March 25, 2026 • 38 mins
Ethan Zuckerman helped design the amateur web as we know it. In the 90s, he worked at Tripod, providing free web space for anyone to build their own site. His invention, pop-up ads, helped make that possible. The industry ran with it, and the Internet was never the same.
Since then, Ethan’s been on a mission to fix the Internet and bring it back to what he hoped it would be – he even sued Facebook over it. Dexter talks to Ethan about how to make advertising less surveillant, a “free-trade coffee” model of the web, and why ad blockers might hint at a way to make Facebook a better place.
Hit us up: killswitch@kaleidoscope.nyc, or @killswitchpod and @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky.
Links:
- Ethan Zuckerman and Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci’s proposal on Forgetful Adveritising: https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/area/center/isp/documents/zuckerman.pdf
- Ethan’s op-ed in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/05/opinion/facebook-court-internet-meta.html
- Ethan and Isaac Brickman’s proposal for middleware: https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/JMYZ3GJKPE7UTCN8ZR3K/full
- kill switch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@killswitch_pod
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
In the nineteen nineties, we had this idea that the
Internet was just this open space and we could try
all sorts of nonsense there. Piero Midjar wants to sell
his pez collection, and you end up with eBay, and
then people realize that people are ripping each other off
on eBay, and so you end up with an escro service,
and that turns into PayPal, and like, all these things happen,
(00:33):
and they happen really really fast. I want us to
get back to that moment of thinking things are possible.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Ethan Zuckerman is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
He's also something of an Internet activist, and.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
I work on a whole lot of projects trying to
make the Internet a better place, which I still believe
can happen despite all the evidence of the contrary.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
You know what, you may be one of the last
soldiers standing on that battlefield.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
I know, man, I know, I know it's a lonely
place to be. But you know, the great thing about
being a professor is that I can try to win
over students to the cause, and every so often, you know,
we get a win. Every so often. People are excited
about this idea that things actually can change, and I
think a lot of it just hass to do with
(01:20):
reframing our thinking.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Ethan is one of the most unusual professors I've ever
spoken to. So, first off, if you're of a certain age,
I guarantee you that you've seen his work. It might
have made you mad, It might have made you money,
it might have done both at the same time. The second,
Ethan really really likes Facebook, so much so that he
sued Facebook, and you know what, after listening to what
(01:43):
he has to say, you might want him to win
from Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is kill Switch. I'm
Dexter Thomas.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Good bye.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Ethan Zuckerman wants to fix the Internet. But before we
could talk about how he would do that, we need
to understand how we got here. We've talked about this
here before on the show, but early on the Internet
was a much more optimistic place until money basically ruined it.
If you haven't caught our episode with Tim, we'll definitely
check that one out too. So Ethan started his career
(03:08):
during those early dot com days. He was one of
the first employees at a company called Tripod, and Tripod
was most well known for being a place where you
could build your own homepage, which back then was a
really exciting thing. There were all kinds of communities popping
up online and Tripod was helping to foster that. But
in order to do that, they needed money, and so
they started looking at advertising. I was a GeoCities person. Yep,
(03:33):
that's what I was on. We're talking pre my Space here,
but I remember.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
We're talking pre my Space and that was our leading
competitor at Tripods. So I'm not going to hold that
against you, Dexter, but you know, that is a bit
of a you know, you did just a little bit
of a Yankees Mets thing there. You gotta be careful about.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
God, Hey, listen, I'm just trying to be honest with you.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
I'm just fair enough. That's where I went.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
But you know, I mean, as I was entering this
phase of Wow, there's all these other people made things,
and I would like to make things too. Very early
in that stage, I realized that that was always going
to mean there's gonna be ads next to whatever I did,
or on top of whatever I did, or inside of
whatever I did. And that started to feel very normal.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Yeah, So like roll back to GeoCities and I'm going
to tell you what's going on a tripod.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
Right.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
So, so our biggest rival geo cities is West Coast.
We're East Coast. So there's beef. We know each other,
we're you know, we're in touch with one another. But
we're all trying the same ideas. We try a subscription service.
We've got it. You know, you can sign up, you
can get extra space, you can get premium customer service.
Nobody wants that. We try merch We make the tea shirts,
(04:46):
we make the hats. We're psyched that people want to
identify with Tripod. We think that's a way that we're
going to go. We go with sponsorship. We actually have
sponsors who are like these are probably high school and
college students. You know what high school and college students
really love is mutual funds. Calvert Mutual Funds comes on
and says, we want to sponsor people to go and
(05:08):
get mutual funds. The only thing that works for us
dexter is advertising, and the whole industry moves there at
the same time and at a certain point, if you're
trying something new, if you're trying a different business model,
your pitch to an investor gets very tricky. What the
(05:29):
investors want to hear is how many page views are
you getting a month and how fast is it growing?
And because we have eighteen million people like you who
put home pages on the site, we are getting the
eighth most page views on the Internet and it's growing
something like ten percent a month. And companies like Yahoo
(05:51):
are coming and knocking on our door and saying we
would like to do some business. We are like, you know,
kids in our twenties in the top floor of a
plastic factory in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and like Jerry Yang from
Yahoo is calling us, and we're like, yeah, I guess
advertising is the way to go.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
So advertising is the way to go might not be
the most idealistic phrase ever, but again, advertising made Tripod work,
and it also made some pretty interesting things possible.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
The other thing it's an amazing model for is for
people who are unbanked, who are not part of the
mainstream financial system, who are in countries where the amounts
of money would be very challenging. One thing you probably
did not know when you were fooling around with that
Tripod homepage is that our number two country for users
(06:46):
was Malaysia. And what was going on in Malaysia at
that point was most of the political opposition was using
Tripod to organize and it became the voice of the
Malaysian REFORMASSEI movement, And those folks might have been able
to afford official websites somewhere, but they weren't really set
(07:08):
up for transacting with Malaysian users. They probably didn't have
credit cards, they didn't have the payment mechanisms. So advertising
is a great way to help out people who are
coming from different parts of the world, who have different resources.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
It wasn't just Tripod. Advertising became the default model for
supporting publishing on the Internet, which shouldn't be surprising. They
were just adapting what print magazines and newspapers were doing.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Ads at this point are being sold by what's called CPM,
and CPM is cost per mill which you know, confusingly enough,
is cost per thousand, right. It's a term coming out
of the newspaper and magazine industry, And so if you
want to buy a page in Wired, for instance, you're
(07:54):
basically being told by Wired, well, here's our circulation. You know,
we're reaching fifty thousand people multiply that out by the
cost per thousand that's what you're gonna pay for a page.
And Wired we come in nineteen ninety five and go,
we are so much better than that page. And Wired
you can click on our ad and it will take
you to your website and people might spend hours with you,
(08:17):
not just that moment on the page, and you can
take their name and address. So we are worth so
much more than that magazine ad. So we start out
pricing the way that magazine ads are. We're is charging
like fifty bucks for one thousand impressions. And then people
realize that there's ads all.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Over the web.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
You can go wherever you want and get ad inventory,
and so suddenly it drops to like a dollar per
thousand impressions. And then Overture, which is a company that's
affiliated with Yahoo, comes in and says, you know, the
ads that you don't click on, those shouldn't count, and
so then it moves to cost per click, and that's
(08:58):
an entirely different space. In the course of five years,
we go from ads being fifty two one hundred dollars
for one thousand impressions to being twenty five cents for
a thousand impressions to being impressions don't matter. We will
pay anywhere from a penny to ten bucks per collect
(09:20):
depending on what the ad is.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
And you know where this goes. Ads not only became
an escapable on the Internet, but as clicks become the
metric of success, you have to start listening to what
the advertisers want. And so here's the thing about Ethan.
He wasn't just a pioneer in the early dot com boom.
He helped facilitate it by figuring out a way to
keep those advertisers shilling out that money for our websites.
(09:43):
He essentially invented was now known as the pop up ad.
To be clear, he regrets that he did this the
innovation of pop up ads, and we should call it
an innovation.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
I think I'm not going to let you get away
with innovation. First of all, come up ads no, no, no, no, sorry,
I'm sorry. Pop up ads are, to use a technical term,
a Cluegi hack. It is an inelegant solution to a problem,
and unfortunately, like a lot of cluegi hacks, it still persists,
(10:15):
although thank god, not as much as it used to.
So here's the story on the pop up bed. Let's
go back to nineteen ninety six. We've got an increasing
number of user homepages. They have become the center of
our business. Tripod thought it was going to be like
a magazine and educational site for young people. My friend
Jeff Vanderklute, without my permission, I should add, puts up
(10:37):
a homepage builder. We discover a couple months later, when
our bandwidth bill has gone through the ceiling, that it
is the most popular thing on our site. So it's
completely accidental. We get into the business completely by accident.
But by nineteen ninety six, my boss Bo Peebet understands
that this is the tail that's wagging the dog. He
understands that this is where our growth is coming from.
(10:59):
And he's trying to sell ad inventory on this. And
we've got ad execs going out and they are showing
random homepages with ads on them, and often those ads
are showing up on content that the advertisers do not
want to be associated with. Sometimes it's extremism, sometimes it's pornography.
(11:20):
It is the web, right and unfortunately, you know, the
Internet has been an if he placed going back into
the nineteen seventies, so Bo comes to me and says, look,
we got to run ads against the homepages. But as
long as the ad is on the homepage, the advertiser
feels like they're endorsing them. What can you do? And
(11:42):
I invent the nav bar. The navbar is a vertical panel.
It has a two hundred by two hundred add on it,
It has Tripod branding, it has some navigation links, and
so it's like, hey, here's Dexter's homepage, but also here's
some Tripod branding, some navigation. Oh and by the way,
an ad. And they're separate windows. So it's very clear
(12:05):
that the ad is against Tripod and your homepage is
your space.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
So the pop up ad was created to solve a problem.
Advertisers were scared that their ads would show up somewhere unsavory,
and the pop up helped to alleviate that fear by
creating that separation so that they would keep that money flowing.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
And I'm like, this is great, I've worked it out.
It's a solution. We put up the little piece of JavaScript,
we insert it into every one of the homepages that's
out there. We got a little pushback. People are sort
of like, you know, what's going on? Why is there
this extra weird window here, But we don't get a
ton of pushback. Your guys at GeoCities take my code,
(12:43):
they turn it from vertical into horizontal. They take my
polite little two hundred by two hundred AD and they
turn it into you a full withd like seven hundred
pixel AD and there's no branding or anything. It's just
an AD. So I do the first pop up, and
it is a pop up AD. So I'm absolutely owning
(13:04):
up to it. But it was trying to be maybe
a bit more than that. The essence of it gets
stripped down to a pop up AD, and then it's
off to the races, right like then people are doing
these pop unders. They're doing pop ups that can't be minimized,
so on and so forth, and you have really the
scourge of the nineteen nineties and early two thousands internet.
(13:27):
And let me just say just to be clear on this.
When we were talking before this interview, I told you
I did not want to do an interview on pop
up ads. And part of it is that it's a
little too easy. It's a little like you know, look,
it's the Robert Oppenheimer of the Internet who hates his creation.
Let me be honest with you, Dexter, I get hate mail.
(13:48):
Every time someone writes a story. I get death threats.
I have a relationship with my local police department in
this small town in western Massachusetts where they know not
to call a swap team to my residence because almost
every time I do an interview on pop ups that
gets some exposure, we get an arm response call. So
(14:11):
it's a thing, and it's interesting. It's definitely the sort
of thing that I did not anticipate, either when building
the pop up or twenty years later, owning up to
building the pop up and talking about it as a problem.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Seeing all the anger that gets directed in Ethan is.
Aside from being really terrifying, it's also kind of confusing
because really you're mad about pop ups in twenty twenty six, like,
are you still dialing up from your mom's dell in
the living room?
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Yell?
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Are mad at the wrong dude? Because first off, pop
ups didn't even last that long. We're going to come
back to that later, but the industry has long since
moved on to something that has zero to do with
what anyone at tripod dot com could ever even thought
of back then. Traditional banner ads, which again, this is
the thing that Ethan was trying to replace. Those came back,
(15:01):
and they came back stronger. Remember, the original problem was
that banner ads might be irrelevant to the website that
they were on, and thus irrelevant to you, the user.
But the industry figured out how to make those ads
much more relevant to you by watching everything you do
on the Internet. And this is where Ethan started thinking
a little differently.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
The problem with advertising, as I see it, is that
the people who have been trying to make money out
of advertising have tried to add every possible piece of
information to the equation. They want to know where you are,
They want to know where else on the Internet that
you've been, They want to know what you've done, what
(15:44):
you've searched for previously. And so they turned this Internet,
this super exciting space that we're building in the nineteen nineties,
into a surveillance machine. My friend Chan Regenda Nikolucci, and
I started looking at this and saying, what if you
could get eighty percent of what you wanted with so
(16:05):
much less of the surveillance.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Suddenly Ethan had a new mission to keep the lights
on the Internet without having to sell out your audience.
That's after the break. So years later, Ethan sees how
the Internet has grown into a surveillance machine, partially in
(16:30):
service of the advertising that still drives the Internet, and
he started to think, could we do anything about this?
Speaker 1 (16:37):
My attitude in some ways is, well, can't we just
end advertising?
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Right? Like?
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Advertisings a terrible model. We're paying with our attention. But
here's the thing about ads. Ads turn out to be
a fantastic model for a product or service that you
don't know that you're willing to pay for yet. So
imagine that someone is launching something new. Right, Someone in
(17:04):
Western Massachusetts where I live, says, I don't like the
way local media is working. I'm going to create a
new news product. It's going to be video first, and
it's going to be put together by citizens. And I'm like, well,
that might be interesting, but I'm not ready to put
up ten bucks a month for it. Let me see
how it's going first, and under the let me see
(17:24):
how it's going first. Advertising is a great model.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Okay, It's probably not realistic to think that the Internet
could ever be totally free of ads, especially if the
content is being provided for free. I mean, somebody has
to get paid, right. So a few years ago, Ethan
and a colleague came up with a new proposal. If
ads are going to be on the Internet, and they're
crucial for it to function, could we make them somehow
more ethical.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
And I'm going to get very personal about this for
a moment, because it's the example that we actually use
in the paper. I am an alcoholic. I am nine
years sober, but well through my twenties, thirties, forties, I
drank all and I was one of those drinkers where
it was like part of my personality, Like I collected
scotches and you know, I researched the interesting bourbons, and
(18:11):
so there's a whole digital trail associated with me as
a drinker. I go on to Twitter, and Twitter loves
advertising booze to me. They love putting up ads trying
to get me to buy a nice, high end bourbon.
I can't escape that data doppelganger. I can't escape that
(18:35):
other drunk version of myself, even though I'm now off
into the future. What we end up saying is that
you do have a right to be forgotten, not in
the sense of like you have a right necessarily be
scrubbed off the Internet. But you have a right to
change your mind. And so what we end up proposing
is forgetful advertising, and forgetful advertising basically says you can
(18:57):
know anything about me in this one session. You can
look at the different pages that I go to on
the website. You can look at the time, you can
look at the date, you can look at the location,
you can look at what I'm searching for. You can
look at the context of those pages and use that
to target an ad. What you cannot do is look
at what I was looking at a month ago, a
(19:18):
year ago, ten years ago. And we think that, yeah,
it'll be less accurate, but we think it's a more
ethical way to do it. And we end up suggesting
that it's something like free trade coffee. There are some
percentage of people who are willing to pay the money
to make sure that human beings aren't being exploited, you know,
(19:39):
for the product that we're drinking every morning. And so
what we were thinking was maybe there will be websites
that are willing to say we're going to do this.
I'll tell you my first attempt on this was The Guardian,
the British newspaper. They run all of these expos's on
online surveillance, they run all the stuff about Edward Snowden,
(20:04):
and I end up in a session with the publisher there,
Alan Russbritcher, and I say, Alan, I'm looking at these
stories on the Guardian and here are sixty trackers that
are sending the information. Then I'm looking at this on
the Guardian like it's time for you to get rid
of these things. You reading the Edward Snowden article and
there's trackers again. Yeah, but just the irony of that,
(20:26):
Like it feels like if you're going to be The
Guardian and a validly progressive publication, you might decide I
might opt out of this form of advertising and into
a more ethical form of advertising.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Okay, so I just want to echo the last thing
you said, ethical form of advertising. Might have remind you
that those are not.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Where it's the go together very often.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Yeah, ethical and advertising. I can't think of the last
time somebody said that to me.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Let's explore it for half a second, right, So let's
go and be Google for a bit. Okay, it's the
middle of winter here in western Massachusetts. My roof is leaking,
because everybody's roof is leaking. I go onto Google and
I search roof repair Pittsfield, Massachusetts. There are a whole
bunch of roofing contractors who really want my phone call,
(21:18):
and they want my phone call because so I call
them up. There's a decent chance that they're going to
make five to ten thousand dollars fixing my roof. That
ad click is worth anywhere between five and fifty bucks
in cost per customer acquisition. Google loves that ad click,
and frankly, some of the advertisers, the advertisers are like, man,
(21:40):
here is a qualified lead outside of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to
go repair a roof. That's ethical advertising, right, That is
advertising that actually helps both me, somebody looking for a service,
someone trying to provide a service, and the broker in
the middle of those things. It is surveillance. It is
(22:00):
aware that I am near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, so there is
a certain amount of surveillance, but it's actually meeting a need.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
In their paper on Forgetful Advertising, Ethan and his colleague
talk about what they call a DPI, a digital public infrastructure.
So think of it like this, Facebook and Google ad
Sense might just started out as little tools that could
help you talk to your college friends or maybe help
you sell t shirts. But nowadays, if you want to
sell anything online you have to use those platforms. There
(22:31):
really is no alternative. I mean, imagine if the only
way to drive from Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles
was to take a toll road. You can't bike, you
can't walk, you can't take a bus, you can't take
a train, You can only take that expensive toll road.
There should be an alternative Forgetful advertising is just alternative infrastructure. Again,
they're not saying that they want to abolish Google ad Sense,
(22:54):
They're just building another option for people who prefer something,
as Ethan would put it, more ethical. But Ethan's work
on fixing the Internet doesn't stop there. He's got another idea,
and believe it or not, it kind of goes back
to that hack that he's most famous for.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Here's the interesting thing. Unless you are hanging out in
certain corners of the Internet and man that's between you
and your browser, you are probably not seeing a lot
of pop up ads these stays. And there's a couple
of reasons behind that. The first one is that every
modern web browser has a feature to allow you to
(23:34):
block pop up ads, and that is the simplest example
of middleware that we know of. So middleware is software
that you, as a user can install on your web
browser or potentially on your phone to give you more
(23:54):
control over a service. So the classic piece of middleware
is a pop up blocker, which is, hey, this site
wants to open a window. You can choose not to
have that opened if you prefer. So, first of all,
it actually shows us that things can get better. We're
not so much drowning and pop ups. We're now drowning
(24:16):
and other stuff. We're drowning in video AutoPlay ads. Sites
like Facebook work very actively to disable ad blockers, but
pop ups and ads in general were really the first
time that users were sort of like, you know what,
we actually need some more control in this situation. So
(24:37):
let's start building the software that gives us increasing amounts
of control.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
And even once you use this concept of middleware to
fix social media, we'll explain how after the break. So
I just want to read back to you a headline
(25:04):
of an article that you wrote in twenty twenty four.
The headline reads, I love Facebook. That's why I'm suing Meta. Yeah, either,
please explain this to me. I guess I can come
across as kind of aggressive every so often.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
So I'm a Facebook user. I use it pretty much
every day. I got married thanks to Facebook. Tenish years ago.
I was divorced. I reconnected with a college friend of mine.
She was living in Houston, Texas. I was out in
western Massachusetts. But I looked her up on Facebook and
we started chatting and I invited her to talk that
(25:40):
I was giving down at Rice University. Seven years later,
we're married. So thank you Facebook. You know, I appreciate that,
and I think as far as keeping people loosely in
touch with one another, particularly you know, for me as
a gen xer, it's actually been an incredible tool. However, Comma,
(26:00):
like everything else, it is becoming more and more algorithmically driven.
And these days on Facebook, I am a lot less
likely to be seeing updates from my friends about their kids.
I instead get a lot of reels just trying to
capture as much of my attention as possible. And so
(26:20):
I got really interested in this idea that maybe I
could have more control over Facebook. Friend of mine in
the UK, guy named Louis Barclay, wrote a piece of
software called unfollow everything. It did something super simple. It
went into Facebook. It kept your whole friend's graph. It
(26:41):
just said I'm going to unfollow all of them, and
eventually what you end up with is an empty feed.
You just don't have anyone that you're following anymore. People
liked it, Louie liked it, other people started using it,
and Facebook said, Louis, you got to take this down
otherwise we're going to come after you and you court.
And by the way, that long click rap agreement that
(27:05):
you signed onto makes you responsible for our legal fees.
So what Facebook's contract in the UK says that if
you lose litigation against them, you are responsible for the
legal fees incurred by Facebook. Wow. So Louis looks at
this and says, yeah, I'm not taking that gamble. I
(27:29):
could be financially ruined. But he goes to a group
called the Night First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and
they say, what if we tried to do this again
in the United States? And I said, you know, I
love this idea because this is an example of middleware.
So Night First Amendments that comes to me and says,
(27:51):
do you want to try to put this in front
of a federal court, and the idea is, I will
put together an experiment. The experiment is we will recruit
a whole bunch of users, they will try using an
updated version of unfollow Everything, and they will let us
know whether they like that experience, and we will study
(28:12):
whether it changes how much they use Facebook. We then
brought it to a federal court and said, hey, we
want to do this. The last time someone did this,
Facebook came down on them like a ton of bricks.
Before we invest our time and money on this, we'd
like a ruling that this is legal. The federal court said, nice,
tryprof You're asking us to rule on something that hasn't
(28:36):
happened yet. That's not how the US court system works.
Build something and we'll let you know what happens. So
I have now been in the process of trying to
figure out how to build what my friend Louie built.
The trick is in the couple of years since Louie
built that software, Facebook has put a lot of people
(28:59):
working on making middlewhere impossible. Specifically, the middleware that they
care about is ad blockers, and they have a whole
team working to make it almost impossible to block ads.
On Facebook, and the same techniques that I need to
use to do and follow everything are the same techniques
that ad blockers use. So we're still very much engaged
(29:23):
in battle. But it's me and a couple of brave
students that ums Amherst versus Facebook, all of its resources
and all of its lawyers.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
I don't know too many people who are willing to
go against Meta like that, but if this thing that
Ethan is working on comes out, I would try it.
I mean, this would be the one thing that could
bring me back to Facebook. But Ethan isn't advocating for
everyone to just sit back and wait for him to
swoop in and save the day. There are things that
you and me can do right now for ourselves. It's
just going to take some work.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
So the funny thing is you can do things about
it right So here's a couple of things you can
do about it. A lot of people have gotten off
of Twitter because Twitter is now controlled by a right
wing extremist troll and it is not the community that.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
It used to be.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
When people get off Twitter, they tend to go one
of two different places, and they actually have both really
good things to talk about with them. Blue Sky has
a lot of the functionality that Twitter used to have,
and it's got some very cool functionality around being able
to do custom feeds. You can go into Blue Sky
and you can actually have a lot of control, very
(30:39):
much like middleware, except that it's actually built into the tool.
It's built in as a function. People are using their
ability to do feeds to do very focused collections. There's
a collection called Black Sky for people who are trying
to get more color in their Twitter feeds. There are
people doing it to push women, to push voices from
the developing world. It's a really exciting set of tools
(31:04):
and I'm a huge supporter of it. The trick is
Blue Sky is still run by a corporation. They're subject
to the laws of capitalism, so on and so forth.
So let me introduce you to mastadon. Mastodon is an
open source alternative to Twitter. You can run a mast
it on server on your own server. You probably don't
want to. It's a decent amount of work, but I
(31:25):
am part of a group called social dot co Op.
This is a masked it on server that is run
as a co op. I pay seventy five bucks a
year for my membership to it. The leadership of it,
the people who do moderation. It is elected out of
the community. People are asked to put in volunteer time
to take on moderation duties at different points. It is
(31:47):
a different model for doing this. The trick is these
models are small. They're getting used by a couple million people,
not by two billion people. These models don't have ad budgets.
They're not going out and buying Super Bowl ads. And
(32:07):
we got to tell the story. We got to get
on podcasts and tell people that there's another way to
do this. It doesn't have to suck as bad as
it does. It really doesn't. So here are three things
that we can do. We need to force these big
platforms to allow for middlework. We need to make it
(32:30):
a law that you can use something to give you
more control over TikTok or Facebook or something along those lines. Second,
we would do interoperability, so if you don't want to
use TikTok's app to see TikTok, you can still get
the content out of it, but you can do it
(32:51):
through a browser on your phone that you control. And
then third, we got to get people psyched about building
and governing their own online spaces. Right now, social dot
co op is not a good alternative to Twitter or
(33:12):
to blue Sky. There just aren't enough people on mastadon.
But if I have a client on my phone that
I control and I can merge them all together, Hey,
let me see what people are talking about on Twitter,
let me see Facebook, let me see Insta, let me
see all of it and my own little social network
at the same place. And I can go in and say,
you know what, and prioritize my local news and you
(33:34):
know what, I'm probably not hearing enough from women in
the global South, So you know, adding a feed like that,
now I've got my custom feed. It's local, it's prioritizing
the voices I want to hear, it's incorporating all of
these things. This is technically possible. We have shown we
can do it. It is a policy issue, and it
(33:57):
is a policy issue that's very hard to make progress
on in the United States because these very powerful platforms
are run by men who are sitting with Donald Trump
at his inauguration period. These companies figured out that they
needed to stay on the right side of the most
(34:19):
powerful person in the United States right now, so that
we don't get a better internet.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
What you're talking about is I mean even the phrase
a better Internet. I mean, I'm sure you've seen that
a lot of people's solution is just get off of
social media. It's really interesting to me that you're actually
advocating for in some ways basically saving social media for
people who are trying to leave it.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Social media is worth saving. I'm a Type one diabetic.
I'm an insulin dependent diabetic. I've had diabetes since I
was thirteen years old. I'm fifty three years old. Now
my body's changing. I'm trying to figure out how to
manage my diabetes, lose way, keep up my running. And
one of the things that I rely on to do
(35:05):
this is the t one D community on Reddit, where
I can come on and say, hey, I go for
runs in the morning and my blood sugar goes up.
What's up with that? And someone comes in and says,
it's called a cortisol dump. Here's the scientific paper on it.
Find out more about it. That is the Internet that
I fell in love with in nineteen eighty nine when
I showed up at my university and discovered that I
(35:27):
could log onto incredible amounts of information out there. The
Internet I love is the Internet that I was able
to turn to and say, hey, I wonder where Amy
is these days, and reconnect with her and seven years
later get married. It is the internet where queer and
trans kids in my community can go online and find
(35:51):
people who are going through the same experiences that they're
going through in high school, find out about the summer
camps that they can go to, and they can bond
with other trans us. This is what social media should
be about. Social media doesn't have to be terrible, and
it is not our fault. It has become terrible because
(36:15):
some very powerful people with some very good financial motivations
have figured out how to make money off it being terrible.
But it will continue to be terrible until we take
responsibility for it not being terrible.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
I have started to hate social media. I've basically stopped
using it, which has been pretty good for my mental health,
but it also means that it's much harder for me
to stay in tune what my parents or my other
family members are into. So what if we could just
plug something into social media and make it a little
bit better. What if Ethan's middleware project could make you say,
you know what, I can tolerate Facebook now It's probably
(36:58):
not the only solution, and it might not be for everyone,
but I do think that it's an option that, at
the very least we should be allowed to try. Anyway,
that's it for this one. And by the way, if
you like this episode and you want to know more
about why it is that the Internet got so bad,
check out my interview with Tim Woo. The link for that,
plus links to Ethan's work, is in the show notes.
(37:22):
Thank you again to Ethan for breaking all this down
for us, and thank you once again for listening to
another episode at kill Switch. If you want to talk,
you can email us at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC,
or on Instagram. We're at kill switchpod. And if you
dug this one, I think someone else might like it too,
you could send it to them, or if you're too
shy to share us with your friends, you could write
(37:44):
a review. It helps other people find the show, which
helps us keep doing our thing. Kill Switch is hosted
by Me Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Shena Ozaki, dar
Luck Potts, and Julia Nutter. A theme song is by
me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixed the show.
From Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Oswa Lashin One Guest
Shot to Gadur and Kate Osborne from iHeart. Our executive
(38:06):
producers are Katrina Norville and Nikki Detour. Catch on the
next one, Goodbye,
In the nineteen nineties, we had this idea that the
Internet was just this open space and we could try
all sorts of nonsense there. Piero Midjar wants to sell
his pez collection, and you end up with eBay, and
then people realize that people are ripping each other off
on eBay, and so you end up with an escro service,
and that turns into PayPal, and like, all these things happen,
(00:33):
and they happen really really fast. I want us to
get back to that moment of thinking things are possible.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Ethan Zuckerman is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
He's also something of an Internet activist, and.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
I work on a whole lot of projects trying to
make the Internet a better place, which I still believe
can happen despite all the evidence of the contrary.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
You know what, you may be one of the last
soldiers standing on that battlefield.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
I know, man, I know, I know it's a lonely
place to be. But you know, the great thing about
being a professor is that I can try to win
over students to the cause, and every so often, you know,
we get a win. Every so often. People are excited
about this idea that things actually can change, and I
think a lot of it just hass to do with
(01:20):
reframing our thinking.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Ethan is one of the most unusual professors I've ever
spoken to. So, first off, if you're of a certain age,
I guarantee you that you've seen his work. It might
have made you mad, It might have made you money,
it might have done both at the same time. The second,
Ethan really really likes Facebook, so much so that he
sued Facebook, and you know what, after listening to what
(01:43):
he has to say, you might want him to win
from Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is kill Switch. I'm
Dexter Thomas.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Good bye.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Ethan Zuckerman wants to fix the Internet. But before we
could talk about how he would do that, we need
to understand how we got here. We've talked about this
here before on the show, but early on the Internet
was a much more optimistic place until money basically ruined it.
If you haven't caught our episode with Tim, we'll definitely
check that one out too. So Ethan started his career
(03:08):
during those early dot com days. He was one of
the first employees at a company called Tripod, and Tripod
was most well known for being a place where you
could build your own homepage, which back then was a
really exciting thing. There were all kinds of communities popping
up online and Tripod was helping to foster that. But
in order to do that, they needed money, and so
they started looking at advertising. I was a GeoCities person. Yep,
(03:33):
that's what I was on. We're talking pre my Space here,
but I remember.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
We're talking pre my Space and that was our leading
competitor at Tripods. So I'm not going to hold that
against you, Dexter, but you know, that is a bit
of a you know, you did just a little bit
of a Yankees Mets thing there. You gotta be careful about.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
God, Hey, listen, I'm just trying to be honest with you.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
I'm just fair enough. That's where I went.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
But you know, I mean, as I was entering this
phase of Wow, there's all these other people made things,
and I would like to make things too. Very early
in that stage, I realized that that was always going
to mean there's gonna be ads next to whatever I did,
or on top of whatever I did, or inside of
whatever I did. And that started to feel very normal.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Yeah, So like roll back to GeoCities and I'm going
to tell you what's going on a tripod.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
Right.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
So, so our biggest rival geo cities is West Coast.
We're East Coast. So there's beef. We know each other,
we're you know, we're in touch with one another. But
we're all trying the same ideas. We try a subscription service.
We've got it. You know, you can sign up, you
can get extra space, you can get premium customer service.
Nobody wants that. We try merch We make the tea shirts,
(04:46):
we make the hats. We're psyched that people want to
identify with Tripod. We think that's a way that we're
going to go. We go with sponsorship. We actually have
sponsors who are like these are probably high school and
college students. You know what high school and college students
really love is mutual funds. Calvert Mutual Funds comes on
and says, we want to sponsor people to go and
(05:08):
get mutual funds. The only thing that works for us
dexter is advertising, and the whole industry moves there at
the same time and at a certain point, if you're
trying something new, if you're trying a different business model,
your pitch to an investor gets very tricky. What the
(05:29):
investors want to hear is how many page views are
you getting a month and how fast is it growing?
And because we have eighteen million people like you who
put home pages on the site, we are getting the
eighth most page views on the Internet and it's growing
something like ten percent a month. And companies like Yahoo
(05:51):
are coming and knocking on our door and saying we
would like to do some business. We are like, you know,
kids in our twenties in the top floor of a
plastic factory in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and like Jerry Yang from
Yahoo is calling us, and we're like, yeah, I guess
advertising is the way to go.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
So advertising is the way to go might not be
the most idealistic phrase ever, but again, advertising made Tripod work,
and it also made some pretty interesting things possible.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
The other thing it's an amazing model for is for
people who are unbanked, who are not part of the
mainstream financial system, who are in countries where the amounts
of money would be very challenging. One thing you probably
did not know when you were fooling around with that
Tripod homepage is that our number two country for users
(06:46):
was Malaysia. And what was going on in Malaysia at
that point was most of the political opposition was using
Tripod to organize and it became the voice of the
Malaysian REFORMASSEI movement, And those folks might have been able
to afford official websites somewhere, but they weren't really set
(07:08):
up for transacting with Malaysian users. They probably didn't have
credit cards, they didn't have the payment mechanisms. So advertising
is a great way to help out people who are
coming from different parts of the world, who have different resources.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
It wasn't just Tripod. Advertising became the default model for
supporting publishing on the Internet, which shouldn't be surprising. They
were just adapting what print magazines and newspapers were doing.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Ads at this point are being sold by what's called CPM,
and CPM is cost per mill which you know, confusingly enough,
is cost per thousand, right. It's a term coming out
of the newspaper and magazine industry, And so if you
want to buy a page in Wired, for instance, you're
(07:54):
basically being told by Wired, well, here's our circulation. You know,
we're reaching fifty thousand people multiply that out by the
cost per thousand that's what you're gonna pay for a page.
And Wired we come in nineteen ninety five and go,
we are so much better than that page. And Wired
you can click on our ad and it will take
you to your website and people might spend hours with you,
(08:17):
not just that moment on the page, and you can
take their name and address. So we are worth so
much more than that magazine ad. So we start out
pricing the way that magazine ads are. We're is charging
like fifty bucks for one thousand impressions. And then people
realize that there's ads all.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Over the web.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
You can go wherever you want and get ad inventory,
and so suddenly it drops to like a dollar per
thousand impressions. And then Overture, which is a company that's
affiliated with Yahoo, comes in and says, you know, the
ads that you don't click on, those shouldn't count, and
so then it moves to cost per click, and that's
(08:58):
an entirely different space. In the course of five years,
we go from ads being fifty two one hundred dollars
for one thousand impressions to being twenty five cents for
a thousand impressions to being impressions don't matter. We will
pay anywhere from a penny to ten bucks per collect
(09:20):
depending on what the ad is.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
And you know where this goes. Ads not only became
an escapable on the Internet, but as clicks become the
metric of success, you have to start listening to what
the advertisers want. And so here's the thing about Ethan.
He wasn't just a pioneer in the early dot com boom.
He helped facilitate it by figuring out a way to
keep those advertisers shilling out that money for our websites.
(09:43):
He essentially invented was now known as the pop up ad.
To be clear, he regrets that he did this the
innovation of pop up ads, and we should call it
an innovation.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
I think I'm not going to let you get away
with innovation. First of all, come up ads no, no, no, no, sorry,
I'm sorry. Pop up ads are, to use a technical term,
a Cluegi hack. It is an inelegant solution to a problem,
and unfortunately, like a lot of cluegi hacks, it still persists,
(10:15):
although thank god, not as much as it used to.
So here's the story on the pop up bed. Let's
go back to nineteen ninety six. We've got an increasing
number of user homepages. They have become the center of
our business. Tripod thought it was going to be like
a magazine and educational site for young people. My friend
Jeff Vanderklute, without my permission, I should add, puts up
(10:37):
a homepage builder. We discover a couple months later, when
our bandwidth bill has gone through the ceiling, that it
is the most popular thing on our site. So it's
completely accidental. We get into the business completely by accident.
But by nineteen ninety six, my boss Bo Peebet understands
that this is the tail that's wagging the dog. He
understands that this is where our growth is coming from.
(10:59):
And he's trying to sell ad inventory on this. And
we've got ad execs going out and they are showing
random homepages with ads on them, and often those ads
are showing up on content that the advertisers do not
want to be associated with. Sometimes it's extremism, sometimes it's pornography.
(11:20):
It is the web, right and unfortunately, you know, the
Internet has been an if he placed going back into
the nineteen seventies, so Bo comes to me and says, look,
we got to run ads against the homepages. But as
long as the ad is on the homepage, the advertiser
feels like they're endorsing them. What can you do? And
(11:42):
I invent the nav bar. The navbar is a vertical panel.
It has a two hundred by two hundred add on it,
It has Tripod branding, it has some navigation links, and
so it's like, hey, here's Dexter's homepage, but also here's
some Tripod branding, some navigation. Oh and by the way,
an ad. And they're separate windows. So it's very clear
(12:05):
that the ad is against Tripod and your homepage is
your space.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
So the pop up ad was created to solve a problem.
Advertisers were scared that their ads would show up somewhere unsavory,
and the pop up helped to alleviate that fear by
creating that separation so that they would keep that money flowing.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
And I'm like, this is great, I've worked it out.
It's a solution. We put up the little piece of JavaScript,
we insert it into every one of the homepages that's
out there. We got a little pushback. People are sort
of like, you know, what's going on? Why is there
this extra weird window here, But we don't get a
ton of pushback. Your guys at GeoCities take my code,
(12:43):
they turn it from vertical into horizontal. They take my
polite little two hundred by two hundred AD and they
turn it into you a full withd like seven hundred
pixel AD and there's no branding or anything. It's just
an AD. So I do the first pop up, and
it is a pop up AD. So I'm absolutely owning
(13:04):
up to it. But it was trying to be maybe
a bit more than that. The essence of it gets
stripped down to a pop up AD, and then it's
off to the races, right like then people are doing
these pop unders. They're doing pop ups that can't be minimized,
so on and so forth, and you have really the
scourge of the nineteen nineties and early two thousands internet.
(13:27):
And let me just say just to be clear on this.
When we were talking before this interview, I told you
I did not want to do an interview on pop
up ads. And part of it is that it's a
little too easy. It's a little like you know, look,
it's the Robert Oppenheimer of the Internet who hates his creation.
Let me be honest with you, Dexter, I get hate mail.
(13:48):
Every time someone writes a story. I get death threats.
I have a relationship with my local police department in
this small town in western Massachusetts where they know not
to call a swap team to my residence because almost
every time I do an interview on pop ups that
gets some exposure, we get an arm response call. So
(14:11):
it's a thing, and it's interesting. It's definitely the sort
of thing that I did not anticipate, either when building
the pop up or twenty years later, owning up to
building the pop up and talking about it as a problem.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Seeing all the anger that gets directed in Ethan is.
Aside from being really terrifying, it's also kind of confusing
because really you're mad about pop ups in twenty twenty six, like,
are you still dialing up from your mom's dell in
the living room?
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Yell?
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Are mad at the wrong dude? Because first off, pop
ups didn't even last that long. We're going to come
back to that later, but the industry has long since
moved on to something that has zero to do with
what anyone at tripod dot com could ever even thought
of back then. Traditional banner ads, which again, this is
the thing that Ethan was trying to replace. Those came back,
(15:01):
and they came back stronger. Remember, the original problem was
that banner ads might be irrelevant to the website that
they were on, and thus irrelevant to you, the user.
But the industry figured out how to make those ads
much more relevant to you by watching everything you do
on the Internet. And this is where Ethan started thinking
a little differently.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
The problem with advertising, as I see it, is that
the people who have been trying to make money out
of advertising have tried to add every possible piece of
information to the equation. They want to know where you are,
They want to know where else on the Internet that
you've been, They want to know what you've done, what
(15:44):
you've searched for previously. And so they turned this Internet,
this super exciting space that we're building in the nineteen nineties,
into a surveillance machine. My friend Chan Regenda Nikolucci, and
I started looking at this and saying, what if you
could get eighty percent of what you wanted with so
(16:05):
much less of the surveillance.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Suddenly Ethan had a new mission to keep the lights
on the Internet without having to sell out your audience.
That's after the break. So years later, Ethan sees how
the Internet has grown into a surveillance machine, partially in
(16:30):
service of the advertising that still drives the Internet, and
he started to think, could we do anything about this?
Speaker 1 (16:37):
My attitude in some ways is, well, can't we just
end advertising?
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Right? Like?
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Advertisings a terrible model. We're paying with our attention. But
here's the thing about ads. Ads turn out to be
a fantastic model for a product or service that you
don't know that you're willing to pay for yet. So
imagine that someone is launching something new. Right, Someone in
(17:04):
Western Massachusetts where I live, says, I don't like the
way local media is working. I'm going to create a
new news product. It's going to be video first, and
it's going to be put together by citizens. And I'm like, well,
that might be interesting, but I'm not ready to put
up ten bucks a month for it. Let me see
how it's going first, and under the let me see
(17:24):
how it's going first. Advertising is a great model.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Okay, It's probably not realistic to think that the Internet
could ever be totally free of ads, especially if the
content is being provided for free. I mean, somebody has
to get paid, right. So a few years ago, Ethan
and a colleague came up with a new proposal. If
ads are going to be on the Internet, and they're
crucial for it to function, could we make them somehow
more ethical.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
And I'm going to get very personal about this for
a moment, because it's the example that we actually use
in the paper. I am an alcoholic. I am nine
years sober, but well through my twenties, thirties, forties, I
drank all and I was one of those drinkers where
it was like part of my personality, Like I collected
scotches and you know, I researched the interesting bourbons, and
(18:11):
so there's a whole digital trail associated with me as
a drinker. I go on to Twitter, and Twitter loves
advertising booze to me. They love putting up ads trying
to get me to buy a nice, high end bourbon.
I can't escape that data doppelganger. I can't escape that
(18:35):
other drunk version of myself, even though I'm now off
into the future. What we end up saying is that
you do have a right to be forgotten, not in
the sense of like you have a right necessarily be
scrubbed off the Internet. But you have a right to
change your mind. And so what we end up proposing
is forgetful advertising, and forgetful advertising basically says you can
(18:57):
know anything about me in this one session. You can
look at the different pages that I go to on
the website. You can look at the time, you can
look at the date, you can look at the location,
you can look at what I'm searching for. You can
look at the context of those pages and use that
to target an ad. What you cannot do is look
at what I was looking at a month ago, a
(19:18):
year ago, ten years ago. And we think that, yeah,
it'll be less accurate, but we think it's a more
ethical way to do it. And we end up suggesting
that it's something like free trade coffee. There are some
percentage of people who are willing to pay the money
to make sure that human beings aren't being exploited, you know,
(19:39):
for the product that we're drinking every morning. And so
what we were thinking was maybe there will be websites
that are willing to say we're going to do this.
I'll tell you my first attempt on this was The Guardian,
the British newspaper. They run all of these expos's on
online surveillance, they run all the stuff about Edward Snowden,
(20:04):
and I end up in a session with the publisher there,
Alan Russbritcher, and I say, Alan, I'm looking at these
stories on the Guardian and here are sixty trackers that
are sending the information. Then I'm looking at this on
the Guardian like it's time for you to get rid
of these things. You reading the Edward Snowden article and
there's trackers again. Yeah, but just the irony of that,
(20:26):
Like it feels like if you're going to be The
Guardian and a validly progressive publication, you might decide I
might opt out of this form of advertising and into
a more ethical form of advertising.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Okay, so I just want to echo the last thing
you said, ethical form of advertising. Might have remind you
that those are not.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Where it's the go together very often.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Yeah, ethical and advertising. I can't think of the last
time somebody said that to me.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Let's explore it for half a second, right, So let's
go and be Google for a bit. Okay, it's the
middle of winter here in western Massachusetts. My roof is leaking,
because everybody's roof is leaking. I go onto Google and
I search roof repair Pittsfield, Massachusetts. There are a whole
bunch of roofing contractors who really want my phone call,
(21:18):
and they want my phone call because so I call
them up. There's a decent chance that they're going to
make five to ten thousand dollars fixing my roof. That
ad click is worth anywhere between five and fifty bucks
in cost per customer acquisition. Google loves that ad click,
and frankly, some of the advertisers, the advertisers are like, man,
(21:40):
here is a qualified lead outside of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to
go repair a roof. That's ethical advertising, right, That is
advertising that actually helps both me, somebody looking for a service,
someone trying to provide a service, and the broker in
the middle of those things. It is surveillance. It is
(22:00):
aware that I am near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, so there is
a certain amount of surveillance, but it's actually meeting a need.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
In their paper on Forgetful Advertising, Ethan and his colleague
talk about what they call a DPI, a digital public infrastructure.
So think of it like this, Facebook and Google ad
Sense might just started out as little tools that could
help you talk to your college friends or maybe help
you sell t shirts. But nowadays, if you want to
sell anything online you have to use those platforms. There
(22:31):
really is no alternative. I mean, imagine if the only
way to drive from Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles
was to take a toll road. You can't bike, you
can't walk, you can't take a bus, you can't take
a train, You can only take that expensive toll road.
There should be an alternative Forgetful advertising is just alternative infrastructure. Again,
they're not saying that they want to abolish Google ad Sense,
(22:54):
They're just building another option for people who prefer something,
as Ethan would put it, more ethical. But Ethan's work
on fixing the Internet doesn't stop there. He's got another idea,
and believe it or not, it kind of goes back
to that hack that he's most famous for.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Here's the interesting thing. Unless you are hanging out in
certain corners of the Internet and man that's between you
and your browser, you are probably not seeing a lot
of pop up ads these stays. And there's a couple
of reasons behind that. The first one is that every
modern web browser has a feature to allow you to
(23:34):
block pop up ads, and that is the simplest example
of middleware that we know of. So middleware is software
that you, as a user can install on your web
browser or potentially on your phone to give you more
(23:54):
control over a service. So the classic piece of middleware
is a pop up blocker, which is, hey, this site
wants to open a window. You can choose not to
have that opened if you prefer. So, first of all,
it actually shows us that things can get better. We're
not so much drowning and pop ups. We're now drowning
(24:16):
and other stuff. We're drowning in video AutoPlay ads. Sites
like Facebook work very actively to disable ad blockers, but
pop ups and ads in general were really the first
time that users were sort of like, you know what,
we actually need some more control in this situation. So
(24:37):
let's start building the software that gives us increasing amounts
of control.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
And even once you use this concept of middleware to
fix social media, we'll explain how after the break. So
I just want to read back to you a headline
(25:04):
of an article that you wrote in twenty twenty four.
The headline reads, I love Facebook. That's why I'm suing Meta. Yeah, either,
please explain this to me. I guess I can come
across as kind of aggressive every so often.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
So I'm a Facebook user. I use it pretty much
every day. I got married thanks to Facebook. Tenish years ago.
I was divorced. I reconnected with a college friend of mine.
She was living in Houston, Texas. I was out in
western Massachusetts. But I looked her up on Facebook and
we started chatting and I invited her to talk that
(25:40):
I was giving down at Rice University. Seven years later,
we're married. So thank you Facebook. You know, I appreciate that,
and I think as far as keeping people loosely in
touch with one another, particularly you know, for me as
a gen xer, it's actually been an incredible tool. However, Comma,
(26:00):
like everything else, it is becoming more and more algorithmically driven.
And these days on Facebook, I am a lot less
likely to be seeing updates from my friends about their kids.
I instead get a lot of reels just trying to
capture as much of my attention as possible. And so
(26:20):
I got really interested in this idea that maybe I
could have more control over Facebook. Friend of mine in
the UK, guy named Louis Barclay, wrote a piece of
software called unfollow everything. It did something super simple. It
went into Facebook. It kept your whole friend's graph. It
(26:41):
just said I'm going to unfollow all of them, and
eventually what you end up with is an empty feed.
You just don't have anyone that you're following anymore. People
liked it, Louie liked it, other people started using it,
and Facebook said, Louis, you got to take this down
otherwise we're going to come after you and you court.
And by the way, that long click rap agreement that
(27:05):
you signed onto makes you responsible for our legal fees.
So what Facebook's contract in the UK says that if
you lose litigation against them, you are responsible for the
legal fees incurred by Facebook. Wow. So Louis looks at
this and says, yeah, I'm not taking that gamble. I
(27:29):
could be financially ruined. But he goes to a group
called the Night First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and
they say, what if we tried to do this again
in the United States? And I said, you know, I
love this idea because this is an example of middleware.
So Night First Amendments that comes to me and says,
(27:51):
do you want to try to put this in front
of a federal court, and the idea is, I will
put together an experiment. The experiment is we will recruit
a whole bunch of users, they will try using an
updated version of unfollow Everything, and they will let us
know whether they like that experience, and we will study
(28:12):
whether it changes how much they use Facebook. We then
brought it to a federal court and said, hey, we
want to do this. The last time someone did this,
Facebook came down on them like a ton of bricks.
Before we invest our time and money on this, we'd
like a ruling that this is legal. The federal court said, nice,
tryprof You're asking us to rule on something that hasn't
(28:36):
happened yet. That's not how the US court system works.
Build something and we'll let you know what happens. So
I have now been in the process of trying to
figure out how to build what my friend Louie built.
The trick is in the couple of years since Louie
built that software, Facebook has put a lot of people
(28:59):
working on making middlewhere impossible. Specifically, the middleware that they
care about is ad blockers, and they have a whole
team working to make it almost impossible to block ads.
On Facebook, and the same techniques that I need to
use to do and follow everything are the same techniques
that ad blockers use. So we're still very much engaged
(29:23):
in battle. But it's me and a couple of brave
students that ums Amherst versus Facebook, all of its resources
and all of its lawyers.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
I don't know too many people who are willing to
go against Meta like that, but if this thing that
Ethan is working on comes out, I would try it.
I mean, this would be the one thing that could
bring me back to Facebook. But Ethan isn't advocating for
everyone to just sit back and wait for him to
swoop in and save the day. There are things that
you and me can do right now for ourselves. It's
just going to take some work.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
So the funny thing is you can do things about
it right So here's a couple of things you can
do about it. A lot of people have gotten off
of Twitter because Twitter is now controlled by a right
wing extremist troll and it is not the community that.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
It used to be.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
When people get off Twitter, they tend to go one
of two different places, and they actually have both really
good things to talk about with them. Blue Sky has
a lot of the functionality that Twitter used to have,
and it's got some very cool functionality around being able
to do custom feeds. You can go into Blue Sky
and you can actually have a lot of control, very
(30:39):
much like middleware, except that it's actually built into the tool.
It's built in as a function. People are using their
ability to do feeds to do very focused collections. There's
a collection called Black Sky for people who are trying
to get more color in their Twitter feeds. There are
people doing it to push women, to push voices from
the developing world. It's a really exciting set of tools
(31:04):
and I'm a huge supporter of it. The trick is
Blue Sky is still run by a corporation. They're subject
to the laws of capitalism, so on and so forth.
So let me introduce you to mastadon. Mastodon is an
open source alternative to Twitter. You can run a mast
it on server on your own server. You probably don't
want to. It's a decent amount of work, but I
(31:25):
am part of a group called social dot co Op.
This is a masked it on server that is run
as a co op. I pay seventy five bucks a
year for my membership to it. The leadership of it,
the people who do moderation. It is elected out of
the community. People are asked to put in volunteer time
to take on moderation duties at different points. It is
(31:47):
a different model for doing this. The trick is these
models are small. They're getting used by a couple million people,
not by two billion people. These models don't have ad budgets.
They're not going out and buying Super Bowl ads. And
(32:07):
we got to tell the story. We got to get
on podcasts and tell people that there's another way to
do this. It doesn't have to suck as bad as
it does. It really doesn't. So here are three things
that we can do. We need to force these big
platforms to allow for middlework. We need to make it
(32:30):
a law that you can use something to give you
more control over TikTok or Facebook or something along those lines. Second,
we would do interoperability, so if you don't want to
use TikTok's app to see TikTok, you can still get
the content out of it, but you can do it
(32:51):
through a browser on your phone that you control. And
then third, we got to get people psyched about building
and governing their own online spaces. Right now, social dot
co op is not a good alternative to Twitter or
(33:12):
to blue Sky. There just aren't enough people on mastadon.
But if I have a client on my phone that
I control and I can merge them all together, Hey,
let me see what people are talking about on Twitter,
let me see Facebook, let me see Insta, let me
see all of it and my own little social network
at the same place. And I can go in and say,
you know what, and prioritize my local news and you
(33:34):
know what, I'm probably not hearing enough from women in
the global South, So you know, adding a feed like that,
now I've got my custom feed. It's local, it's prioritizing
the voices I want to hear, it's incorporating all of
these things. This is technically possible. We have shown we
can do it. It is a policy issue, and it
(33:57):
is a policy issue that's very hard to make progress
on in the United States because these very powerful platforms
are run by men who are sitting with Donald Trump
at his inauguration period. These companies figured out that they
needed to stay on the right side of the most
(34:19):
powerful person in the United States right now, so that
we don't get a better internet.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
What you're talking about is I mean even the phrase
a better Internet. I mean, I'm sure you've seen that
a lot of people's solution is just get off of
social media. It's really interesting to me that you're actually
advocating for in some ways basically saving social media for
people who are trying to leave it.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Social media is worth saving. I'm a Type one diabetic.
I'm an insulin dependent diabetic. I've had diabetes since I
was thirteen years old. I'm fifty three years old. Now
my body's changing. I'm trying to figure out how to
manage my diabetes, lose way, keep up my running. And
one of the things that I rely on to do
(35:05):
this is the t one D community on Reddit, where
I can come on and say, hey, I go for
runs in the morning and my blood sugar goes up.
What's up with that? And someone comes in and says,
it's called a cortisol dump. Here's the scientific paper on it.
Find out more about it. That is the Internet that
I fell in love with in nineteen eighty nine when
I showed up at my university and discovered that I
(35:27):
could log onto incredible amounts of information out there. The
Internet I love is the Internet that I was able
to turn to and say, hey, I wonder where Amy
is these days, and reconnect with her and seven years
later get married. It is the internet where queer and
trans kids in my community can go online and find
(35:51):
people who are going through the same experiences that they're
going through in high school, find out about the summer
camps that they can go to, and they can bond
with other trans us. This is what social media should
be about. Social media doesn't have to be terrible, and
it is not our fault. It has become terrible because
(36:15):
some very powerful people with some very good financial motivations
have figured out how to make money off it being terrible.
But it will continue to be terrible until we take
responsibility for it not being terrible.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
I have started to hate social media. I've basically stopped
using it, which has been pretty good for my mental health,
but it also means that it's much harder for me
to stay in tune what my parents or my other
family members are into. So what if we could just
plug something into social media and make it a little
bit better. What if Ethan's middleware project could make you say,
you know what, I can tolerate Facebook now It's probably
(36:58):
not the only solution, and it might not be for everyone,
but I do think that it's an option that, at
the very least we should be allowed to try. Anyway,
that's it for this one. And by the way, if
you like this episode and you want to know more
about why it is that the Internet got so bad,
check out my interview with Tim Woo. The link for that,
plus links to Ethan's work, is in the show notes.
(37:22):
Thank you again to Ethan for breaking all this down
for us, and thank you once again for listening to
another episode at kill Switch. If you want to talk,
you can email us at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC,
or on Instagram. We're at kill switchpod. And if you
dug this one, I think someone else might like it too,
you could send it to them, or if you're too
shy to share us with your friends, you could write
(37:44):
a review. It helps other people find the show, which
helps us keep doing our thing. Kill Switch is hosted
by Me Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Shena Ozaki, dar
Luck Potts, and Julia Nutter. A theme song is by
me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixed the show.
From Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Oswa Lashin One Guest
Shot to Gadur and Kate Osborne from iHeart. Our executive
(38:06):
producers are Katrina Norville and Nikki Detour. Catch on the
next one, Goodbye,
kill switch News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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