Tech Won't Save Us - The Forgotten Story of How Conservatives Shaped the Internet w/ Becca Lewis

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by Becca Lewis to discuss the right-wing project to shape the internet in the 1990s and how we’re still living with the legacies of those actions today.Becca Lewis is a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:Paris wrote about Marc Andreessen mentioning the Italian Futurists in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto.Ruth Eveleth wrote about the Italian Futurists in the context of Silicon Valley.In 1995, Wired published a story on how “America’s futurist politicians” Al Gore and Newt Gingrich were in an epic struggle to shape the internet.Becca mentioned the work of Nicole Hemmer and Patricia Aufderheide.Support the show

We do tend to assume that technology is inherently progressive. And I think it's really difficult to take away that facade and not only to say that technology can have unintended reactionary consequences, but also that there are people who are specifically building and using them towards reactionary ends. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks. Last week, we celebrated 250 episodes of the show, and we had to reckon with some political developments that have been happening. But this week, I have such a fascinating conversation for you that I think really gets to the heart of what this show is trying to do, right? In trying to interrogate the

politics of the tech industry, but also understand where these things have come from and how ideas that have been around for a long time, how movements that have been pushing these particular ideas for a long time have influenced what we're dealing with today in ways that sometimes we don't even recognize. And so my guest this week is Becca Lewis. Becca just finished her PhD. She is now a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University. And so I had the great pleasure of being able to read Becca's dissertation, which is not something that you usually say about a doctoral dissertation. Let's be clear about that. But it was absolutely fascinating because it gets into the right-wing movements that were organizing around computation and digital technologies and the internet in the 1980s and 1990s, and ultimately had a very significant impact on

the way that we think about these technologies, and also the policy responses that existed to them, and the deregulation that happened in the 1990s that have gone on to significantly shape not just how we think about these technologies today, but things that are actually happening in this moment. And when we look back at the types of ideas that the leaders of these movements, people like George Gilder and Newt Gingrich, were communicating in the 1990s, you'll hear us say it in this interview, in this discussion, there's so many resonances to the types of things that the billionaires of Silicon Valley are talking about today as they have started openly championing this right-wing politics in a way that maybe they haven't done

in a while, but it shows once again that these right-wing ideas are not novel, are not new, are something that have just emerged in the past little while, but rather have been around and have been in the waters of this industry for a very long time. able to explore this important subject with her. Because especially as we head into this Trump presidency that has empowered the tech industry and increasingly right-wing tech industry that is really seeking to reshape so many aspects, not just of American society, but of our societies much more broadly, because these ideas won't just stay in the United States and these people will be trying to exert their power far beyond that, that this is an episode that really helps us understand where these ideas came from. And knowing that history, I think, is really important to being able to push back against them and to try to limit their influence. So unfortunately, I'm not able to

share Becca's dissertation with you because it is under embargo, but I know that she's planning to do some writing about the ideas that she discussed in the dissertation. They've not been published yet, but certainly you can watch either of our social media accounts on Twitter or Blue Sky, and we'll certainly be sharing those for you to read once they are published. So if you enjoy this interview, if you enjoy the work that we do here on Tech Won't Save Us, make sure to leave a five-star review on the podcast platform of your choice. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show that we've now been doing for 251 episodes to make sure we can keep having these critical conversations about the tech industry at a time when they're about to be championing their power. You can join supporters like Tristan from Calgary, Barbara from Toronto, Carl from Portland, Oregon, and Dan in Essex in the UK by going to

patreon.com slash tech won't save us where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Becca, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for having me back. I'm thrilled. And before we get into the interview, which is like on such a fascinating topic, I have to say two things. First of all, congratulations on finishing your PhD, such a huge feat. And second of all, I've read your dissertation.

This is what we're talking about in this episode. So fantastically done. Like, you know, kudos to you on what you've been able to research and pull off with it. It's just fantastic. Oh, thank you so much for the kind words. It is very much a Paris Marx-centric type of dissertation. It was made just for me personally. I appreciate it. But yeah, it's so fascinating. And I'm sure if the listeners are able to grab it somewhere, they'll really enjoy it as well if they're really into this stuff. But if not,

you know, they'll have an hour of us talking about it. So they'll get some of the basics at least. And so the dissertation and your research really digs into this period in the 1990s and, you know, some of the ideologies, for lack of a better word, that have shaped how we think about the internet today. And this is obviously something that a lot of people have explored. A lot of people have written about the 1990s and what went on there. Why did you feel it was important to wade back into that space and that moment? And what did you feel was missing from the usual analysis that we have of what went on in that period? Yeah, there were a couple of things. I mean, I came into this research from the standpoint of looking at right-wing and far-right movements as they use social media, which is what I've talked about on this podcast in the past.

And I really wanted to understand where those strategies that the right uses on digital media, where they emerged from. And, you know And there's been scholarship on Fox News and talk radio, but there really hasn't been as much about how the right went online in the first place. And then as I was researching right-wing media, I also found that venture capitalists and tech CEOs were showing up in this media ecosystem a whole lot. And so I wanted to understand how these two worlds kind of started to intersect. And I started looking a few years back and then a few years further back. And as it turned out, the story goes all the way back to the 90s, which I was a bit surprised by. I love that it did because it produced this fascinating piece of work to

understand and to dig into, right? Because you talk about this reactionary futurist network, right? This forms really kind of the core of what you're talking about. These people who did start to shape these things and basically have impacts that, you know, we're seeing the results of today, which we'll dig into a little bit further. But how would you define what this reactionary futurist network or what reactionary futurism was in the 80s and through to the 90s. And how is that distinct from, you know, the more kind of countercultural libertarians that we typically hear about, you know, associated with the Californian ideology and those sorts of analyses that I think the listeners of the podcast would be very familiar with?

Yeah, that's exactly right. I think the ideology that everyone talks about from that era is the Californian ideology, which is this mix of counterculturalism and libertarianism. And what I am looking at instead is the existence of this other thread, which I have ended up calling reactionary futurism, which emerged out of this loose network of kind of media organizations and think tanks and newsletters. And basically, it was this group of people who thought that the new digital technologies would help bring about and restore an older social order. So kind of pre-feminist in particular, and a way of restoring

kind of the centrality of the nuclear family and Christian values and so on. It's so fascinating to like hear you talk about that and then to see so many of the resonances between, you know, the types of things that these people are interested in and what they're trying to push in the ideas that they're trying to center around these new technologies that are really emerging in that moment and how much we're seeing a lot of those ideas really reemerge in a prominent way among the tech billionaires today. Like those threads are so clear, especially in this moment, like it must be such a coincidence that your PhD, that your dissertation is just finishing up, right? As these tech billionaires that we have now are just going crazy with these things.

That's exactly right. I like, I finished it up and then kind of emerged from underwater. And then one of the first things I watched was like J.D. Vance on a podcast talking about kind of, you know, women and the need for mother and also, you know, seems to define a lot of this moment and is projecting a lot of these ideas through media work, through conferences, through engaging with influential politicians, all these sort of things is George Gilder. People who've read some of this history might have come across him before, you know, his name reemerged a couple of years ago, pushing like crypto stuff again, if I remember correctly. How does he come to be such an important character? And who is this guy? Yeah, it's so interesting. You know, aside from, as you say, the crypto world, his name has mostly fallen out of public knowledge. But in the 90s, in writings about Silicon Valley, his name was everywhere. He was one of the biggest techno evangelists, Silicon Valley evangelists. He built this career up as kind of a tech guru. He had this newsletter where he would talk about his preferred startup stocks. And it caused this wave that people called the Gilder

effect where people would rush to buy those stocks. So he was this really influential figure in Silicon Valley at the time. And he actually emerged out of a very traditional right wing world. He had been a longtime mentee of William F. Buckley, the godfather of modern conservatism. And, you know, throughout the 70s, he was known primarily as an anti-feminist provocateur, and then in the 80s remade himself as a supply side economics guru, and then by the 90s became this techno evangelist. And I think it's easy to think of him as kind of this opportunist who was flitting from world to world, but I see it much more as a cohesive ideology that he formed between all of these things. Yeah, again, like the resonances are just wild to me as I was reading through the dissertation and seeing these ideas and seeing what these people are talking about now. But I feel like one of

the things that really stood out to me as I was reading about this was, as you're saying, this notion of gender in particular, how he's very concerned about what masculinity is looking like in that moment. And he's pitching the entrepreneur associated with this new rising tech industry, associated with the internet technologies that are coming on and the kind of new advanced computing technologies and all this kind of stuff, and is really being kind of centered around this masculine image of what this tech entrepreneur is going to be. Can you flesh that out a bit more for me and how, you know, these ideas that he had, as you say, he comes out of this anti-feminist past, get kind of, you know, melded together with this tech optimism or whatnot that you were

talking about? Yeah, absolutely. So in the 70s, he published a few different books that painted really this deeply pessimistic vision of society. I mean, his first big anti-feminist tract was called Sexual Suicide. And the claim was that because humanity was no longer prioritizing procreation within the heterosexual nuclear family unit, that we were going to cease to populate the world into the future. Sounds so familiar. Also has some interesting resonances. Yeah. But what you see as you read his works is he was really consumed, I think, by this crisis of masculinity emerging at the time that, you know, had to do with the

emergence of second wave feminism and women's liberation and had to do with the rise of women in the workforce, the birth control pill, and the rise of no-fault divorces. And he really started to express how awful he thought all of that was for society, in large part because it rendered this male breadwinner role obsolete. And for him, that was kind of one of the most important pieces of society functioning as it should. And one of his big things that he laid blame on as well was the welfare state, as he called it. So, you know, there were also racial connotations because he said, you know, black poverty, which was a big topic of discussion in policy circles in the 70s, he said that emerged as a result of welfare programs, because welfare programs were funding

black mothers, so that there was no need for black fathers to be around. And these black men, he said, would be kind of really restless and uprooted. And they needed that fatherhood role and the ability to be entrepreneurial to be restored. It's such like a backward framing, like the complete reverse, right? The welfare programs are the problem, not a way to try to rectify these long term like harms created by slavery and you know, the histories of american racism and all this kind of stuff like it yeah it's wild right it's starting from like the complete opposite point and then working working from there um and then by the end of the decade i mean some of this was due to changes in his personal life he got married and he either discovered or rediscovered christianity

and started going to church again. And he remade himself and started publishing actually these incredibly optimistic books. And he found his answer in the role of the entrepreneur. And he associated entrepreneurship with the restoration of the male breadwinner role. And he said, you know, if men can be entrepreneurial enough, we'll have no need for welfare programs. Women can kind of return to the home. And I think it also served as this affirmation at a moment that was not only kind of a crisis of the nuclear family, as it had been known, but also a crisis of industrialism, right? That this was kind of the shift from industrialism to post-industrialism. And I think entrepreneurship was the answer for that as well. So he kind of

started to center all of his hopes on this quasi-mythological masculine figure of the entrepreneur. That makes so much sense, right? What is the post-industrial man now that you're not working in the factory and creating these things that is, you know, what was held up as like masculinity in the past. So, okay, this role of making cars or making things or whatever is dying is going away. You know, all these communities are losing these jobs. What's the next thing? Okay, we're going to be the entrepreneurs. We're going to be creating these new companies. We're going to be changing the world, blah, blah, blah. But you mentioned how he kind of also picks up Christianity around this

moment as well. And I feel like one of the important things that your dissertation does too, which is, you know, I've had some conversations about this on the podcast is I feel like Silicon Valley is often treated as this kind of secular space, right? Where they're not very religious and things like that. But I feel like another thing that your dissertation does really well is to bring back in the important role that I feel like, you know, some of these Christian right-wing movements played in the foundation of the ideas that we have around the internet and digital technologies today. Can you talk about that aspect of it too? Yeah, that's exactly right. I think to the extent that people have explored religion within Silicon

Valley, it's tended to be kind of like an Eastern mysticism piece. So that definitely is an aspect in the Californian ideology and the countercultural piece. I think more recently in the book, Eat, Pray, Code, I believe. Yeah, well, you have your Steve Jobs, you know, going off and getting involved in all that stuff and your Jack Dorsey's more recently, right? Yeah. Exactly. But Gilder came to see Silicon Valley in these deeply Christian terms. And that related both to the technologies and to the people building them. So, you know, he started writing these kind of like, worshipful books about entrepreneurial figures and really kind of ascribed this almost godlike quality to the entrepreneurs that he said were

building the next generation. And that taps into like a much longer mythos of like genius and the idea that geniuses are touched by God and all of that. So he was kind of restoring that, especially focusing it on Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. But then he also believed the technologies themselves were these gifts from God to humanity. And his first technology that he got incredibly excited about was the microchip, which was what allowed these big mainframe computers to shrink down to the personal computers of today that could allow this massive power to be run on a very, very small device. And what Gilder said is that in doing so, it kind of overcame the limits of time and space and opened up this quasi-spiritual realm of the information world. And he literally called it the cathedral of the modern era. The microchip was the

cathedral of the modern era. And it was brought to us by these genius entrepreneurial figures. So you really do have this Christian set of ideas being, you know, placed onto Silicon Valley and interpreted through that lens. Yeah, the story of Christianity is being retold through the technologies or, you know, the story of technology is being like retold in a way that that aligns with these stories that, you know, have been around for ages and ages and ages. Right. But I feel like, again, like when I was reading through that, yeah, you know, we've had this notion of digital technology being treated a bit as a religion for a while, you know,

people making fun of Apple for ages and how Steve Jobs was kind of held up as a god and even their product unveilings were like going to church. It felt like, you know, this is something that I think has kind of stood out for a while. But then again, more recently, right, you've had, you know, the Peter Thiel's for a very long time openly identifying as Christian, I think Catholic in particular in Peter Thiel's case. But you've seen a lot of these folks in Silicon Valley over the past couple of years start to talk a lot more about religion, whether they mean it or not, you know, about saying that they're finding God again and all this kind of stuff. So, again, like there's so many residences here. You know, the moment that Gilder was writing about was the moment that Silicon Valley was really taking off as this next level phenomenon.

So like, you know, in the 80s, you had the emergence of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. But it was really in the 90s, then when it kind of exploded in this first dot com boom. And it really did feel like, you know, he was helping to shape how people felt about entrepreneurship and played a role in the facts that we continue to see it in those ways today. And even looking at Steve Jobs, I mean, he rebranded himself a bit in the 2000s and 2010s. He didn't always have such a godlike approach, right? He kind of seemed like this scruffy hippie and then was able to really parlay that into a next level thing. You really do feel with Steve Jobs, you know, the presentation of

these devices was kind of like he was, you know, taking these things down and presenting them to this public, like he had been gifted them from God, you know, nobody made them, there were no engineers or anything behind them. He was just like showing off this magical device that was going to do all these things through like, it's wild. We're going to get down from on high. Exactly, exactly. But you know, you're talking about how Gilder was shaping these ideas in the 90s, right? And again, I feel like for a lot of people who are hearing the name George Gilder and are not kind of deeply into this history in the way that we are, and to be clear, I learned so much reading your dissertation. You're even much more into this than I am, but at least I've read a number of these books and stuff, right? But for people who, you know, are just kind of coming into

contact with this stuff every now and then, the name George Gilder might be far less familiar, even though, as you say, he was very well known at the time. He was very influential at the time. And I feel like one of the things that stood out to me reading this and thinking about the other things that I have read in the past is how this kind of right-wing interest in the internet and digital technology and the role that they played in trying to shape the ideas that we have around it in the 1990s seems really lost in our discourse of the internet and its history and how it has developed since then. Do you have any theories as to why that part of the story seems to have been so lost or kind of written out of the histories that we have of it? Yeah, I have a few different theories. I

mean, one is that Gilder's influence really, really waned after the dot-com crash because he was the biggest techno-optimist in the world. And even when other critics were starting to suggest that there might be a crash coming, he never publicly spoke about that. Although he insisted after the fact he knew it was coming. Yeah. There's this quote where he's saying like he was the best stock picker for this year and this year and this year. And then when the crash happened, he was the worst one ever or something like that. You're the best until you're not. So I think that his influence really waned after that. And so it wasn't as visible. And I also think there was a lot of work that Silicon Valley was doing between

Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 to kind of rebrand how it was positioning itself. But then I also think more broadly, culturally, we have a really tough time separating the idea of technologies from social progress. And this is partly due to the work of marketing from Silicon Valley. But it's really tough for us, I think, to wrap our head around the idea that people could be embracing contemporary technologies for the purpose of socially reactionary goals. But in fact, that has been the case in really important historical moments before, not least of all the rise of fascism. Italian futurists were kind of the artistic proto-fascist movement. They were obsessed with the speed of cars, which were the newest thing at the time, and also openly rejected kind of women in public life and wrote about those being aligned. And they, you know, looked to the

older mythology of kind of, you know, the Roman Empire. And, you know, I know it could seem potentially like a big leap to be comparing the guys I'm looking at to literal fascist movements. But if you look at someone like Marc Andreessen today, one of the biggest VCs, he literally writes praise of the Italian futurists. So he's not making a leap. He says it himself that he looks to these guys. Yeah, I think he literally called Filippo Thomas Marinetti, basically one of the founders of Italian futurism, a patron saint of techno-optimism. Yes, that's right. And Andreresen was someone that worked quite closely with Gilder in the late 90s.

So you see those threads connected as well. Yeah. Yeah. I guess I was not so surprised when he came up with the dissertation, but I was like, oh, not this guy again. He's here again. But, you know, so as I mentioned earlier, this is not just about Gilder. This was a network, right? There were a lot of other people involved in it. And especially as we get into really trying to shape policy, there are other actors who play an important role there, too. And again, you know, when we're talking about some of these forgotten histories or some of these aspects of it that get written out of the history, we talk a ton about Al Gore, right?

And the role that he played in, you know, the creation of the internet, the rollout of the internet, all this kind of stuff. But there's another important figure in that time on the other side of the political aisle who I feel like we don't talk about all that much at all. And that is Newt Gingrich, of course. How was he embracing the internet and trying to shape it to conservative ends in this time as well? Yeah, totally. Gingrich actually was always a big technology enthusiast. And in the 80s, he would write about his dreams of kind of colonies on the moon and trying to use, you know, NASA funding and so on to get people to the moon. To make us a multi-planetary species, even one might say.

Once again, the resonances are strong. But again, this wasn't opportunistic on his part. He genuinely was super excited about new technologies. And in the second half of the 20th century, one of the big ways that conservative movements built power was by building up their own media outlets and building up think tanks where they could produce research. And so both Gilder and Gingrich became kind of tied into this broader network of think tanks and helped found think tanks. In particular, one of them, the Progress and Freedom Foundation, was established in part to help shape legislation around the young web. And they did, in fact, help shape the policy that turned out to be the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which is kind of where we got Section 230 and a lot of

the different aspects that are still kind of the legal structure of the web. So I want to come back to that point in just a second, but I want to talk about the media piece of it first, right? Because this was something that was a bit surprising to me, even reading your dissertation. You know, obviously, everyone knows that Wired was really involved in, you know, pushing these very optimistic ideas in the 1990s for what the internet was going to be and all this kind of stuff. And there's a lot of links to John Perry Barlow and kind of the ideas that were coming out of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

and all that kind of stuff. But I was a bit more surprised to see about these more kind of right wing oriented publications that were pushing these ideas, which obviously, you know, had to be there if this was happening, but were ones that I was less familiar with, in particular, seeing like Forbes and Forbes kind of creating its own brand around these type of things that George Gilder was involved in. So I guess what was the role of media in popularizing these ideas? And how were these right-wing figures really trying to be engaged in shaping the type of media that was being created to get these ideas out there in that time? Exactly. As you say, they haven't had as much cultural memory

lasting power as Wired, in part because they don't exist anymore. Most of them closed up shop in the early 2000s. That's a good reason. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Extremely fair. There were a couple of big publications that ended up being pretty big megaphones for Gilder's ideas and also at times for Gingrich and his ideas. One of them, as you mentioned, was Forbes. So in 1990, you know, Forbes was a multi-generational family-run company. And in 1990, a new generation took over and it was run by this guy, Steve Forbes, who in 1996 actually ran for president on a flat tax model. Oh, sounds like a great one.

Yeah. He became really, really taken by Gilder and Gilder's ideas. And so he founded this like once every two months, they would distribute this additional magazine to all of the Forbes subscribers, like 800,000 or so subscribers. That basically was a mouthpiece for Gilder's ideas. So it was called Forbes ASAP. And in almost every issue, there would be a long form essay by Gilder, basically talking about like, which new technologies he was super excited about. And in particular, he would choose these technologies that aligned with his ideological vision. So, you know, at first it was the microchip, but then by the 90s, he was so excited about networked computing. And he was excited about a number of different technologies that would help kind of build the network infrastructure that would become the internet as we know it today. So there was that piece. And then there was also a conservative publication called

Upside that was founded by another couple of young conservatives in Silicon Valley who were also inspired by William F. Buckley. And they became really close friends with Gilder. And that became a publication really focused on the business side of the Valley and entrepreneurs and promoting Gilder's ideas of entrepreneurship. That publication didn't feature Gilder's writing as much, although it did sometimes, but it featured several cover pieces on Gilder. Gotcha. You got to profile him as well, right? Not just allow him to write. There's another piece of this too, right? So we talk about the magazines and kind of the print publications, but another aspect of this that you write about is how, you know, you have these right-wing networks, these right-wing think tanks that are also

investing in television and cable at this time to create this other means of distributing these ideas, you know, to also push particular notions of, you know, what media should be in that time. Because Gilder, as you noted, was also writing a lot about his thoughts on media and, you know, obviously was not a fan of a lot of, you know, the kind of mainstream media at the time and wanting to break it up. Again, ideas that seem very, very resonant. How were they thinking about media and how that needed to change in their kind of ideal vision for how this new society would work? Yeah. So as a lot of media historians have written about,

you know, this right-wing animosity towards quote-unquote mainstream media goes way further back than the internet. So, you know, someone like Nicole Hemmer has written about how in the 1950s, conservatives were talking about liberal media bias and were trying to build up their own publications and institutions to counter it.

And by the 1980s, you had the rise of people like Rush Limbaugh on talk radio. And at this moment in time, you know, Gilder was writing about entrepreneurs. He was writing about Silicon Valley. And he became really taken with the media and communication potential of these new information technologies. And he basically said, this is going to be the newest weapon in our arsenal in fighting back against the mainstream media and the public schools. So, you know, he was concerned with the liberal bias in the media and then also the secular bias in schools. So this was a moment when there were battles happening over, you know, sex education and the theory of evolution versus creationism. And then you had someone like Newt Gingrich saying, oh, actually, the internet will also be a way that you can bypass the morally corrupted profession of doctors,

because he was concerned with the fact that doctors were being too sympathetic to AIDS patients instead of treating it as a moral failing. So you had at this moment of time, this realization among this network of people that the internet could be a way to work around and subvert the power of kind of traditional institutions of expertise in society. And they jumped at that chance. And actually, you know, in the early 90s, they started to bring their publications and organizations onto the internet and started to build out their own sources and libraries of information that then they could use to attack the sources they didn't like. Yeah, it's so wild to hear that, right?

And it feels like every time we have these discussions about like what the right is saying about the media or the schools or whatever, it feels like brand new, right? Like this is something that is just happening now. But then you look back and it's like, oh, like every decade or decade and a half or something, there's a new way that they're bringing these like attacks back. And we're just in like another moment of them being like at their height, it feels like. Yeah, absolutely. It's like critical race theory and wokeness. If you take that out naturally, I think not just about what the right is saying in this time, but also what these more libertarian perspectives that we're more used to hearing about that come out of this more countercultural background or tendency are also saying then

too, right? You look at the John Perry Barlow's and his kind of manifesto, and it's all about getting the state out of the internet and making sure that they're not there. And we're going to build this wonderful community online that's going to be free of discrimination and all this kind of stuff, like, you know, total utopian thinking about what this kind of cyber future is going to be. But then you see how there are some resonances in the two discourses of what this kind of right wing movement is saying, but also what you're hearing and this more libertarian perspective, more countercultural perspective is saying on the internet in that time. What similarities do you see between those perspectives, but also distinctions as well? Yeah, the group of people that I am looking at were really inspired by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And, you know, I think commentators at the time even noted that EFF came about and then

these right wing guys created the Progress and Freedom Foundation, PFF. The two groups found a lot of resonances and ended up building this kind of political coalition, even though they diverged in many important ways in their goals. I think a journalist at the time called them bedfellows of unimaginable strangeness because the Electronic Frontier Foundation guys, as you mentioned, you know, commune-inspired social structures. And they thought that the internet was going to kind of naturally bring that about. And they saw these early virtual communities starting and they thought, wow, society can be structured in this way. And so from their perspective, the government getting involved could only harm that process. And so they wanted as little government intervention as possible. The networks of people that I'm looking at

also wanted government to not be involved, but not for a purpose of egalitarianism. They said, you know, we don't want government involvement because that's this top-down imposed system of hierarchy. In fact, you need to get rid of that so that the natural hierarchies of the universe can emerge. And that's the world and the society that we want to see. And that will be the internet. So even though they had very different ultimate goals than the people at the EFF. They all shared the goal of getting the government out of the internet. And so they built this political coalition fighting back against Al Gore's information superhighway vision of the internet. It's such a fascinating story. And there was a quote in your dissertation where John Perry Barlow said, quote, Newt Gingrich's culture is literally at war with my

culture. But ideologically about the net, we don't have any disagreements. And I guess like, my question based on that is, you know, if you look at how the internet has evolved, I feel like this more reactionary futurist perspective that you're talking about, and this desire that they had to create this really commercialized internet you know where people were going to profit you were going to have all these entrepreneurs all this kind of stuff is a vision that really won out you know maybe it's not as socially conservative as they would have wanted but like this hyper commercialism is what we have received from this digital infrastructure and so i guess on the side of like the EFF and the Barlows, do you think that there was just a lot of naivete there? Or like, did they start to buy

into some of these ideas that this right wing project was having as well? Like, how do you see that moment and the interaction there? Yeah, I think there was a little bit of both. And you know, I'm not an expert on the EFF. So some of this I am getting from the work of my colleagues. But, you know, someone like Fred Turner would say that there was a lot of naivete about, you know, as much as these groups talked about non-hierarchical networks, that hierarchies always emerged, right? Even back in the 60s, when they set up communes, they fell into these very traditional gender relations. They were kind of setting up shop next to indigenous populations, like all of these things that ultimately there was a lot of naivete involved. But I also think that some of these guys were in fact more right wing than they let on. And John Perry Barlow is like a classic case of that. I mean, he was a Republican.

A speechwriter for Dick Cheney, if I remember correctly. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. And was also very concerned with masculinity in his own ways. And he kind of foregrounded the cowboy figure, right? I mean, he was a cattle rancher, I think. And he developed this metaphor of like the digital frontier, and making it seem like this uncharted wilderness where this like rugged masculinity would come in and establish itself. So I think that in a lot of ways, there were actually more ideological resonances than they might have let on. And I don't know whether it was, you know, it may have been strategic to hype up the fact of like, oh, look, we're so different. We've come together over this thing. Or maybe they genuinely didn't

think about how similar their ideas actually were in a lot of ways. Thank you. web. Data brokers hate Delete.me. When you sign up, Delete.me immediately goes to work scrubbing all of your personal information from data broker platforms. Your personal profile is no longer theirs to sell. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete.me, now at a special discount for our listeners. Today, get 20% off your Delete.me plan by texting TECH to 64000. That's TECH to 64000. The only way to get 20 percent off is to text tech to 64000. Once again, that's tech to six four triple zero. Disclaimer, message and data rates may apply. See terms for details. There's another piece in your dissertation where you talk about how, you know, Gilder and the ones that openly identified as more conservative saw this idea of the frontier and really embraced it because it really resonated with their political ideals, right? And they're more conservative ideas

and, you know, it fits in with manifest destiny and all these ideas that they were kind of wrapped up in. So yeah, that makes perfect sense. But you also mentioned Al Gore's information superhighway, right? And I think that this is our pathway into talking about the policy ramifications of these sorts of things, because I feel like a lot of people will know Al Gore invented the internet, you know, this meme that we have, and they will know the term information superhighway, but they might not know that Al Gore's vision of the information superhighway is actually a very distinct one that originally is quite different from the internet that we ultimately got, that was very much

influenced, you know, as you're talking about by this kind of reactionary futurist network, by these more anti-government kind of ideas for what the internet should be. Can you talk about how that played out and how those ideas around the internet developed from this kind of original Al Gore idea to what was ultimately realized? Yeah, that's exactly right. That even this metaphor, the information superhighway, Gore was strategically using his own metaphors and was drawing on the superhighway metaphor, in part because his dad had been in Congress when interstate highways were being developed. And so it was this idea of like, well, this is our generation's public infrastructure project.

And when he first started talking about it, he very much had a vision of government building the networks themselves, having it be a public works project, having it be a way to expand the reach of public schools and libraries. And he pretty quickly started caving into corporate interests but you also had this larger group of public interest media advocates who became their own group advocating for a vision of the internet and it was one that really stressed carving out pieces of the information superhighway for civic discussion and kind of educating the citizenry in a non-commercial space. So they called it a public lane on the information superhighway. And they stressed things like universal access and making sure that, yeah,

there could be resources for schools and libraries and they would have discussions about kind of what role would librarians play in helping people work through this kind of glut of information that they will have. And so they were really pushing for this very, very different vision of what the internet would look like. And if you look at early drafts of legislation around policy, and here I'm referring to work done by scholars like Patricia Ofterheide, these early drafts of legislation did carve out, like there was one version of a draft that had like 20% of the internet devoted to public discourse in a non-commercial realm. So it was very, very different.

I feel like that also kind of harkens back to ways that television and spectrum were thought about in the past, right? Where, yeah, okay, there's going to be this commercial aspect to it in, you know, American telecommunications policy, but we're going to make sure that there's still going to be this public notion that's built in there too. This notion that, you know, there is going to need to be some public benefit. Yes, people can profit, but they need to make sure that, you know, there's a public good being served here as well. And I feel like, you know, what you're discussing is this notion, this idea was built into internet policy in the beginning. But as we move through, you know, the early mid 1990s, you slowly see that being carved away by these more anti-statist and right-wing groups that are championing a very

different vision for what the internet should be, a very different kind of neoliberal vision, a free market vision that ultimately wins out, right? Totally. And a lot of it was pure capitalist interests at work. So you had telecommunication industry lobbying to deregulate, and that was a massive, massive force. Yeah, can't leave that out. Yeah. Right, right, right. And that was a massive, massive force. Yeah, I can't leave that out. Yeah. Right, right, right. And to a large extent, those were the funding sources for some of the think tanks that I'm looking at. So these things are not, you know, entirely able to be separated out. But I think the story that has kind of prevailed about these battles over legislation at the time, there's the story

of, oh, there was the Christian right who really wanted the government to come in and regulate because they were nervous about porn on the internet. And then you had the free speech libertarian side that was advocating against that. And in fact, what these networks that I'm looking at were advocating for was deregulation as a way of restoring morality in media. And that's why they collaborated with the libertarians. And so they distinguished what they called statist moralists from anti-statist moralists. And in fact, over time, you know, at first the statist moralists, you know, had some important wins and then they got overturned in the courts. And over time, the guys that I've looked at helped bring the statist moralists around to their way of thinking. porn on the internet, sure. But he saw the television kind of media industry as it currently existed as rotten to the core with secular influence that, you know, the news media was

liberal. Television shows have feminist themes. You know, this was the moment in time when Murphy Brown, is that the name of the sitcom? There was a big to do over a character that like decided to raise a child as a single mom. And then Dan Quayle called it out. It was like at the center of the culture wars right then. it's limited to these few major networks that have power over the spectrum. So once we kind of liberate anyone to become a media producer and entrepreneur, then morality will make its way back in and pornography will become just like a teeny tiny part of the internet, which that piece wasn't perhaps the most prescient of his predictions. Like his prediction, there wouldn't be a crash. That one, not exactly. I mean, for the record, he did have a ton of really prescient predictions about kind of how

the new media could be used by the right wing. But yeah, he had a couple of real swings and misses as well. Yeah. And we'll come back to that. But, you know, you don't get it right every time, right? Yeah. But like you were saying, you know, the story that we have about the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in particular, right, that it was these right wing groups trying to regulate pornography and, you know, the EFF and these groups were fighting for people's free speech rights and digital rights online and stuff like that. Like this is the story that we have for how this played out. But can you talk to us about what the Telecommunications Act of 1996 actually was and what the longer term impacts of that legislation have been and how it kind of transformed, I guess,

this idea of what the internet and telecommunications should be to this very different idea that you've been talking about that's much more deregulated and has these influences in it? Yeah, it was a massively deregulatory bill. It basically was the first massive rewrite of communications legislation since it had been written in the first place in 1934. And one of the major things that happened is that it allowed for cross ownership of media properties. And so it was a direct result of the Telecommunications Act that Fox News was able to be established because Rupert Murdoch could now own both newspaper and television property and that sort of thing where you could have radio stations and news network all in the same region, whereas you used to not be able to do that.

The concentration of ownership of these media conglomerates so that now there's like four or five big conglomerates that own almost every piece of media, that's a direct result of the Telecommunications Act. And in terms of the internet, what we see happening is the groups that I researched along with the EFF not only helped establish, you know, Section 230, this idea that platforms could kind of regulate without being treated as publishers, but they also really helped to kill a lot of the public interest initiatives that had been built into earlier versions of the legislation. So some some efforts to establish more equitable access to the internet. But for the most part, the work of these groups was in part to kind of, you know,

remove all of these affirmative efforts. And also to ensure, as you're saying, that it could be a hyper commercial space. And for the people I'm looking at, that was one in the same with, you know, if entrepreneurs, these commercial figures are also the central sources of morality in society, as Gilder argued, then a more commercial internet is also an internet of more morality. It was fascinating for me to like read about that history and how it all happened. And in particular, you know, the political dynamics of this where you have this like, more original bill that's not nearly as deregulatory that has these more kind of, you know, public oriented initiatives in it. But as Gingrich and the

Republicans see that they're, you know, on the cusp of gaining more power, you know, in late 1994. And into 1995, they basically like ditch the bill that was already there and start to rewrite their own to get ready to pass it, you know, to kind of have their agenda become the one that ultimately ends up shaping, you know, so much of what we have seen over the past three decades, right? Yeah, that's a really good point. But a big piece of that is that in 1994, Gingrich became Speaker of the House, said it was the first Republican House in multiple decades. And so at that point, a couple of drafts of the Telecommunications Act had been written. But once the Congress was flipped, and he was heading it, that's when they were able to rewrite

it and kind of put all this pressure on other Congress people as well. Yeah, it's so interesting to see. And so this is kind of some of the history that was happening in the 1990s. I would say history that we largely don't discuss when we think about what is happening today and, you know, the influences of which that we don't take into account nearly as much as we should. And so, you know, to start to close off our interview, I wanted to discuss some of those longer term impacts of these types of things. And, you know, the first one, the most obvious one,

as you talked about when we started, is how has these changes to the media infrastructure and these goals that these right wing figures in the 90s wanted to see realized? How do they play out in the media today? Like, in particular, you were just saying not too long ago that Gilder's goal was kind of to blow up this mainstream ecosystem that we had to enable conservatives to be able to create all this alternative media to restore the morality, right? As he saw it, that really resonated to me with what we see today. But how do you see that playing out and how does that shape what we see today in terms of this evolving media ecosystem and technology ecosystem and things like that? Yeah, I see the influences being twofold. One is in terms of the people that are actually producing

media content on social media platforms. And then the other is the people who are running the social media platforms. So in terms of the content being produced, I mean, the goal of the conservatives, Gilder and those he was working with, was to destroy their enemies in the media and the schools, as they put it. Now, have they destroyed the media? No, it still exists. an incredibly weakened media system right now. And I think in no small part due to the internet media systems that we see at work. And I'm drawn to the example of something like Prager University, which is a YouTube channel that I researched quite a bit back in the day when I was looking at, you know, right wing YouTubers. And Dennis Prager was really influenced by Gilder and his ideas and ended up working with some of the organizations that had gone online early on. He became kind of part of that broader network and then went on to found this organization of YouTube content that is meant as an attack on schools, right? It's meant specifically to provide an

alternative set of facts and information for people who think that schools and the media are too liberal. And then in terms of how these platforms are getting run, I mean, I think the goal for the people that I'm looking at was not just to deregulate the internet, it was to deregulate it so that it could be run by entrepreneurs. And we now have these media systems that are run by individual entrepreneurs. I mean, seeing Elon Musk buying Twitter and the direct results to kind of how it gets run and operated, I think is seeing that world in action in a lot of ways. The fact that these are not kind of spaces guided by the public interest, their spaces run according to the

whims of an individual billionaire. I think that in many ways is a direct result of what we're seeing in the 90s. That makes perfect sense, right? And in the end of your dissertation, you talk about how we're having all these discussions today about polarization and disinformation and fake news and all this kind of stuff. And often that is positioned as, you know, the product of these platforms and this kind of platform issue. How do you think that looking back at this longer history and understanding what was happening in the 90s and these fights that were going on that we are clearly seeing the impacts of today. How should that kind of help us

maybe rethink some of those conversations and what is actually going on there? There can be an allure to falling into these technological fixes to what are fundamentally social problems. This idea, for example, that if you simply tweak the YouTube recommendation algorithm,

that that will solve the issue of radicalization or racism on the platform, or disinformation on the platform. Or if you change newsfeed algorithms, it will solve polarization. And in fact, what we see is that it was a highly polarized or highly ideological group who specifically went onto the internet with the goal of attacking the people whose information and ideas they disagreed with, that that's kind of baked in, then that changes. We're not going to solve this with a tweak to the algorithm. Now, that's not to say that those changes aren't important, but I think we need to understand that platforms aren't coming into these neutral

worlds and shaping them. They're coming into these already highly polarized worlds and are adopted from the get-go by people with these ideological goals. Yeah, it's such an important point to understand, I think, right? And I feel like another one of these takeaways or things that I wanted to ask you about these longer-term impacts is, you know, when we think about these narratives that we have about the tech industry and about the Internet in particular today, I feel like a lot of these narratives, you know, what we hear about often come from these digital rights framings of decentralization and the need to protect free speech and all these sorts of things, right? But I wonder how when you think about this anti-status nature of this and how there was not just this kind of EFF Barlow kind of line of thinking that was influencing these ideas, but also this kind of Gilder reactionary futurist conservative element of this, how much has the work that people like Gilder and his network, how has that kind of shaped and normalized certain ideas that we have aboutilder and his network, how has that kind of shaped and normalized certain

ideas that we have about the internet and digital technology today that maybe we don't interrogate nearly enough because we don't think about these histories and we don't know so much where they came from? Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot because doing this research has upended a lot of assumptions that I've had, you know, these things that we take for granted about the fact that our de facto public spheres are these commercial spaces, that they are run by kind of a small group of elite businessmen. The fact that librarians don't play a central role in our information systems anymore. And I don't mean to say that the answer is to bring in more librarians necessarily. But, you know, there's certainly a Pandora's box element. But I do think it has helped me denaturalize certain elements of the internet that I had always just taken for granted.

And that, as you said, I think Section 230 always gets framed in terms of this like pro-free speech thing, instead of thinking about the fact that also what it was doing was enabling our public spheres to be commercial entities, first and foremost. Yeah, I think such an important point and probably something I should dig into a bit more on the show in the future. Some of those ideas and the legacies of them, where they come from, this would be a great starting point for that. But I guess finally, my question would be, you have been doing this research now for years. You've been digging into this history. You've been exploring all this. You've now finished your dissertation, this huge piece of work. What is the thing that you would most want us to take away from the work that you've been doing and what you have learned from doing this for so long? Yeah, I do think some of the things we were talking about at the beginning about the fact

that we do tend to assume that technology is inherently progressive. And I think it's really difficult to take away that facade and not only to say that technology can have unintended reactionary consequences, but also that there are people who are specifically building and using them towards reactionary ends. And I think just if I can do my part to help reframe that in people's minds, that would probably be my ultimate goal. I love that. I think that's a very noble goal and one that certainly will resonate with the listeners of this show. Becca, congratulations again on finishing your PhD. I can't wait until we have a book about all this to promote to people to go pick up.

But thanks again for taking the time to come on the show. I always appreciate talking to you. Thanks so much for having me. Becca Lewis is a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by Bridget Palou-Fry.

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