Looks Like New - on KGNU: Recent Episodes
Nathan Schneider
Looks Like New asks old questions about new tech. MEDLab’s radio show and podcast, partnering with KGNU. Each month, we speak with someone who works with technology in ways that challenge conventional narratives and dominant power structures.
With the rise of open social media platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky, nonprofits have new opportunities to develop close conversations with the communities they seek to support. Many of these open social media platforms are also better aligned with nonprofits’ values than major tech companies have been. What are the [...]
In the aftermath of a chaotic Twitter takeover, many people have moved away from centralized social media platforms to a new set of social platforms that are open-source, decentralized, and user-centered—like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Nostr. But civic-minded social platforms are nothing new. This episode presents some of Open Social Media’s [...]
At a time when many people are focused on recent advances in artificial intelligence, another transformative technology is quietly emerging to reshape our future: quantum computing. The people working toward this radical shift imagine a world where quantum computing revolutionizes […]
IMAGE BY Alexis Kenyon via DALL-E Many of us assume everyone has access to the Internet. In light of the last few years of global pandemic, however, we observed headlines about the unconnected and the issues that were created in […]
Being an entrepreneur in the international cryptocurrency market involves numerous challenges—from government regulations to cultural context. These challenges play out very differently around the world. The conversation revolves around cryptocurrency in India, web3 entrepreneurship, and cryptocurrency technology-based arcades for gamers. […]
Blockchain was created to build democratic systems but more often than not we see stories of scams, frauds and attacks. Despite these allegations, there are a few builders who continue to work towards improving this technology; builders who wish to […]
ChatGPT, short for “Conversational Generative Pre-training Transformer,” is an advanced language model developed by OpenAI that can understand and generate natural language with a high degree of accuracy. It has been a hot topic lately, for contexts in education and […]
Cryptocurrency has been in the news this past month after a cascade of bankruptcies unraveled a web of fraud. This comes after a year of already declining markets recast the 2021 crypto boom in a dark light. However, the headlines […]
Many of us may not realize that artificial intelligence, or AI systems, are increasingly being used to make decisions that affect your everyday life, from insurance to hiring. While AI has been a popular buzzword over the last few years, […]
With the journalism industry dwindling across the country, journalists formed the Colorado Sun as a beacon of hope. The Colorado Sun is a small but mighty digital news source for the state of Colorado. It is a Public Benefit Corporation […]
Do social media networks have to be addictive, or polarizing, or advertising-funded? This conversation explores lessons from the past that could help us make social media better today. Our guest is University of Virginia media studies professor Kevin Driscoll, author […]
Democracy seems to be in crisis around the world. Aspiring dictators are on the rise in many countries, and the flows of information are under the control of often-unaccountable tech companies. Could democracy be on its way out? This month, […]
These days it seems like cryptocurrencies and blockchains are mostly enabling abuses: speculative bubbles, malware attacks, and money laundering for rogue states. But could the same technology also hold powerful governments and corporations accountable? Jonathan Dotan directs the Starling Lab […]
When we think about social media platforms and online interactions, it might seem like we are merely experiencing feeds of information that are curated for us by algorithms. The scale by which companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram now operate […]
Competitive entertainment has always been an essential part of human culture. Traditionally, sports have been the preferred form of competition, however, in a modern age of mass globalization through connection, a new form of entertainment has taken the stage: esports. […]
News headlines have been full of debates about Critical Race Theory (CRT), books and topics being banned in schools, and calls to remove statues of colonizers around the world. More recently, universities and governments have done work in land acknowledgements […]
If you’ve noticed your social media platforms and web searches are giving you personalized results or advertisements, you might be curious about how or why this happens. This is the work of algorithms—the programming that computers use to take raw […]
When we design the future, we rely on history, whether we like it or not. In December 2021, the MEDLab and the United Nations Internet Governance Forum launched a virtual art exhibition called “Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of […]
Twitter is a social media platform that has played a significant role in everything from politics, news, to social justice organizing. How do marginalized communities use this platform? What drives people to use the platform to find and build community […]
News from the Arab world tends to come to us in the United States in the form of dramatic spectacle that oversimplifies complex situations. Lebanon is no exception—most recently, the site of a deadly explosion and a political crisis. What […]
Long before our present day audio boom, public broadcasting in the United States flourished. Radio, a powerful way to connect people, underwent many transformations and federal regulatory shifts that impacted what it became. Where did public media come from? We […]
With all of the headlines about scandals and issues within technology companies and social media platforms, one may ask how we got where we are today. Is it possible for things to get better? As we witness company leaders and […]
You have likely heard of or used FitBit, Apple Smartwatches, GoPros or other devices we affix to our bodies each day. Despite the rapid development of wearable technologies in the last few decades, this conversation explores how they might not […]
How did the Global South once inscribe its battle for liberation into media archives and how does accessing and viewing this material change through time, location and context? What lessons can the mediated image learn in counteracting the digital divide […]
After years of shedding reporters and newsrooms, Colorado is home to a new experiment in sustainable journalism. In early May, the National Trust for Local News announced it was acquiring Colorado Community Media, a network of 24 newspapers in the […]
As the US federal government considers once-in-a-generation investments in infrastructure, is it possible to also enable a new commitment to a democratic economy? Sara Horowitz is the founder of the Freelancers Union and author of the new book Mutualism, which […]
In the last year, many of us have relied on the Internet even more than before. As we process life’s individual and collective trauma, do we turn to digital spaces for support and healing? If so, why? This month, we […]
Most of us use the Internet each day with our smartphones and devices. But too rarely do we consider how our connections are possible. How does the Internet work? What environmental toll does the Internet have? Our guest this month, […]
A lot of us are thinking about the legacies of racism these days, and about a media ecosystem that seems to hinder any hope of progress. But too rarely do we think about race and media together. Who gets to […]
Free and open-source software is a kind of miracle. It’s community-created technology, a commons that anyone can contribute to and use. But those communities are not always the utopias they’re made out to be. Many have been havens for exclusionary […]
The stakes for moderation and governance in online communities are getting higher and higher. Harms can be very serious, from election manipulation to sexual abuse. But for the most part, platforms rely on only very blunt tools for addressing these […]
Art has often been the vanguard of new tech. It was through art that many people got interested in the Internet to begin with, or became willing to pay for subscription services. But too often, large corporations take advantage of […]
Brick House is a new news organization that calls itself “the wolf-proof media cooperative.” It has emerged in part out of a failed experiment, Civil, which sought to use Bitcoin-like blockchain technology to shore up the ailing news business. Brick […]
This month, President Donald Trump has threatened to ban the Chinese-owned platforms TickTock and WeChat. This comes after years of China banning major US platforms like Google and Facebook, and securing the purchase of Uber’s Chinese business by a Chinese […]
Activist Adrienne Maree brown writes that the work of social change requires “science fictional behavior”— which is surely all the more true in the context of a global pandemic. To help us think through this crisis, we hear from Cadwell […]
We are haunted and mobilized by images. The cellphone video of George Floyd’s death has set cities on fire, elevated Black struggles for justice, and reminded White Americans of violence that their society is organized to blind them to. We […]
Often, discussions about diversity in the tech industry focus on mere representation. But in this discussion from Boulder Startup Week, we take inspiration from the Zebras Unite network, which seeks not just to change representation superficially but to change models […]
How can we collaborate at a distance? The COVID-19 pandemic has many of us rapidly changing how we work—and wondering how many of the changes will stick. To guide us through this process, we hear this month from Natalia Lombardo […]
Today’s guest is Evan Ravitz, a proponent of direct democracy, who served on the City of Boulder’s Campaign Finance and Elections Working Group. Ravitz has been critical of the City of Boulder’s delays in rolling out a voter approved initiative […]
The cultures of computer hacking have made their way from marginal subcultures to becoming driving forces in the world as we know it. Facebook’s headquarters is on a street called Hacker Way. A hack of the Democratic National Committee’s emails […]
The cultures of computer hacking have made their way from marginal subcultures to becoming driving forces in the world as we know it. Facebook’s headquarters is on a street called Hacker Way. A hack of the Democratic National Committee’s emails […]
While digital privacy issues often get a lot of attention and even alarmism, it rarely seems to change behavior. Even if it did, do individual choices really make a difference? Amie Stepanovich is a veteran policy expert and advocate who […]
There is a kind of dream out there that, once we get the gizmos set up just right, work will be transformed. While many speculate about this, Kevin Owocki, founder of the Colorado-based startup Gitcoin, is in the thick of […]
This month, Spanish activist Stacco Troncoso and his collaborators released the DisCO Manifesto (disco.coop), which proposes a new model for organizations that account for the care work that supports workers and their communities. In this conversation, he explains how the […]
Unicorns are mythical animals. It’s also the name for a mythical idea that drives the tech startup economy. In that context, a unicorn is the rare $1 billion company that makes the whole system of widespread crashing-and-burning seem to work. […]
We might not think about textiles as advanced technology, but in fact it was textile looms that helped inspire the designs of the earliest computers. This month we hear from Steven Frost, is an artist and an instructor of Media […]
The priorities of community journalism have often come into conflict with corporate priorities—something we know well in Colorado. A new publication, the Colorado Sun, has attempted to protect its mission by incorporating as a public benefit corporation. As part of […]
More and more people feel uncomfortable with the role of big tech companies in their everyday lives, but they don’t feel they have any other option. System76 is trying to change that. It’s a Denver-based computer company that produces its […]
Educators today feel pressured to keep up with the latest technology, and big tech companies are eager to turn that pressure into a market for themselves. This week’s guest, Erin Glass, is a digital scholarship librarian at the University of […]
Longmont, Colorado is considering a new way of funding news—through a proposed library-district tax. This idea builds on a model, the Community Information District, first proposed by Simon Galperin. This month on Looks Like New, Galperin describes his vision for […]
We’re in a moment of crisis for democracy around the world. But democracy doesn’t just need defense. Santiago Siri believes it needs a better offense—to evolve in order to address the shortcomings that led to the crisis in the first […]
This month’s guest is Douglas Rushkoff, one of our most prominent and provocative thinkers on technology and culture. In his latest book, a manifesto called Team Human, Rushkoff calls for mobilizing against the forces seeking to make people subservient to […]
This month’s guest is Nathalia Scherer of DAOstack who asks How Can We Self-Organize at Scale? Can we create big, ambitious projects without corporations, governments, and bosses? Nathalia Scherer wants to try. Her organization, DAOstack, is using Bitcoin-like blockchain technology […]
What Is a Lab? With Lori Emerson of the Media Archaeology Lab CU Boulder’s Media Archaeology Lab is a place where artists, scholars, students, and tinkerers can come to use apparently obsolete computers and other technology. Founding director Lori Emerson, […]