kind of deeply into

20:35

this history in the way that we are. And

20:37

to be clear, I learned so much reading your

20:39

dissertation. You're even much more into this than I

20:41

am. But at least I've read a number of

20:44

these books and stuff, right? But for people who,

20:46

you know, are just kind of coming into contact

20:48

with this stuff every now and then, the name

20:50

George Gilder might be far less familiar, even though,

20:53

as you say, he was very well known at

20:55

the time. He was very influential at the time.

20:58

And I feel like one of the things that

21:00

stood out to me reading this and thinking about

21:02

the other things that I have read in the

21:04

past is how this kind of right wing interest

21:06

in the internet and digital technology and the role

21:09

that they played in trying to shape the ideas

21:11

that we have around it in the 1990s

21:14

seems really lost in our discourse of

21:16

the internet and its history and how

21:18

it has developed since then. Do you

21:20

have any theories as to why that

21:22

part of the story seems to have

21:24

been so lost or kind of

21:26

written out of the histories that we have of it?

21:28

Yeah, I have a few different theories. I mean, one

21:31

is that Gilder's influence really,

21:33

really waned after the.com crash

21:35

because he was the biggest

21:38

techno optimist in the world.

21:41

And even when other critics were starting

21:43

to suggest that there might be a

21:45

crash coming, he never publicly spoke about

21:47

that, although he insisted after the fact

21:49

he knew it was coming. Yeah,

21:52

there's this quote where he's saying like he was the best

21:54

stock picker for this year and this year

21:56

and this year. And then when the crash happened, he was the

21:58

worst one ever or something like that. You're

22:02

the best until you're not. So I

22:04

think that his influence really waned after

22:06

that. And so it wasn't as visible.

22:09

And I also think there was a

22:11

lot of work that Silicon Valley was

22:13

doing between Web 1.0 and

22:15

Web 2.0 to kind of rebrand how

22:17

it was positioning itself. But then

22:19

I also think more broadly, culturally,

22:21

we have a really tough time

22:24

separating the idea of

22:26

technologies from social progress.

22:29

And this is partly due to the

22:31

work of marketing from Silicon Valley. But

22:34

it's really tough for us, I think,

22:36

to wrap our head around the idea

22:38

that people could be embracing contemporary

22:41

technologies for the purpose of

22:44

socially reactionary goals. But

22:46

in fact, that has been the

22:49

case in really important historical moments before,

22:51

not least of all the rise of

22:53

fascism. Italian futurists were

22:55

kind of the artistic proto-fascist movement.

22:57

They were obsessed with the speed

22:59

of cars, which were the newest

23:02

thing at the time, and also

23:05

openly rejected kind of women in

23:07

public life and wrote about

23:09

those being aligned. And they looked to

23:11

the older mythology of kind of the

23:13

Roman Empire. And I know

23:16

it could seem potentially like a big leap

23:18

to be comparing the guys I'm looking at

23:20

to literal fascist

23:22

movements. But if you look at

23:24

someone like Marc Andreessen today, one

23:26

of the biggest VCs, he literally

23:28

writes praise of the Italian futurists.

23:30

So he's not making a leap.

23:32

He says it himself that he

23:34

looks to these guys. JS. Yeah,

23:36

I think he literally called Filippo

23:38

Thomas Maranetti basically one of the

23:40

founders of Italian futurism a patron

23:42

saint of techno-optimism. JS. Yes, that's

23:44

right. And Andreessen was someone that

23:46

worked quite closely with Gilder in

23:48

the late 90s. So you see

23:51

those threads connected as well. Yeah.

23:53

JS. Yeah, I guess I was not so surprised when

23:55

he came up with the dissertation, but I was like,

23:58

Oh, not this guy again. He's here. But

24:02

you know, so as I

24:04

mentioned earlier, this is not just about Gilder. This

24:06

was a network, right? There were a lot of

24:09

other people involved in it. And especially as we

24:11

get into really trying to shape policy, there are

24:13

other actors who play an important role there too.

24:15

And again, you know, when we're talking about some

24:17

of these forgotten histories or some of these aspects

24:20

of it that get written out of the history,

24:22

we talk a ton about Al Gore, right? And

24:25

the role that he played in, you know, the creation

24:27

of the internet, the rollout of the internet, all this

24:29

kind of stuff. But there's another important figure in that

24:31

time on the other side of the political aisle who

24:34

I feel like we don't talk about all that much

24:36

at all. And that is Newt Gingrich, of course. How

24:38

was he embracing the internet and trying to shape

24:41

it to conservative ends in this time as well?

24:43

Yeah, totally. Gingrich actually was

24:46

always a big technology enthusiast.

24:49

And in the 80s, he would write

24:51

about his dreams of kind of colonies on

24:53

the moon and trying to use, you know,

24:55

NASA funding and so on to get

24:57

people to the moon. To make us

24:59

a multi planetary species, even though I'd

25:02

say. Once again, the

25:04

resonances are strong. But again,

25:06

this wasn't opportunistic on his part.

25:08

He genuinely was super excited about

25:10

new technologies. And

25:12

in the second half of the 20th

25:15

century, one of the big ways that

25:17

conservative movements built power was by building

25:19

up their own media outlets and building

25:21

up think tanks where they could produce

25:23

research. And so both

25:26

Gilder and Gingrich became kind of

25:28

tied into this broader network of

25:30

think tanks that helped found think

25:33

tanks. In particular, one of them,

25:35

the Progress and Freedom Foundation, was established

25:37

in part to

25:39

help shape legislation around the young

25:41

web. And they did, in

25:44

fact, help shape the policy that turned out

25:46

to be the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which

25:49

is kind of where we got section 230

25:51

and a lot of the different aspects that

25:54

are still kind of the legal structure of

25:56

the web. So I want to come

25:58

back to that point in just a second. I want

26:00

to talk about the media piece of it first, right? Because

26:03

this was something that was a

26:05

bit surprising to me, even reading

26:07

your dissertation. You know, obviously everyone

26:09

knows that Wired was really involved

26:11

in pushing these very optimistic ideas

26:13

in the 1990s for what

26:16

the internet was going to be and all this kind

26:18

of stuff. And there's a lot of links to John

26:20

Perry Barlow and kind of the ideas that

26:23

were coming out of the Electronic Frontier

26:25

Foundation and all that kind of stuff. But

26:27

I was a bit more surprised to

26:29

see about these more kind of right wing

26:31

oriented publications that were pushing these ideas,

26:33

which obviously had to be there if this

26:36

was happening, but were ones that I

26:38

was less familiar with, in particular seeing like

26:40

Forbes and Forbes kind of creating its

26:42

own brand around these type of things that

26:44

George Gilder was involved in. So I

26:46

guess what was the role of

26:49

media in popularizing these ideas? And how

26:51

were these right wing figures really trying

26:53

to be engaged in shaping the type

26:56

of media that was being created to

26:58

get these ideas out there in that

27:00

time? Exactly as you say, they haven't

27:02

had as much cultural memory lasting power

27:05

as Wired in part because they don't

27:07

exist anymore. Most of them closed up

27:09

shop in the early 2000s. That's

27:12

a good reason, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Extremely

27:15

fair. There were a couple of

27:17

big publications that ended up being

27:19

pretty big megaphones for Gilder's ideas

27:21

and also at times for Gingrich

27:23

and his ideas. One of

27:26

them, as you mentioned was Forbes. So in

27:28

1990, Forbes was

27:30

a multi-generational family run company.

27:33

And in 1990, a new generation took over

27:35

and it was run by this guy,

27:38

Steve Forbes, who in 1996 actually

27:41

ran for president on a flat

27:43

tax model. Sounds like a

27:45

great one. Yeah. He

27:47

became really, really taken by Gilder

27:49

and Gilder's ideas. And

27:52

so he founded this

27:54

like once every two months, they

27:56

would distribute this additional magazine to

27:59

all of the... Forbes subscriber is

28:01

like 800,000 or so subscribers, that

28:03

basically was a mouthpiece for Gilder's

28:05

ideas. So it was called Forbes

28:08

ASAP. And in almost

28:10

every issue, there would

28:12

be a long form essay by

28:15

Gilder, basically talking about like which

28:17

new technologies he was super excited

28:19

about. And in particular, he would

28:21

choose these technologies that aligned with

28:23

his ideological vision. So, you know,

28:25

at first it was the microchip,

28:28

but then by the 90s, he

28:30

was so excited about network computing.

28:32

And he was excited about a number of

28:34

different technologies that would help kind of build

28:37

the network infrastructure that would become the internet

28:39

as we know it today. So there

28:41

was that piece. And then

28:43

there was also a conservative publication

28:46

called Upside, that was founded by

28:48

another couple of young conservatives in

28:51

Silicon Valley who were also inspired

28:53

by William F. Buckley. And

28:56

they became really close friends with Gilder.

28:58

And that became a publication really

29:00

focused on the business

29:03

side of the Valley and entrepreneurs and

29:05

promoting Gilder's ideas of entrepreneurship. That publication

29:07

didn't feature Gilder's writing as much, although

29:09

it did sometimes, but it featured several

29:12

cover pieces on Gilder. Gotcha. Got to

29:14

profile him as well, right? Not just

29:16

allow him to write. There's another piece

29:19

of this too, right? So we talk

29:21

about the magazines and kind of the

29:23

print publications, but another aspect of this

29:25

that you write about is how, you

29:28

know, you have these right-wing networks, these

29:30

right-wing think tanks that are also investing

29:32

in television and cable at this time

29:35

to create this other means of distributing

29:37

these ideas, you know, to also push

29:39

particular notions of, you know, what media

29:41

should be in that time.

29:44

Because Gilder, as you noted, was also writing a

29:46

lot about his thoughts on media and, you know,

29:48

obviously was not a fan of a lot of,

29:50

you know, the kind of mainstream media at the

29:52

time and wanting to break it up, again, ideas

29:54

that seem very, very resonant. How were they thinking

29:56

about media and how that needed to change in

29:58

their kind of ideal vision? for

30:01

how this new society would work. Yeah,

30:03

so as a lot of media historians

30:05

have written about, you know, this right

30:07

wing animosity towards, quote unquote, mainstream media

30:10

goes way further back than the internet.

30:12

So, you know, someone like Nicole Hemmer

30:14

has written about how in the 1950s

30:17

conservatives were talking about liberal

30:19

media bias and were trying to build

30:21

up their own publications and institutions to

30:23

counter it. And by the 1980s,

30:25

you had the rise of people like Rush Limbaugh

30:28

and talk radio. And at

30:30

this moment in time, you know,

30:32

Gilder was writing about entrepreneurs. He

30:34

was writing about Silicon Valley and

30:37

he became really taken with the

30:39

media and communication potential of these

30:42

new information technologies. And

30:44

he basically said, this is going to be

30:46

the newest weapon in our

30:48

arsenal in fighting back against the mainstream

30:50

media and the public schools. So, you

30:52

know, he was concerned with the liberal

30:55

bias in the media and then also

30:57

the secular bias in

31:00

schools. So this was a moment when

31:02

there were battles happening over, you know,

31:04

sex education and the theory of evolution

31:06

versus creationism. And then

31:08

you had someone like Newt Gingrich saying,

31:10

oh, actually the internet will also be

31:12

a way that you can bypass the

31:15

morally corrupted profession of doctors because he

31:17

was concerned with the fact that doctors

31:19

were being too sympathetic to AIDS patients

31:22

instead of treating it as a moral

31:24

failing. So you had at this moment

31:26

of time, this realization among this network

31:28

of people that the internet could be

31:30

a way to work

31:33

around and subvert the power

31:35

of kind of traditional institutions

31:37

of expertise in society. And they jumped

31:40

at that chance and actually, you know,

31:42

in the early nineties, they started

31:45

to bring their publications and organizations

31:48

onto the internet and started to build out

31:50

their own sources and libraries of information that

31:52

then they could use to attack

31:54

the sources they didn't like. Yeah, it's wild to

31:56

hear that, right? And it feels like every time

31:58

we have these discussions. about like what the right

32:00

is saying about the media or the schools or

32:02

whatever. It feels like brand new, right? Like this

32:04

is something that is just happening now. But

32:07

then you look back and it's like, oh,

32:09

like every decade or decade and a half

32:11

or something, there's a new way that they're

32:13

bringing these like attacks back and

32:16

we're just in like another moment of

32:18

them being like at their height, it

32:20

feels like. Yeah, absolutely. It's like critical

32:22

race theory and wokeness. If

32:24

you take that out and plug in political

32:27

correctness, articles everywhere in the

32:29

90s are basically identical. It's just using

32:31

slightly different terminology. You know, as I

32:34

said, I wanted to get to the

32:36

policy piece, but based on what you

32:38

were talking about there, right, these ideas

32:40

that they're putting out there, that technology

32:42

and the Internet offer these opportunities to

32:44

challenge these traditional institutions. When you say

32:46

that naturally, I think not just about

32:48

what the right is saying in this

32:50

time, but also what these more

32:52

libertarian perspectives that we're more used to

32:54

hearing about that come out of this

32:56

more countercultural background or tendency are also

32:58

saying then, too, right? You look at

33:00

the John Perry Barlow's and his kind

33:02

of manifesto and it's all about getting

33:04

the state out of the Internet and

33:06

making sure that they're not there. And

33:09

we're going to build this wonderful community

33:11

online that's going to be free of

33:13

discrimination and all this kind of stuff

33:15

like, you know, total utopian thinking about

33:17

what this kind of cyber future is going

33:20

to be. But then you see how there

33:22

are some resonances in the two discourses of

33:24

what this kind of right wing movement is

33:27

saying, but also what you're hearing from this

33:29

more libertarian kind of aspect of

33:31

it. So I wonder, you know, when

33:34

you're looking at what this reactionary futurist

33:36

network is saying and putting out there,

33:38

and then you compare that to what,

33:40

you know, Electronic Frontier Foundation and this

33:43

more libertarian perspective, more countercultural perspective is

33:45

saying on the Internet in that time,

33:47

what similarities do you see

33:50

between those perspectives, but also distinctions

33:52

as well? Yeah, the group of

33:54

people that I am looking at

33:56

were really inspired by the Electronic

33:58

Frontier Foundation. And I think

34:00

commentators at the time even noted that EFF

34:03

came about and then these right-wing

34:06

guys created the Progress and Freedom

34:08

Foundation, PFF. The two

34:10

groups found a lot of resonances

34:12

and ended up building this kind

34:14

of political coalition, even though they

34:17

diverged in many important ways in

34:19

their goals. I think a journalist

34:21

at the time called them bedfellows

34:23

of unimaginable strangeness because the

34:26

Electronic Frontier Foundation guys, as

34:29

you mentioned, they were coming out

34:31

of this much more countercultural tradition. The

34:34

historian Fred Turner has written quite a bit

34:36

about them, that they wanted to see decentralized

34:40

non-hierarchical, commune-inspired

34:45

social structures. And

34:48

they thought that the internet was going

34:50

to naturally bring that about. And they

34:52

saw these early virtual communities starting and

34:54

they thought, wow, society can

34:56

be structured in this way. And

34:59

so from their perspective, the government

35:01

getting involved could only harm that

35:04

process. And so they wanted as

35:06

little government intervention as possible. The

35:08

networks of people that I'm looking

35:10

at also wanted government to

35:13

not be involved, but

35:15

not for a purpose of

35:17

egalitarianism. They said, we

35:19

don't want government involvement because that's

35:21

this top-down imposed system

35:23

of hierarchy. In fact, you need

35:25

to get rid of that so

35:28

that the natural hierarchies of the

35:30

universe can emerge. And

35:32

that's the world and the society that we want

35:34

to see, and that will be the internet. So

35:37

even though they had very different ultimate

35:39

goals than the people at the

35:42

EFF, they all shared the goal

35:44

of getting the government out of

35:46

the internet. And so they built

35:49

this political coalition fighting

35:51

back against Al Gore's information

35:53

superhighway vision of the internet.

35:55

It's such a fascinating story. And there

35:58

was a quote in your dissertation. where

36:00

John Perry Barlow said quote, nuking

36:02

riches culture is literally at war

36:05

with my culture, but ideologically about

36:07

the net, we don't have any

36:09

disagreements. And I guess like my

36:11

question based on that is, you know, if

36:13

you look at how the internet has evolved,

36:16

I feel like this more reactionary

36:19

futurist perspective that you're talking about

36:21

and this desire that they had

36:24

to create this really commercialized internet,

36:26

you know, where people were going to profit,

36:29

that you were going to have all these

36:31

entrepreneurs, all this kind of stuff is a

36:33

vision that really won out. You know, maybe

36:35

it's not as socially conservative as they would

36:38

have wanted, but like this hyper-commercialism is what

36:40

we have received from this digital infrastructure. And

36:43

so I guess on the side of like the EFF

36:45

and the Barlows, do you think

36:47

that there was just a lot of naivete

36:49

there or like, did they start to buy

36:51

into some of these ideas that this right-wing

36:53

project was having as well? Like, how do

36:55

you see that moment and the interaction there?

36:57

Yeah, I think there was a little bit

36:59

of both. And, you know, I'm not an

37:01

expert on the EFF, so some of this

37:03

I am getting from the work of my

37:05

colleagues, but, you know, someone like Fred Turner

37:07

would say that there was a lot of

37:09

naivete about, you know, as much as these

37:11

groups talked about non-hierarchical

37:13

networks, that hierarchies

37:16

always emerged, right? Even back in the

37:18

sixties when they set up communes, they

37:20

fell into these very traditional gender relations.

37:22

They were kind of setting up shop

37:24

next to indigenous populations, like all of

37:26

these things that ultimately there was a

37:29

lot of naivete involved. But I also

37:31

think that some of these guys were

37:33

in fact more right-wing than

37:35

they let on. And John Perry

37:37

Barlow is like a classic case of that. I

37:39

mean, he was a Republican. A

37:42

speechwriter for Dick Cheney, if I remember correctly.

37:44

Yeah, I think that's right, yeah. And

37:46

was also very concerned with masculinity

37:48

in his own ways. And he

37:51

kind of foregrounded the cowboy figure,

37:53

right? I mean, he was a

37:55

cattle rancher, I think. And

37:58

he developed, this metaphor of

38:00

like the digital frontier and

38:03

making it seem like this uncharted wilderness where

38:05

this like rugged masculinity would come in and

38:07

establish itself. So I think that in a

38:09

lot of ways there were actually more ideological

38:12

resonances than they might have let on. And

38:14

I don't know whether it was, you know,

38:16

it may have been strategic to hype up

38:18

the fact of like, oh, look, we're so

38:20

different, we've come together over this thing. Or

38:22

maybe they genuinely didn't think about how similar

38:24

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38:27

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for details. There's

39:36

another piece in your dissertation where you

39:38

talk about how Gilder and the ones

39:40

that openly identified as more conservative saw

39:42

this idea of the frontier and really

39:45

embraced it because it really resonated with

39:47

their political ideals and their more conservative

39:49

ideas. And it fits in with Manifest

39:51

Destiny and all these ideas that they

39:53

were wrapped up in. So yeah, that

39:56

makes perfect sense. But you also mentioned

39:58

Al Gore's information superhighway. And I think

40:00

that this is our pathway into talking

40:02

about the policy ramifications of these sorts

40:04

of things. Because I feel like

40:06

a lot of people will know Al Gore invented

40:09

the internet, this meme that we have, and they

40:11

will know the term information superhighway, but they might

40:13

not know that Al Gore's

40:15

vision of the information superhighway is

40:17

actually a very distinct one that

40:20

originally is quite different from the

40:22

internet that we ultimately got that

40:24

was very much influenced as

40:26

you're talking about by this reactionary

40:28

futurist network, by these more anti-government

40:31

ideas for what the internet should

40:33

be. Can you talk about how

40:35

that played out and how those

40:37

ideas around the internet developed from

40:39

this original Al Gore idea to

40:41

what was ultimately realized? Yeah, that's

40:43

exactly right that even this metaphor,

40:46

the information superhighway, Gore was

40:48

strategically using his own

40:50

metaphors and was drawing on the

40:53

superhighway metaphor, in part because

40:55

his dad had been in Congress when

40:57

interstate highways were being developed. And so

40:59

it was this idea of like, well,

41:01

this is our generation's public

41:03

infrastructure project. And when he first started

41:06

talking about it, he very much had

41:08

a vision of

41:10

government building the networks

41:12

themselves, having it be

41:14

a public works project, having it be

41:16

a way to expand the reach of

41:19

public schools and libraries. And

41:22

he pretty quickly started caving

41:24

into corporate interests. But you

41:26

also had this larger group

41:28

of public interest media advocates

41:31

who became their own group advocating

41:33

for a vision of the internet.

41:36

And it was one that really stressed

41:39

carving out pieces of

41:41

the information superhighway for

41:44

civic discussion and kind of educating

41:46

the citizenry in a non-commercial space.

41:48

So they called it a public

41:51

lane on the information superhighway. And

41:53

they stressed things like universal access and

41:56

making sure that yeah, there could be

41:58

resources for schools and libraries. that they

42:00

would have discussions about kind of what

42:03

role would librarians play in helping people

42:06

work through this kind of glut of information

42:08

that they will have. And

42:10

so they were really pushing for this

42:12

very, very different vision of what the

42:15

internet would look like. And if you

42:17

look at early drafts of legislation around

42:20

policy, and here I'm referring to work

42:22

done by scholars like Patricia Ofterheide, these

42:24

early drafts of legislation did carve out,

42:26

like there was one version of a

42:28

draft that had like 20% of the

42:31

internet devoted to public discourse in

42:34

a non-commercial realm. So it was

42:36

very, very different. I

42:39

feel like that also kind of

42:41

hearkens back to ways that television

42:43

and spectrum were thought about

42:45

in the past, right? Where, yeah, okay,

42:47

there's going to be this commercial aspect

42:49

to it in, you know, American telecommunications

42:51

policy, but we're going to make sure

42:53

that there's still going to be this

42:55

public notion that's built in there too,

42:57

this notion that, you know, there is

42:59

going to need to be some public

43:01

benefit. Yes, people can profit, but they

43:03

need to make sure that, you know,

43:05

there's a public good being served here

43:07

as well. And I feel like, you

43:09

know, what you're discussing is this notion,

43:11

this idea was built into internet policy

43:14

in the beginning. But as we move

43:16

through, you know, the early mid 1990s,

43:18

you slowly see

43:20

that being carved away by these more

43:22

anti-statist and right wing groups that are

43:24

championing a very different vision for what

43:26

the internet should be a very different

43:29

kind of neoliberal vision of free market

43:31

vision that ultimately wins out. Right. Totally.

43:33

And a lot of it was pure

43:36

capitalist interests at work. So you

43:38

had telecommunication industry lobbying to deregulate

43:40

and that was a massive, massive

43:42

force. Yeah, I can't leave that

43:44

out. Yeah. Right. And

43:47

to a large extent, those were the funding

43:50

sources for some of the think tanks

43:52

that I'm looking at. So these things

43:54

are not, you know, entirely able to

43:56

be separated out. But I

43:59

think the story that has kind of

44:01

prevailed about these battles over legislation at

44:03

the time, there's this story of, oh,

44:05

there was the Christian right who really

44:07

wanted the government to come in and

44:10

regulate because they were nervous about

44:12

porn on the internet. And

44:14

then you had the free speech libertarian

44:16

side that was advocating against that. And

44:19

in fact, what these networks

44:21

that I'm looking at were

44:23

advocating for was deregulation as

44:25

a way of restoring morality

44:28

in media. And that's why

44:30

they collaborated with the libertarians. And so

44:32

they distinguished what they called statist

44:35

moralists from anti-statist

44:37

moralists. And in

44:39

fact, over time, at first the statist

44:41

moralists had some important wins

44:44

and then they got overturned in the

44:46

courts. And over time, the guys that

44:48

I've looked at helped bring the status

44:50

moralists around to their way of thinking. So

44:54

Gilder, for example,

44:56

wrote about, he said, will

44:58

there be immoral porn on the internet? Sure.

45:01

But he saw the

45:04

television kind of media industry as

45:06

it currently existed as rotten

45:09

to the core with secular influence

45:11

that the news media was

45:13

liberal, television shows have feminist

45:15

themes. This was the moment in time

45:17

when Murphy Brown, is that the name

45:19

of the sitcom? There was a big

45:22

to-do over a character that decided to

45:24

raise a child as a single mom.

45:26

And then Dan Quayle called it out.

45:28

It was at the center of the

45:30

culture wars right then. Oh, so controversial.

45:35

He said, look, the existing media

45:37

industry is the problem. And

45:39

that's because it's limited to these

45:42

few major networks that have

45:44

power over the spectrum. So

45:47

once we kind of liberate anyone to

45:49

become a media producer

45:52

and entrepreneur, then

45:54

morality will make its way back in

45:56

and pornography will become just like a

45:58

teeny tiny part of. the

46:00

internet, which that piece wasn't perhaps the most

46:02

prescient of his predictions. Like his prediction, there

46:04

wouldn't be a crash, that one not exactly.

46:07

Right, right, right. I mean, for the record,

46:09

he did have a ton of really prescient

46:11

predictions about kind of how the new media

46:13

could be used by the right wing. But

46:16

yeah, he had a couple of real swings

46:18

and misses as well. Yeah,

46:20

and we'll come back to that. But you know,

46:23

you don't get it right every time, right? Yeah,

46:25

yeah. It's okay. But like you were saying, you

46:27

know, the story that we have about the telecommunications

46:29

act of 1996 in particular,

46:31

right? That it was these right wing groups

46:33

trying to regulate pornography and, you know, the

46:35

EFF and these groups were fighting for people's

46:37

free speech rights and digital rights online and

46:39

stuff like that. Like this is the story

46:41

that we have for how this played out.

46:43

But can you talk to us about what

46:46

the telecommunications act of 1996 actually was and

46:49

what the longer term impacts of that

46:52

legislation have been and how it kind

46:54

of transformed, I guess, this idea of

46:56

what the Internet and telecommunications

46:58

should be to this very different

47:01

idea that you've been talking about that's much

47:03

more deregulated and has these influences in it.

47:06

Yeah, it was a massively

47:08

deregulatory bill. It

47:10

basically was the first massive

47:12

rewrite of communications legislation since

47:16

it had been written in the first place in 1934. And one of the

47:21

major things that happened is

47:23

that it allowed for cross

47:25

ownership of media

47:27

properties. And so it was a

47:30

direct result of the telecommunications act

47:32

that Fox News was able to

47:34

be established because Rupert

47:37

Murdoch could now own both

47:39

newspaper and television property and

47:41

that sort of thing where

47:44

you could have radio stations and news network

47:46

all in the same region, whereas you used

47:48

to not be able to do that. The

47:50

concentration of ownership of these

47:53

media conglomerates so that now there's like

47:55

four or five big conglomerates that own almost

47:58

every piece of media. That's a

48:00

direct result of the Telecommunications Act.

48:02

And in terms of the internet,

48:04

what we see happening is the

48:06

groups that I researched along with

48:09

the EFF not only

48:11

helped establish Section

48:14

230, this idea that platforms could

48:16

kind of regulate without being treated

48:18

as publishers, but they also really

48:20

helped to kill a lot of

48:22

the public interest initiatives that

48:25

had been built into earlier

48:27

versions of the legislation. So

48:29

some more affirmative things like

48:31

this public lane on the

48:33

information superhighway. Gore bragged that

48:35

this was the first time

48:37

that universal service language had

48:39

been brought into any legislation.

48:41

There were some efforts to

48:44

establish more equitable access to

48:46

the internet. But for

48:48

the most part, the work of these

48:50

groups was in part to kind of

48:52

remove all of these affirmative efforts. And

48:55

also to ensure, as you're saying,

48:58

that it could be a hyper-commercial

49:00

space. And for the

49:02

people I'm looking at, that was one

49:04

and the same with, if entrepreneurs, these

49:06

commercial figures, are also the central

49:09

sources of morality in society, as

49:12

Gilder argued, then a more

49:14

commercial internet is also an internet of

49:17

more morality. It was fascinating for me

49:19

to read about that history and how

49:21

it all happened. And in particular, the

49:23

political dynamics of this, where you have

49:26

this more original bill that's not

49:29

nearly as deregulatory, that has these

49:31

more public-oriented initiatives in it.

49:33

But as Gingrich and the Republicans see

49:35

that they're on the cusp of gaining

49:38

more power in late 1994 and into 1995, they basically ditch

49:40

the bill that was already there

49:46

and start to rewrite their own to get ready to

49:48

pass it, to kind of have

49:50

their agenda become the one that ultimately ends

49:52

up shaping so much of what

49:54

we have seen over the past three decades. Yeah, that's

49:56

a really good point. But a big piece of that

49:58

is that in 1990, 1994, Gingrich

50:00

became Speaker of the House, that it was the first

50:03

Republican House in multiple

50:06

decades. And so at

50:08

that point, a couple of drafts

50:10

of the Telecommunications Act had

50:12

been written. But once the Congress was flipped

50:14

and he was heading it, that's when they

50:17

were able to rewrite it and kind of

50:19

put all this pressure on other Congress people

50:21

as well. Yeah, it's so interesting to see.

50:23

And so this is kind of some of

50:26

the history that was happening in the 1990s.

50:29

I would say history that we largely don't

50:31

discuss when we think about what is

50:33

happening today and the influences of

50:35

which that we don't take into account nearly

50:37

as much as we should. And so to

50:39

start to close off our interview, I wanted

50:41

to discuss some of those longer

50:44

term impacts of these types of things.

50:46

And the first one, the most obvious

50:48

one as you talked about when we

50:50

started is how

50:52

has these changes to the media infrastructure

50:54

and these goals that these right wing

50:56

figures in the 90s wanted to see

50:58

realize how do they play out in

51:00

the media today? Like in particular, you

51:02

were just saying not too long ago

51:04

that Gilder's goal was kind of

51:07

to blow up this mainstream ecosystem that we

51:09

had to enable conservatives to be able to

51:11

create all this alternative media to restore the

51:13

morality, right? As he saw it, that really

51:16

resonated to me with what we see today.

51:18

But how do you see that playing out

51:20

and how does that shape what

51:22

we see today in terms of this

51:24

evolving media ecosystem and technology ecosystem and

51:27

things like that? Yeah, I see that

51:29

the influences being twofold. One is in

51:31

terms of the people that are actually

51:33

producing media content on social media platforms.

51:36

And then the other is the people

51:38

who are running the social media platforms.

51:40

So in terms of the content

51:43

being produced, I mean, the goal

51:45

of the conservatives, Gilder and those

51:47

he was working with was to

51:49

destroy their enemies in the media

51:51

and the schools as they put

51:53

it. Now, have they destroyed the

51:55

media? No, it still exists.

51:58

But I do think it is. an

52:00

incredibly weakened media system right now, and

52:02

I think in no small part due

52:04

to the internet media systems

52:06

that we see at work. And

52:09

I'm drawn to the

52:11

example of something like Prager University, which

52:14

is a YouTube channel that I researched quite

52:17

a bit back in the day when I

52:19

was looking at right-wing YouTubers. And

52:21

Dennis Prager was really influenced

52:24

by Gilder and his ideas and ended

52:27

up working with some of

52:29

the organizations that had gone

52:31

online early on. He became part of

52:33

that broader network and then

52:36

went on to found this organization

52:38

of YouTube content that

52:40

is meant as an attack on

52:42

schools. It's meant specifically to provide

52:45

an alternative set of facts and

52:47

information for people who think

52:49

that schools and the media are too liberal.

52:52

And then in terms of how

52:54

these platforms are getting run, I

52:56

think the goal for the

52:59

people that I'm looking at was not

53:01

just to deregulate the internet. It was

53:03

to deregulate it so that it could

53:05

be run by entrepreneurs. And

53:08

we now have these media systems

53:11

that are run by individual entrepreneurs.

53:13

I mean, seeing Elon

53:15

Musk buying Twitter and the

53:17

direct results to kind of how it

53:20

gets run and operated, I

53:22

think is seeing that world in action

53:24

in a lot of ways. The fact

53:26

that these are not kind of spaces

53:28

guided by the public interest, they're spaces

53:30

run according to the whims of an

53:33

individual billionaire. I think that in many

53:35

ways is a direct result of what

53:37

we're seeing in the 90s. That

53:40

makes perfect sense, right? And in the

53:42

end of your dissertation, you talk about

53:44

how we're having all these discussions today

53:46

about polarization and disinformation and fake news

53:48

and all this kind of stuff. And

53:50

often that is positioned as the

53:53

product of these platforms and this kind

53:55

of platform issue. How do

53:58

you think that looking back at this longer

54:00

history? and understanding what was happening in the

54:02

90s and these fights that were going on

54:04

that we are clearly seeing the impacts of

54:06

today. How should that kind of help us

54:08

maybe rethink some of those conversations and what

54:10

is actually going on there? There

54:13

can be an allure to falling

54:15

into these technological fixes to what

54:17

are fundamentally social problems. This idea,

54:19

for example, that if you simply

54:22

tweak the YouTube recommendation algorithm, that

54:25

that will solve the issue of

54:27

radicalization or racism on the platform

54:29

or disinformation on the platform. Or

54:32

if you change newsfeed algorithms, it

54:34

will solve polarization. And

54:36

in fact, what we see is that it

54:38

was a highly polarized or

54:41

highly ideological group who specifically

54:43

went onto the internet with the

54:46

goal of attacking

54:49

the people whose information and ideas they

54:51

disagreed with, that that's kind of baked

54:53

in. Then that changes, we're

54:55

not going to solve this with a

54:57

tweak to the algorithm. Now, that's not

54:59

to say that those changes aren't important,

55:01

but I think we need to understand

55:04

that platforms aren't coming into these neutral

55:06

worlds and shaping them. They're coming

55:08

into these already highly polarized worlds

55:10

and are adopted from the get-go

55:12

by people with these ideological

55:15

goals. Yeah, it's such an important point to

55:17

understand, I think, right? I

55:19

feel like another one of these takeaways or things

55:21

that I wanted to ask you about these longer

55:24

term impacts is when we think

55:26

about these narratives that we have about the tech

55:28

industry and about the internet in particular today, I

55:31

feel like a lot of these narratives, what

55:33

we hear about often come from these

55:35

digital rights framings of decentralization and the

55:37

need to protect free speech and all

55:40

these sorts of things, right? But

55:42

I wonder how, when you think

55:44

about this anti-status nature of this

55:46

and how there was not just

55:48

this kind of EFF Barlow kind

55:51

of line of thinking that was

55:53

influencing these ideas, but also this

55:55

kind of Gilder reactionary futurist conservative

55:57

element of this, how much

55:59

has- the work that people like

56:01

Gilder and his network, how

56:04

has that kind of shaped and normalized

56:06

certain ideas that we have about the

56:08

internet and digital technology today that maybe

56:10

we don't interrogate nearly enough

56:12

because we don't think about these histories and we

56:15

don't know so much where they came from? Yeah,

56:18

I've been thinking about that a lot

56:20

because doing this research has upended a

56:22

lot of assumptions that I've had, you

56:24

know, these things that we take for

56:26

granted about the fact that our de

56:29

facto public spheres are these commercial spaces,

56:31

that they are run by kind of

56:33

a small group of elite businessmen, the

56:36

fact that librarians don't play a

56:38

central role in our information systems

56:41

anymore. And

56:43

I don't mean to say that the answer

56:45

is to bring in more librarians necessarily. But,

56:49

you know, there's certainly a Pandora's box

56:51

element, but I do think it has

56:53

helped me de-naturalize certain elements of the

56:56

internet that I had always just taken

56:58

for granted and that, as you said,

57:00

I think Section 230 always

57:02

gets framed in terms of this like pro

57:04

free speech thing instead of thinking

57:07

about the fact that also what it was

57:09

doing was enabling our public spheres

57:11

to be commercial entities first and foremost. Yeah, I

57:13

think such an important point and probably something I

57:15

should dig into a bit more on the show

57:18

in the future. Some of those ideas and the

57:20

legacies of them where they come from, this

57:22

would be a great starting point for that. But

57:24

I guess finally, my question would be you have

57:26

been doing this research now for years. You've

57:29

been digging into this history. You've been

57:31

exploring all this. You've now finished, you

57:33

know, your dissertation, this huge piece of

57:35

work. What is the thing that

57:37

you would most want us to take away from

57:39

the work that you've been doing and what you

57:42

have learned from doing this, you know, for so

57:44

long? Yeah, I do think some of the things

57:46

we were talking about at the beginning about the

57:48

fact that we do tend

57:50

to assume that technology is inherently

57:53

progressive. And I think

57:55

it's really difficult to take

57:57

away that facade and not only

57:59

to say that that technology can

58:01

have unintended reactionary consequences, but also

58:03

that there are people who are

58:05

specifically building and using them towards

58:07

reactionary ends. And I think just

58:09

if I can do my part

58:11

to help reframe that in people's

58:13

minds, that would probably be my

58:15

ultimate goal. I love that. I

58:17

think that's a very noble goal,

58:19

and one that certainly will resonate

58:21

with the listeners of this show.

58:23

Becca, congratulations again on finishing

58:26

your PhD. I can't wait until we have a

58:28

book about all this to promote to people to

58:30

go pick up. But thanks again for taking the

58:32

time to come on the show. I always appreciate

58:34

talking to you. Thanks so much for having

58:37

me. Becca Lewis is a

58:39

postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University. Tech Won't Save

58:41

Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine

58:43

and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is

58:45

by Eric Wickham in transcripts or by Bridgette Palau

58:47

Fry. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support

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58:52

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58:58

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59:31

Thank you.