Tech Policy Podcast TechFreedom

Renée DiResta (Stanford Internet Observatory) discusses her new book, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality.

Topics include:

- Social media influencers: the new media elite
- How do ideas take root?
- Influencers as exploiters of asymmetries
- B******t: an investigation
- Could platforms have stopped Stop the Steal?
- Fixing the expert class
- Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent
- The future of social media

Links:

Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality (https://tinyurl.com/y66h4us5)

Influencers, Bullshitters, and How We Lost a Shared Reality (https://tinyurl.com/2bc8am93)

Renée DiResta at Politics and Prose (DC), June 13 (https://tinyurl.com/pm4cvaya)

Renée DiResta at the Commonwealth Club (SF), June 17 (https://tinyurl.com/h62tkb3p)

The New Media Goliaths (Noema) (https://tinyurl.com/29p7rjxr)

Agents of Influence newsletter (https://tinyurl.com/44zstpty)

Tech Policy Podcast 293: The Supply of Renée DiResta Should Be Infinite (https://tinyurl.com/59k265aa)

From January 10, 2022 (Episode 309): Joseph Uscinski (University of Miami) argues that the internet is not increasing the prevalence of conspiracy theories.

Links:

Don’t Blame Social Media for Conspiracy Theories—They Would Still Flourish Without It (https://tinyurl.com/whz5a9uk)

Robert Atkinson is president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. He joins the show to discuss his new book, Technology Fears and Scapegoats: 40 Myths About Privacy, Jobs, AI, and Today’s Innovation Economy, co-authored with David Moschella.

Topics include:

- Tech panic: speeding-uppers vs. slowing-downers
- Tech and privacy: try living in an analogue village!
- The wicked problem of content moderation
- Is tech progress bad for the middle class?
- Is tech driving market concentration?
- “Industrial planning”: dirty words?

Links:

Technology Fears and Scapegoats: 40 Myths about Privacy, Jobs, AI, and Today’s Innovation Economy (https://tinyurl.com/p93fypz5)

Richard Morrison (Competitive Enterprise Institute) joins the show, in a crossover episode with the Free the Economy podcast.

Topics include:

- The history of podcasts
- The rise of micro media (find a thousand true fans!)
- Performative tech doomerism
- The idleness of romanticizing the past
- The quest for online community
- Conservatives in the Technium

Links:

Free the Economy (https://tinyurl.com/38r6jw7t)

Why Conservatism Failed (https://tinyurl.com/yru444f5)

The Quest for a Better Online “Community” (https://tinyurl.com/5f8twhny)

It’s the episode you’ve been waiting for: TechFreedom’s Corbin Barthold and Ari Cohn talk about pornography and free expression.

Topics include:

- The Founding Fathers: epic porn fiends (j/k)
- Obscenity law, a brief history
- Do conservatives still want to ban James Joyce?
- “I know it when I see it”—Worst. Legal standard. Ever.
- Is there a moral case against porn? (Spoiler alert: No)
- The Fifth Circuit botches internet speech law

Links:

Tech Policy Podcast #360: Red States vs. Every SCOTUS Internet Precedent (https://tinyurl.com/4y4fwb9j)

A Reagan Judge, The First Amendment, And The Eternal War Against Pornography (https://tinyurl.com/2ba82bbe)

Texas Legislature Convinced First Amendment Simply Does Not Exist (https://tinyurl.com/4x8vyjkh)

Is Porn Harmful? The Evidence, the Myths and the Unknowns (https://tinyurl.com/59fzrxvd)

Ryan Scirocco is the spacesuit business development lead at Collins Aerospace. Collins, an RTX business, is, along with its partners ILC Dover and Oceaneering, developing a new generation of spacesuits for NASA. Ryan discusses everything that goes into keeping people alive in a freezing zero-gravity vacuum far outside the biosphere.

Topics include:

- A spacesuit is a mini-spaceship
- Space: it wants to kill you
- Spacesuit history
- What’s new? No more mirrors!
- Testing spacesuits on the vomit comet
- The ISS, the Moon, and beyond

Links:

Collins Aerospace Completes Key Spacesuit Testing Milestone (https://tinyurl.com/3nphfunp)

Space Symposium (https://tinyurl.com/yh27xsfc)

Tech Policy Podcast #349: The State of Space Exploration (https://tinyurl.com/yns72nwm)