Our guest for this episode is Brewster Kahle, a digital librarian who has spent his career intent on providing universal access to all knowledge. Kahle created the Internet’s first publishing system, Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) and two sites that help catalog the web by collecting data of books, web pages, music, television, and software: Alexa Internet and the Internet Archive. He also implemented the Wayback Machine, a digital archive of the World Wide Web.  

In this episode, Brewster talks about expanding access to the published works of humankind through creating these systems. He emphasizes the importance of archives and elucidates how his systems work on a technical level. Lastly, Brewster reflects on the evolution of the Internet and his goal to help Internet users gain more control of their privacy and what they have access to online. 

Our guest for this episode is Howard Rheingold, a critic, writer, and teacher who specializes in the cultural, social, and political implications of modern communication media. Howard wrote about the earliest personal computers at Xerox PARC, and he was also one of the early users of the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link or The WELL, an influential early online community. In 1994, he was hired as the founding executive director of HotWired. He is the author of several books, including The Virtual Community, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, and Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. 

In this conversation, Howard talks about transitioning from typewriters to computers and the potentials of virtual communities – to both serve as think tanks and form personal connections. He talks about recognizing “signals” of what was to come with telephones and computers and the early collective action that the smartphone encouraged. Finally, he describes five media literacies that everyone should master if they want to use social media well. 

Our guest for this episode is Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. Siva is a regular columnist for The Guardian as well as the author of Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford, 2018) and The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) (University of California Press, 2011), among other books. He focuses on how big tech companies – especially Google and Facebook – are permeating our lives.

In this conversation, Siva talks about the creation of Google Books and why he thinks Google was the wrong choice to be a platform that houses the world’s online library. He also talks about how authoritarian rulers have used Facebook to win elections and ties this fact into a discussion of the big tech companies’ race to become “the operating system of our lives” – and to manage everything from our houses to our minds.