Ethan Zuckerman
How to fix the internet
The physical isolation of the pandemic has shifted even more of our lives online. Meetings and classes moved to Zoom and many have stayed there. Holidays and birthdays are delivered to us through the lens of social media. YouTube and Tik- Tok feed us an apparently endless stream of entertainment, tailored—though we don’t understand quite how—to our own tastes and preferences.
As our lives become more digitally mediated, many of us do not like what we see. Social media is a performance: we find ourselves comparing quotidian moments of our lives to the carefully curated greatest hits of the beautiful lives our friends present online. The videos fed to us by opaque algorithms never satiate us—they just keep us hungry for more.
The good news is that we’re becoming better critics of the technologies that surround us. Ideas that 10 years ago were primarily encountered in the academy have become common talking points. No technology is neutral: tools embody the values and intentions of their creators, whether or not their creators intended to insert their biases. We are learning to look at the futures imagined by Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg through a critical lens, asking who these tools will help and who they might hurt. Armed with these critiques, the obvious question is: “What do we do with these broken systems?”