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The Rip Current

Jacob Ward
The Rip Current
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  • Ep 06: Renee DiResta on Our Invisible Rulers and Building a Credibility Counterculture
    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theripcurrent.substack.comBefore she was an associate professor at Georgetown and a cofounder of Stanford’s Internet Observatory, which measured the disinformation campaigns at work in multiple presidential elections, Renee DiResta was a new mom at home getting bombarded with anti-vaccine ads on Facebook. “Why are they hitting me with this stuff?” she wondered, and her efforts t…
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  • EP 05: Lawrence Lessig on Corruption, AI, and the Need to Rethink Everything
    When I was at a particularly despairing place about how quickly the world seemed to be doing exactly what I tried to warn against in my book The Loop: How AI is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back, I got an email out of the blue from Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, an icon of my early life thinking about the Internet. We’d never met. Here’s what he wrote me:Thank you for an incredibly valuable book — which complements and completes one I'm working on just now about AI and democracy. I was lost without it, but now I'm found! Endless gratitudeMan did that turn my week around. His encouragement helped me get up the courage to launch The Rip Current, and when I started putting a podcast together here I invited him on, and this episode is the result.Thanks for listening to The Rip Current podcast! This episode is available immediately to paid subscribers, and free subscribers get it a week later. Send it to someone in your life who thinks about technology, democracy, or corruption.At the end of my time with NBC News I talked a lot about the notion of “future crimes.” I thought of these as the kinds of misdeeds, made possible by technology, that are clearly intolerable in a civilized society, but fall outside the current bounds of the law. So when people talk about being “originalist” when it comes to the law and legal precedent, it makes me nuts. The idea that the founding fathers should be expected to have known exactly what was coming in the grand American Experiment, much less what new technology would be doing to it today — well, to someone who has covered the unexpected consequences of innovation for all this time, that’s crazy.Lessig agrees, and his life exemplifies this idea. He’s the author of 13 books, which run the gamut from his early belief in the need to rewrite copyright to make culture as open as possible to his latest book, still in the works, that he told me will argue technology has put democracy, not to mention human society, into a terrible dilemma. I found him open and thoughtful, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe
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  • Ep 04: Kat Tenbarge on Misinformation, Media, and How Influencers Work You
    The public duels between celebrities like Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni aren’t just gossip fuel. They’re a vast business, one that’s also a thriving laboratory for experimenting with influence and public perception. Kat Tenbarge reports on these propaganda wars at Spitfire News, where she brings the dogged investigative techniques she honed at NBC New… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe
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  • Bonus Episode: The Tariff Hand Grenade
    A special reading from the latest issue of The Rip Current, about the Trump tariffs, the the idiocy of the math, the effects he won’t see coming, and the reaction from CEOs, world leaders, and the markets. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe
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  • Ep 03: Jennifer Freyd on DARVO and the Language of Betrayal
    We’re in an upside-down moment, in which there seems to be no cost for lying and no respect for honesty. How did we get here? Jennifer Freyd can explain. Since the 1990s she’s been tracking the misbehavior of public figures and the ways that institutions unwittingly betray us. And in the process she discovered and revealed the secret, specific choreogra… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe
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About The Rip Current

We're in the invisible grip of technology, politics, and our own weirdness. We gotta get better at seeing it. Hosted by veteran journalist Jacob Ward (correspondent for Al Jazeera, PBS, NBC News, and CNN), The Rip Current is your guide to spotting the hidden forces at work in our lives and getting across them safely. Each week we speak to experts in the stuff you didn't know was having an impact on your life, from venture capital to racism to the tried-and-true tactics of bullies, and teach you how to see The Rip Current before it sweeps you out to sea. Read more at TheRipCurrent.com! theripcurrent.substack.com
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