Tag: technology
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The Marriage of Platforms and Politics Is Complete
On election night, the effective-accelerationist influencer @BasedBeffJezos posted a photo of Donald Trump along with Dana White and Elon Musk, captioned “CEO, CMO, CTO of the USA.” The country, the post implied, has become a tech company. The next day, Beff Jezos added, “America is back in the warm embrace of the techno-capital machine.” Once…
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The Age of Campaign Financialization is Here
What matters more, your vote or your bet on a prediction market? A campaign contribution or a stock purchase? It has long been common practice to worry about “campaign finance.” But even since the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision further unleashed dark money, that kind of finance was relatively straightforward: contributions to support the…
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Letter to the Boulder City Council on municipal broadband
In advance of the meeting tomorrow, I would like to write in support of moving forward on expanding our city-owned broadband resources. Several years of research on municipal and other community-based broadband solutions has made clear to me that communities need to take an active role in ensuring that their internet access is accessible, affordable,…
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Serving the State
This month I have a new title—I’m an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, on tenure track. It’s not fully clear to me how this departure from the precariat happened, except that it involved a move across the country with my family, astonishingly supportive colleagues, patient students, and an opportunity…
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What Happened to the Future?
Hi there! We’re just a few weeks away from the third #platformcoop conference at The New School in New York—a celebration and strategy session for a truly democratic internet. It’s called The People’s Disruption, and it runs all day November 10 and 11. If you can come to just one part of it, come to…
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Electricity People
The big oil and electric companies are largely unaccountable to the communities they power and pollute. But the U.S. power grid has other kinds of companies, too. Seventy-five percent of the landmass of the country gets electricity from electric cooperatives—a wildly successful New Deal program, long maligned as communist, and now little-remembered, even by its…
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Innovation for Everyone
Catch it while we still have public radio: This weekend I’ll be on WBGH-Boston’s show Innovation Hub. Listen online or over the air with your local NPR affiliate. I’m talking about Ours to Hack and to Own, the new collective manifesto for a cooperative internet that I co-edited with Trebor Scholz. The book is available…
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#WeAreTwitter
Usually when I throw out a somewhat crazy idea, it remains just that—a somewhat crazy idea, out there in the ether. But when I proposed in The Guardian recently that maybe Twiter users should buy Twitter rather than letting it get sold to another big company, something else happened. People started organizing. It has become…
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Ours to Hack
The Internet we’ve been waiting for is now available for pre-order—or, at least, a book about it. For the past couple of years, New School professor Trebor Scholz and I have been working the support and build a movement to develop more democratic, fair, and accountable ownership models for the online economy. We organized a…
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Opening Doors
Everyone is talking about Donald Trump. I can’t bring myself to do it. As we choose our apocalypse from among the presidential candidates, I’m starting to think that the best hope this election season may come from state-level initiatives, which in turn could open doors for the rest of the United States. This week, I…