Revolution.Social

Revolution.Social

A podcast about the future of social media and reclaiming our digital communities. Revolution.Social is hosted by technologist and community advocate Rabble, a.k.a. Evan Henshaw-Plath — who was Twitter’s first employee and hired Jack Dorsey. In weekly interviews, Rabble will interview thought leaders, technologists, academics, and more about the need for a new social media "bill of rights." Just as the original Bill of Rights protected individual freedoms from government overreach, we need fundamental protections from corporate control and surveillance capitalism. This is the start of a conversation about what developers are building, how they're building it, and what consumers need to be asking for. Guests will include Jack Dorsey (former CEO & co-founder of Twitter); Kara Swisher (host of On with Kara Swisher, co-host of Pivot); Cory Doctorow (science fiction author & former editor of Boing Boing); and Taylor Lorenz (founder of User Mag, host of Power User).

Episodes

AI Slop Is Killing the Joy of the Internet (with Bridget Todd)

January 8, 2026 • 60 mins
Bridget Todd is the host of the podcast There Are No Girls on the Internet, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, and a longtime commentator on how platforms shape culture. And she says the rise of AI-generated videos has turned her — an OG superfan of Vine — against short-form video altogether. "I can't trust that any of these are real cats doing cute things," Bridget says. "It's completely turned me off of a kind of conten...
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[Re-Air] What's Next for Jack Dorsey After Twitter and Bluesky

January 1, 2026 • 48 mins
Happy new year to all! Today, we're re-airing the first episode of Revolution.Social, an interview with Jack Dorsey. We'll be back next week with a new interview about the future of social media. Twitter never should have been a traditional tech company, says Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey. Instead, it should have been designed as a protocol — like email, or podcasting. “That was the pure expression of it from da...
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Decentralized Social Media for 40 Million+ Users (with Bluesky’s Jay Graber)

December 18, 2025 • 42 mins
When Bluesky hit its millionth user, it had fewer than 10 employees; today, it has more than 40 million users, but only 30 workers; that means that “everyone on the team wears a lot of hats,” says Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. It also makes it much harder to comply with regulations like the new wave of age verification laws, which have been designed for Meta-sized social media companies. “There's a whole patchwork of legislation [in d...
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Team Human vs. Tech Monopolies (with Douglas Rushkoff)

December 11, 2025 • 49 mins
Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist, author, and host of the Team Human podcast, who has been advocating for human-centered technology since the early '90s. He believes venture capital turned social media into a strip mall, but that its fundamental values can be reclaimed and re-invented. “It was a wonderful chaotic thing,” Douglas says about Twitter. “It was not a mean, treacherous, troll-baiting, horrible thing … the bias was to...
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Defending Digital Rights in the Surveillance Era (with Jillian York)

December 4, 2025 • 57 mins
We need a more diverse approach to internet governance, says Jillian York, the director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). At the EFF, Jillian has studied the global impact of social media policies and advocated on behalf of global activists and others whose voices are often suppressed.  Today on Revolution.Social, she and Rabble talk about the challenges of content moderation, the i...
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Enshittification and “Breaking Kings” (with Cory Doctorow at Web Summit)

November 26, 2025 • 21 mins
In this live interview recorded in November at Web Summit 2025 in Lisbon, Cory Doctorow returns to Revolution.Social to talk about building alternatives to “enshittified” digital platforms.  "Apps are websites that are illegal to protect your privacy while you use them," Cory explains. "The reason companies are so horny to get you to use their apps is because they can't be modified in that way. No one's ever installed an ad blocker...
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"Our Mission Is To Keep Flickr Pictures Visible for 100 Years" (with George Oates)

November 20, 2025 • 53 mins
Designer, community-builder, and Flickr co-creator George Oates is now the executive director of the Flickr Foundation, which is working to preserve the platform's 21 years of photos for the next 100 years. She helped create Flickr's community guidelines, designed its nested privacy controls, and launched the Flickr Commons program, which partners with more than 100 institutions to make publicly held photography collections more ac...
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Vine Revisited and The Fight Against AI Slop

November 18, 2025 • 20 mins
Rabble and Alice Chan, Revolution.Social’s host and executive producer, talk about the launch and overwhelming reception to diVine, a new social video app that resurrects the six-second looping format of Vine and features archived original Vine content. This time, however, the app is built on open protocols and a promise to focus on real content made by real people, not AI. Within hours of announcing diVine at Web Summit in Lisbon...
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Building Human Rights Into the Social Web (with Mallory Knodel)

November 13, 2025 • 50 mins
Mallory Knodel is the executive director of the Social Web Foundation and former CTO of the Center for Democracy & Technology. Her roots go back to the activists, anarchists, and dreamers who built the open web, and then lost control of it to big business. “Especially in the smaller circles of digital human rights organizations and so on, [they] really understood that everything that they would work so hard for … could just be so ...
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How to Overthrow Dictators Without Violence (with Srđa Popović)

November 6, 2025 • 83 mins
Political activist Srđa Popović led the movement that overthrew Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević in 2000. Since then, his organization, Canvas, has trained activists in over 50 countries how to build successful nonviolent movements—and he says most people misunderstand how change actually happens. “When we start working with them, they often say, ‘Oh, I'm too busy doing things, I don't have time for planning,’” Srđa says. “If I...
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Banning Kids From Social Media Isn’t the Answer (with Pamela Wisniewski)

October 30, 2025 • 55 mins
Pamela Wisniewski is one of the leading researchers on how social media affects teens, working at the UC Berkeley-affiliated International Computer Science Institute. In an era of moral panics around youth online safety, she believes the solution is to empower teens and teach them resilience, rather than restricting them. "We treat it as if our teens should know how to act online without any kind of training," Pamela says. "We do...
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Jeff Jarvis on the Death of Mass Media, Twitter vs. UberMedia, and Section 230’s Brilliance

October 23, 2025 • 67 mins
In books like The Web We Weave and podcasts such as Intelligent Machines, journalist and educator Jeff Jarvis — formerly the director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York — has traced the history of media from the Gutenberg press to AI. And he says that today’s attempts to clamp down on the internet are nothing new. "Whenever there's an explosion of speech, those who controlled...
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Harper Reed on Building for Obama, Social Media for Bots & Why Tech Isn't Always the Solution

October 16, 2025 • 72 mins
2389 Research CEO Harper Reed was previously the CTO of President Barack Obama's 2012 reelection campaign, where he helped redefine modern political technology. Before that, he was CTO of Threadless, the crowdsourced T-shirt company that accidentally invented crowdsourcing. Harper has spent his career building systems that bring people together online—but also exploring why technology often produces unintended consequences. He re...
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“Think Like a Commoner" Author David Bollier on the Commons & Why Open Platforms Aren't Enough

October 9, 2025 • 57 mins
When a community wants to organize itself, it might decide between private ownership and state control. David Bollier has spent decades arguing that that’s a false binary, and that there is a better way: The commons. "The commons is as old as humanity," David says. "It's kind of the default setting for coordination and governance. It's just in the past 200 years or so, we've tricked ourselves into thinking that we're isolated indi...
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“The Etymology Nerd” Adam Aleksic on Algospeak, AI Slop, and the End of Writing

October 2, 2025 • 58 mins
Adam Aleksic, known to his social media followers as the “Etymology Nerd,” has built a massive audience by decoding the origins of words, accents, and memes. In his new book Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language, he talks about the ways our social media algorithms have accelerated the “context collapse” that changes the words we use. “You perceive this creator using a word like, I dunno, rizz, ate, sla...
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Rudy Fraser on Blacksky, Mutual Aid & Reclaiming Social Media

September 25, 2025 • 64 mins
Rudy Fraser is the founder of Blacksky, a community-driven project building on top of the AT Protocol while remaining independent of Bluesky, where that protocol originated. At Blacksky, he and his team are applying the principles of mutual aid and community ownership to algorithms, moderation teams, and governance tools for the Black community, giving users more control over their means of communication. “For me, community really...
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Techdirt’s Mike Masnick on Growing Bluesky, Clueless Regulators & the Case for Optimism

September 18, 2025 • 74 mins
Techdirt founder & editor Mike Masnick has long argued that the internet’s power should lie with its users. In his landmark 2019 essay, Protocols, Not Platforms, he laid out a vision for how decentralized systems could preserve free speech while avoiding the pitfalls of centralized control. That vision has since helped inspire Bluesky, where Mike now serves on the board. “Your right to free speech does not include the right to put...
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Bonus: Cory Doctorow on Sci-Fi Influences & the Social Media Bill of Rights

September 13, 2025 • 20 mins
We had more to talk about with Cory Doctorow than we could fit in this week’s episode. In this bonus ep, the science fiction author and internet rights activist talks to Rabble about being raised by science fiction in Toronto, and his one objection to the social media bill of rights: the right to “own” your connections to other people. “I think ownership's a really bad model for it because property frameworks don't work well on th...
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Cory Doctorow on Escaping Big Tech, Privacy Battles & “Enshittification”

September 11, 2025 • 68 mins
Sci-fi isn’t about hypothetical technologies, but rather about challenging the social impact of that tech, says author and activist Cory Doctorow. And in the real world, we must be just as conscious of the societal impact of the tech products we use. “Apologists for Big Tech would like you to think that all of the properties of their platforms are ... inevitably coterminal,” he says. “You cannot have a conversation with your frien...
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Taylor Lorenz on Moral Panics, Tech Villains & Protecting Free Expression

September 4, 2025 • 64 mins
Journalist and Power User host Taylor Lorenz has reported on the fall of Vine, influencers who accept "dark money," and the proliferation of far-right content on Substack, just to name a few. Today on Revolution.Social, she joins Rabble to talk about why governments, including the U.S., are advancing laws to restrict free speech online; the misleading moral panics that have led to apps being banned; and the challenges of monetizin...
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