The Silicon Valley canon and malformed publics: Podcast with Max Read and John Ganz

Bringing this all together, the technologies through which we see the public shape how we understand it, making it more likely that we end up in the one situation rather than the other. As you have surely guessed by now, I believe Twitter/X, Facebook, and other social media services are just such technologies for shaping publics. Many of the problems that we are going to face over the next many years will stem from publics that have been deranged and distorted by social media in ways that lower the odds that democracy will be a problem solving system, and increase the likelihood that it will be a problem creating one.

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Other Writing:

Essay

El Comercio como Arma: Europa entre Estados Unidos y China

Estados Unidos ha bloqueado la exportación de semiconductores sofisticados a China. Esto demuestra cómo ha cambiado fundamentalmente su actitud hacia el comercio. Hace una década, los políticos estadounidenses todavía sostenían que el comercio transformaría el mundo. Los mercados abiertos traerían la libertad a su paso, transformando países como China. Ahora, Estados Unidos ve el comercio ...
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Essay

Defending Democratic Mechanisms and Institutions against Disinformation Attacks – with Bruce Schneier

To better understand influence attacks, we proposed an approach that models democracy itself as an information system and explains how democracies are vulnerable to certain forms of information attacks that autocracies naturally resist. Our model combines ideas from both international security and computer security, avoiding the limitations of both in explaining how influence attacks may ...
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