How to Fix the Internet

• Coming Soon: How to Fix the Internet Season Six

  Now more than ever, we need to build, reinforce, and protect the tools and technology that support our freedom. EFF’s How to Fix the Internet returns with another season full of forward-looking and hopeful conversations with the smartest and most creative leaders, activists, technologists, policy makers, and thinkers around. People who are working to create a better internet – and world – for all of us.Co-hosts Executive Director Cindy Cohn and Activism Director Jason Kelley will speak with people like journalist Molly White, reproductive rights activist Kate Bertash, press freedom advocate Harlo Holmes, the Tor Project’s Isabela Fernandes and computer scientist and AI skeptic Arvind Narayanan, among many others.

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• Vote for “How to Fix the Internet” in the Webby Awards People's Voice Competition!

  EFF’s “How to Fix the Internet” podcast is a nominee in the Webby Awards 29th Annual People's Voice competition – and we need your support to bring the trophy home! Voting ends on April 17, so if you like what we do here by trying to envision a better digital future—please take a moment to go to eff.org/webby to cast your vote. 

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• Rerelease - Dr. Seuss Warned Us

  This episode was first released on May 2, 2023.  Dr. Seuss wrote a story about a Hawtch-Hawtcher Bee-Watcher whose job it is to watch his town’s one lazy bee, because “a bee that is watched will work harder, you see.” But that doesn’t seem to work, so another Hawtch-Hawtcher is assigned to watch the first, and then another to watch the second... until the whole town is watching each other watch a bee. To Federal Trade Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, the story—which long predates the internet—is a great metaphor for why we must be wary of workplace surveillance, and why we need to strengthen our privacy laws. Bedoya has made a career of studying privacy, trust, and competition, and wishes for a world in which we can do, see, and read what we want, living our lives without being held back by our identity, income, faith, or any other attribute. In that world, all our interactions with technology —from social media to job or mortgage applications—are on a level playing field. Bedoya speaks with EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley about how fixing the internet should allow all people to live their lives with dignity, pride, and purpose. In this episode, you’ll learn about: The nuances of work that “bossware,” employee surveillance technology, can’t catch.Why the Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act (HIPAA) isn’t the privacy panacea you might think it is.Making sure that one-size-fits-all privacy rules don’t backfire against new entrants and small competitors.How antitrust fundamentally is about small competitors and working people, like laborers and farmers, deserving fairness in our economy.Alvaro Bedoya was nominated by President Joe Biden, confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and sworn in May 16, 2022 as a Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission; his term expires in September 2026. Bedoya was the founding director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown University Law Center, where he was also a visiting professor of law. He has been influential in research and policy at the intersection of privacy and civil rights, and co-authored a 2016 report on the use of facial recognition by law enforcement and the risks that it poses. He previously served as the first Chief Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law after its founding in 2011, and as Chief Counsel to former U.S. Sen. Al Franken (D-MN); earlier, he was an associate at the law firm WilmerHale. A naturalized immigrant born in Peru and raised in upstate New York, Bedoya previously co-founded the Esperanza Education Fund, a college scholarship for immigrant students in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. He also served on the Board of Directors of the Hispanic Bar Association of the District of Columbia. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College and holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served on the Yale Law Journal and received the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.  This podcast is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology.Music for How to Fix the Internet was created for us by Reed Mathis and Nat Keefe of BeatMower. This podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, and includes the following music licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported by their creators: http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/64772lostTrack by Airtone (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/64772 Ft. mwic__________________________________http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/59729Probably Shouldn’t by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Mr_Yesterday__________________________________http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/58703CommonGround by airtone (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) Ft: simonlittlefield

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• Rerelease - So You Think You're a Critical Thinker

  This episode was first released on March 21, 2023.  The promise of the internet was that it would be a tool to melt barriers and aid truth-seekers everywhere. But it feels like polarization has worsened in recent years, and more internet users are being misled into embracing conspiracies and cults. From QAnon to anti-vax screeds to talk of an Illuminati bunker beneath Denver International Airport, Alice Marwick has heard it all. She has spent years researching some dark corners of the online experience: the spread of conspiracy theories and disinformation. She says many people see conspiracy theories as participatory ways to be active in political and social systems from which they feel left out, building upon beliefs they already harbor to weave intricate and entirely false narratives. Marwick speaks with EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley about finding ways to identify and leverage people’s commonalities to stem this flood of disinformation while ensuring that the most marginalized and vulnerable internet users are still empowered to speak out. In this episode you’ll learn about: Why seemingly ludicrous conspiracy theories get so many views and followersHow disinformation is tied to personal identity and feelings of marginalization and disenfranchisementWhen fact-checking does and doesn’t workThinking about online privacy as a political and structural issue rather than something that can be solved by individual action  Alice Marwick is director of research at Data & Society. Previously she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and cofounder and Principal Researcher at the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She researches the social, political, and cultural implications of popular social media technologies. In 2017, she co-authored Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online (Data & Society), a flagship report examining far-right online subcultures’ use of social media to spread disinformation, for which she was named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s 2017 Global Thinkers. She is the author of Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale 2013), an ethnographic study of the San Francisco tech scene which examines how people seek social status through online visibility, and co-editor of The Sage Handbook of Social Media (Sage 2017). Her forthcoming book, The Private is Political (Yale 2023), examines how the networked nature of online privacy disproportionately impacts marginalized individuals in terms of gender, race, and socio-economic status. She earned a political science and women's studies bachelor's degree from Wellesley College, a Master of Arts in communication from the University of Washington, and a PhD in media, culture and communication from New York University. This podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, and includes the following music licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported by their creators: http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/59729Probably Shouldn’t by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Mr_Yesterday__________________________________http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/58703CommonGround by airtone (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) Ft: simonlittlefield__________________________________Additional beds and alternate theme remixes by Gaëtan Harris

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• Fighting Enshittification

  The early internet had a lot of “technological self-determination" — you could opt out of things, protect your privacy, control your experience. The problem was that it took a fair amount of technical skill to exercise that self-determination. But what if it didn’t? What if the benefits of online privacy, security, interoperability, and free speech were more evenly distributed among all internet users?This is the future that award-winning author and EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow wants us to fight for. His term “enshittification” — a downward spiral in which online platforms trap users and business customers alike, treating them more and more like commodities while providing less and less value — was selected by the American Dialect Society as its 2023 Word of the Year. But, he tells EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley, enshittification analysis also identifies the forces that used to make companies treat us better, helping us find ways to break the cycle and climb toward a better future.In this episode you’ll learn about: Why “intellectual property” is a misnomer, and how the law has been abused to eliminate protections for societyHow the tech sector’s consolidation into a single lobbying voice helped bulldoze the measures that used to check companies’ worst impulsesWhy recent antitrust actions provide a glimmer of hope that megacompanies can still be forced to do better for usersWhy tech workers’ labor rights are important to the fight for a better internetHow legislative and legal losses can still be opportunities for future changeCory Doctorow is an award-winning science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger, and a Special Advisor to EFF. He is the editor of Pluralistic and the author of novels including “The Bezzle” (2024), “The Lost Cause” (2023), “Attack Surface” (2020), and “Walkaway” (2017); young adult novels including “Homeland” (2013) and “Little Brother” (2008); and nonfiction books including “The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation” (2023) and “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism” (2021). He is EFF's former European director and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.

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