Ethan Zuckerman: Talks Metaverse, building a better internet, and the power of local communities.
Ethan Zuckerman is a Professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (my alma mater), where he teaches Public Policy, Communication, and Information. His work focuses on designing and advocating for versions of social media that have positive social and civic impacts. Which means moving beyond existing models of funding and governance.
On the show, Ethan talks about the Metaverse, trust, Facebook vs Apple, making the Metaverse a safe space, governance of online spaces, data ownership, what the biggest piece missing from the Metaverse conversation is, Omar Wasow and Black Planet, and technical barriers when it comes to storytelling access on various platforms.
Ethan founded the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure to explore the ideas previously mentioned. It’s a research group studying and building alternatives to the existing commercial internet.
Previously Ethan was at the MIT Media Lab working at the Center for Civic Media, researching the relationship between media and social change, and building tools to study how ideas spread in the media, and how citizens can better participate in their civic lives. He is also the inventor of pop-up windows.
Ethan has many hats but the one that he wears the most is that of a blogger/writer. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, CNN, Wired and others. He also has a Ted Talk about listening to global voices.
Over the years, he’s been a tech startup guy (with Tripod.com), a non-profit founder (Geekcorps.org) a peace Corp for geeks, transferring tech skills from geeks in developed nations to geeks in emerging nations, especially entrepreneurial geeks who are building small businesses. He is also the Co-founder of Globalvoices.org which is a global blogging community.
He’s has written two books: Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them and Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, both published through W.W. Norton. And is an alumnus of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard, the MIT Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies at MIT, Geekcorps, and Tripod.
Transcript
Yulia Laricheva 0:05
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Dream Nation Love. I'm your host Julia. And today I get to interview Ethan Zuckerman who's a professor at my alma mater, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Fun fact, I got my start at WFMU, the radio station back in the day. And that's where I really honed in my interview chops and also got familiar with storytelling, you know, spoken word storytelling. And I'm really excited to have him on the show, because he is teaching public policy communication and information. His work focuses on designing and advocating for versions of social media that have positive social and civic impacts, which is kind of like the basis or the shell, right? Dream Nation Love is really focused on social impact, and diversity, and impairment are all these topics that we're going to talk about today. And what's really interesting is that Ethan is working on moving beyond existing models of funding and governance, which is super fascinating. He founded the Institute for digital public infrastructure to explore the ideas I just mentioned. And basically, it's a research group studying and building alternatives to the existing commercial internet. Really, really, really super, super, super awesome stuff. Such an on spot podcast for Dream nation, love, can't wait to get into the discussion. Another fun fact, this is about Ethan, he is the inventor of pop up windows. Yes, pop up windows. And he has had many hats, but the one he wears the most is that of a blogger and a writer. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, CNN, wired and others. And he also has a TED talk, you should check out. He's super brilliant. And honestly, I want to do like 10 podcasts with him because trying to cram all this information into one hour is gonna be really, really tough. Who knows, we might do another podcast coming up in the future. This information is so pertinent right now, because we are in the middle of massive changes online, especially with trust and freedom of speech and all this stuff. So let's get into the discussion. Enjoy the show. And don't forget to share it with a friend after you've listened to it.
Yulia Laricheva 2:08
Hi Ethan. How’s life?
Ethan Zuckerman 2:09
Hi Yulia. I am well. How are you doing?
Yulia Laricheva 2:12
I'm good. I'm so glad to have you on the show. And I'm so excited that you're at UMass because it's a really experimental place.
Ethan Zuckerman 2:19
It's an interesting place. It's a big state university. So there's a lot of different things going on. But it's a university that has a real dedication towards social change and social justice. And it's a good fit for me. So I'm happy to be there.
Yulia Laricheva 2:32
Yeah, it's my alma mater. So when I've been reading your work probably for the last year I haven't I really came across you like, recently. And then I was like, Wait, he's at UMass. Lowell. This makes so much sense because we do a lot of social justice work at UMass Amherst. And a lot of people don't know about that. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the metaverse and honestly, your career is like 10 podcasts. I don't know if I can squeeze all the questions I want to ask because there's like a podcast I want to do about trust issues, which is like what you've written books about on which is like fascinating, and government and all that stuff. And then your work also in places like Ghana, and in all the tech programs that you've built, I'm going to just try to get it into this hour, I will do my best. And I guess you're into hip hop too?
Ethan Zuckerman 3:21
I listened to lots of different kinds of music, hip hop and some of it but yeah, pick whatever works for you. You get to steer the boat. I'm sitting back and you can take me for a ride today.
Yulia Laricheva 3:31
Awesome. What was your dream as a child growing up?
Ethan Zuckerman 3:34
You know, I think the dream that I probably remember the clearest was wanting my parents to let me loose in the New York City Public Library. I actually lobbied my parents to let me take a year off between high school and college and just go to the New York Public Library and read. And I think for a lot of kids, that would have been an excuse to run wild in New York City. I think for me, I probably would have gone to the New York Public Library and read, I just loved libraries. I loved being able to find out about a topic that I didn't know much about, and read everything that I could find on it. You know, I grew up in a pre-internet age, I was very involved with Apple computers and Commodore computers. But those weren't really information devices at that point, where I was happiest as a kid where libraries were magazine stands were bookstores were book sells. And I don't know if my dream was to be a librarian or to be a researcher, but it was basically to have unlimited amounts of time. Unlimited books and comfortable chairs to sit in.
Yulia Laricheva 4:42
That's the dream, right? It's just access to information I grew up with — I'm 43. So I grew up in the pre-internet age, right? Pre-internet pre in a privacy age. Really, it was really a privacy age. Like if you want to find things out on me it might be on VHS somewhere buried in a friend's house. You know, like there's no information that really exists, which is quite lovely. Now we exist in this new universe that is just so public. And it's getting more and more public every day. And I have seen your TED talk too, which is great. And you talk about being a xenophile versus like, you know, xenophobe. And I think he recorded the TED Talk in 2011. That kind of all ties into like where we are now, which is the metaverse and knowledge and people coming together. My question is, before there were authorities, right? People used to purchase books, and they were written by people who had authority. And now you know, like, even this podcast, right? Like, I have a microphone. I'm not a published authority, but I am a voice in the social impact space and diversity and inclusion. Here we are. Everybody is just able to get knowledge and share knowledge. And how can the metaverse build trust? Because we don't trust each other in real life these days?
Ethan Zuckerman 6:02
Yes. So let me pick up on sort of part of your preamble and see if that pushes us in an interesting direction. And then I'll I promise, I'll get to the Metaverse and trust questions. Something super interesting happened. Round about the year 2000, maybe 2005. The early internet had this idea that anyone could create content, anyone could say whatever they wanted to say. The trick was, for most people, it was actually pretty hard. Most of us weren't comfortable setting up our own web servers. Most of us were comfortable with the sort of publishing software that existed at that point, round about 2000 to 2005, we start seeing a whole wave of companies that make it possible for people to say what they want to say and share what they want to share. It starts with some of the blog companies, it starts with some of the early social media companies, YouTube comes out sort of near the end of that period where people can start sharing videos, things like Flickr, where you could share photos, suddenly, everyone's a publisher, there is a huge upside to this, which is that there are a lot of people who didn't find a platform in the world that you and I grew up in. So I'm 49. So I was born in 1973. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, you were way more likely to have your voice heard, if you were a white male educated in an Ivy League school. And you know more than anything, if you were from the United States, right? If you were a person of color, if you were a queer person, if you were female, if you were less educated. If you were an immigrant, if you were from outside the US, all of those things, made it less likely that you would be heard. And so the great news of the internet is that lots of us found ways to have our voices and the fact that you can have a mic you can have a podcast. That's wonderful, wonderful news. What it does is it puts the gatekeeping in a different place. The gatekeepers used to be whoever was programming television, whoever was programming, the radio, whoever was publishing books for different publishers, whoever was editing the newspaper. Now the gatekeepers are, can anyone find your podcast? Apple is a big gatekeeper on podcasts. Facebook and Twitter are enormous gatekeepers? Do people see your comments? Do they see your points? Those things tend to be algorithmic. We are starting to learn that they don't always have our best interests at heart. Often what's going on on those platforms is that they're looking for engagement. They're looking for clicks, they're looking for likes. They're not necessarily looking for accuracy. They're not necessarily looking for content. That's good for us. That's helpful for us. So what does this mean, as we head into the metaverse, we haven't really talked about what the metaverse is. There's a lot of definitions for it. I think a lot of the reasons people are asking about the metaverse early in 2022 is that Facebook has essentially said they're going to rebrand their company around the metaverse. They are speculating about some sort of a shared digital space that you would access through the Oculus headset and that we're all going to interact with. My guess is that a Facebook Metaverse is going to have a lot of control by Facebook. And if it doesn't, it's probably going to fall apart pretty quickly. What many people are finding is that shared? Metaverse like spaces, give people a whole lot of opportunities to behave badly. And some of those opportunities to behave badly that we can filter out in the world of text. We have a much harder time filtering out in a world of motion. There's a story in The New York Times a couple of days ago suggesting that one of the problems that people are having on these early Meta versus People are virtually groping each other. By the way, it's something that can be really unpleasant. Some people are wearing haptic suits. So if I reach out and touch your chest, virtually, you might well feel that. So it's it's digital, but it actually can be a very physical assault, in the same way that we might filter things out in conversation, if you use certain language, we're gonna mute your kick you out, we may have to figure out how to do that in virtual spaces. Because we know that not everyone's gonna behave well or behave badly. My guess is that Facebook and other people sort of trying to build these spaces are probably going to look for a great deal of control over them, they're not going to want them to be harassment, heavy spaces. And what that means is that they actually are going to take on a lot of that gatekeeping my guess is that you'll see a good bit of control over what you are allowed to do in those spaces, what you're allowed to build in those spaces. And that'll be a real balancing act between companies like Facebook, wanting the spaces to be generative, wanting them to produce new products and new behaviors and new content, and wanting them to be safe and not wanting to be constantly working on problems of abuse, that's going to be a real balancing act for them.
Yulia Laricheva 11:16
I really wonder how it's gonna play out because, you know, they're obviously problems with Facebook and moderators who have stepped up and said, they've been traumatized by things that they've been monitoring on Facebook. And that's just like in the 2d world. So when you get into a 3d world and have to grow when you're really monitoring things in the VR space, that is some serious PTSD beyond just comments and beyond just video posts. And then again, it's like the Rockstar Games now. And for some reason, I was Googling some Metaverse stuff. And I just learned that they're cops now in Rockstar Games, which I really don't recall them being in Rockstar Games. When it first started, there was a place where you can just go and like maraud, and now they're characters that can take on cop roles, and they can arrest you. And I was like, since when is this happening? I don't know how moderation is going to take place in the metaverse because we're dealing with interactions in the real world genocide, in Myanmar, all these things that are kind of filtered into advertising as well in a weird way that you can take out ads for and skew people. So how, how do you monitor that?
Ethan Zuckerman 12:27
I think there have been police in Grand Theft Auto for a long, long time. I don't think I've played for 15 years or so. But certainly if you busted up enough shops, the cops would come for you. So I don't think that's brand new. I think that's been there for a while. Look, one of the things that I often tell people is that I think moderation is one of the great missed opportunities of social media. Moderation. And by the way I have a role in this is in part my fault. So the company that I helped run from 1995 to 1999, was called tripod, it hosted personal web pages. So you could come to us and for free, you could get a little space and build your own web page. Our main competitor was a site called geo cities. Those two companies are sort of widely seen as kind of the pioneers that led to Friendster and all of these other MySpace, so on and so forth. We realized pretty quickly that people were going to break our rules. And they were going to put up pirated software, they were going to put up copyrighted materials, they're going to put up nude imagery, all those things were against our rules. So we came up with a customer service team. And a big chunk of what they did was remove content that violated the rules. And we sort of outsourced it to a bunch of professionals. They were mostly college grads living and working in Williamstown, Massachusetts. These days, people have outsourced that work mostly to people in the developing world, the Philippines does an enormous amount of that work. I would argue that the real mistake is in trying to outsource that work. If you try to make that work, something that happens somewhere else out in the world. That's where things get really problematic. But you actually wanted to have communities that engage in governance. So in the real world all the time, if someone says something that's unacceptable if someone really strays that set of lines, we have a conversation, Hey, you can't do that. I'm not gonna let you remain in my class, or you can't come into this bar anymore, or any number of other things. We govern the spaces that we interact in in the real world. We need to start thinking about how we govern online spaces, and simply saying that this isn't our problem. We should outsource it to someone who for as little money as possible. We'll figure out what we can look at and what we can't look at. That is not a very good solution. This is an opportunity instead for us to say, what sort of conversations do we want to be having? And what sort of conversations do we want to restrict people from having?
Yulia Laricheva 15:14
It gets so delicate. Because then you're starting to get into free speech areas as well. And then you get into the area of free speech. And then also, who has access to the metaverse and what kind of conversations can be had. But on the metaverse, it basically, the metaverse is going to be as large as the world. So even get like a quarter of the worlds users, which is still going to be a lot, let's just say like maybe 10% of the world that's still large and trying to figure out how to police the whole entire world. It's impossible you have, it's so impossible, because I think people are just gonna find new ways to go about it. Like if he can become like a jaguar in the jungle, like people are going to have meetings as a jaguar in the jungle. They're just gonna have like jungle Jaguar communities talking about who knows what.
Ethan Zuckerman 16:01
But what if what if the answer is, you don't have one community with 3 billion people in it. For me, that's the fundamental flaw of Facebook, Facebook says we are one community with 3 billion people. And there's one set of rules that we all follow. My take would be, let's have the jungle Jaguar community and they run their own server and they run it according to jungle Jaguar rules. And if they are violating, you know, state or national laws, maybe their server gets taken down. If they are exchanging child abuse imagery, or they're selling illegal drugs, you know, there's a legal problem preventing them from doing that. But if they're simply having a jungle Jaguar a space where everything has to be proceeded with roaring, you know, they can have their own space, and they can govern their own conversation. And when someone comes in and says, I don't want to play by your rules, they can say go found your own community and have your own rule set. It's a very different model for how social media has worked. But it's probably a much healthier model. Trying to make us all play by one set of rules that Facebook tries to have apply for everywhere in the world, just doesn't make a ton of sense. You have really different people with really different cultural values, the norms, and different conversations and different behavior are acceptable in different spaces. So why do we try to do this with a single set of rules, we try to do it. Because to Facebook, as an advertiser, it's enormously advantageous to be able to say, Oh, we've got 3 billion people here, this is where you want to advertise. But in terms of actually running a community, that's probably not the best way to go ahead and try to figure out how to run a community. So maybe the thing to do is to say, perhaps some sort of a Metaverse is inevitable. But does it really have to be a single space uniting 3 billion people? Or could it be 1000s of different spaces with 1000s of different role sets, that's very much more how I would like to build something like this.
Yulia Laricheva 18:18
I think so too. And I think you know, the pandemic to the world is coming to kind of like this conclusion as well, that everybody's going into their bubbles, and everybody's going into their community. And everybody's just kind of staying small, except for like, obviously, the global elite who are just like partying, and, you know, the world is private jets, and yachts, and it's just as big as it always is. But everybody else is kind of like, staying home being local. But you know, I think it's really interesting that you mentioned culture, because a lot of it is Facebook culture, and like, what constitutes Facebook culture, and what can be Facebook culture? I think I mentioned I was I was sending you an email. And I was like, Yeah, Facebook tried to recruit me aggressively a few years ago. And I was really turned off by their culture and their approach. And I was like, Oh, I don't fit this culture, right? Because I'm a little different. And I brought that up in my interviews. And I was like, you know, I think you guys need me because I'm not your culture. And I'm more of a product builder. Like I'm a little bit more like Mark Zuckerman, because I built communities and I understand technology. And I realized that their culture did not understand who I was because they were programmed to be one certain way. Because, you know, when you're corporate, that's what you do. You're like, Okay, does this peg go into the square, like hole? You know you match things up. And when things are a little, a little different, you have a little bit of a hard time understanding them and quantifying I mean, if it's something that you've never seen before, you don't know how to identify it. So I thought that was really interesting. And I think that kind of makes a lot of sense when you start looking at company culture, and the way they present themselves and the way they monitor everything, which I think is really really interesting, but thinking of diversity and inclusion and being marginalized. How can we build a metaverse? That's an inclusive space for women and marginalized groups? This is a question that my friend Anne Griffin and I were talking about. She's an awesome product manager. And that's one of our main concerns like, you know, when you get to groping somebody in the universe and other threats that marginalized groups face, you know, even being included in such a space, some people might not have enough money to have an internet connection, let alone buy an Oculus. And frankly, I can't wear that thing longer than two, three hours, I want to like I'm really nauseous after a game. So as much as I love it, I can't imagine having meetings there on a daily basis.
Ethan Zuckerman 20:39
First of all, I mean, the notion that a Metaverse is going to be fully absorbed to wearing a headset, so on and so forth. This is a fantasy for tech companies. You know, at the end of the day, Facebook really wants to be Apple, Facebook is really freaked out by the fact that Apple can control how their software operates on the iPhone. And Facebook got really panicked. When Apple said, I'm sorry, you're not going to be able to track users the way that you want to track use. It was tremendously freaky to them. And Zuckerberg, his response has been to say, I want to own the hardware as well as the software. So Facebook started as a software company, it's becoming a hardware company with Oculus. The goal is to have an experience that goes from the hardware on your face to the universe in which it happens, all the software that runs on top of it, in the same way, that Apple's universe goes from the iPhone to the operating system, to taking a cut of the content, the audio, video, video content that goes back and forth on it, just because they want it doesn't mean they get to have it, right. There's no guarantee that because this is how Facebook would like the world to be that this is how the world is going to be. We get a choice around this, we can say we're not going to do it that way. This is not the universe that we want to live in. When you get into questions of safety and integrity. Again, the question really becomes Do you want one world where everyone has to come up with a common standard of behavior? Or do you want multiple worlds with different standards? This is one thing that I think Second Life has actually done reasonably well. The second life is, you know, probably the best-developed Metaverse in the sort of three-dimensional immersive sense of metaverse. Arguably, Minecraft is a metaphor. It's arguably Roblox as a metaverse. But as far as what most people think it Metaverse is will look like Second Life is probably the closest that we've had so far. Yeah, sure, sure. But with Second Life, one of the things that have been very interesting is that they've had to fence off areas as being adult-rated and being PG-rated. And they've, they've sort of said, there's certain behavior that's appropriate here, there's certain behavior that's appropriate there. Lots of people go on Second Life to have cybersex. But if you do it in a PG area, you're gonna get thrown out. And I think the way to try to deal with abuse, harassment, misogyny, racism, is to create spaces that people have control over, you're not going to be surprised. My answer, again, is governance. I think it would be really wise for people to be able to say, Hi, this is a server with zero tolerance for sexual harassment, you come on, and you make demeaning content, gestures, or comments or anything like that, and you're gonna get kicked off, and we've got zero tolerance for it. Other servers might be whatever goes and people might choose to go on those servers in the same way that people choose right now to go on 4chan. But you would have different spaces for different audiences with different rules associated with it. The key is in sort of ensuring that there's actual governance behind it. You don't want to say all these problems get escalated up to the Facebook level or some sort of platform level. Because then you know, whatever control you have won't be real. It won't be genuine. You actually want a lot of those problems to get solved at the community level before they get escalated.
Yulia Laricheva 24:29
That's interesting. But then I also like as you're speaking, I had the thought of like, also like, wow, I would not want my information held by Meta. Say you're having an affair. You're having an affair in the Metaverse... Say you are doing something else [something that is not intended to do] in the Metaverse. I mean, again, we're creating data. With everything that we post, everything that we say. And at the end, there is just so much data and again hacking and then you even have like Neuralink to the side. Right? Then you have like Neuralink which Meta kinda wants to be like eventually. I'm sure there's gonna be some kind of like a merger. That's just like a chip where you're just living in the metaverse, 24/7. You have augmented reality and GPS, like right in front of your eyeballs and whatever it is going to be, but again, and who has all this data? And who has this power? And how many servers are going to be like... Are we just going to be a whole planet of servers at the end? Like — that's it!
Ethan Zuckerman 25:22
There are a couple of different questions in there on the questions of data and control. There are folks like Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who are trying pretty hard to engineer protocols that are significantly different. And basically trying to make it so that you can have protocols where you show up with a small amount of your data. And you essentially say, I'm going to make my data usable for the following purposes. It's not usable for these other purposes. But you're in control of that data, rather than the platform being in control of that data. He has a whole protocol that he's working on, called solid, which tries to give people ownership of their data stores. And then they are sort of exposing parts of that data that you would need to do a particular transaction, right. If you're going to buy something you need to expose your credit card information, you need to expose your shipping information. But those things shouldn't be available. Otherwise, there are architectures that you could do to make a Metaverse that are significantly safer. The truth is, this is so far from what a Facebook Metaverse would look like that you would need a real revolution and how the services worked. You probably already do need that revolution, right? We've already seen examples of cases where adult services have been hacked and had their records exposed. And they have and people's careers they have been incredibly embarrassing to people when they're signed up for something to have an affair with someone or in the case of priests being involved with gay hookup sites, things along those lines. Simply having that data is potentially very dangerous and potentially very harmful. So re-architecting the system so that we have control over our data rather than the platform's having control over our data. That would be a great way to go forward. As far as how immersive these things are. Again, I would want to caution you. I think that just because someone says I want to put a chip in your head, and I want you to be in the metaverse all the time, doesn't mean that people are going to consent to that doesn't mean that the FDA is going to allow us to do that. There are a whole lot of possible barriers between futures that people may desire and want, and the futures that we actually end up with. And I think that this is a great time when we have something as big and weird and scary as the metaverse to really ask those questions. What do we want? And what's the combination of legislation and policy and technology that actually gets us there? Because we have a lot of control at this moment in time to sort of say, yes, let's have that or no, let's not have that.
Yulia Laricheva 28:23
The only thing that really makes me nervous is the fact that legislation when you get to like Congress and Senate like people don't understand technology there. So it's like, well, we really need a change in our governance to where you really have people who are currently involved in the current world where they're not bogged down by legislation, where they actually understand how modern technology works. Or at least a few people just like not everyone, but at least just have like, like three or four people who really understand it, who can explain it to everybody else. Because it's like, impossible not to know how technology works these days, even on a basic level.
Ethan Zuckerman 28:58
So one of the things that I'm starting to see is that there's a lot of legislators who had science and technology advisors who tended to have more of a hard science background, you're now starting to see better technologists sort of coming into these things. I would say that there's half a dozen senators and representatives who I trust, or I trust their staffs to pick apart and understand the technology bill. I think more than anything else, what I'm worried about is that technology, like almost every other space right now has become so politicized and so polarized, that things that might be common sense legislation are much harder to do now. And I think that, you know, we're ending up with these weird moments where Donald Trump and people affiliated with him feel like any sort of content moderation online, constantly. censorship. And that's simply not true. Censorship in the sense of First Amendment rights has to do with congressional laws restricting rights to speech. All these platforms are private actors. Now, whether or not they should be private actors, maybe they should be public spaces subject to much stricter rules about what sort of conduct should be carried on them. That's kind of a different conversation. But for now, they are private spaces. They got to make their own rule sets. And the issue is that those rule sets have become so politicized, and so phenomenally polarized in the conversation. It's an extremely difficult conversation to have.
Yulia Laricheva 30:46
You know, what is the biggest piece missing from the Metaverse conversation that's happening right now? Because this question comes again, from my friend Anne Griffin and, and also her and I have been looking online and I know we're seeing the same info [about the Metaverse]. There's only a certain amount of information that exists about the Metaverse because it's still very early, and people are having the same repetitive conversations, which I'm obviously trying to avoid in this podcast as well, because I'm trying to dig a little deeper. And I wonder what some of the biggest pieces that you think are missing from the conversations are.
Ethan Zuckerman 31:16
So I think maybe the first piece is who actually wants this, it's pretty clear that Facebook wants this and Facebook wants it because they're in desperate need of a rebranding. And because they'd like to be hot and sexy. Again, they haven't been particularly exciting or on the technological cutting edge for a while. It makes perfect sense that Facebook would like to bring this about. The truth is there have been these interactive spaces like Second Life for years, they've been pretty limited. There's about a million Second Life users, you go back about 10 years, there were about a million Second Life users, it is not a community that has radically expanded, it hasn't had a big growth curve associated with it. The Oculus headset certainly has people who are adopting it. But they're sort of adopting it in the way that you were talking about, they might use it for a couple of hours, they tend to get pretty tired wearing it, they might get disoriented, wearing it, it's really fun for gaming, does anyone want to use it for their work environment? I really haven't heard anyone talking about it as becoming a meaningful sort of work environment. So the first question in all of this is who wants to build this and why? And then I think the next question becomes, how does it get governed? Who gets to be in charge of it? And do we want them to be in charge of it, I would say that Facebook has a pretty atrocious track record of taking care of online communities. I think generally speaking, their online communities have had a lot of abuse, they've had very little effective governance. And I think if we were picking people to run a new space, Facebook would be pretty low in my list of people who I would want to run it. So before we have any sort of other additional conversations, let's try to work those two out who is building it and why and who actually gets to run it and govern head. And then of course, there's other questions like who gets to make the money off of it. But I think if we try to work through those, you know, sort of in order, we start finding a lot of questions about is any of this really happening anytime soon? Or is this more sort of fantasy and imagination, designed more for Facebook shareholders than for anybody else? It seems to me like that's a very big part of what we're dealing with at this point.
Yulia Laricheva 33:42
And you know, I often think about the Zuckerberg want to really become the next Apple. And I think about Steve Jobs, and the difference between Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs. And I think there's so different personality wise. And Facebook has a tendency to just kind of absorb everything, absorb competitors, absorb competition, it deals with everything, by buying something up instead of inventing something from scratch. And that's what I think is going to be really interesting because they're not really inventing the metaverse. They're they're kind of buying a space that already existed, which is the Oculus, which was crowdfunded on Kickstarter by people to begin with. And I think about Steve Jobs, and I think Steve Jobs was just such an interesting human in this world. And I have to bring up the fact that he tripped on a lot of acid and spend a lot of time in monasteries and he was really spending a lot of time in his own head and envisioning the future. I don't really know Zuckerberg, I don't know him personally, but I would assume that he's not spending time meditating and taking a lot of acid and walking around barefoot. I think in order to envision the future, I think you have to spend a lot of time alone and I think if they're really think about what you want to give to the world. Instead of what you want to morph into the world and how you want to morph the world to you. You really have to be a creator. A creator, which is such an powerful word, you know, in every right.
Ethan Zuckerman 35:11
I guess in some ways, I'm nervous about any technology about technological futures. That makes it dependent on individual. Great man, right? And they, they always turn out to be white dudes, right?
Yulia Laricheva 35:24
It's always a white savior!
Ethan Zuckerman 35:26
So I'm not particularly thrilled about it, whether it's Steve Jobs, or whether it's Mark Zuckerberg, I guess what I would ask is, I want to see more communities based around the values and the preferences of different people running them. So I had the great opportunity to talk with Omar Wasow, who is a terrific political science academic, but he was a techie before he moved over into academia. And he was one of the founders of a company called Black Planet, which was a social network specifically for African Americans.
Yulia Laricheva 36:01
I remember Black Planet, I spent some time on Black Planet. Oh, my gosh, this is such such a flashback.
Ethan Zuckerman 36:09
At the time that Omar was starting Black Planet there were a lot of different online spaces starting for Asian people, starting for black people, starting for women starting for queer people. And the theory behind it was the Internet is a weird and complicated place, you might want to have a home space where there's certain things that you can take for granted, people are probably going to be other black people, people are going to understand the way you speak and the way that you present yourself. And it doesn't have to be a space for everybody. What's really interesting is that those spaces faded away, because of the business model that we ended up using. Those spaces tend to do really, really well around subscription models, they do really, really well, if you sort of end up saying, Hey, pay five bucks a month and keep this thing going. They do not do well, if the model is let's support everything with advertising. Because if you're gonna support everything with advertising, you simply want the most users possible. And so any restrictions right, Facebook started out as a university based social network, it started out as a place for students at Harvard to rate each other's attractiveness. But then it expanded from Ivy League universities, to all universities to everybody and Facebook had to keep growing to expand the smaller spaces that were designed for one particular audience, those sort of fell away over time. And it would be really interesting to think about potentially going back to those spaces, and essentially saying, No, you know what, I'm going to choose to spend this chunk of time in a space, specifically for professors, and I'm going to choose to spend this space in a space for New Englanders and another one for progressives, people are going to complain that we're going to get isolated at an echo chambers. But the truth is, we are already finding ways to get isolated and an echo chambers, within these giant, so called shared spaces, that are shared spaces without being safe spaces.
Yulia Laricheva 38:20
You know, I think I mentioned I did a drive across the country a few years back, and I kept on going through the US and really seeing all of the US, right, you stop in towns, you stop and have food at the diner and you go from progressive places to really not progressive spaces, you know, basically rural spaces. I kept on thinking about how everything should be about local community, because we're still very, very tribal. We're still a very tribal planet. As much as we want to say that we're global, a very small portion of us is actually global. And, you know, I think you mentioned on your podcast, the word bridge figures, right, like people who reside in multiple cultures and who can bridge bridge multiple communities. And I really think that like in the future, the way you can improve the world is by improving your community first, my friend, I don't know if you know him. His name is Ben Berkowitz. I think he sold the company, but he started this really wonderful little company. So the company called See Click Fix. Yeah, sure. And it was all about focusing on local. Yeah, it was it was focusing on what he was one of my first podcast guests. It was basically empowering local citizens to fix their communities. If you have a pothole if there's somebody selling drugs outside of your window, you notify the SOP and it takes it to your local governments. And it's like in their face, basically, it's it says like a notification, showing that it has to be dealt with. I really like this model. I like this model of civic involvement. And I think about it for the future and how the metaverse can actually improve your current communities and the world because I think the way people are looking at the metaverse right now is this totally separate place to escape, right? It's like a place to dissociate a place to have fun as a place to escape. But I look at it as like, how can you get together in it and like, solve problems? And how can you use the Metaverse to create actual social impact? Aside from having fun, maybe you can have fun while creating social impact. I don't know maybe there's some kind of a gaming thing that can be created around it. But, but I wonder how we can use the Metaverse to actually impact social change and improve humanity.
Ethan Zuckerman 40:32
One of the things about a site like See Click Fix is that those sites are not particularly technically sophisticated. They're pretty simple. They're usually forms that are then forwarding an email to the right person. So the truth is, the sorts of technologies that we need to organize social change are probably not on the bleeding edge of technology. I made an argument some years ago called The cute Cat Theory, that sort of suggests that the tools that you want to use for activism are the same tools that you use to share cute pictures of your cat. Because they are robust. They work for a lot of people. They're user friendly. And they're surprisingly hard for governments to censor because people don't like shutting down the entertainment channels. I'm not sure that Metaverse would be the first place that I would be looking, I think I would be looking at technologies that are already pretty pervasive technologies that are widely used. I will say the first boom of enthusiasm around the metaverse in the late 2010s. There were a bunch of people trying to use the metaverse to do things like call attention to genocide in Darfur. And the problem with those efforts was that what they really showed were sort of the Western imagination of what was going on in Darfur, because there was very little data and very little reporting coming from the ground. And I remember writing a blog piece years and years ago, talking about how I knew that this was going to be a problem. Because I'd gone to this virtual refugee camp in Darfur, and the space for people to sit and contemplate, you know, the horrors was the campfire surrounded by these big thick logs. Now, it turns out that one of the major problems in Darfur refugee camps were that women, it was always women had to walk five miles outside of the camp to collect firewood because firewood was very precious. And routinely women were getting raped and attacked when they went to get firewood. So you have the Star Ferry refugee camp with this roaring campfire. And these enormous logs. And in fact, like one of the most fundamental facts of what it meant to be a different refugee was being misrepresented in that virtual environment. And it was happening because whoever was creating virtual Darfur had not been to Darfur, right? They were they were extrapolating on what they thought a refugee camp would look like. And they assume that a camp would be a campsite. And you know, the answer is, what you actually probably need is better documentation. So I don't know that using the metaverse for these purposes, is really the top priority that I would have. I think there's a lot that we can do with existing technologies to try to make social change. I think what I'm really worried about is is the Metaverse going to make existing disparities, that existing problems, even more entrenched, even harder to combat.
Yulia Laricheva 43:40
That's a really good point. But again, it just boggles my mind when people are creating stories, right? Because in the end, it's storytelling. It's like writing a book writing a movie, you're writing a program, you're writing a movie, you're writing a story. And I think the world is getting a lot better at it. But like using actual people who have spent time there, like making it authentic, as opposed to just like being representative of a concept. I remember that game. I remember the whole entire Darfur experience. And I remember, I actually got a chance to go into it. And I don't remember where it was maybe the conference might have been a VRLA in 2017. It might have been somewhere else, but I do. Remember I was like poking around with it. And I just, I don't it was just very surreal. I wasn't sure what to make of it. I just knew that like, this is not the way to observe a dartboard cam. Let's just say that. Because there's no way you can grasp the experience of being a refugee through VR. There's no way unless you're deprived of food. Unless you are fully in your country. There's no way you can really empathize with being a refugee. I'm I'm a refugee. I'm a refugee from Russia. So I know the experience of leaving a country you know the experience of having nothing and you can't just like tap into it from your couch. And go check dun dun I've been there. I've seen it. I know It feels like cool. I've gained, you know, a new perspective. And I think about that a lot. And I don't know. And I think about the over like, you know, people who are going to be investing in projects to like, how do you get buy in, right? Like, I'm thinking about what I can, like contribute to the world in the next few years. I mean, I have kids now, it's impossible. This this hour is so precious, which is wrapping up soon. But you know, I think about like, I'm like, What can I do? I'm like, maybe I can go to Harvard. And I can get a PhD and like AI, and I can be a female consultant on certain issues for AI consulting, because I don't see myself being represented in the future, especially. I just don't, and I was like, well, maybe I do that. But I don't know what the bigger thing that I will do yet. I just, I'm still trying to figure it out. But again, how do you? How do you? How do you create these authentic stories that are going to live forever? Aside from the, this is all this is so beautiful, this is bookending, our podcast on the same question that we started it on, right? Like, who gets to tell these stories? Who is leaving these records behind? Who's going to be reading these future records? You know, this is we're building a giant virtual library, basically, like, Where are the people gonna come from who are gonna write the stories, who's gonna have access to it?
Ethan Zuckerman 46:19
So one way to think about this is who gets access to those tools to tell a story with, right?
Yulia Laricheva 46:25
Aha. Aha.
Ethan Zuckerman 46:25
There are... There's a wonderful quote from Stephen Jay Gould, where he says "I'm less interested in the size and shape and structure of Einstein's brain than I am in the fact that there are surely many other people out there who were as brilliant as Einstein, but who died working in cotton fields or, you know, working in factories and never had the opportunity to sort of think in the same ways that he had the opportunity to think." And I think similarly, we have encountered some brilliant storytellers over the years, but we encounter the people whose words make it to the printing press and make it into our hands. And there are people who never got their stories on paper and never got them printed never got them shared. One of the things that worries me a little bit of the Metaverse is that every time you make storytelling, technically harder, you limit whose story is going to get told. I thought the explosion of blogging, and sort of photo logging on things like Flickr, were brilliant because many, many people are able to write many, many people are able to take photographs and share them. Those are very low barriers to content creation. I thought when we started doing to YouTube, and even things like Tik Tok that requires enormous amounts of effort and enormous amounts of creativity, but it's probably filtering out some people and some voices. I think when we get into creating virtual reality when we get into creating a space, like a proposed Metaverse, or even something like Second Life, that's another barrier of technical access, it's a barrier of know-how, maybe what we actually need to get better at is amplifying existing voices. And maybe that's the place where podcasting and blogging have more upside in the long run than something like Meta, which requires an enormous amount of technical expertise to be able to make things at.
Yulia Laricheva 46:27
That's so interesting. Yes, I think that's a really good point too. I also look at like what is going to last the the end of the world right, like the black hole is just going to eat everything eventually, right? But like if you visit this planet, and we're gone nobody's gonna know that the internet was here. And if they if they don't know how to tap into the internet, they're not going to know how to access all this information. So you're going to come to this planet and go there is no intelligent life here. Like there's just a bunch of like old computers that I found they look pretty prehistoric I don't know how to operate these things. He you know and it goes back to like having tablets and like you find the you know, you go to an Egyptian pyramid unified hieroglyphics. And you can kind of figure out what it is. But we're, we're smart civilization, we still can't figure out a lot of hieroglyphics. And we can't figure out a lot of ancient civilizations. So it's interesting is like... What do we leave behind for people who are going to find us 1000s of hundreds of years in the future after we moved on to Mars? After the rich people have moved on to Mars. I'm just gonna say that, right?! After they moved on to Mars and Earth is just like a giant server planet. What is going to stay here? We have to figure out something that lets the world know what we did and who you were. Or I mean... That's even thinking that we are somebody... Maybe we need no record of us. Maybe we just disappear, because we're not intelligent enough to really do anything. We're not even intelligent enough to create peace on this planet, like we're just a giant war planet.
Ethan Zuckerman 48:48
Well, we have rather effectively raised carbon dioxide and methane levels. If we managed to melt the permafrost, we're gonna have a real lasting impact on it, at least the geological structure of the planet. I do think these questions of, you know, what we leave behind are really worthwhile in the long run. But I think even more than what's going to survive, I'm interested in the question of who gets to speak up and who we get to listen to, for me, those are really some of the critical questions and the ones where I feel like I might be able to have some influence. Whereas I, there's not a lot that I can do. As far as the eventual heat death of the universe.
Yulia Laricheva 50:47
Right? I also can't forget that Etherium is probably going to be like the way we all go out. It's going to be like the Mayans cutting down the trees for like, whatever purpose they thought they were cutting him down for. We're just gonna be mining Bitcoin and creating, like, just pollution. And that's it. That's I'm pretty sure that's going to be like the future. That's how we're gonna go out. My last question to you is, what is your dream as an adult,
Ethan Zuckerman 51:09
I don't know how different it is. I definitely felt like libraries, I definitely still would love to have unlimited time to read. I think my dreams much more have to do right now with mentoring, I think they have a lot more to do with meeting brilliant students who I get the chance to share what I'm thinking about and what I'm working on. And then a year, five years, 10 years, I get to see what they're doing. And sometimes I can see a little bit of what we talked about or worked on, in what's going on in their work. And a lot of the time they've just gone on in wonderful new directions that I'm listening and learning from them. I think I'm living my dream. And I think it has everything to do with trying to help give people a little shove, and maybe just a little redirection early in their career earlier in their thinking. And then I hope staying on warm enough terms that I that I get the chance to see where people are many years down the road, because that's certainly been the most satisfying work that I've had the chance to do.
Yulia Laricheva 52:11
Well, you're in a good place to do that work.
Ethan Zuckerman 52:13
I'm feeling very good about it. And thank you so much for having me on this conversation.
Yulia Laricheva 52:18
Thank you so much for joining. You know, UMass [Amherst] is 40,000 people. I don't know what it is... When I was going there in like 1999 at 40,000 people, I think it might be more or less around that time. But it's a really big place. And it's really great. And what's wonderful about is that there are five colleges all around it. So you really get this really amazing discourse. And you really get this really great brains stew. As I want to refer to it, right. You get like Hampshire College, you got Smith, you got Amherst College. It's a wonderful little thing. And I just want to thank you for being on the show because it was so much fun speaking with you and thank you for making the time.
Ethan Zuckerman 52:52
Absolutely great to speak with you as well. And good luck finding time between parenting and everything else. And congratulations on being able to produce the show.
Yulia Laricheva 53:01
Thanks so much Ethan. Have a good night. Take care. Bye. Thanks. Bye bye.