Salvation, Abundance, Apocalypse: Is Technology the World's Most Powerful Religion?

Kate Starbird is a professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering and director of the Emerging Capacities of Mass Participation Laboratory at the University of Washington, and co-founder of the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public. Justin Hendrix interviewed her about her team’s ongoing efforts to study online rumors, including during the 2024 US election; the differences between the left and right media ecosystems in the US; and how she believes the research field is changing. 

Mass migration presents a challenge to democracy in multiple ways. Chief among them is that anti-immigrant sentiment often plays a major role in the advance of illiberal and anti-democratic politics. We've seen this play out in the United States, where President-elect Donald Trump has promised a dramatic crackdown on immigration and the mass deportation of millions. But the scale of today's migration may be dwarfed by what's to come. How has the movement of people affected the politics driving the development of surveillance, biometrics, big data and artificial intelligence technologies? And how do these technologies employed at borders and in governments themselves drive policy and change the way we think about the movement of people?Today's guest has spent years traveling the world to study how technology is being deployed in border regions and conflict zones, and she's written a book about it. Petra Molnar is a lawyer and an anthropologist and the author of The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

Robert Gorwa is the author of a new book titled The Politics of Platform Regulation: How Governments Shape Online Content Moderation, published by Oxford University Press. (The book is available open access- download a free copy here.) It is an analysis of how and why governments around the world engage in platform regulation. The lessons he draws from case studies of key regulatory developments in Europe, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia help explain the adoption of different regulatory strategies by these governments and the underlying politics that shape their approach.

At its November 21st "Summit of the Future of the Internet," billionaire Frank McCourt's Project Liberty hosted a panel discussion featuring Congresswoman Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, on a panel with Congressman Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, that was moderated by the media personality Charlemagne the God. Last month, Congresswoman Mace led an effort to ban transgender women from using female bathrooms at the US Capitol in response to the election of Sarah McBride, who is set to be the first openly transgender person in Congress representing voters in Delaware. Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a tech advocacy organization, took the opportunity to confront Congresswoman Mace's bigotry during the Project Liberty conference. Justin Hendrix spoke to Evan last week about the incident, where she believes the tech accountability and digital rights movement should draw the line when it comes to engaging with far-right politicians, and how we can go about building spaces where we can imagine a different future that is truly just and liberatory.

During his recent campaign, President-elect Donald Trump made various promises consistent with the ongoing effort by Elon Musk and MAGA Republicans to target researchers and civil society groups that study issues such as propaganda and mis- and disinformation. Today's guest has looked deeply at this effort, conducting an analysis of over 1800 pages of primary documents to identify the strategic approaches employed by these parties, including the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, and the outcomes and broader democratic implications of the campaign. Philip M. Napoli is the James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy, the Director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy, and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research for the Sanford School at Duke University. His findings are published in a new paper The Information Society titled "In pursuit of ignorance: The institutional assault on disinformation and hate speech research."

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology regulation, artificial intelligence, and social media. Her new book, Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World tells a tale of rivalry and ambition as it chronicles the rush to exploit artificial intelligence. The book explores the trajectories of Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis and their roles in advancing artificial intelligence, the challenges posed by corporate power, and the extraordinary economic stakes of the current race to achieve technological supremacy.

These days, if you see someone with their head bowed, you’re much more likely observing them staring into their phone than in prayer. But from digital rituals to the promises of abundance from Silicon Valley elites, has technology become the world’s most powerful religion? What kinds of promises of salvation and abundance are its leaders making? And how can thinking about technology in this way help us generate ways to reform our approach to it, particularly if we aim to restore humanist principles?Today’s guest is Greg Epstein, who drew on lessons from his vocation as a humanist chaplain at Harvard and MIT to write a new book, just out from MIT Press, called Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation.

Today’s guest is Boston University School of Law professor Woodrow Hartzog, who, with the George Washington University Law School's Daniel Solove, is one of the authors of a recent paper that explored the novelist Franz Kafka’s worldview as a vehicle to arrive at key insights for regulating privacy in the age of AI. The conversation explores why privacy-as-control models, which rely on individual consent and choice, fail in the digital age, especially with the advent of AI systems. Hartzog argues for a "societal structure model" of privacy protection that would impose substantive obligations on companies and set baseline protections for everyone rather than relying on individual consent. Kafka's work is a lens to examine how people often make choices against their own interests when confronted with complex technological systems, and how AI is amplifying these existing privacy and control problems.

On Tuesday, November 5th, the final ballots will be cast in the 2024 US presidential election. But the process is far from over. How prepared are social media platforms for the post-election period? What should we make of characters like Elon Musk, who is actively advancing conspiracy theories and false claims about the integrity of the election? And what can we do going forward to support election workers and administrators on the frontlines facing threats and disinformation? To help answer these questions, Justin Hendrix spoke with three experts: Katie Harbath, CEO of Anchor Change and chief global affairs officer at Duco Experts;Nicole Schneidman, technology policy strategist at Protect Democracy; andDean Jackson, principal of Public Circle LLC and a reporting fellow at Tech Policy Press.

If you’re trying to game out the potential role of technology in the post-election period in the US, there is a significant "X" factor. When he purchased the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, “Elon Musk didn’t just get a social network—he got a political weapon.” So says today’s guest, a journalist who is one of the keenest observers of phenomena on the internet: Charlie Warzel, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Galaxy Brain. Justin Hendrix caught up with him about what to make of Musk and the broader health of the information environment.