Prompt: The tech industry typically speaks the language of engineering and finance. Increasingly, however, its leaders are coming to realize that they may need to become conversant in other idioms as well: the social and the political. And the social and the political, as our writers make clear, are the territories where tech’s particular configurations of bigness and smallness must ultimately be understood.

Response: Social media is the site of much hatred and delusion. It is also the soil where social movements can take root. Hashtags enable individual incidents of injustice to go viral, revealing systemic patterns. Yet that virality is made possible by monopoly—it requires one Facebook, one YouTube, one Twitter. And these large concentrations of unaccountable private power endanger the basic premise of democracy—the idea, often invoked but rarely attempted, that the whole of the people should determine how society is run.


Prompt: The leaders of the tech industry talk big. California’s very own Rocket Man wants to build a vacuum-tube railway across the state while financializing the stars. But new technologies also make it possible for ordinary people to experiment. Our children may be reduced to doing platform-driven piecework in a world ravaged by the energy demands of crypto mines. But “#nerdfarmers” are working to bring the outside indoors. In their smart bedrooms our children’s children may grow their own avocados.

Response: 4. Big Tech is an empire built on sand—literally. Sand is what silicon is made of. In the Bible, Jesus says that a wise man builds his house on rock; a foolish man, on sand. When the rain comes and the winds blow, the fool’s house falls down. The problem with sand is how quickly it can shift. It’s fluid. But this is also its advantage.


Prompt: If we learn to see the world in a grain of sand, we may find the means to build the future we want. To live well at new scales, individually and collectively, will require imagining new shapes a society could take. Turn over an hourglass and time runs in a different direction—toward a new Year Zero.

Response: Right now, many minds are tending toward the apocalypse. But if we can resist the temptations of fatalism—the bird’s-eye-view—we can start looking for specific places to hone in. The fact that global systems of networked power must pass through small nodes means that occupying those nodes can create enormous leverage.


Prompt: If a tree falls on the power line leading to a Facebook data center, everybody hears it. “Give me a point on which to stand,” Archimedes said, “and I will move the earth.” What is the Wikimedia Foundation, and what do you do there? The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit that powers Wikipedia. We run the servers. We make sure the site runs. We’re responsible for designing things, like the iOS app you have if you read Wikipedia on your phone.

Response: The English-language Wikipedia is the one that people often think of as Wikipedia. But we also have over 200 Wikipedias in other languages. It’s the fifth most visited site in the world. I’m a design researcher on the anti-harassment team, which sits under our community technology team. The community technology team exists to help build tools requested by the community of Wikipedia editors. So if an editor says, “We want X that does Y,” it goes on a wish list, and it’s voted on by the community. If it gets enough votes, we’ll build it.


Prompt: All of Wikimedia has to be radically transparent about what we do, and why we do what we do. But that’s particularly true of the anti-harassment team, because we’re engaging in participatory design with our editors. So if we want to solve something, we have to outline the different ways we think we could solve it, solicit feedback from our editors, and then take that feedback and fold it in. It’s a back-and-forth.

Response: What are you working on right now? The anti-harassment team was funded by a grant from the Craig Newmark Foundation to study and mitigate online harassment inside the English-language Wikipedia, as part of a bigger initiative to address the gender gap inside of Wikipedia. And one of the things we realized we needed to do was to create tools that can mitigate different forms of harassment.


Prompt: We just launched a tool to look at the interaction patterns of two editors to see if they’re potentially stalking each other or harassing each other. This kind of tool exists internally in other companies that run social networks—it’s just never externally talked about. I’m almost positive it exists at Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook.

Response: How does the tool work? If you’re running a social network, then all of the interactions inside that network create data. When I like something on your Facebook page, that’s a data point. When I post something, that’s a data point. When I talk to you, that’s a data point. We’re building a dashboard that analyzes all of these patterns of interactions between users, to try to identify possible harassment.


Prompt: I think people are aware of doxxing and harassment on Twitter. But what does harassment look like on Wikipedia, and how does it adversely affect the community? One of the reasons we made this tool is to study a form of online stalking called “wiki hounding.” Imagine that you’re a Wikipedia editor and you clean up an edit somewhere, or start an article page—and then someone goes and reverts all of your changes. And maybe they leave a comment—and what if that comment’s really aggressive? Is this wiki hounding, or is this just two people not agreeing in a debate about knowledge? Well, let’s say that person follows you to two other pages that are not in the domain expertise of the previous page. Let’s say you’re editing a page on spiders, and then you’re on City Lights Bookstore, then you’re going to automobiles. That’s not in the same realm of domain knowledge as the previous page. So they could be following you.

Response: Wikipedia has historically has been an aggressive space because debates about knowledge can get really heated really fast. So harassment on Wikipedia is less like, “Hey, someone made a shitty Wikipedia page about me.” It’s more like someone you got into an argument with is now antagonizing you or following you around the encyclopedia.


Prompt: This is something that we’re trying to figure out. We don’t actually know how often this scenario happens, versus other forms of harassment. For example, Wikipedia has had stringent rules against doxxing for a long time. A lot of people use pseudonyms. For us, doxxing is if you release someone’s real name, gender, or even their Twitter handle.

Response: Listening to the scenarios you’re describing, it sounds like a very nuanced problem—trying to define what harassment looks like on Wikipedia, and what the community should be policing. One of the problems around mitigating harassment inside of Wikipedia—which I think is true of every other platform—is that there aren’t enough nuanced examples of what harassment is specifically.


Prompt: It’s one thing to say no doxxing. But what’s doxxing? Let’s look at Twitter as an example. What is doxxing on Twitter? Is doxxing accidentally retweeting someone’s phone number, which led to Rose McGowan having her Twitter account suspended for twelve hours? Is doxxing the release of someone’s real name? Could you argue that doxxing is tweeting the email of one of your senators—or maybe only if it’s their personal email? You need to be able to say, “Doxxing is this event, but not this event.” You need to provide people with specific examples.

Response: When you can provide those examples, you are providing a lot more clarity. The downside, however, is that you’ll sometimes have people arguing in a very pedantic way: “I didn’t do this exactly.” Well, no, but you did something within the scope of this. And people can always argue that something’s not harassment, that it’s more light-hearted trolling.


Prompt: We shouldn’t think of trolling as one word. Trolling is an umbrella term. I made this taxonomy of trolling in the form of a matrix when I was studying Gamergate. I saw how often Gamergaters would use the argument that they were just trolling someone, especially when they were engaging in rape threats or death threats. “I hope you get raped to death” is not the same as sending someone goatse at work.

Response: I grew up on the internet: I think trolling can be funny! Trolling can be a positive thing or a negative thing. But when you take something like a rape threat and put it into the umbrella of trolling, you lessen the severity and the specificity of what a rape threat is. So my matrix placed examples of trolling in a grid from most harmful to most absurd, and most casual to most serious. For example, sending someone goatse at work without warning is absurd and serious—it’s a shitty thing to do. What about sending pizza to the Church of Scientology? That’s more casual than serious, but potentially a little bit more harmful than absurd.


Prompt: Thinking about where scenarios sit in this matrix is useful for trying to understand what harassment is. There’s conflict, harassment, and abuse—and harassment is the middle ground. Harassment can be really bad. But it’s important to acknowledge that certain events can be problematic—but that doesn’t make them a problem yet.

Response: We’re people who live on the internet. So we’re going to be tenacious and angry and happy and upset and emotional. We should have the space to be those things online. We should also understand that sometimes getting into a fight with someone isn’t harassment—you’re just fighting. So how do you preserve space for that kind of conflict? And how do you then define what crosses the line? If you’re in a fight with someone, and they’re calling you a bitch, is that conflict or harassment? What if someone’s calling you a racial slur and a bitch—that should be harassment, right? And what if someone’s threatening to come to your house— well, that’s harassment that’s getting really close to abuse.


Prompt: How do you think of these things as escalating events, while keeping in mind how you would litigate it? For example, someone saying “I want to kill you” is not necessarily considered a threat in a court of law. But someone saying “I’m going to kill you on this day, at this time, and in this location” is.

Response: What are the differences you see in how Wikipedia handles harassment versus how another social network like Twitter does? It’s hard to say, because we don’t know how other social networks define harassment. You can go and read their terms of service, but that doesn’t necessarily help. Reddit gets pretty close to defining it, but only because they’re still very much a community-driven space. They have five rules that are kind of nebulous, and then they have the suggestion to follow “Reddiquette,” which consists of one to two hundred suggestions. But those are not firmly enforced.


Prompt: With a platform like Facebook, we know a lot less. Until someone leaked the Facebook guide for moderators, we actually had no idea what was considered harassment or not. And this is the guide that says black children are not a protected class, but white men are. Until these materials are leaked, it’s really hard to know what the baseline is for what companies consider harassment. They often don’t even disclose why people are removed from a platform. People have to guess: “Oh, it’s probably because of this tweet.” I was just reading a story today in BuzzFeed by Katie Notopoulos about how her Twitter account was suspended for ten days for something she tweeted in 2011. It was a joke, with the words “kill all white people.” She wasn’t even notified, “Hey, it’s because of this tweet, and this is where you broke this rule.” I think that’s the problem here. There’s just no clarity for people.

Response: That brings us to the subject of automated content moderation. Big platforms have a lot of users, and thus a lot of content to moderate. How much of the work of detecting harassment and abuse can be outsourced to algorithms? At Wikipedia, content moderation is very human and very grassroots. It’s being performed by a community of editors. That seems unscalable in today’s Big Tech. But I think it’s actually the most scalable, because you’re letting the community do a lot of small things.


Prompt: That said, it depends on the platform. Content moderation doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all solution. Take Twitter. Rose McGowan was a good example of what automatic flagging looks like in terms of doxxing. They figured out what a phone number looks like: it’s a parenthesis, three numbers, end parenthesis, three numbers, dash, four numbers. That’s easy to detect.

Response: At Twitter, they’re trying to fix things with code first, instead of hiring smarter people. And that can be really problematic. I don’t think Twitter knows enough about harassment. They’re trying to solve problems in a way that they think is smart and scalable. To them, that means relying on autonomous systems using algorithms and machine learning. It means fewer human-powered systems and more tech-powered systems. And I don’t think that’s the best way to go about solving a problem as contextual as harassment, especially if you don’t have good examples that explain how you’re even defining harassment.


Prompt: What do you think is driving Twitter’s preference for automated approaches to content moderation? Techno-utopianism sold us the idea that technology can do things better than we can. It sold us the idea that the way to solve problems is through technology first. And in some cases, that approach made sense.

Response: But the problem is that no one’s made a case for why ethnography matters, why anthropology matters, why qualitative researchers are so important. How many people at Twitter understand Twitter subcultures? How many people looked in-depth at the Green Revolution or the Arab Spring? How many people know what Sina Weibo looks like? How many people have read Gabriella Coleman’s book on Anonymous, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy? That’s the problem. Jack Dorsey doesn’t think about why his designers should know how people talk to each other on the internet.


Prompt: I actually interviewed two years ago for a job with Twitter. Anil Dash recommended that the head of product talk to me. I had just wanted to consult with them about problems inside of Twitter. And they were like, “Well, we need a design researcher. You should interview.” And I was like, “I’m not going to make it through your interview process, because I’ve read on the internet about how you hire people, and it’s this really weird formulaic space where it’s clearly designed for people coming out of Stanford’s d.school.” [1] Those are not the skills that I have. And that’s not the way I conduct research. And I didn’t make it through the interview, because they asked me how I would study the effectiveness of their harassment reporting system if they’d made changes. It’s a standard question.

Response: I was like, “What if you send out a survey?” And the guy said, “Only 2 percent of people respond to surveys.” So I proposed sending out a survey to people who have filed reports more than five or six times over the course of a month, and asking them to chat individually. I wanted to actually speak to victims of harassment.


Prompt: That was not the answer that they wanted. I think they wanted something that was related to A/B testing—something that you could roll out really quickly and privately. And my idea was, “What if you just ask them?” That sounds like a huge clash in worldviews. And it says so much about how Twitter is fucked up. That whole d.school approach is like, “How do we design for this system that we have already imagined?” Totally. And a couple of months ago, I gave a lecture at the d.school. I was talking about all these different design interventions I would do on Twitter. And someone was like, “Aren’t you worried about changing the identity of Twitter?” If adding three more buttons changes the scope of your product, then maybe your product is made incorrectly. You should never put your product view over the safety of your user. What you’ve designed should never be incongruous with someone’s safety. If that’s happening, then you have made a flawed product. Maybe you don’t know how other people use this product. And maybe you aren’t experiencing the pain of it because you’re not that person.

Response: What about Facebook? Harassment teams at places like Facebook are really siloed. They’ll be on a team devoted to a demographic, or devoted to a specific kind of product. So you could be on a team that’s focusing on the Facebook News Feed in Brazil, or that’s looking at how women in Brazil are using Facebook. But that doesn’t mean that you’re an expert on what Brazilian harassment looks like.


Prompt: And I think that’s the problem. Did someone interview for that job in particular? Oftentimes when you interview at big companies, they just place you somewhere. But studying harassment is a form of expertise in the same way that studying misinformation or digital literacy or data visualization are. You wouldn’t hire an Android developer and put them in an iOS role, right? So why hire researchers and assume that the expertise is fluid? On a more optimistic note, do you have examples from your own work of successful interventions to stop online harassment? Not in my specific work with Wikipedia, because I just started, and it takes a long time when working with a community. I like to say that if regular tech is about moving fast and breaking things, civic tech is about moving slowly and being kind.

Response: But I will say that I am generally optimistic about what’s happening with trying to mitigate online harassment. Because two years ago, no one really knew what the word doxxing meant—and now it’s in every major website’s terms of service. That’s a big change. I think we’re starting to see the standardization and the institutionalization of harassment research. Hopefully we’ll keep moving forward. It’ll just take time, because what we’re talking about is the establishment of a whole new area of expertise.


Prompt: A few years ago, the mantra seemed to be, “Don’t read the comments, don’t read the retweets, just accept it for what it is.” But now it’s more like, “Okay, we should read the comments. We should treat that as a problem.” What do you think people should focus on with harassment online? Think about being on systems that listen to you, or creating your own systems and spaces. Come to a place where, if you request something to be built, it’s in their purview to build it for you. What does a social media co-op look like? And how do we band together and force companies to listen? People started to react really poorly to the spread of fake news on Facebook, to a point where even internally, Facebook employees were organizing and protesting. How do we continue that, but beyond fake news? How do we say that it behooves these platforms to have a community technology team? How do we demand the things we want built for us? I don’t think change will come from legislation—I don’t think those companies would listen anyway. But there needs to be some equity exchange.

Response: [1] The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, commonly known as the d.school, has helped popularize “design thinking,” particularly in tech. Atossa Araxia Abrahamian (AAA) Luxembourg is very bullish on asteroid mining. They think it’s gonna be a huge business five, ten, fifteen, twenty years from now. And they’re a tiny country that needs to get ahead in this world. Historically, one of the ways they’ve done that has been to identify emerging businesses and lure them to Luxembourg. So that’s why they’re courting Planetary Resources, a startup based outside of Seattle that’s received funding from Richard Branson and various Google executives.


Prompt: Meehan Crist (MC) How big is Luxembourg? AAA The size of Rhode Island. MC And how does a company like Planetary Resources describe what it wants to do? AAA Space is no longer a place where only big, nationally funded projects can go. It’s now open—it’s possible for commercial operators like Elon Musk’s SpaceX to send up rockets.

Response: But bringing things back from space is still a long way off. There are significant financial and technical challenges. So right now, Planetary Resources says that their goal is to refuel existing space missions. Essentially, they want to build a gas station in space. That saves a lot of money, because it’s expensive to send fuel and water up with rocket launches. If you could just have a fueling station that’s already up there, you could extend the length of space missions.


Prompt: So that’s the first step. And down the line, the idea is that there are natural resources that we’re going to run out of on earth—or that we don’t have very much of to begin with—that the company can procure in space by mining asteroids. MC What is actually in these asteroids that one could mine? Denton Ebel (DE) My understanding is that some companies are focused on mining iron asteroids for metals and others, like Deep Space Industries, are more focused on mining carbon and hydrogen and oxygen—water—for space civilization down the road.

Response: We know there are bodies in the asteroid belt that are mostly iron. We have them in the form of iron meteorites—bits of them. In the American Museum of Natural History we have the crown jewel of meteoritics—or I’ll call it that—which is the Ahnighito fragment of the Cape York meteorite. It sits on six pillars going down to bedrock because it’s thirty-four tons of iron nickel metal. That has about eight grams of platinum per ton. By comparison, the richest ores that we mine in South Africa for platinum group elements have less than four grams per ton.


Prompt: There’s also an asteroid called Kleopatra that reflects radar telling us that it’s mostly metal. It’s 220 kilometers long. You could sit it nicely down on New Jersey. It’s about 4.2 grams per cubic centimeter in density, where one gram is water. Iron nickel meteorites are 7.2 grams or more per cubic centimeter—so this is a porous, large object. It consists of big chunks of iron that are sort of welded together.

Response: MC So how do you begin to solve the engineering problems involved in asteroid mining? Asteroids are shaped differently, they have different kinds of densities, they have different kinds of gravity. Building a robot that can actually go land on an asteroid and extract something and come back is not a single problem, right? DE No, it’s a bunch of problems.


Prompt: On earth, a mining operation is a single, large, complicated thing—one failure and you’re down. In space, we can’t afford that. Instead, asteroid mining will involve a horde of ant-like robots, each of which will work semi-autonomously, linked through a hive mind. This is where people like E.O. Wilson, and other insect studiers, become important for asteroid mining because we will need to understand swarm behavior.

Response: AAA You can definitely imagine conflicting swarms fighting over a piece of asteroid real estate. It’s something that seems pretty ripe for science fiction, but it could happen. DE Robots fighting each other in space—Roy Batty talks about it in the original Blade Runner. But yeah, that’s one scenario for space warfare. Another is throwing things. If you throw something from an asteroid in just the right direction, it will hit the earth and make a destructive impact, because it’s going really fast. It’s called conservation of angular momentum.


Prompt: MC And how do you power all these tiny robots? AAA Well, you need water to do most things—up there, down here, everywhere, if you’re a robot or a rocket or a human. And if you can get it up there, it saves you a lot of time and trouble. That’s why Planetary Resources wants to build a fueling station in space.

Response: But the main point here from Luxembourg’s perspective is that this is a massive business opportunity and it’s largely unregulated for now. MC Why Luxembourg? AAA That’s a good question. There’s nothing about Luxembourg, or where it is, or who lives there, that makes it particularly qualified to get into this game. They don’t have a space agency. They only just built a university. They only have about half a million people. They’re not a massive industrial power.


Prompt: But what they do have—and this is really important—is the ability to make laws. You can only make laws if you’re a sovereign country. There are only so many sovereign countries. Luxembourg is one of them. And throughout its history, it has survived by making laws that businesses want. It’s as though lobbyists write their legislation. In fact, sometimes they do. Luxembourg is one of the biggest tax havens in the world, even though it’s one of the tiniest countries in the world. It’s the second biggest center for mutual funds. Trillions of dollars are funneled offshore through Luxembourg. It’s just astonishing the amount of wealth that passes through this tiny little country, and it does that because they have really favorable tax laws.

Response: Fun fact: right before the Great Depression, Luxembourg passed a law exempting holding companies from any corporate taxes. So what happened? Companies from all around the world flocked to Luxembourg to open up shop. Within a few decades you had tens of thousands of companies there, to the point where you walk past a building in Luxembourg today and there are a hundred firms listed as resident there. There’s no way all of these people could fit in the building. But they’re registered.


Prompt: MC By “open up shop,” you mean they have an address there. AAA Exactly. And simply by virtue of having an address and registration, they are able to claim they’re a Luxembourg company. There’s a lot of accounting acrobatics involved. But what does this have to do with space? Well, if you’re a company that thinks that one day you’re going to make a ton of money by digging platinum out of asteroids and bringing it back to earth, where do you want to incorporate? You want go to a place that’s going to have low taxes, where it’s easy to set up a company, where the politicians want to help you, and where the country is going to recognize your ownership of the stuff that’s in space. Which is not obvious or intuitive because there isn’t any binding international law that determines who can own stuff that’s in space.

Response: MC The basis of space law is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which says that sovereign nations can go out and explore space, but they can’t claim sovereignty over it. AAA Right. According to the Outer Space Treaty, space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, use or occupation or any other means. So you can’t go up there and say, “This is part of my country.” The question is: can a private company not claiming sovereignty say “this asteroid is mine” or “this platinum is mine”? Property rights in space are not a given. If I take your bracelet, you can say, “That’s my bracelet.” Why is it your bracelet? Because you bought it in a shop. There was a transaction. That doesn’t happen in space. There are no transactions in space. There’s no market yet. The whole aim of this enterprise is to create markets up there in a (literal) vacuum.


Prompt: MC They’re creating property law where there is no property, or law… DE There is some precedent for property in space, though. The moon rocks returned by the Apollo missions, and the moon rocks returned by the robotic lunar missions of Russia—those are the property of those sovereign nations. MC Why should this worry us? What are the potential dangers of space privatization? AAA Space is relatively untouched. It has not yet been exploited and pillaged—and when it is, I would hope that everybody could benefit from it. If space becomes entirely privatized, however, I worry that the profits will simply flow to the private sector—and thanks to countries like Luxembourg, those profits won’t be taxed.

Response: It’s going to look like the extractive industries on earth. It’s going to be a repeat of what we’re seeing in Congo. Now, one big difference is that there aren’t any humans to suffer human rights abuses up in space, so that’s good. You won’t have blood minerals, because the miners will be robots. MC What does the Law of the Sea and the history of deep sea mining tell us about what might happen with asteroid mining? AAA Well, the asteroid mining companies like to compare mining asteroids to fishing in international waters. They say, “This doesn’t belong to anyone and it’s not sovereign territory, but we can fish and take the fish and eat the fish and sell the fish and do all the things with the fish. Why can’t we just do that with the stuff that’s on asteroids?” That’s a good question. Some legal scholars say, “Yeah, that’s legit.” Others say, “No, you can’t do that without having established who owns what beforehand.” I’m generalizing, but that’s the tenor of the discussion.


Prompt: MC You can’t get very far down this road before you start talking about empire. Even if you love the basic science and believe in understanding more about the moon and how the universe started, this is functionally an extension of the colonialist project into space, to some degree. DE In 1960, the top federal tax rate on income in the United States was 91%. And if you look at constant dollar spending on space activities by the public sector, the Apollo program in the 1960s was huge compared to what we’re spending today. The shift to private enterprise taking some of the responsibility for space may reflect the fact that the resource balance between private entities and public entities has changed.

Response: MC One could ask where all those resources came from. Or argue that if all of these companies that are funneling their money through Luxembourg were actually paying their taxes, we might have more money for things like NASA. What about the idea of space as a cosmic commons? That was part of the intention of the Outer Space Treaty. It states that whatever is done up there should be done for the good of all humankind, and that space belongs to everyone.


Prompt: AAA I would love for a portion of all profits made in space to be redistributed. Maybe that’s crazy. Maybe I’m a crazy Marxist. Could you begin by telling us a little bit about People’s Policy Project? What is 3P, and why did you start it? People’s Policy Project is a crowdfunded think tank that focuses primarily on socialist and social-democratic policy ideas. The purpose of 3P right now is to try to provide policy support— analysis, construction, justification—for the gaps left by the liberal think tank establishment.

Response: I started 3P because it is clear that there is a rather large swath of the American public who support ideas that are to the left of the mainstream Democratic Party. Prior to 3P, those people had no organ capable of polishing those ideas into practical policy. This is not because those ideas are inherently impractical, but rather because there are few if any institutions who put in the work on those ideas.


Prompt: This gap between where the American public is and where the overwhelming weight of the DC think tank establishment is most clearly manifested itself in the last Democratic primary race, where Bernie Sanders was advocating ideas that are all completely doable—indeed they exist in other countries in the world right now—but which the major policy shops refused to do work in support of.

Response: Some of this refusal was coldly careerist: people who work in these institutions crave administration jobs and so wanted to be on the team they thought would win the primary. But it was also ideological, meaning that the people who populate the DC liberal policy establishment just do have more conservative politics than Sanders, and financial, meaning that these institutions get money from people and organizations who are opposed to a Sanders-like agenda.


Prompt: Why did you choose to fund 3P through Patreon? What kind of advantages or opportunities does that crowdfunding model provide? I am not sure if “choose” is the right term here. When I began 3P, there was no way for me to get money from any other source than crowdfunding. No big donor or foundation is going to give money to a twenty-eight-year-old who says he’s starting a new think tank. But I hoped that people who know my work from the internet would be willing to pitch in $5 a month for a while to see if I could actually make this happen. And it worked.

Response: Even though I had no choice but crowdfunding, it nonetheless has a lot of advantages. I don’t have to spend money or time on fundraising or “development” as they say in the nonprofit world. It just comes in from Patreon on its own. Maybe I’ll need to promote the Patreon here and there with a social media share, but mostly it just grows organically as people see my stuff and as I get interviewed in outlets like this.


Prompt: Additionally, crowdfunding means I am not heavily reliant on money from corporate donors, foundations, or very rich people. In fact, I am not heavily reliant on any one entity, as I have over 1,800 small donors. This gives me a lot of independence and completely liberates me to promote whatever policy I think is best, without wondering how this or that donor will feel about it. This can seem like an abstract “money in politics” type point, but all one has to do is look at what happened with New America and Google to see that funding sources exert very real influence over what a think tank produces.

Response: The Patreon model clearly has a lot of benefits, but I wonder if you could speak to any challenges or limitations you’ve faced so far. Has it been tricky or time-consuming to “manage” your patrons—by supplying exclusive content, for instance, or providing input on certain decisions? The Patreon part has been really easy. I don’t supply any exclusive content or do any real patron relations management type stuff.


Prompt: I have done some open threads on the Patreon platform to get input from patrons on things. For instance, the patrons named the think tank. That has been hugely helpful to me and not a burden at all. I’ve also gotten a lot of help from patrons on things I didn’t know how to do. So, for instance, I wanted to do videos as part of the think tank but had no prior experience doing them. I indicated as much on the Patreon platform, and from my patron pool, I got messages from voice actors who could do voiceovers. I got messages from audio engineers who could handle the voiceovers and mix in music and such. I also got some messages from animators who can put the videos together. In fact, 3P’s first video was produced with the labor of four different people. Three of those were patrons, all of whom I paid, and one is my wife. So, the patrons also serve as a kind of labor pool, which was unexpected, but creates a really neat community dynamic since it is their collective money that I then use to pay them to do things for the think tank.

Response: Do you have plans to do more “offline” things with 3P, such as conferences or talks? Or is “online-only” a more efficient model for now? I do some offline things. I talk to people on Capitol Hill pretty regularly. I do podcasts and media interviews. There are some limits to the offline stuff only because I am one person, but I do more of that than people might realize.


Prompt: The offline vs. online efficiency question is an interesting one that I am not sure I have an answer to. I’ve always found talks and conferences and such kind of odd because, when you go to them, you are speaking to a few dozen people and maybe a couple hundred at most. But if I deliver the same content online, I can easily reach tens of thousands (and often more) just through my own social media distribution. For instance, the first 3P video was shared by Robert Reich and Bernie Sanders and received over half a million views on Facebook alone. But nonetheless, people see doing offline stuff as the real, impactful work for some reason. I get that when it comes to organizing real people, but I don’t really get it when it comes to spreading ideas throughout the discourse.

Response: The kind of offline work that I suspect is really valuable is paradoxically the stuff that is the most private: meeting with politicians’ staff, the editors of other publications, and that sort of thing. I do more of that than I do big public appearances. We’d love to hear your broader thoughts on the prospects of using the internet to build alternative political institutions that can challenge the prevailing common sense. Do you think the Right or the Left has been more successful so far in capitalizing on the new opportunities created by the internet? The value of the internet is primarily the fact that it has quasi-free distribution. I can reach millions of people for nothing. This means I can also fundraise from millions of people for nothing—or thousands, in my case. The social aspect of it means that people I reach can in turn share it with people they know, also for free. This allows for a level of coordination that wasn’t previously possible outside of huge institutions.


Prompt: So in that sense, it does enable movements and people to try out new stuff and succeed without going through the usual institutional gatekeepers. As far as which political orientations have used the internet most successfully, it’s hard to say. The left movements behind Bernie and Corbyn, both fairly successful, were heavily assisted by the internet. Corbyn says as much.

Response: I don’t think the Right has been successful in the same sense, but obviously they rack up huge audiences, especially in the InfoWars and InfoWars-adjacent part of the internet. So it’s obviously not a universally positive medium. Some people worry that the internet is bad for leftist politics: that it encourages insularity, “uncomradely” conversations, and so on. What’s your response to that? I don’t think the internet is bad as much as certain subcultures on the internet are bad. I’ve seen those same subcultures operate in real life, especially when I was a student in Boston. They are just as self-destructive and stupid there as they are online.


Prompt: Supposing the internet was a woman—what then? This is not exactly how Friedrich Nietzsche began his book Beyond Good and Evil, when he first published that book in 1886. But it is one of the questions I have been thinking about ever since I first saw “#MeToo” in the Facebook status of a colleague one night last October.

Response: I was at a bar with my husband, and a couple of men we had just met. I knew immediately what the hashtag meant, even though I had only ever met the colleague who posted it a few times. “#MeToo,” I typed with my thumbs, under the table. A minute later, I slipped my phone back out of my handbag and deleted the post.


Prompt: I am not sure what I felt afraid of. When Nietzsche asked what if Truth were a woman he meant: Was there any such thing? Nietzsche believed there was not such a thing; or, rather, that the kind of Truth philosophers had been talking about all these centuries would never reveal itself to them. At the key moment, Truth would always draw back. Truth was a cocktease, teasing philosophy, which was a man. The philosophers should give up already.

Response: (The love life of Friedrich Nietzsche seems to have been unhappy.) It might sound strange to say the internet is a woman, when you meet so many misogynist men online—so many of whom love Nietzsche! Or, at least, what they see about him on YouTube or read about him on Reddit. But when I ask if the internet is a woman I am not only thinking of all the women using the internet to talk to one another. I am also thinking of how much of what we do online corresponds to activities that have traditionally been seen as female.


Prompt: Social media make “women” of us all. We preen and pose, hoping to draw eyes to us. When others do the same, we emote for and affirm them. We share events of everyday life that had never before been considered newsworthy. Here is my baby. Here is my breakfast. I should make clear that when I say “woman,” I do not mean a person whose body has this or that biology. I am not interested in chromosomes or hormones or genitals—not now. I mean a person who is expected to do certain kinds of work. Namely, the kind that is not seen as work, not really, but rather as expressing “natural” emotions. Childbearing and rearing and household chores are classic examples. But our culture considers care of all kinds feminine. And we treat female feeling as a natural resource that anyone can take for cheap, or free.

Response: Smile, sweetheart! You have such good soft skills. On online platforms, we make money for other people, in return for the feeling that we are being seen and maybe even loved. In return for a digital place to live, we click. We let the men who own the platforms keep tabs on us 24/7. Good “digital housewives,” as the media theorist Kylie Jarrett has named us, we spend our days making “cookies” for them! Sexism at Scale One result of this arrangement is that the internet has become an engine for the accumulation of vast sums of capital. What a good business model, to get countless people to do things that make you money all the time, without paying them to do any of it! But another effect has been consciousness-raising. Social media shows just how political the personal is. If nothing else, social media platforms are vast machines for revealing structure. Facebook and Twitter encourage each of us to share the details of our lives all day—and then analyze these data points to discover patterns. People who like x also like y. People who look p and q ways are likely to have r happen to them.


Prompt: Correlation may not be causation. But, as networks encourage us to discover our commonalities, to join a chorus of likes and retweets and hashtags, they show us the systems we live in. This may be why Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have made fitting homes for both conspiracy theories and new social movements. They remind us that even our most intimate experiences are not only our own; they prompt us to classify and tag our thoughts in ways that link them with those of others.

Response: You may have spent years wondering: What if I had just said something else? Why did I have to have that last drink? Wear that dress to the interview? The internet will tell you: Maybe. But, look, the Thing that happened, happened to all these other people, too. Once you see structure, you cannot unsee it. The duck becomes a rabbit. The vase becomes two faces, staring each other down. The question is: What next? The morning after drinks with my husband and the other men, I arrived at my office and opened Facebook to kill time: A solid wall of #MeToos. I typed my post again. By then, it did not feel scary to do so. Or if it did, it was only because the statement felt too obvious to bother making. (My “#MeToo” got only fifty-six reactions.) Smart friends were already adding qualifiers. “#MeToo, duh.” “#MeToo, obviously, but also, I want to live in a world where women do not have to choose between identifying with men and seeing themselves as victims.” In the months since, the news has sped by like the third act of a horror movie. Like the mom who thought she was going crazy (cue: furious paging through old books and shuffling of Scrabble tiles), woman after woman is making her audience see what she is finally sure she sees. There really is a ghost! The clue was right there in the carpet where we had been standing! We are seeing sexism at scale, in other words. If there is fear in the elation of our anger, that fear, and not a little sadness, comes from the Bad Guys being our fathers, husbands, boyfriends, brothers, sons. You’ve always been the caretaker. In heterosexuality, the call is always coming from inside the house.


Prompt: Good Neighbors The standard reading has been that the sad and ugly stories that appear under the hashtag #MeToo constitute a “revelation.” I am not entirely convinced. I know, we must leave room for the problem of other minds. “Assume good intentions,” as they say. It has been a long season of peering over the fence and feeling stunned by everything you do not see in the yard next door. And yet you want to stay good neighbors.

Response: I meet a Good Man—or a friend I think is one, anyway—for lunch and he cannot believe the thing he read about our other friend—a story that all of the female friends we have in common knew. We are trying to decide what we should do about it. My husband and I meet a Good Man and his wife for dinner, and the Good Man starts telling a story about another Man who did x to his subordinate, years ago, and how the Man was talking about it the last time they got drinks together until I feel like I cannot not interrupt: “Did you not know that that subordinate was me?” My friend feels terrible for bringing it up. I feel relieved that he really had not known. It was not what I ever wanted to be known for. Still, as I smile it’s ok, I feel like my face is on too tight. My heart keeps beating all over my body.


Prompt: “There are reasons you do not come to us with these things,” another Good Man reflects, about women, at a holiday party. He’s right. There are open secrets and then there are the secrets we keep even from ourselves. A senior colleague tells me, out of nowhere, about a dissertation advisor and how he threatened her, decades ago. The other night I went home and wrote it all down. I printed it out and folded it and put in an envelope. The advisor is long dead. I’m not going to send it anywhere. I just had to. A friend tells me about a powerful man asking her whether another powerful man they worked with was touching her, his college intern.

Response: In a different context, a colleague says something I keep thinking about: “You have to allow people their shock.” She is talking about all the white people who, since Trump became president, or since they saw the Eric Garner video or the Philando Castile video, keep saying this is not us, meaning they do not recognize America. She wants to laugh. “Are you kidding?” But she believes it is better, in the long run, not to laugh in the faces of people who want to be allies. She believes this, even as she cannot help but marvel at the luxuries of their ignorance.


Prompt: I know there are differences among these differences. But I think about it when I think about the shocked men. How hard do we work not to know what we know? When do we decide we have to? (“We” who?) Some of the specific details that have come out of #MeToo are shocking. The executive throwing the young reporter down the stairs. The button under the desk that locked the office door, locking you in. But the gist—that men in an unequal world use women to feel powerful, that they abuse their power over women, and often weaponize sex to do so… Who can remember the time before they knew that? The fact that we can be raped is the subtext of so many warnings we receive as girls. Do not wear this. Do not go there. Try your best not to exist, in public.

Response: Clickbait Deathmatch To get to my provocation: I suspect that what #MeToo is revealing about the behavior of men within the media industry is less new than what it reveals about the industry itself. #MeToo is registering a change that has less to do with what we know than how. Whatever else it is, #MeToo is great digital content. Nobody does not have a stake. Nobody does not have an opinion. Stories of workplace abuse come with a titillating hint of pornography—particularly in the privileged, mostly white settings that have received the most media attention. We are supposed to be watching some kind of battle of the sexes, and we may be. But more often, these are battles between young women and older women, between Cool Girls and “cry-bully” victims, staged as a clickbait deathmatch.


Prompt: The shape that #MeToo has taken reflects an ongoing contest between legacy media and digital media—and the way that these different forms of media get gendered. The Major Magazine, run by mostly white men, feels itself being eaten alive by a feminized (meaning: unpaid or underpaid) digital media ecosystem. There, women and queer people and people of color and working-class people have louder voices than they used to. But very few writers make a living.

Response: The drama that unfolded in January 2018 regarding the so-called Shitty Media Men List and Harper’s Magazine reads like an allegory of the struggle between masculinized legacy media and their feminized digital rivals. A recap of the chain of events: An anonymous young woman creates a crowd-sourced Google Doc, shared and filled in by other anonymous women, and takes it down after less than twelve hours.


Prompt: A legacy magazine run by an old man with inherited wealth, Harper’s, reveals that they plan to identify the creator of the Google Doc in an upcoming cover story by Katie Roiphe, a pundit who established her career by dismissing the existence of date rape in the New York Times, back in the 1990s. Dayna Tortorici, the young female editor who took over n+1, a literary magazine founded by four to five men, tweets that the “legacy magazine” responsible for the story should not out the Shitty Media Men list creator.

Response: Nicole Cliffe, a writer and editor best known as the founder of the (now defunct) feminist website The Toast, retweets Tortorici, and offers to compensate any writer who pulls a piece from Harper’s. The campaign gathers momentum on Twitter. The creator of the spreadsheet, Moira Donegan, preempts Harper’s by publishing a long essay outing herself in New York magazine’s digital native “fashion and beauty” (women’s) vertical, The Cut.


Prompt: The internet lights up. Donegan gains tens of thousand of Twitter followers overnight. Weeks later, on Super Bowl Sunday, Harper’s publishes its anti #MeToo story online. The subhead announces that “Twitter feminism is bad for women.” www.harpers.org gets more clicks than it has had in ages. Over the next few weeks, Harper’s sees a modest bump in subscriptions.

Response: The process repeated itself the week after news of the Harper’s cover story leaked. On January 14, the online magazine Babe.net published an anonymized account of a bad date with the actor Aziz Ansari. Suddenly, a low-paid woman’s words (and screenshots of her text messages) went viral—and pundits at The Atlantic and The New York Times rushed to get a piece of the traffic by denouncing a feminist website that, until then, few of their readers had ever heard of.


Prompt: Crazy Girlfriends and Straw Women The Media Men List showed what online platforms let women do: shareability means scalability, even if nobody is getting paid. Nobody but Google, that is. The internet made the whisper network clearly legible—and portable. But who was going to monetize it? Harper’s is the oldest general-interest magazine in the country. It is also one of the most notorious for failing to publish and promote women. And it is almost certainly the very worst at the internet. The website interface is risible. At the time of this writing, they have paywalled the Katie Roiphe article again.

Response: Harper’s clearly craved online traffic. And they concluded that discussing a Google Doc written by anonymous women could be a great way to draw it. When their intention to reveal the name of Moira Donegan leaked, women on Twitter protested. On NPR, Katie Roiphe compared them to “a mob with torches outside the window.” There goes Twitter, like a girlfriend, being “crazy”! So Moira Donegan did the only thing she could do, which was to scoop Harper’s by telling her own story in a women’s vertical.


Prompt: The Internet of Women: 1, Major Male Media: 0. When the Harper’s article finally came out, its six thousand rambling words said little that many others had not said already. Amid a lot of posturing falsely suggesting that others denied this, the piece advanced the following, indisputably true argument: Addressing the systemic, gendered inequality that pervades American workplaces—inequality that both expresses and maintains itself through the sexualized abuse of power—will be… complicated! The author, who teaches writing at New York University, seems to have missed the memo that says theories should be falsifiable. In order to create rhetorical drama, she had to suggest that there were people out there online saying that the situation was not complicated. Ironically, the main evidence that she cited of such refusal of nuance—indeed, the only named sources in her entire piece—came from blog posts and tweets.

Response: One technique that Roiphe used in Harper’s is the signature of many anti-#MeToo op-eds that have appeared in other legacy publications. I call it The Straw Girl. This technique posits the existence of a hypothetical observer who is conflating things that should not be conflated. It discredits the testimony of real women by implying that other, imaginary, women are too stupid to know the difference between getting raped and having a guy be “creepy in the DMs.” Let us set aside the irony that the very pundits who accuse the Straw Girls of confounding things seem to think that having people in your office gossip about you is tantamount to getting fired and jailed. It does not seem unreasonable to ask whether these acts of sexualized aggression exist on a spectrum. I have never heard any woman say that the harms they cause are the same.


Prompt: But Roiphe used another, newer, strategy in concert with the Straw Woman: feigned naivete. She quoted young women who were clearly making jokes online—tweets like “It’s not a revolution until we get the men to stop pitching LMAO” and “Small, practical step to limit sex harassment: have obamacare cover castration”—but refused to recognize these jokes as jokes, or personae as personae. Roiphe may have looked like a digital Rip van Winkle. But her incomprehension was a power move.

Response: I don’t know how Twitter works, this move said, and I’m proud not to. I write for print! In contrast to the authors of the anonymous Google Doc she criticized, Roiphe probably got paid at least a few thousand dollars for her thoughts. Taken as a whole, the Harper’s cover story constituted an attempt to assert control over discourse in the digital public sphere—a sphere that merges the public and private to the point where those terms may no longer make sense. In much the same way, New York Times editorialists Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss rail against “Twitter mobs.” Despite the fact that, as one recent leak showed, they have plenty of critics among their coworkers in the New York Times office Slack. If these critics hesitate to reveal themselves, it’s because they fear getting dumped from their jobs—back on Twitter, among all the other Crazy Exes.


Prompt: Season of the Witch Hunt One way that critics dismissed the “Twitter feminists” arrayed against Roiphe was that these women were leading a “witch hunt.” For some time, witch hunts have been in the air. Donald Trump regularly complains that the ongoing Russia investigations constitute a “witch hunt.” In the wake of a series of scandals during the summer of 2017, men in the tech industry were claiming that witch hunts were running wild on the West Coast, too. In early August, after the “gender diversity” memo that got James Damore fired from Google, the entrepreneur Jeff Giesea told The Guardian, “it’s a witch hunt.” In a widely shared story about pushback against the campaign for gender equality in tech, engineer James Altizer told the New York Times there was a cabal of feminist women looking to subjugate men in the industry—”It’s a witch hunt,” he concluded. In the wake of the revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s long history of harassing and assaulting women, Woody Allen warned against “a witch hunt atmosphere.” Most recently, the director Michael Haneke told the Austrian press that #MeToo had created “a witch hunt that should be left in the Middle Ages.” There is an obvious irony to this. When anti-feminists, serial harassers, and rapists say they are victims of “witch hunts,” they are claiming a status that has historically belonged to vulnerable women. And when Trump says that he and his (large adult) sons are the targets of a “witch hunt,” he is deploying a strategy that Republican leaders have used for years: appropriating the language of “identity politics” from historically marginalized and oppressed groups in order to claim victim status. (Cf. “reverse racism,” “white genocide.”) But the “witch hunt” has a special salience under a Twitter President. The ubiquity of witches demonstrates the slipperiness of political signifiers in the age of social media and memes.

Response: As Jo Livingstone observed in The New Republic in summer 2017, witches were trending for a few years before Donald Trump started talking about them. Through clicks and other consumer choices, many women, queer and straight, adopted the “witch” as a transgressive identity. During the Hillary Clinton campaign accusations of her statecraft-witchcraft flew; Rush Limbaugh memorably called her a “witch with a capital B.” Following her defeat, supporters took up the witch label as a form of defiance. At the Women’s March and other protests in the aftermath of the election, variations on “we are the witches you couldn’t burn” became popular slogans. Lindy West delightfully flipped the paradigm in her New York Times op-ed, “Yes, This is a Witch Hunt. I’m a Witch and I’m Hunting You.” What we see in these repeated appropriations, reappropriations, and resignifications is that “witch” and “witch hunt” can mean almost anything. The context is no context. That is, the context is the internet.


Prompt: Witches of the World, Unite! Revenants, by definition, return. In America, the language of witch hunts tends to reappear during moments of struggle over cultural authority: during the McCarthy era’s persecution of alleged Communists, and during the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s. Now, the web is stoking new fears about how information spreads. Enabling content by even relatively marginalized people to scale rapidly and unpredictably, it makes all information potentially contagious. #MeToo gained momentum because billions of “digital housewives” are clustered on the few big platforms that now comprise our “global village.” Concentration makes the spread of information uncontainable.

Response: But it is striking that, even as we recognize that sexism and sexual harassment permeate every layer of American life, the men that own the platforms where we are having these conversations have mostly avoided their consequences. Tech has faced relatively little #MeToo reckoning. Susan Fowler and others drew attention to systemic sexism at Uber, and a series of stories in the summer of 2017 brought scrutiny to a few venture capitalists. At least one or two wrote apologetic Medium posts pledging to “do better.” But mostly, the real seat of media power—Silicon Valley—has been spared. So too have the Wall Street firms that help provide the flood of capital lifting the private yachts of West Coast seasteaders.


Prompt: As legacy media desperately try to snatch clicks with #MeToo content, they continue to hemorrhage eyeballs and money to Big Tech. As they throw young women to the internet as clickbait, the companies that own the internet—companies bigger and more male than any Major Male Magazine will ever be—circle them.

Response: Historically, witch hunts took place at moments of economic transition. Feminist writers such as Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English, and Silvia Federici have shown that the killings of thousands of young women in the early modern period was not primarily motivated by medieval superstition. (If it had been, one imagines there would have been comparably vast and violent witch hunts throughout the Middle Ages; there were not.) Instead, the state persecuted women en masse during the transition from feudalism to capitalism and, again, when men in authority sought to drive women out of traditionally female healing professions.


Prompt: Witch hunts were crackdowns on women workers, in other words. You can see it in the accusations that witch hunters made. Squint and “black sabbaths,” depicted as feasts and orgies held in the woods at night, come into focus as clandestine workers’ meetings. The acts of “stealing” or “eating” children becomes providing reproductive care. The roots and herbs that became part of the iconography of witchcraft were medicines, abortifacients, contraceptives. As women tried to gain power over the conditions of their labor and their lives, witch hunts aimed to destroy that power—keeping women dependent on patriarchal institutions.

Response: Today, #MeToo marks the site of a struggle for the chance to work with dignity. Sexual harassment serves to keep women precarious, blocking access to capital—literal, social, cultural—and to the networks that distribute it. At the same time, it is the precarity of so much work that makes many women vulnerable to harassment in the first place. If the conversation has moved beyond the workplace to what we might once have called private life, in many industries the porous boundary between work and life is a sign of precarity, too. You never miss a chance to network if you never know how long a job will last.


Prompt: Writers cannot afford to romanticize the internet we have. It has squeezed the economics of media, and thus the wages and working conditions of everyone in that industry. Yet the internet also provides tools that can be used to build alternatives. In this sense, the internet is ambivalent. Fortunately, inhabiting ambivalence is something that women are good at, having had to practice it for so long.

Response: One thing is clear: When enough people whisper the truths about their lives together, they cast a powerful spell. For months now, we have been living under it. In that murmuration, a question like a heartbeat: What now? What now? Over a hundred years ago, the upheavals of industrialization gave rise to what Louis Brandeis famously called the “curse of bigness.” The modern industrial economy increasingly came to depend on new technologies and infrastructures: railroads, modern finance, oil, and the like. Yet these infrastructures remained largely in private hands.


Prompt: For Brandeis and his fellow Progressive Era reformers, the result was a fundamental threat to liberty, opportunity, and democracy. By virtue of their control over these foundational goods and services, private firms could extract greater profits from the public. If the essence of arbitrary, authoritarian governance was the concentration of unchecked power, then these firms represented a profoundly oligarchical mode of social order, where the public good remained dependent on the will and whims of chairmans and chief executives.

Response: A hundred years later, the fear of bigness is with us once again—from the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, which introduced “too big to fail” into the vernacular, to growing concerns about corporate concentration in healthcare, airlines, and innumerable other industries. But nowhere is this anxiety about modern-day bigness more alive—and more difficult to address—than in the domain of technology.


Prompt: As in the Progressive Era, technological revolutions have radically transformed our social, economic, and political life. Technology platforms, big data, AI—these are the modern infrastructures for today’s economy. And yet the question of what to do about technology is fraught, for these technological systems paradoxically evoke both bigness and diffusion: firms like Amazon and Alphabet and Apple are dominant, yet the internet and big data and AI are technologies that are by their very nature diffuse.

Response: The problem, however, is not bigness per se. Even for Brandeisians, the central concern was power: the ability to arbitrarily influence the decisions and opportunities available to others. Such unchecked power represented a threat to liberty. Therefore, just as the power of the state had to be tamed through institutional checks and balances, so too did this private power have to be contested—controlled, held to account.


Prompt: This emphasis on power and contestation, rather than literal bigness, helps clarify the ways in which technology’s particular relationship to scale poses a challenge to ideals of democracy, liberty, equality—and what to do about it. Taming the Beast Starting in the late nineteenth century, scale became the central focus for Americans concerned about emerging forms of corporate power. But what’s notable about the intellectual ferment around scale is the degree to which these debates turned not on bigness, but rather on issues of power and contestability. How much and what kinds of power did these new corporate entities exercise? And how could these concentrations of power be minimized, contested, and held accountable? Power, crucially, could manifest in “good” and “bad” forms. Just because a firm acted benevolently did not change the fact that it possessed power. The key, then, was not outcomes but potential: so long as the good effects of corporate power relied on the personal decisions of corporate leaders, rather than on institutionalized forms of accountability, it remained a threat.

Response: Perhaps the most famous front in this debate was the clash between Brandeis and other progressives like Herbert Croly and Teddy Roosevelt. For Croly and Roosevelt, corporate bigness was a problem, but one that could be addressed through government oversight. For Brandeis, by contrast, concentrations of corporate power had to be broken up through measures like antitrust laws.


Prompt: While this is usually seen as a clash between bigness skeptics like Brandeis and bigness optimists like Roosevelt, much of this debate boiled down to a different set of disagreements: not about how big the government should let a company be, but about the best way to contest corporate power and hold it accountable. Roosevelt and Croly believed in the social and economic value of these corporate giants, and had faith in the capacities of public-minded, expert regulators to manage these concentrations, extracting the public goods and minimizing the public evils.

Response: Brandeis shared many of these views. He was after all a classic progressive, who celebrated the importance of expertise and the emerging regulatory state. Nevertheless, he expressed skepticism towards concentrated corporate power, which in his view necessarily spilled over into political power as well. Economic influence could so easily be leveraged into political influence that the more prudent route would be to reduce concentration itself.


Prompt: Furthermore, Brandeis, like many classical liberals, saw the marketplace itself as a machine for enforcing checks and balances. Once cut down to size, firms would face the checks and balances imposed by market competition—and through competition, firms would be driven to serve the public good, to innovate, and to operate efficiently. By making markets more competitive, Brandeisian regulation would thus reduce the risk of arbitrary power.

Response: Around the same time, the architects of modern corporate law were trying to solve the same problem from another angle. In 1932, Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means published The Modern Corporation and Private Property, a landmark work that laid the foundation for modern corporate governance. For many modern defenders of free markets, Berle and Means are seen as architects of the idea that shareholders and other market actors could hold corporate power accountable through the “discipline” of financial markets. This would defuse the problem of corporate power and assure the economically efficient allocation of capital.


Prompt: But this is misleading, because Berle and Means shared the Brandeisian unease with corporate power. In fact, their analysis highlighted a serious obstacle to holding that power accountable: the structure of the modern firm. Since a public corporation was nominally “owned” by a diffuse and inchoate set of shareholders, they couldn’t effectively assert control over it.

Response: The answer for some, like Berle, lay in the public-mindedness of corporate managers. Like the regulators of the early New Deal, they would approach their control of the firm in a spirit of public service and with a sense of social obligation. For others, this faith in managerial goodwill was misplaced, and the answer lay in more assertive forms of shareholder control.


Prompt: Meanwhile, the rise of the labor movement and the consumer rights movement took a different approach altogether. Rather than trusting firm managers, shareholders, or even regulators to act on their own, contesting private power required building autonomous, grassroots groups like unions and consumer organizations that could exercise their own forms of countervailing power.

Response: The problem of scale, then, has always been a problem of power and contestability. In both our political and our economic life, arbitrary power is a threat to liberty. The remedy is the institutionalization of checks and balances. But where political checks and balances take a common set of forms—elections, the separation of powers—checks and balances for private corporate power have proven trickier to implement.


Prompt: These various mechanisms—regulatory oversight, antitrust laws, corporate governance, and the countervailing power of organized labor— together helped create a relatively tame, and economically dynamic, twentieth-century economy. But today, as technology creates new kinds of power and new kinds of scale, new variations on these strategies may be needed.

Response: The Varieties of Corporate Power Corporate power isn’t a monolith. Rather, as the progressive crusaders of the past century recognized, it comes in several different forms. First, there is literal monopoly: the direct control over an entire good or industry by a single firm. But that’s only the most blatant kind of corporate power: there are other kinds of dominance that are far less obvious.


Prompt: One of these is control over infrastructure. Infrastructure can mean many things. It can refer to physical infrastructure, like highways and bridges and railroads, or it can be social and economic: the credit that forms the lifeblood of business, for instance, or the housing stock and water supply that provide the foundational necessities for life.

Response: These infrastructural goods and services combine scale with necessity. They are necessities that make possible a wide range of “downstream” uses. This social value in turn depends on the provision of these goods and services at scale to as many people as possible. Where a good or a service is essential and irreplaceable, the user depends on its provider—they are, by definition, in a vulnerable position. So if a firm controls infrastructure, it possesses arbitrary power over all those who rely on the infrastructure.


Prompt: But infrastructural power can also operate in a more diffused way. Much of the early debate around corporate power revolved around norms of nondiscrimination in serving travelers. The classic example was the innkeeper. The innkeeper is not a monopolist in the sense of massive scale and concentration. And yet, for the traveler in isolation, without other competing providers present, the innkeeper possesses a kind of localized dominance, with the ability to deny or condition service, placing the traveler at the innkeeper’s mercy. Indeed, this understanding of localized power played a major role in the development of public accommodations laws, which aimed to prevent this kind of diffused exclusion through generally applicable requirements of nondiscrimination.

Response: Transmission, Gatekeeping, Scoring A century after the debate between Brandeis and Croly, our technologically transformed economy poses new challenges. For much of the last few decades, these challenges were hidden from view: technology seemed to be at worst neutral and at best radically decentralizating, democratizing, and value-generating.


Prompt: Recently, however, this optimism has begun to unravel. The problems of technology have come into sharper focus. But this has brought difficulties of its own: technological power today operates in distinctive ways that make it both more dangerous and potentially more difficult to contest. First, there is transmission power. This is the ability of a firm to control the flow of data or goods. Take Amazon: as a shipping and logistics infrastructure, it can be seen as directly analogous to the railroads of the nineteenth century, which enjoyed monopolized mastery over the circulation of people, information, and commodities. Amazon provides the literal conduits for commerce.

Response: On the consumer side, this places Amazon in a unique position to target prices and influence search results in ways that maximize its returns, and also favor its preferred producers. On the producer side, Amazon can make or break businesses and whole sectors, just like the railroads of yesteryear. Book publishers have long voiced concern about Amazon’s dominance, but this infrastructural control now extends to other kinds of retail activity, as third-party producers and sellers depend on Amazon to carry their products and to fairly reflect them in consumer searches.


Prompt: As some studies indicate, Amazon will often deploy its vast trove of consumer data to identify successful third-party products which it can then displace through its own branded versions, priced at predatorily low levels to drive out competition. This is also the kind of infrastructural power exercised by internet service providers (ISPs) in the net neutrality context, through their control of the channels of data transmission. Their dominance raises similar concerns: just as Amazon can use its power to prevent producers from reaching consumers, ISPs can block, throttle, or prioritize preferred types of information.

Response: A second type of power arises from what we might think of as a gatekeeping power. Here, the issue is not necessarily that the firm controls the entire infrastructure of transmission, but rather that the firm controls the gateway to an otherwise decentralized and diffuse landscape. This is one way to understand the Facebook News Feed, or Google Search. Google Search does not literally own and control the entire internet. But it is increasingly true that for most users, access to the internet is mediated through the gateway of Google Search or YouTube’s suggested videos. By controlling the point of entry, Google exercises outsized influence on the kinds of information and commerce that users can ultimately access—a form of control without complete ownership.


Prompt: Crucially, gatekeeping power subordinates two kinds of users on either end of the “gate.” Content producers fear hidden or arbitrary changes to the algorithms for Google Search or the Facebook News Feed, whose mechanics can make the difference between the survival and destruction of media content producers. Meanwhile, end users unwittingly face an informational environment that is increasingly the product of these algorithms—which are optimized not to provide accuracy but to maximize user attention spent on the site. The result is a built-in incentive for platforms like Facebook or YouTube to feed users more content that confirms preexisting biases and provide more sensational versions of those biases, exacerbating the fragmentation of the public sphere into different “filter bubbles.” These platforms’ gatekeeping decisions have huge social and political consequences. While the United States is only now grappling with concerns about online speech and the problems of polarization, radicalization, and misinformation, studies confirm that subtle changes—how Google ranks search results for candidates prior to an election, for instance, or the ways in which Facebook suggests to some users rather than others that they vote on Election Day—can produce significant changes in voting behavior, large enough to swing many elections.

Response: A third kind of power is scoring power, exercised by ratings systems, indices, and ranking databases. Increasingly, many business and public policy decisions are based on big data-enabled scoring systems. Thus employers will screen potential applicants for the likelihood that they may quit, be a problematic employee, or participate in criminal activity. Or judges will use predictive risk assessments to inform sentencing and bail decisions.


Prompt: These scoring systems may seem objective and neutral, but they are built on data and analytics that bake into them existing patterns of racial, gender, and economic bias. For example, employers might screen out women likely to become pregnant or people of color who already are disproportionately targeted by the criminal justice system. This allows firms to engage in a kind of employment discrimination that would normally be illegal if it took place in the workplace itself. But these scoring systems allow for screening even before the employer is involved in a face-to-face interaction with the candidate.

Response: Scoring power is not a new phenomenon. Consider the way that financial firms gamed the credit ratings agencies to mark toxic mortgage backed assets as “AAA,” enabling them to extract immense profits while setting up the world economy for the 2008 financial crisis. But what big data and the proliferation of AI enable is the much wider use of similarly flawed scoring systems. As these systems become more widespread, their power—and risk—magnifies.


Prompt: Each of these forms of power is infrastructural. Their impact grows as more and more goods and services are built atop a particular platform. They are also more subtle than explicit control: each of these types of power enable a firm to exercise tremendous influence over what might otherwise look like a decentralized and diffused system.

Response: This is the paradox of technological power in a networked age. Where a decade or two ago, these technologies may have seemed intrinsically decentralizing, they have in fact enabled new forms of concentrated power and control through transmission, gateways, and scoring. These forms of power, furthermore, often operate in the background, opaque and hidden from view. This makes them harder to challenge and contest.


Prompt: Inside Voices If the problem with scale is less literal size and more these forms of concentrated, unaccountable power, then what are the remedies? As technology creates new kinds of infrastructural power, we need to develop new tools for holding that power accountable. We can imagine a few different strategies. First, we might turn, like Berle and Means, to the internal politics of technological firms themselves. We might push for the creation of independent oversight and ombudsman bodies within Facebook, Google, or other tech platforms.

Response: For these bodies to be effective and legitimate, however, they would need to have significant autonomy and independence. They would also need to be relatively participatory, engaging a wider range of disciplines and stakeholders in their operations. Precisely because of the infrastructural nature of their power, technology platforms affect a wide range of groups: workers within the firms, consumers more broadly, small businesses and producers, media companies, and the like. Any attempt to create internal checks and balances will have to find ways to engage these different constituencies and provide them with a channel through which to raise concerns and flag problems to be resolved.


Prompt: A related idea might be the formation of more explicit professional and industry standards of conduct. It is not a coincidence that the professionalization of journalism emerged around the same time as print and broadcast media took a more concentrated form. Professionalization helped legitimate the industry’s growing dominance.

Response: This mid-century custodial ethos is notably different from the Silicon Valley culture of “moving fast and breaking things.” Changing this culture will be difficult, but not impossible. Tech firms might prioritize a wider range of professional backgrounds outside of tech, engineering, and finance when developing internal leaders. The training of engineers could also incorporate a wider range of influences—ethics, sociology, history—whether through changes to the curriculum in leading university programs or through the formation of professional development practices within the industry.


Prompt: These cultural and curricular shifts could be facilitated by third-party scoring systems. We need more independent nonprofit organizations with sufficient resources, technological sophistication, and public legitimacy to provide independent scoring of tech platforms’ data, privacy, and AI practices—similar to the LEED program that certifies green building practices.

Response: A New Deal for Big Tech Another route would be to follow the example of Teddy Roosevelt and the New Deal itself. To the extent that we doubt the efficacy and independence of self-regulation, we might create new government institutions for oversight. These agencies would have to leverage interdisciplinary expertise in data, law, ethics, sociology, and other fields in order to monitor and manage the activities of technological infrastructure whether in their transmission, gatekeeping, or scoring forms.


Prompt: Along these lines, several scholars have suggested the formation of regulatory bodies to assess algorithms, the use of big data, search engines, and the like, subjecting them to risk assessments, audits, and some form of public participation. Government oversight could attempt to ensure that firms respect values like nondiscrimination, neutrality, common carriage, due process, and privacy. These regulatory institutions would monitor compliance and continue to revise standards over time.

Response: Yet both self-governance and regulatory oversight depend to some degree on the human capacities of the overseers, whether private or public. Call these managerial strategies for checking concentrated power. The problem with managerialism is that even if we built a powerful, independent, and accountable public (or private) oversight regime, it would face the difficulties endured by any regulator of a complex system: industry is likely to be several steps ahead of government, especially if it is incentivized to seek returns by bypassing regulatory constraints. Furthermore, the efficacy of regulation will turn entirely on the skill, commitment, creativity, and independence of regulators themselves.


Prompt: A more radical response, then, would be to impose structural restraints: limits on the structure of technology firms, their powers, and their business models, to forestall the dynamics that lead to the most troubling forms of infrastructural power in the first place. One solution would be to convert some of these infrastructures into “public options”—publicly managed alternatives to private provision. Run by the state, these public versions could operate on equitable, inclusive, and nondiscriminatory principles. Public provision of these infrastructures would subject them to legal requirements for equal service and due process. Furthermore, supplying a public option would put competitive pressures on private providers.

Response: The public option solution is not a new one. Our modern-day public utilities, from water to electricity, emerged out of this very concern that certain kinds of infrastructure are too important to be left in private hands. This infrastructure doesn’t have to be physical: during the reform debate after the financial crisis, for example, there was a proposal to provide a public alternative to for-profit credit ratings agencies, to break the oligopoly of those ratings companies and their rampant conflicts of interest.


Prompt: What would public options look like in a technological context? Municipally owned broadband networks can provide a public alternative to private ISPs, ensuring equitable access and putting competitive pressure on corporate providers. We might even imagine publicly owned search engines and social media platforms—perhaps less likely, but theoretically possible.

Response: We can also introduce structural limits on technologies with the goal of precluding dangerous concentrations of power. While much of the debate over big data and privacy has tended to emphasize the concerns of individuals, we might view a robust privacy regime as a kind of structural limit: if firms are precluded from collecting or using certain types of data, that limits the kinds of power they can exercise.


Prompt: Usually privacy concerns are framed as a matter of individual rights: the user’s privacy is invaded by firms collecting data. But if we take seriously the types of technological power sketched above, then privacy acquires a larger significance. It becomes not just a personal issue but a structural one: a way to limit the kinds of data that firms can collect, in turn reducing the risk of arbitrary and biased technological power. Such privacy rules can be achieved by legal mandate and regulation, or through proposed technological tools to deliberately corrupt some of the data that platforms collect on users.

Response: Tax policy could also play a role. Some commentators have proposed a “big data tax” as another structural inhibitor of some kinds of big data and algorithmic uses. Just as a financial transactions tax would cut down on short-term speculation in the stock market, a big data tax would reduce the volume of data collected. Forcing companies to collect less data would structurally limit the kinds of risky or irresponsible uses to which such data can be directed.


Prompt: Finally, antitrust-style restrictions on firms might reduce problematic conflicts of interest. For example, we might limit practices of vertical integration: Amazon might be forbidden from being both a platform and a producer of its own goods and content sold on its own platform, as a way of preventing the incentive to self-deal. Indeed, in some cases we might take a conventional antitrust route, and break up big companies into smaller ones.

Response: Civic Scale Creating public options or imposing structural limits would necessarily reduce tech industry profits. That is by design: the purpose of such measures is to prevent practices that, while they may bring some public benefits, are both risky and too difficult to manage effectively through public or private oversight.


Prompt: Taming technological power will require changing how we think about technology. It will require moving beyond Panglossian views of technology as neutral, apolitical, or purely virtuous, and seeing it as a form of power. This focus on power highlights the often subtle ways that technology creates relationships of control and domination. It also raises a profound challenge to our modern ethic of technological innovation.

Response: A key theme for Progressive Era critics of corporate power was the confrontation between the democratic capacities of the public and the powers of private firms. Today, as technology creates new forms of power, we must also create new forms of countervailing civic power. We must build a new civic infrastructure that imposes new kinds of checks and balances. But where new firms, however innovative, outstrip our ability to assure their accountability, then we have to ask hard questions about whether we want to pursue such innovation in the first place.


Prompt: Moving fast and breaking things is inevitable in moments of change. The issue is which things we are willing to break—and how broken we are willing to let them become. Moving fast may not be worth it if it means breaking the things upon which democracy depends. Google knows you’re pregnant. Spotify knows your favorite throwback jams.

Response: Is this convenient or creepy? It depends. Anxiety is a feeling that tends to come in waves—big data anxiety is no different. One minute, you’re grateful for the personalized precision of Netflix’s recommendations. The next, you’re nauseated by the personalized precision of a Facebook ad. Big data has been around for awhile, but our discomfort with it is relatively recent. We’ve always had dissenters sounding the alarm about Silicon Valley’s surveillance-based business model. It’s only since 2016, however, that their message has gone mainstream. The election of Donald Trump punctured many powerful fictions, among them the belief in the beneficence of the tech industry. The media, long captive to the tales that Silicon Valley tells about itself, has turned a sharper eye on tech. Among other things, this has meant greater public awareness of how a handful of large companies use technology to monitor and manipulate us.


Prompt: This awareness is a wonderful thing. But if we want to harvest the political opportunity it presents, and channel the bad feelings swirling around tech into something more enduring and transformative, we need to radicalize the conversation. The techno-skeptical turn is fragile, incomplete—it needs to be consolidated, intensified. It’s good that more people see a problem where they didn’t before. The next step is showing them that the problem is much larger than they think.

Response: The problem is not personal. Yes, our private lives are being pillaged on an unprecedented scale. Information as trivial or as intimate as our favorite sandwich or our weirdest sexual fantasy is being hoarded in data centers and strip-mined for profit. But big data is bigger than that. It is not merely the mechanism whereby Google learns you’re pregnant. It is not confined to the cluster of companies that we know, somewhat imprecisely, as the tech industry.


Prompt: Rather, big data describes a particular way of acquiring and organizing information that is increasingly indispensable to the economy as a whole. When you think about big data, you shouldn’t just think about Google and Facebook; you should think about manufacturing and retail and logistics and healthcare. You should think about pretty much everything.

Response: Understanding big data, then, is crucial for understanding what capitalism currently is and what it is becoming—and how we might transform it. What Makes Data Big? As long as capitalism has existed, data has helped it grow. The boss watches how workers work, and rearranges them to be more efficient—this is a good example of how surveillance generates information that’s used to improve productivity. In the early twentieth century, Frederick Winslow Taylor made systematic surveillance of the productive process a key part of “scientific management,” a set of widely influential ideas about how to increase industrial efficiency.


Prompt: Data is useful for capitalism. That’s not new. What’s new is the scale and significance of data, thanks to breakthroughs in information technology. Take scale. Digitization makes data infinitely more abundant, because it becomes much easier to create, store, and transmit. You can slap a sensor on almost anything and stream data from it—an assembly line, a gas turbine, a shipping container. Our ability to extract information from the productive process in order to optimize it has reached a level of sophistication far beyond anything Taylor could’ve ever imagined.

Response: But observing the productive process isn’t the only way we create data. More broadly, we create data whenever we do anything that is mediated or monitored by a computer—which, at this point, is almost everything. Information technology has been woven into the entire fabric of the economy. Just because you’re not directly using a computer doesn’t mean you’re not making information for someone somewhere. Your credit score, your healthcare history—simply by virtue of being alive in an advanced capitalist country, you are constantly hemorrhaging data.


Prompt: No single technology contributes more powerfully to our perpetual data hemorrhage than the internet, of course. The internet both facilitates the flow of data and constantly creates more of it. It goes without saying that everything we do online leaves a trace. And companies are working hard to ensure that we leave more traces, by putting more of our life online.

Response: This is broadly known as the “Internet of Things”: by placing connected devices everywhere, businesses hope to make corporate surveillance as deeply embedded in our physical environment as it is in our virtual one. Imagine a brick-and-mortar store that watches you as closely as Facebook, or a car that tracks you as thoroughly as Google. This kind of data capture will only grow in coming years, as the already porous boundary between online and off disappears.


Prompt: Eating Reality At one level, then, big data is about literal bigness: the datasets are larger and more diverse because they are drawn from so many different sources. But big data also means that data can be made more meaningful—it can yield valuable lessons about how people or processes behave, and how they’re likely to behave in the future.

Response: This is true for a few reasons. It’s partly because we have more data, partly because we have faster computers, and partly because developments in fields like machine learning have given us better tools for analysis. But the bottom line is that big data is driving the digitization of everything because any scrap of information, when combined with many other scraps and interpreted en masse, may reveal actionable knowledge about the world. It might teach a manufacturer how to make a factory more efficient, or an advertiser what kind of stuff you might buy, or a self-driving car how to drive.


Prompt: If information can come from anywhere, then it can hold lucrative lessons for any industry. That’s why digitization is becoming as important to capitalism as financialization became during and after the 1970s. Digitization, as scholars like Shoshana Zuboff and Nick Srnicek have shown, offers a new engine of capital accumulation. It gives capitalism a new way to grow.

Response: Rosa Luxemburg once observed that capitalism grows by consuming anything that isn’t capitalist. It eats the world, to adapt Marc Andreessen’s famous phrase. Historically, this has often involved literal imperialism: a developed country uses force against an undeveloped one in order to extract raw materials, exploit cheap labor, and create markets. With digitization, however, capitalism starts to eat reality itself. It becomes an imperialism of everyday life—it begins to consume moments.


Prompt: Because any moment may be valuable, every moment must be made into data. This is the logical conclusion of our current trajectory: the total enclosure of reality by capital. In the classic science-fiction film The Blob, a meteorite lands in a small town carrying an alien amoeba. The amoeba starts expanding, swallowing up people and structures, threatening to envelop the whole town, until the Air Force swoops in and air-lifts it to the Arctic.

Response: Big data will eventually become so big that it devours everything. One way to respond is to try to kill it—to rip out the Blob and dump it in the Arctic. That seems to be what a certain school of technology critics want. Writers like Franklin Foer denounce digitization as a threat to our essential humanity, while tech industry “refuseniks” warn us about the damaging psychological effects of the technologies they helped create.


Prompt: This is the path of retreat from the digital, towards the “authentically human”—an idea that’s constantly invoked by the new techno-moralists but rarely defined, although it’s generally associated with reading more books and having more face-to-face conversations. The other route is to build a better Blob.

Response: Building a Better Blob Data is the new oil, says everyone. The analogy has become something of a cliche, widely deployed in media coverage of the digital economy. But there’s a reason it keeps coming back. It’s a useful comparison—more useful, in fact, than many of the people using it realize. Thinking of data as a resource like oil helps illuminate not only how it functions, but how we might organize it differently.


Prompt: Big data is extractive. It involves extracting data from various “mines”—Facebook, say, or a connected piece of industrial equipment. This raw material must then be “refined” into potentially valuable knowledge by combining it with other data and analyzing it. Extractive industries need to be closely regulated because they generate all sorts of externalities—costs that aren’t borne by the company, but are instead passed on to society as a whole. There are certain kinds of resources that we shouldn’t be extracting at all, because those costs are far too high, like fossil fuels. There are others that we should only be extracting under very specific conditions, with adequate protections for workers, the environment, and the broader public. And democratic participation is crucial: you shouldn’t build a mine in a community that doesn’t want it.

Response: These principles offer a framework for governing big data. There are certain kinds of data we shouldn’t be extracting. There are certain places where we shouldn’t build data mines. And the incredibly complex and opaque process whereby raw data is refined into knowledge needs to be cracked wide open, so we can figure out what further rules are required.


Prompt: Like any extractive endeavor, big data produces externalities. The extractors reap profits, while the rest of us are left with the personal, social, and environmental consequences. These range from the annihilation of privacy to algorithmic racism to a rapidly warming climate—the world’s data centers, for instance, put about as much carbon into the atmosphere as air travel.

Response: Society, not industry, should decide how and where resources are extracted and refined. Big data is no different. Giving People Stuff Regulating big data is a good start, but it’s far from revolutionary. In fact, it’s already begun: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that takes effect in the European Union in 2018 embodies aspects of this approach, imposing new obligations on companies that collect personal data. Congress isn’t anywhere close to passing something similar, but it’s not impossible to imagine some basic protections around data privacy and algorithmic transparency emerging within the next decade.