What an outstanding interview with Julia Angwin. Julia Angwin is a veteran investigative reporter and publisher known for groundbreaking, data-driven stories on the power of technology over our lives. She founded The Markup in 2018, and was recently appointed as the inaugural director of the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s initiative on independent media.
Mariner has edited the interview.
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What’s one underrated big idea?
The industry we call tech has transformed into media. Their political power comes largely from their role as information gatekeepers. They are the distributors of all content — entertainment, journalism, criticism — and we should start thinking of them in that light, rather than as some kind of technical wizards with magical powers.
This is probably everybody’s answer — but AI. Last year I wrote that the big question was whether AI was too stupid and unreliable to be useful. But I would add that the benefits of AI are even more questionable now that we know it’s stealing all our water and electricity.
What could the government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t?
The top of my list would be for Congress to pass comprehensive privacy legislation and amend the Federal Privacy Act to make it a meaningful bulwark against the DOGE data thefts that occurred with impunity this year.
What book most shaped your conception of the future?
David Brin’s “The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?” was so prescient. Published in 1999, Brin foretold the exact dilemma posed by the prevalence of powerful cameras available to everyone. If we restrict the cameras to government control, he argued, we will live in a police state. If we allow everyone to have cameras, we will at least be able to counter-surveil the government and maintain an equilibrium of power.
For everyone wringing their hands about banning kids from using smartphones, I suggest reading this book and imagining what our lives would be like right now if we didn’t have the ability to film federal agents as they unleash weapons on our unarmed neighbors who have committed no crimes.
What has surprised you the most this year?
I honestly didn’t think AI was going to cause people to commit suicide. I did not understand the level to which it was creating psychosis. Kashmir Hill’s reporting on this has been so horrifying. I’ve been writing articles about tech and covering this industry for many decades, and I often have had the problem of: I’m writing about something bad, but no one’s dying, and so it’s hard to get the public to care. In this case, people are dying directly. It’s the first time that I’ve really seen a technology cause such immediate harm and it’s really, really terrifying. It should be keeping everyone awake at night.
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Mariner is envious of Ms Angwin’s ability to criticize without attitude. It is a fault of alter ego Amos.
Ancient Mariner