Hindsight is 2020

An ode to a year of tremendous challenges.

Welcome to New_ Public where a year of turbulence meets an opportunity for change. In this issue, we review 2020 with our co-founder, commit to tech-related resolutions for the New Year, highlight projects or writings constructed by our contributing editors, and gear up for our upcoming New_ Public festival in January. If you haven’t already registered for the festival, do so here.

Year in Review Q&A with our Civic Signals co-founder Eli Pariser

This New_Public conversation occurred on Zoom, like most of our personal and professional lives. The interview has been edited for length and clarity:

New_ Public: What is the takeaway for 2020?

Eli Pariser: It was such a huge year for contending with the promise and limits of digital spaces— because of the pandemic, the election, small businesses cratering, more local journalism going under when it was most needed. A friend of mine suggests that the pandemic bubble Zoom experience is what Silicon Valley has been designing for for years. You never need to go outside, you can order anything to your door, and you can see your friends in a window. There are some wonderful magical Internet things that have happened, but some real gaps were exposed.

The stock market and tech stocks are doing better than ever before, while the economy is in its biggest recession since the Great Depression. That alone signals something deeply off-kilter about how our digital life is working. Can we make the current digital platforms that we have good enough to support a flourishing democracy?

We're realizing that dealing with the flaws in the existing platforms is necessary, but it's deeply insufficient. If we don't start building other pieces of infrastructure, we're not gonna get to a healthy society anytime soon. 

Where is there a gap?

The existing tech platforms disabled some core features in order to make it through the election intact.  Some of those efforts were really important and relatively successful. Yet, we're walking out of this year with a country that's extraordinarily angry, divided, and with no theory on what places are going to bring us to some sense of common cause or greater purpose. That's a scary place to be.

I keep thinking about an essay by Renée DiResta about manufacturing consent. The phrase has a dark quality to it, but it is really about how getting to a social contract takes work. It takes institutions and people trying to figure out how to come to a stable agreement about how to do things. 

We don't have the tools we need to do that. That's the biggest gap, especially as we reckon with power imbalances, the history of suppression, racism, and anti-blackness. That's a big innovation challenge that is right in front of us that we have to take on.

What are you looking forward to in 2021?

I look forward to the New_ Public festival. To me, it’s one little glimpse at a different digital future that many people are helping to create all around the world that is respectful of humanity and community and thoughtful about how to bring people together in different ways for different purposes and with different power dynamics. 

I think about how this whole experiment of living life [online] is just so new in the history of humanity. At a mass level, we've only been doing this for like 10 or 15 years. If we can do it in under a century and before we go to war with each other, that'll be a success. I feel incredibly inspired by the people who are doing that work.

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A New Year’s Resolution for the Internet—in 6 Words

To celebrate the end of 2020 (finally!) we asked our team to write 6-word New Year’s Resolutions for the Internet. Some of our favorites: 

A plurality of voices on platforms —Marina Garcia-Vasquez
No anti-vax groups on any platform —Lauren Naturale
Blogging is back, but in newsletters —Josh Kramer
Places to meet kind interesting strangers— Romy Nehme
Better spaces for us to disagree— Neelam Sakaria

What’s your 6-word resolution for the Internet?

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Newsletter Moments

Over the last year, we’ve published 35 newsletters as a means to build community, share our values, commiserate on societal ills, and to celebrate the work of colleagues in imagining a future for digital public spaces. Here are five thought provoking moments from 2020:

1. The coronavirus lockdown revealed societal inequalities due to a lack of broadband infrastructure or a lack of affordable options that limited internet access to rural and urban communities alike.

2. We interviewed Joanne McNeil, author of Lurking: How a Person Became a User during quarantine. She talked about the power of lurking to belong and feel like we have a sense of community.

3. The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag demonstrated how the Internet could be an effective tool for organizing, amplifying, and educating people about dismantling racist systems.

4. Sarah Drinkwater, Omidyar Network’s Director of Beneficial Tech, shares the motivation behind creating the Ethical Explorer Pack with an eye on nurturing responsible leaders in tech. 

5. Cities are the source of some of our best ideas about how to build functional, thriving communities. Enjoy this Civic Signal comic, that visually explores the concept of digital public spaces. 

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   This Week’s Additions to the Digital Public Spaces List

   This week’s additions to the Digital Public Spaces list are the Coworker Solidarity Fund and Coral by Vox. Our list of people and organizations working to build a public-friendly internet is updated weekly and always growing—who else should we add? 

Reading Links from Our Contributing Editors: 

We're proud to launch New_ Public with a diverse, talented group of thinkers from various disciplines. Here's a snapshot of what they're working on and talking about currently:

-Kamal Sinclair is a key collaborator in Sophia Nahli Allison’s Traveling the Interstitium with Octavia Butler project at Sundance Film Festival 2021. 

-Aleks Krotoski writes how the Internet has banished creative practices at night. 

-Can we upload consciousness? Listen as Douglas Rushkoff and other futurists and skeptics talk about the potential for technology to override natural selection. 

-Sara Hendren reframes how we talk about disability and how to design a more humane world for everyone. 

-Carolin Sinders illustrates the human cost of artificial intelligence. 

-Astra Taylor calls for reform of the United States political system and just how deeply undemocratic it is. 

-Dipayan Ghosh argues that the Biden administration must prioritize issues of technology and internet policy reform.

-Malkia Devich-Cyril is a second generation Black activist who demands defunding police use of facial recognition. 

-Vanessa Mason interviews leadership development expert, Corey Morrow, on the future of belonging in the workplace. 

-Meredith D. Clark’s research on how social media has been critical for movements like Black Lives Matter applies to the importance of visibility in verified users on online platforms.

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Join us in January! We’re coming together to chart a more hopeful and equitable future for digital public life.

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What’s Clicking

🌐 Online:

• Is Facebook a doomsday machine?

• Inside Timnit Gebru’s last days at Google.

• A 2020 list of immersive projects from Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab that mix storytelling, performance, play, design and code.

• Twitter launches Spaces, valuing the human voice to bring in a layer of connectivity to the platform through emotion, nuance, and empathy often lost in text.

• The Future is TransFeminist: What would the future look like if algorithms were developed based on feminist values?

• Social networking in any medium is always a balance between self-expression and the accommodation of others.

• The future of social media is all talk.

• Noam Chomsky on the Future of Deep Learning.

🏙 Offline: Design Ideas from Cities

• In Chicago, a community organization learned the Transformative Power of Replacing Guns With Jobs.

• In light of the pandemic, what can universities do with their fancy event centers?

• The Storefront for Art and Architecture in NYC opened their first exhibit since the pandemic titled Re-Source, featuring 26 architects and designers employing surplus items from our office, gallery, and storage spaces.

• Some Silicon Valley tech firms are still paying their cafeteria workers and janitors.

• The School of Afrotectopia is presenting a symposium for Black innovators working at the intersection of art, design, technology, and activism.

• Seven ways Covid-19 is reshaping our cities.

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  Signing off in 2020, 

  The New_ Public Team

  Illustrations by Josh Kramer

  Civic Signals is a partnership between the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, Austin, and the National Conference on Citizenship, and was incubated by New America.