The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Gentrification of the Internet: How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom by Jessa Lingel

Episode Date: June 28, 2021

The Gentrification of the Internet: How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom by Jessa Lingel How we lost control of the internet—and how to win it back. The internet has become a battleground. A...lthough it was unlikely to live up to the hype and hopes of the 1990s, only the most skeptical cynics could have predicted the World Wide Web as we know it today: commercial, isolating, and full of, even fueled by, bias. This was not inevitable. The Gentrification of the Internet argues that much like our cities, the internet has become gentrified, dominated by the interests of business and capital rather than the interests of the people who use it. Jessa Lingel uses the politics and debates of gentrification to diagnose the massive, systemic problems blighting our contemporary internet: erosions of privacy and individual ownership, small businesses wiped out by wealthy corporations, the ubiquitous paywall. But there are still steps we can take to reclaim the heady possibilities of the early internet. Lingel outlines actions that internet activists and everyday users can take to defend and secure more protections for the individual and to carve out more spaces of freedom for the people—not businesses—online.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks chris voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming to you in our great podcast we certainly appreciate you tuning in have i told you how much we are thankful that you are here today? Not only authors that show up, but also our audience that shows up.
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Starting point is 00:01:46 how much power we've given up to these digital conglomerates, the Facebooks, the Instagrams, the ones I just referenced, actually, using as plugs. So we're going to be talking about some of that. She's the author of the new book out May 18, 2021. This is just fresh right off the presses, so you want to grab a copy. The Gentrification
Starting point is 00:02:05 of the Internet, How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom by Jessa Lingell. She's with us on the show today, and we're going to have an amazing discussion. She's an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and core faculty in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Study Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in Communication and Information from Rutgers University. She has an MLIS from Pratt Institute and an MA in Gender Studies from New York University. And lo and behold, she's even on the show today. Welcome to the show, Jessa. How are you? I'm just great. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you for coming. We certainly appreciate you. Congratulations on the book. This is your third book, so awesome sauce. Give us your plug so
Starting point is 00:02:55 people can find you on the interwebs. Sure, you can find me on jessalingle.tumblr.com or through my school website, asc.upenn.edu. So let's talk about your book. Give us the reason why it motivates you to write this third book and what the proponents were behind that. So I've been teaching classes about digital culture for about a decade now. And when you teach the same class over and over, you notice how your students change over time and your students' ideas and assumptions change over time. So when I first stepped into a classroom to teach classes about the Internet around 2010, Facebook was still pretty new. Twitter, YouTube was still pretty new. My students would walk in the door and they had pretty good vibes about big tech. They felt these were crucial tools for them to promote themselves, to get jobs, but also to find friends, to find community.
Starting point is 00:03:50 They associated social media with things like democracy and education. And that has so changed over the last decade. So now when my students walk in the door, they tend to be very skeptical, very cynical about the internet. They tend to assume that they are being watched and surveilled all the time, that their content is being monetized. And of course, they're not wrong. But my job used to be trying to teach people how the internet could be problematic or discriminatory. And now I have a very different job. Now my job is more about teaching students become this way and also how could it be different. So I wrote this book for my students.
Starting point is 00:04:32 I wanted a book that ordinary internet users could read and get a sense of how did we get here and what could make it different and better in the future. That's a great place to be right now because we are deep down the rabbit hole. That Pandora's box is wide open and I don't think there's any shedding of it. But I grew up in an era where we didn't have the internet. When I was a teenager, we threw dirt clods at the side of our house for fun to see the explosion of the pattern of the thing. And then ran around neighborhoods and built tree houses and things like that. Thank God. I didn't do anything extraordinary bad in my childhood. Otherwise, I'd probably be in jail. I never did anything bad, but there's still some things I
Starting point is 00:05:15 probably said or did because it was the seventh. I probably wouldn't be proud of today because so much has changed socially and stuff. It doesn't seem very forgiving. And a lot of these kids now, they grow up from the moment they're conceived, their photo is on the internet. They're right there in the womb. Here's their baby. You can start screwing up right away. And some of these things can stick with you for a lifetime, if not ruin your career and everything else. Give us an overarching overview of what's in the book, please. Sure. You're totally right to say that young people today, they're experiencing the internet in a particular way. And one thing that I think about
Starting point is 00:05:49 is that they're often told digital natives how the internet works. And a lot of times that's true, but they don't always understand or just they haven't had a chance to learn about its history. So that's what the book is about. And so the book starts off by saying the internet has gentrified. And then I unpack the word gentrification, which is a very loaded word for activists versus developers versus longtime residents and new time residents. And then I say, okay, here's what gentrification means. And when we talk about cities, and now I'm going to walk you through how it happens online. And I talk about online communities that's having gentrified. So the platforms that we use like Facebook and Twitter.
Starting point is 00:06:29 And then I talk about how the tech industry itself is this force of gentrification. And then finally, I talk about the infrastructure of the internet. So even the ISPs, the internet service providers that we use that are allowing us to be online right now. Those structures, which we think of as just like fibers and cables, even those have gentrified in the last, say, 20, 30 years. And then the book, just being inspired by urban anti-gentrification activists and trying to think about what have they been able to do pushing back on gentrification that maybe we could apply to the internet. Help us out with the, like you say, it's a loaded word, gentrification.
Starting point is 00:07:08 What does that mean in accordance with the title and content of your book, Gentrification of the Internet? Yeah, gentrification is a process of neighborhood changing over time. And so that's the most basic neutral definition. So everybody agrees that it's about a neighborhood changing over time. And so that's the most basic neutral definition. So everybody agrees that it's about a neighborhood changing. The reason it gets so heated is that change good or bad and whose fault is it? So most of the time when we're talking about gentrification, we're talking about a neighborhood that tends to be poor, that tends to be Black folks living there, Brown folks living there. And then you have young, usually more wealthy, more access to education and jobs, folks moving in. And then what happens over time is that original residents tend to get pushed out and new construction goes in.
Starting point is 00:07:59 And suddenly the neighborhood becomes almost unrecognizable. And so it's loaded because developers come in and say, hey, isn't this great? These houses are new. There's so much more money floating around. But for longtime residents, it's usually a real set of trade-offs because they can no longer afford to live in the neighborhood. Businesses that may be catered to folks who have been living there a long time get pushed out and then fancy brunch spots or coffee shops or yoga studios open up instead. So that's what urban gentrification looks like. There you go. So when you talk to your students to do one of the sub things on the book is how to reclaim our digital freedom. So what are some examples that you use in the book on how to reclaim our digital freedom?
Starting point is 00:08:44 Sure. Step number one is just making sure we're more informed. It's really easy to use these technologies every day. And it's a lot harder to force ourselves to do the work of learning as much about them as they know about us. So there's usually quite a disconnect. Facebook has so much more information about its users than we do about them. Number one is learning what are their policies, who owns the data that you share on these sites, what are your options if something is happening that you don't like, if you want to report someone. All of those basic literacy steps, you might be surprised how often people have to wait until there's a problem before they start really digging into that. Step number two, I call being your own algorithm. And this really means pushing back
Starting point is 00:09:30 on the way that we get pushed into filter bubbles. So for example, if you're on YouTube, and you're watching a video on climate change, and you just happen to see a video, you want to learn more about climate change, and the video just happens to be a climate change denial video, the next video that comes up in your queue will not be a video that says climate change is real. It just will take you down this rabbit hole of more and more content saying the exact same viewpoint. So we know that happens on YouTube, we know that happens on Facebook and Instagram because tech companies make more money the more wrapped, the farther down a rabbit hole you get rather than having these pauses built in. So you have to ask yourself, wait, is this, am I getting just the same viewpoint over and over?
Starting point is 00:10:16 So the strategy of being your own algorithm is to say, how can I take steps to make sure that the content that comes through my feed is different? How can I diversify my content? So that might look like following people who are from different parts of the country, different parts of the world, different ages, different backgrounds than you. So for example, a few years ago, I decided I was just going to start following a bunch of Black women comedians on Tumblr. That's what I was going to do. And I got such a different feed on my Tumblr page than I had before. A, it was a lot funnier, but it was just a whole different set of cultural reference. So that work of being your own algorithm and not relying on platforms to push content your way
Starting point is 00:10:56 can get us back to a moment where the internet was supposed to expose us to new viewpoints and it gives us more sense of control, more sense of agency over our online content. Yeah. Do you go after the big, the big social things, Mark Zuckerberg's one of them, Facebook, of course, Google, do you go after these organizations or how do you feel about these organizations or how do you write about them in the book? I, I definitely have some harsh words for what I would call the big tech industry. The tech industry is huge and we can't turn it into one monolithic thing. There are plenty of awesome tech companies out there that are really trying to protect people's privacy or trying to
Starting point is 00:11:35 be environmentally sustainable. But when I talk about the tech industry, I'm talking about big tech. And in the chapter where I talk about the tech industry as a whole, gentrification becomes less of a metaphor and more of an actual thing that the tech industry is contributing to. People in San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, but other cities too, where there's major tech headquarters like Vancouver, Toronto, London, they are very familiar with tech. Big tech is not really the best neighbor. They set up headquarters in your town and they usually get huge tax breaks to be there. So they're not even paying into things like infrastructure or schools. And then they jack up the prices of rent, making
Starting point is 00:12:19 it very difficult for other folks to live there. The population of Oakland, the Black population of Oakland has fallen dramatically in the last five years. And the cost of living in Oakland has jumped up dramatically in the last few years. And so in that case, I'm not really not using gentrification as a metaphor. I am saying the tech industries are actually gentrifying the spaces where they set up headquarters. But there's other ways where I call out the tech industry to around their long standing problems with diversity, where the average age of an Amazon employee, a Google employee, excuse me, as recently as 2019 was 30. That's an incredibly young workforce. So how are you going to design technology that adapts for people who are in their 50s, 60s, 70s, if you're just a few years out of college. And certainly I think there's a lot the tech industry can be doing
Starting point is 00:13:08 to make it possible for more people to feel like they have some control of their online lives. Yeah, it's a lot of my friends grew up in the tech business in the early days of the tech business, wherever you want to call that. And they're my age,
Starting point is 00:13:20 they're in their 50s now. And they've seen as ageism, the right word for discrimination by age? But they've experienced a massive ageism in the tech community and really badly. And some of these people are brilliant. They've been working in tech since the beginning. Their knowledge base of expertise is extraordinary. But can they work 24-7?
Starting point is 00:13:43 My friend Dan Lyons did a book where he reviewed some of this unicorn industry, there's just so much wreckage. How is that received by these young people nowadays? Do they just go that you're seeing in colleges and stuff? Are they just going, well, that's just the way it is? Or do they really want to start trying to control or bend the arc of the future use of this and how it applies to their lives? I think young people are in a really tough spot when it comes to technology because it's not optional. You can't even go to school. You literally can't even go to school without social media. You can't get, there are jobs where you need at least 500 LinkedIn connections to apply. So they don't have an option of skipping social
Starting point is 00:14:42 media altogether. And also, as we were saying earlier, they're told from very early on, oh, you digital natives, you know exactly how this works. And many of them don't necessarily know how it works. They want, they believe in the power of social media for certain things, right? So young people are very aware of how powerful social media is when it comes to activism, when it comes to building coalitions. But I do think that the problem when it comes to that work of building lines of connection across different groups is this sense of, well, old people just don't understand how the internet works. And so
Starting point is 00:15:18 there's no point trying to explain it to them. So there's that sort of divide that gets set up rather than trying to think about the internet isn't new. The internet's been around a very long time. People in their 40s, 50s, 60s have been using the internet for a very long time. And so they don't quite have this claim on the internet that maybe they're told that they do. So there's some things that need to change. Like number one, I think it's actually really damaging to continuing telling, to continue telling young people, oh, you already know how this works. We all, you've always known how it works. And number two, I think there's more, young people do need to be more open to learning about, they're not the first ones to invent activism. They're not the first ones to
Starting point is 00:15:59 invent criticizing a generation older than they are. So that's just a dynamic that plays out over and over again. Yeah. It's something that's kind of, I would have so much trouble growing up in today's world. I don't know. I would hope that I was, when I was young, I was a dumb kid when I was young. I'm probably still a dumb kid now. You asked the right people. They'll tell you that. But starting with my mom, no, I'm just kidding wonderful but almost yeah actually your mom's the only one who loves you in this world really when it comes down to anyone like your parents that's true my dad hated me but so that's another story but no i'm just kidding but it'll be so hard to grow up in today's world man but just the pressure of everyone's watching i've had friends that have have done things that sometimes end up not well on the cover
Starting point is 00:16:46 of the New York Times or Washington Post. They were good people who made a mistake and they didn't realize how amplified they could get or they get caught up in a movement. And they paid the price for it, for their career and their reputation. I thought it was really interesting to see Jeffrey Toobin back on CNN recently. I never thought, I thought when you go away for something like that, you go away, but maybe there's forgiveness. I don't mean to get into political tropes and stuff, but there is, I hate using these two words, cancel culture, because it sounds like I'm against them.
Starting point is 00:17:21 There are times throughout the history of humankind that cancel culture has been true where you do need to remove people from the tribe because they're a danger to the tribe. That's why we have prisons and death row is because there are people that we go, you're, you endanger all of us. So you have to go to a special place that we put you. And that has been true forever. But there, there are some questions where you need to ask yourself, is there a point of forgiveness? Do we really have to throw people away forever for a bad choice? And that's not for me to decide.
Starting point is 00:17:53 That's for all of us to work on. But it is interesting to me that if I were growing up in the age of being a young person again and looking at the extraordinary amount of like, you make one mistake and you're off the tribe. There's a lot of pressure to perform and be perfect. And so many mistakes as a young person and as a 20-year-old, stupid stuff that you do. I sometimes, I did a few, too many buzz driving things that I'm not proud of that I'm just like, man, you really could have destroyed your life with either a DUI or worse. Stupid stuff you do when you're young. And you look back on it and you're like, wow, that could have ended up on the internet and done this and whatever. And the longevity of it, once it's on the internet, it's forever, it seems. Once you've got a meme or you become a meme by
Starting point is 00:18:39 accident, there's some people who become a meme by accident. And for the rest of life, they're known as that person. What's the future? What can we do to take back or re-control the gentrification of the Internet or maybe regulate these companies? What are some steps that we need to take and do in your mind? Yeah. I'll throw out Kate Eichhorn has a really great book about the difficulties of being a young person in the context of the internet where nothing is ever forgotten. So the idea that your childhood would be a time where you experiment, where you figure out who you are, and then that process of experimentation gets so difficult when everything is documented and shared and you can be canceled. When we think about what to do with a gentrifying internet, when we think about
Starting point is 00:19:28 how we could push back on an internet that's become more commercialized, more unequal, where privacy is harder to find, regulation is certainly key. And so we're more optimistic now than I was a few years ago about the possibilities of getting some federal level regulation about big tech companies. So there's Senate hearings about antitrust and breaking up some of the larger companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google. So we might see some legislation there. And folks might remember a few years ago after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Mark Zuckerberg was brought before the Senate. And it was very disturbing as an Internet studies person to see these senators be so clueless about basic parts of the Internet. He sort of famously had Orrin Hatch up there being like, I just don't understand how Facebook makes money.
Starting point is 00:20:21 And Mark Zuckerberg's, we sell ads. Orrin Hatch being like, I never had to pay a fee for Facebook. And when you have that, it's, oh, that's a funny grandpa thing to say about the internet. But that's a senator who has a lot of power talking in this moment where you could actually have this conversation with these tech companies. And instead you're just showing how little. So that was a real low point for me in terms of are we ever going to get regulation when important people don't even understand how basic things about the internet work. But I saw this past summer when you had the big five tech companies, minus Microsoft, I think it was Amazon, Facebook, Google were there. You saw much more interesting questions, much more informed questions, much more detailed questions. So the senators and their staffers were doing their homework. There's a real push. Obviously, a Democratic majority makes it a little easier to get regulation. Outside of politics, Democrats are usually more interested in regulating big tech.
Starting point is 00:21:18 So that's certainly possible. But we could also just have consumer movement, right? Where there have been different moments where consumers have said, we demand more safety. We want seatbelts in cars. So like we want safety ratings and cribs. There are moments where consumers say, we're not going to buy your stuff unless you make it safer for us to use. And that kind of movement is possible with big tech. They need us more than we need them.
Starting point is 00:21:43 So that kind of literacy I was talking about earlier to know what our rights are, to know what the policies are, that could be a first step in building a movement that just demands more safety online. And depending on what definition of safety people are using, that could be really powerful. We almost need to, we just need younger senators and people to understand this technology. I like you as a guest. I just watched some of these hearings. And what was the one where the one, I don't know if it was a Senate or House member, but he goes, if I take my phone and I move over there, does Google know exactly where I am?
Starting point is 00:22:17 And just looking at the faces of the CEO of Google and Mark Zuckerberg, where they're just like, is this really freaking as I'm on a camera right now? And yeah, you're right. These are the guys who are supposed to be regulating this. I think a good example would be it's if you watch the police department interviewing a criminal in an open hearing situation, like the Senator House chambers, and they're sitting there asking him, we think that you killed somebody, but we're not sure on the definition of murder. Do you feel, sir, like that you killed somebody but we're not sure on the definition of murder do you feel sir like you murdered someone because we're not sure if you did or not even though we're our job is to regulate it we trust you guys to police this and you guys
Starting point is 00:22:56 don't even understand what you're supposed to be policing well it's exactly and it's so infuriating because there are plenty of really well-informed, very smart people who work in the government, who work in the FCC, who works in the Consumer Affairs Protection Bureau. I worked at Microsoft for a couple of years before I started at the University of Pennsylvania. And it drove me bananas when the company would have these epic fails around user privacy or these epic fails around a product. And I'd just be like, man, it's really too bad that you don't have people who work on privacy or gender equity issues. Oh, wait, you do. You just never bothered to ask us, right? I do hope that we see more regulation, more guidelines from the government.
Starting point is 00:23:40 And like I was saying, it does seem like that's more possible now than it was a couple of years ago. We'll see what happens. How do you feel about Facebook and Google? Do they need to be broken up? Some people think that they're a monopoly. They need to be broken up. They need to be dismembered a little bit. Do we need to change the tax laws? For a long time, Apple had parked in Ireland. I think it ireland where they have special tax havens and most of these big companies are parking their profits over there so none of that money is going to the tax base at all it's not supporting like what you said earlier in the show schools and different funding different public works because then there's no tax money coming from these
Starting point is 00:24:19 companies they literally are operating seemingly tax-free they do pay their employees and that goes into the tax base but there's all these games thatfree they do pay their employees and that goes into the tax base but there's all these games that they play to hide their money and we're that none of that's going back into the thing and then like you say they're gentrifying neighborhoods so they're driving at rents you know i mean basically unless you're a test tech worker you just have to go move into the sticks especially with what's going on right now i read yesterday someone people are paying a million dollars over the top of whatever price they would be paying for real estate right now. It's getting really stupid in the real estate market. And it's just pushing people out where
Starting point is 00:24:55 normal people can't live there. I went through that in Vegas when the real estate boom happened before the bust. People that were school teachers and police officers and people that ran things couldn't afford to live in the city, which made it hard for school districts to hire teachers and really started breaking stuff down. They started to have to come up with different programs to try and subsidize teachers or come into places and police officers where they could afford to live there. And then the bust happened, so that kind of refixed everything, but for the most part. But do they really need to be broken up or what are some other things that we can do to go at these guys?
Starting point is 00:25:29 Yeah. We shouldn't have to rely on a housing bubble bursting in order to have affordable housing, especially not for essential workers. I'm a fan of big tech companies paying more taxes, not because they're tech companies, just because they think very wealthy, profitable companies should pay more taxes, not because they're tech companies, just because I think very wealthy, profitable companies should pay more taxes. There was also an economist who studied whether or not offering tax incentives to corporations was a good move. So you might remember a couple years ago, Amazon was like, where are we going to put our next corporation? come make your best offer. And so all of these cities were desperate to have Amazon relocate. And what was so funny about that is this economist found that 75% of
Starting point is 00:26:14 companies would move even if you didn't offer the tax incentive. So they make those decisions for other reasons. And then actually companies that take those tax incentives have a slightly higher chance of folding than companies that don't take the tax incentives. So, A, it's bad for the cities and B, it's not good for the companies. It's a total lose-lose situation. It's not good at all. In terms of whether the companies need to be broken up, in general, I think smaller companies are probably better. That's just like a personal view. But what I do think it's important to ask ourselves, what makes a tech company? Is Airbnb
Starting point is 00:26:52 a tech company? Or are they a rental agency with a fancy website? What really makes them a tech company? Uber insists it's a tech company, but really it's a taxi dispatch. That's what it is. And if you think about what these companies really share, they share an opposition to regulation. They're not really tech companies, they're anti-regulation companies. And I think we have to ask ourselves, why do we give tech companies an out? We would never say that we're not going to regulate other kinds of products that have this much of an impact on our lives. So do we need to break them up? I think it would make them easier to regulate. I think it would give consumers more choice. And also, I want to point
Starting point is 00:27:36 out these companies, people will defend them and say they're just being capitalists. Like they're just being capitalists. We live in a capitalist society. They're just making money. They're actually very anti-capitalist because they're so anti-competition. These are anti-competitive companies. The reason that these companies get so big is they just buy up the competition. So like Facebook buys up Instagram, like all of these companies just get bigger and bigger because they're buying up their competition. That's deeply anti-capitalist, in fact. The whole point of capitalism is that if you're going to, I'm not, barbie it from me to defend capitalism, but when people defend it-business person ever, there's a strong argument for breaking them up because it would lead to more consumer choice and more innovation. Yeah. You talk also in your book about the fight for fiber. Let's talk about that. I imagine you don't mean brand. No fighting to be had there. It's just on the shelf. So I think it's easy to ignore the ways that our cables could be political. But actually, there's been this real transformation in terms of how people get their internet. 90s, we had at one point over 7,000 different internet service providers in this country.
Starting point is 00:29:06 And most people had a choice of up to five, six, seven different ISPs, which was great because then you could choose different packages based on speed, based on price, based on privacy protections. There was a moment in the late 90s, early 2000s, where ISPs really had to compete with each other. And then the ISPs stopped being controlled by the NSF, the National Science Foundation, and are now purely commercial enterprises. Some are run by nonprofits. And so what did we see? We saw some of the things we were just talking about, where it's just like a real push towards monopoly. We saw a lot of anti-competitive behavior. And then what you get is most people in the United States only have the choice of one ISP. If you're lucky, you can choose two. But for huge chunks of the country, you only get to choose
Starting point is 00:29:56 between one ISP. And that's why you have to put up with crummy customer service, high prices, and bad internet. People in the United States pay much higher prices for worse quality internet than a lot of the rest of the highly industrialized world. So we're paying much higher prices for crummier internet in part because these industries are hyper-commercialized and they're not regulated like a utility, which is basically what the internet should be. It should just be treated like a utility. It's an interesting discussion. It really should be utility when it comes down to it. Everyone should have access to the internet.
Starting point is 00:30:30 It should be available to everybody. And do we really have a problem in this country? I don't know if you talk about this in the book, but do we ever really have a problem with unfettered capitalism just being way out of control? It seems like that's where we're at as a society, at least in America. Yes, we do have that problem. And the problem for me really is that it stops a conversation if you say we live in a capitalist society, so businesses are just going to business. They're just going to do whatever they have to do
Starting point is 00:30:56 to make a profit for their public shareholders. And that's just such a limited way of talking about what makes a successful company. So one thing I try and argue in the book is that we need new definitions of what success looks like. In particular, in the tech industry, we have this sort of fairy tale of, oh, these guys, they dropped out of college and they lived in a basement and then they built this thing and it failed and they built and they failed and they built and they failed and they built and they failed they built it and now it's amazing and then we have the IPO and then they all made millions of dollars and that's the success narrative and we don't have other success narratives like hey they have genuine diversity in their leadership or wow this company is so successful at building an environmentally sustainable company right like we could have other narratives of success, but instead in the tech industry, it's very limited to
Starting point is 00:31:49 what was the IPO and how many of the early investors made it really rich. And that's just a very narrow way of thinking about success. There you go. So anything more we haven't covered or touched on in the book, Jess? Those are definitely the main points. I just hope that people feel like the book gives them a way of understanding why the internet is the way that it is and how it could get to be something. There you go. So a wonderful discussion about what needs to happen with the internet. I hope that something good will happen, but at least your book can be instructed to people to start really thinking about what's going on the Internet and how these companies are affecting us. I think when we were trying to seed the business years ago when it was starting out, let's let this new Internet thing go.
Starting point is 00:32:37 But now it's just the freedom that they've had to run and do whatever they want, especially when you look at stuff that's like what happened with Facebook and Myanmar, the massacres there. When you look at, you can say some of it, there was some good with the Arab Spring, but then after that, governments just went, wait, we can use this for evil too? Let's do that. And you've seen politicians abuse it. You've seen all sorts of evil take place on it unregulated and mark zuckerberg and what's her face his i believe his cfo his ceo i'm thinking of sam samberg cheryl samberg there you go thank you i saw her talking there was a quote that she had where she was talking about how they were going to buddy up to an oppressive government that was abusing their people and killing them and she's like that's how it is we just have to do business with these people. You're just like, wow. Yeah. You just pan globalists who don't give a crap about democracy or freedom or anything. They, all they worship is the almighty buck. So it's been wonderful to have
Starting point is 00:33:34 you on. Thank you for sharing all your stuff, Jessa, and your wonderful book, The Gentrification of the Internet, How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom. Anything you want to plug out on the book before we go and where people can find you on the interwebs? Sure. So you can buy the book from the University of California Press. And you can also find me on my website, jessalingle.tumblr.com or through my school website at asc.upenn.edu. There you go. There you go. It's out May 18th, 2021th 2021 guys check out the book and all that good stuff jessa it was wonderful to have you on the show today thank you very much for coming by thanks so much for having me there you go thanks for tuning in go to youtube.com fortune s chris voss hit that bell notification take and see all the wonderful groups we have
Starting point is 00:34:19 on facebook linkedin instagram twitter all that good stuff the kids are into. Also go see us on goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Voss. Be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.

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