Public Parks and Re-creation (with Eli Pariser)

lack of regulation. The government has got to get on tech and we well, we've got to get on the government to do us damn job. And we also heard more about my journey. We charted through my personal experiences in the tech landscape, and we learned that I'm an even bigger tech nerd than you already knew. I shared with you my visions of what was possible for technology over the years, like changing how we tell stories, how

we make comedy, how we organized politically. But we ain't done yet because we talked about the problems right, but now we have to talk about the people who see things differently now, Scott, he argued, for a more traditional path of regulation. But I think we need something new, something that connects us to values that might feel disconnected from the current tech landscape. Some of you might remember my walks during the pandemic, a little bit of the

rich audio environment O pregate. Then out here in these streets that was a menacing hound. Heck, I still walk in my neighborhood almost every day, being outside, seeing people live their own live lives, checking in on the shops of York Boulevard. All that provides a lens to view the world differently. It's grounding, but it's the road where I see other black people walking, and that's the somewhat rare sighting over here. I'm in a heavily Latino Latino

neighborhood in a time where distance literally equal safety. Being in a public space can provide a basic way to see humans being human. Neighborhood very special. To see a fellow Negro, it was like a family reunion with people I've never met before. So thus black people hill now where I'm walking right now, I call coy Rod Because what if we applied this sense of connection, community and humanity to technology. Our current platforms encourage us to engage.

But how's that working out for us? But Scott Galloway mentioned social media platforms inflame our arguments and tear at our social fabric. Here's a simple truth. The giant tech companies are not in the business of what we refer to as citizen ng But using some imagination, is there reversion of social media that can serve the same function as our public spaces, like those parks and community centers, those things we came to rely on this last year.

This all feels daunting, but I've got hope. This moment calls for a lot of kind of creativity and boldness and public imagination. Eli paris Or believes that through new design principles, we can change our digital spaces so that they bring us together instead of tearing us apart. And that might seem insanely ambitious, but the plan he lays out is far from impossible. Eli makes his case after the break, Eli, Hello, welcome to How to Citizen. How are you doing? I am doing well? How are you?

I'm doing well? Especially? Eli Pariser is a triple threat, author, activist, and entrepreneur. He was the executive director of move on dot org and Eli has been a pioneer working to create democracy friendly spaces, the ones we sorely need in the digital landscape for decades. Right now, he's running a nonprofit organization called New Public, and he's putting into practice the methods we need to citizen better online. So when we sat down, we started our conversation by strolling down

digital memory lane. I want to rewind the clock a bit, because, um, you've been around technology for a while, as have I. I can remember the early days with when everything was monochromatic, green blinking curses, Unix and DOSS, when you had to like manually serve the Internet, you know, like one site at a time, just grabbing it. And you had an early what we would now call viral moment when you were about twenty the attacks and I and Leven had

just happened. What did you do? Yeah, so I had just gotten out of college, and you know, it occurred to me that this was one of those moments in history where things can go very different directions, and there was this opportunity for the world to come together around what I thought was really like kind of a global problem of terrorism or there was this world where you know, people kind of seize it and use it for their own political ends and things go badly, and so I

set up this little website calling for multilateralism. Quick explanation. Multilateralism is when multiple nations agree on some common goal or mission, in this case, for the potential war on terror. And there was this guy at the University of Chicago had written up this petition. We put it on the website, and then I like logged off, you know, I needed my phone line for a phone call, and I didn't

check my email for like four days. So I log on, you know, the Monday morning after, and there's this kind of loading bar downloading my email, and it says like four thousand messages left to download and then forty thousand messages left it down. It's just this kind of crazy and comprehensible thing, like what what happened? And it was an early viral email basically like it it had spanned the globe. I thought, if we got a couple of hundred people to sign it, like that would be something

that would be good. But I just didn't even imagine that we'd have fifty thou people as it ended up like five thousand people, you know, signing onto this thing. Five hundred thousand people. Yeah, and and from all over the world. It was like a hundred and nine two countries. And that was crazy. I was a twenty year old college student. I had no political connections or capital, I had no resources. I had not spent a cent. I

just put this website up. And so you know, in those moments you can kind of see why it might feel like this is just this is a democracy tizing technology. What kind of email storage did you have in two thousand one, because that's a lot of email. I appreciate I appreciate the follow up questions. This is really the kind of detail I think people are interested in. It's like I was on outlook. By the way you painting this two thousand one picture is taken me back there

as well. I'm remembering the simplicity of the websites, the crudeness of the HTML, the optimism. M uh that again, the terrible design comes back to me a lot. This was like peak ugly Internet, but also peak beautiful Internet, because we didn't care what it looked like. What was

the potential that you saw in this period? The idea was that information is power and knowledge is power, and here's this technology that's making information and access to some degree free and also allowing people to conceivably the public could break through with the leads because they could demonstrate to each other, hey, we all care about this issue.

And as an organizer you start to see that as a moment where people are willing to do more because one of the biggest impediments to citizen power is just feeling like I'm alone and in my concerns, and so that ability to like quickly find like, oh, there's a there's millions of other people who are concerned like me about what's going on. It seemed like it could change the dynamics of what was happening in politics, and in the same way, you know, change some of the economic dynamics.

If I had been placing you know, five thousand phone calls around the world at that time, yes, long distance was still expensive, like that would be a real undertaking. But here was this thing that was like completely horizontal

and free. The main reason that I wanted to talk to you, besides this trip down Lexicon memory Lane, which has been joyful, is this work you're doing with New Public, this new platform organization, trying to connect and inspire the people who build the Internet tools we use and the people who design them to use them to make better digital public spaces, Healthier public spaces for us to interact with each other that don't descend into some of the

horrors that so many of us have experienced. In your definition, what is new public? So New Public started as kind of a research project I was working with and co founded it with Talia Stroud. There's this communications professor in the University of Texas who studies how media organizations and communities can get engaged better in civic life, and we started to ask this question that was kind of taking

the conversation about tech and flipping it a little. There's a lot of conversation about misinformation, disinformation, hate speech, and all of that is really critical and important work that's happening, But somewhere in there, I think you could end up playing a lot of whack a mole if you didn't have a north star of where you wanted to get. Like, in other words, a good Internet is like a conducive

space for people to come together, especially across difference. And so our original project was like, can we start to put some definition on what the qualities of the spaces that we would really want would be, and then we can evaluate, like can our existing platforms even possibly help

us get there, or do we need something else. We came out with something called the Civic Signals, which are basically kind of fourteen qualities that we saw show up again and again across different academic disciplines and also in interviews and in surveys that we did with people in twenty countries around the world, and the qualities that they

want to see in their digital spaces. And if we think about digital platforms as spaces rather than just as markets for information, how does that change, you know, how we might think about designing them. And we realized, like, oh, this problem of designing spaces where strangers can relate to each other can behave well, like, this is an old problem. This is an urban planning problem, and it's a problem that's been around, you know, as long as human settlements

have been around. And so why aren't we bringing all of that kind of understanding to some of the questions that seem so intractable online. I really like this idea of asking people what they want in a platform, in a space, trying to define a north star. I think so many of us have gotten used to settling for whatever is seemingly available before us. What's the elevator pitch for what new public is trying to do in establishing

that north thought. So we're basically like an incubator that draws on the research that we've done to help support community leaders and technologists who are trying to build better digital spaces. And our belief is that it's when those two ways of thinking come together, kind of the social intelligence and the design and engineering intelligence, that you really find sustainable and durable solutions. But we've adopted this saying from a Nobel Prize winning economist Eleanor Ostrom about no

panaceas it ain't pretty, but society is complex. People are complex and forced to have simple solutions to complex problems not a good idea. And she studies like how human beings manage commons well, and it turns out like all over the world actually contra you know, tragedy of the commons. There are lots of examples where communities really do manage commons well, but there is no one master key, there's

no one master pattern to commons management. It always happens in a very specific way to that community, to that set of problems. And when we think about the way that we're structuring the Internet right now, you know it is built around there is a Facebook algorithm and maybe millions of lines of code. It exists for everyone in the world, you know, everywhere. We think that's impossible. You can't get to something that really works for everybody with

one master protocol or approach. So if there are no panaceas, no universal solutions, how do you give people the tools to build the right kinds of solutions for the particular problems and the particular communities that they're in. There You're on again about democratizing and civic power and helping people to find their own futures. But no, it's like I do think our current digital environment is like subtly so undemocratic.

Your option is to be part of Facebook or not be part of it, and not being part of it at this point has some social costs, or not being part of LinkedIn has some social costs. But you don't get to like weigh in on a design change or have any say and what the rules of speech should be, how people should work. And I think that's problematic and pernicious. I think there's a better way to do things. Now, what New public is calling for our digital public spaces.

These are similar to physical public spaces like a park or library, right owned by the public, serving the public interest in these civil, social kind of political ways. And that's different from a digital private space that most of us use in a daily basis. Right those spaces that operate like a walled garden where corporate owners got total control. Not everybody has equal access, and the space is really designed for commercial or financial interests, not a public interest.

So tell me why you think it's important to have digital public spaces as opposed to just a bunch more digital private spaces. So when we were doing this kind of look at the sociology of communities offline in the physical world, one thing that was very apparent was like the value and importance of places like parks and libraries in building kind of cohesion and giving people forums to

raise their concerns. You know, there's just a whole bunch of ways in which, like measurably, these public places helped knit communities together. And that's because they do whole bunch of things that most private places simply can't or won't. Lending books to anyone who needs them, especially to people who can't afford to pay them. Is just not a good idea for a business, but it's a great idea

for a community function. I think part of the problem when you kind of think about our online world right now, is that we're trying to cram all of these different functions that need to happen in order to have a sustainable community. And I think even if you have the wisest possible leadership and the best possible management and everything was perfect, it's just not what they're there to do. And that's okay, but we need this other thing as well.

The library metaphor really strikes me, and I've been able to see the community function that the library is performing pre pandemic and during the pandemic, a literal common space. People bring their kids there. They're obviously lending books as one function, but they have production facilities, they have career advice, they have citizenship training for those who are new to the country who really want to join the commons in a technical legal sense, and you know, Amazon is not

doing that. It's more than a place of transactions, right, sort of a place of people and connection and community. So when you put it that way at digital public space feels lacking because every example that my mind goes to is actually a private space. Tell me more about that than what what does a quality a well functioning public space, digital or otherwise need to thrive well. I mean the first piece is you need to be serving

a bunch of community needs. And I think that's one of the cool things about libraries is that it's not like people go to the library because they want to be a great citizen. Like they go to the library because they need a book, or their kid needs a place to play chess, or they need a meeting room. There's a bunch of really tangible needs that need to be met, and there are librarians. I think there is another sort of piece of what's missing in digital spaces.

You know, what would a library be like if it was all self served and don't like, you know, instructions taped to the door, but go in at your own peril.

Like it would be hard, especially with the library, because you know, there's a whole bunch of people with a bunch of pretty different needs trying to get their needs met simultaneously and balancing that's challenging, and you have, you know, someone who's experiencing homelessness over here, who's trying to get their unemployment benefits, and you know, someone who's got their young kids at a story hour and without someone kind of holding that space and mediating it um, you can

run into real trouble, which I would argue is like a lot of what happens online. And as soon as those conflicts start to escalate, than that experience of safety and the experience that oh I can be with people who are pretty different and it's okay, starts to dissipate more librarians is never a problem. It's always a step towards the solution. Go librarians, all right. You alluded to

four categories of signals. They seem like a new etiquette or framework so we can actually have more quality digital public spaces. Break that down for me. The first and most important in many ways is this welcome category, which is where a lot of platforms fall down kind of almost as soon as they've started, which is, do people feel invited to be part of the conversation here in the first place? Do they feel safe to be part

of that conversation? Does the platform go out of its way to help humanize people to each other, or does it quickly reduce us to you know, our most incendiary positions or to caricatures. And I think there's a reason that in our physical life we haven't reserved a huge amount of space. That's like walk up to a stranger and tell them you're hottest. Take uh, you know, we haven't recreated Twitter in real life. Yeah, there's but there's a reason for that, which is like, it's difficult and

unpleasant and mostly people don't want it. But having spaces like parks and libraries where you just see people who are having different lives than you. You're in a park especially, you're in this nice environment, and you just get to be like, okay, they're familiar, I've seen them a couple of times before. Maybe this is all okay, and we're part of something together. That's that's nice. That's really an important experience actually in in building a democratic culture. So

then then we've got to connect. And connect isn't just about like everybody connect with everybody. It's about how do you support kind of good connection, especially across groups. Because we know, for example, when it comes to like economic opportunities, job postings will often literally get stuck. And how do you build these networks that like allow information, allow ideas

to kind of cross boundaries. You need to build bridges between these groups, and there are ways you can design for that, and there's a whole field about designing for that, and so we kind of get into how do we support better designs for cross group contact essentially, and then there's this understand chunk, which is really, you know, not just about individual understanding, but it's about how do we

build meaning together. So one of the things that really effective communities do is you kind of have this yes and element where people are kind of adding their their perspective, their point of view, and you're building something that you really couldn't build along. And I think because digital products are often built for with a kind of individual user in mind, we don't think a lot about sort of how do we facilitate these collective experiences that are really important.

And then finally you get to act. And act isn't just vote or change your community selectmen. It's actually like just platforms that facilitate people coming together and doing something together. Because one of the things that sociologists and social scientists and political scientists tell us is that really any time you get a group of people, especially across some difference,

just to accomplish something together. That builds social trust, It builds a sense of power and capacity and agency, and that has this kind of like it feeds back on the whole thing where people then are willing to take on something more. How did you and your co founder

Talia come up with these? So basically, we we talked to over a hundred experts in a whole bunch of different fields, from urban planning to political scientists to community experts, and ask them what public spaces needed for a healthy society and a healthy democracy. And then we did these focus groups where we kind of took them out in five different countries around the world, talk to people and really got sense of like does this resonate, does it's

not resonate? Change some things, And then finally surveyed people in twenty countries just to make sure that this was resonating and also to get a sense of how people evaluated which platforms did well on on what. And that was also really fascinating because you could see both what people wanted from the platforms that we have today and where they fell short. Where did the private spaces the companies that most of us been too much time on

Where did they most fall short? Well? I mean on that welcome category, there weren't a lot of them that did very well. And just you know, do I feel invited to be here? Do I feel safe? Do I feel humanized? Like there was really not a platform but did especially well on humanization, which I think says a lot about our current digital environment. It's a powerful word, humanization.

I think it's an easy one to use. So if it strikes me as very plausible that they are bad at humanization, because I don't always feel very human in in myself. If you look at a TikTok, it's like, please don't colonize this sound. If you're not black, just watch and enjoy. There's two sides to it, right, there's these moments of incredible kind of creative expression and a window and to all of these worlds that you just

would never get to occupy otherwise. And then there's this sense of like, but I've got a game this for attention for clicks, and that's kind of an always on endeavor. And I think we saw this in the service too. It's like, there are real value that these platforms provide. I just think part of the problem is like we're asking too much of the platforms that we have as opposed to like inventing a world that has more opportunities for different kinds of experiences and different kinds of spaces.

So you're out here trying to invent new worlds, and there are a lot of people concerned about the topics we're talking about. Part of their approach is regulatory. It's like we've got to limit the power, the reach, the depth of these organizations, apply new rules and new regulations. That doesn't sound like the focus of yours is much more creative and inventive the usual own language. Why have you chosen this approach and why have you chosen to work on this of all the things you could do

right now? I think the regulation piece is important, But I also think without a kind of imagination for what we want, it's hard even to regulate well, let alone to start to like move towards the future that we want. And I think this moment calls for a lot of

kind of creativity and boldness and public imagination. I think this is the playbook for how we've moved through times of social stress and social fracture in the past is like we've invented new kinds of organizations, new kinds of institutions, public library or a thing that we're invented, and so we're public parks like they didn't always exist with public parks.

We're starting to build these things called cities. There's a lot of smoke and people don't have a place to go to exercise and get some fresh air, Like we need to think about how to do that. Oh, let's have a park that's open to everyone. I think we're kind of there with our digital life, where like it's not just about tweaking things, it's about really having the bold vision for like, what is the life we want to live, and what are the kinds of institutions we

need to make that life possible. I am indeed tired of breathing the toxic smoke of the current Internet, and I would love a public park equivalent. This effort, this mission that you've given yourself is very aspirational. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. It restores my faith in people, and then I have to ask, how real

is it? Yeah? I think, Um, we're starting to see more and more people take this on right, and there are people who have been building places like front Porch Forum in Vermont, which is kind of a great example of what social media can look like when it's detached from the pressure of kind of up into the right exponential growth expectation. So from Porch Forum, it's basically like a local discussion forum that's heavily moderated in every community

in Vermont. Oh throwback term list serve. It's it's like a listener, but it's like a really well moderated listener. Right, so before you can post, someone's going to read your message and they'll send it back to you if you run a foul of the norms, which are pretty like serious.

Even though you know Facebook is very popular, Twitter is very popular, all of these platforms are popular or Vermont, there's this different quality of conversation that happens when it's slow and it's thoughtful and there's an expectation that we're really going to stick to the agreements we make about

how we're speaking to each other. To me, that's like one example that exists right now that I think that you can have one of those in every community, and the United States, it would probably need to be different in every community because no panicsy is I like that example? It sounds deliberate. A lot of us are hooked on what I would consider a kind of an entitled version of the Internet where I want to I get to I will that's it. I something came to my mind.

I'm going to post it. It's my right to post it. And what you're describing as a different balance where there's a sense of obligation as well, Like I can't imagine if I had launched a tweet and it came back to me, this isn't good enough, this is too rude. You're gonna make somebody, You're gonna hurt somebody's feeling, like that's what a tweet is dog launch, Like, why should we care about this? There's a lot of people I can imagine and know some of them who are like,

they can have my data. I'm a grown up. I know what I'm doing. I don't need like a library version of the Internet. Just control yourself and be a good person. Is it that hard? Why do we need a digital public space designed intentionally for these outcomes? Unless you're literally in the cabinet, was you have to deal with society or society is going to come deal with you and you wanted to be healthy, you wanted to

be good. I think that's one perspective. I think another pieces there's just so many people who don't get to to contribute, and that's a loss for all of us. There was a great study on our science where they started kind of moving the norms toward being explicit about what kind of speech was welcome and I welcome there. And there was this question of whether that would just put off everyone, everyone would feel kind of like nannied

and and shut up. But actually what they found was not only was there more speech, there's a lot more speech from women, from folks of color, from groups that would kind of tend to feel like, am I is it okay to be here? Is it okay to be speaking here? Those are the people who then felt like, oh, okay, I can speak up, And those conversations are better when you know you don't just have a bunch of entitled

dudes talking to each other. So I think there's something that we all miss out on when we don't create spaces that are actually doing that work. What if you're wrong? What if humanity is just trash? Right? What if what if your goals and aspirations for us exceed what we're capable of, and this is who we really are, and you can try to mitigate that with some better design, But you're fighting upstream against human nature. What do you say to that. You know there is no such thing

as universal human nature. And part of what we know from social scientists is that even the same person in different contexts will behave in radically different ways, and in some contexts will be much more altruistic and other context will be much more selfish. A lot of that has to do with the situation we find ourselves in and

how we understand how we fit into that situation. And so this is kind of the no panaceas point, Like, I just don't think there are universal statements that are very helpful about humanity as a whole, because people are lots of things, and there are definitely some pretty screwed up people out there with some pretty screwed up objectives, But there are also so many times when you can look at these stories of people with just like not

a lot of resources coming together and doing something really cool, And to me, that's kind of the battle is, like, how do we help those people on those moments happen more, and the people who are kind of aiming to do screwed up stuff do it a little less. And if we can tilt that balance a little bit, Like it doesn't have to be a universal solve, it just has to kind of be a game of inches. It sounds like somebody's trying to bend the moral arc of the

universe towards justice. I wouldn't. It's a small small part of that project. It's look, if billions of us pull on that arc, it'll be right, not all build in just a majority. We just need more. And it's like at any given time, the reality is most people are just living their lives, doing their thing. And that's why building the number of people at the edges who are engaged, who are active can be so powerful because people are busy.

We've got a lot of stuff going on, and just a little bit of extra time and a little bit of extra energy really actually like can have a big, big impact. This stuff takes time. What do you want for future generations? I have heard some kids in the background, so I've seen you're pretty invested in the future. Yeah,

my kids have it pretty good and are privileged. But even for them, like I look at the digital landscape that they're going to grow up and be a part of, and I worry for them, like I worry for their souls. I worry for what it means to them to be human being and some of these environments that we've created,

because they can be pretty soul sucking, pretty extractive. So what I want and what I think is possible, and it's not going to be me, but it's like this movement that's growing to say, like, hey, we can build digital environments that are good for people, and we should do that, and that's going to require thinking about it differently, Like I want those kinds of environments to be available to them. It doesn't have to be that you're spending all of your time in the park. Nobody spends all

their time in the park or the library. But going to the park allows you to see a certain way of being together that's possible, that changes your ideas about what humanity is. And that's kind of what I want for them, is to have those spaces where you can say, like, oh, it is possible to have like a good conversation with strangers online that doesn't evolve into all of us calling each other Nazis. When you put it that way, it

sounds like such a meager request and so achievable. And I also think it's it's important that you oldline that in the words of like the early eighties serials commercials. That is the stuck in my head. This is part of a complete breakfast, right, it's not digital. No one lives in the library or just hangs out in the park, like you said, And so you're not trying to displace the spaces were already used to. You're calling for some variation,

some diversity, options, choice, even um a capitalist should love it. Yeah, you know when you talk about freedom and that kind of like everybody should just be free to do whatever you want. Like the limits of that idea of freedom are that how do you think about freedom when there are certain kinds of things you can only do with

other people, you can only experience with other people. And if your only thing about freedom is this individual like I get to do it or I don't get to do it, you miss all these categories of human experience. There's some of the most joyful, amazing categories that only are facilitated by being able to be doing stuff with other people. And so I think there's that piece as well, which is like, you don't get to really be free

if you're free, you know, just in your own yard. Yeah, freedom all by your damn self is kind of missing out on a lot of the value of freedom. Yeah, Eli, I have thoroughly enjoyed finally being able to spend some quality one on one time with you. Thank you for doing this has been great. Thank you. Eli's reasons for designing a new Internet are pretty personal. It's for as kids, and that seems like a good thing when designing things, shouldn't we be making things with the people we love

in mind? Eli and Talia created the Signals as guide posts for new online conduct and design. These principles directly speak to democratizing and harnessing civic power in digital spaces. They're both helping folks define their own digital futures. It's a roadmap for our tech future, at least one we want. But it's also damn good philosophy to carry offline as well as the world heals or struggles to. Maybe we

can start using this new framework in person. Here at how to Citizen, we're committed to giving you things to do beyond listening to me talk to somebody, though the talking is pretty good. We're building an entire universe of citizen action over at our shiny new website, how to citizen dot com. It's got every episode transcripts, links to guests, and things you can do. Now, for every episode, we're

offering you three ways to take action. A personal reflection you can do alone and even just in your head, a way to get more informed and publicly participating, joining with others for something out in the world. So for this episode, here are three things you can do. First, I want you to reflect on some recent online interactions you've had with total strangers on social media. Now, think about some interactions you've had with strangers offline, maybe in

a public park or library. How did each of these experiences make you feel? Did you prefer one over the other? And why again, just think about it in terms of becoming more informed. Check out New Public's new design playbook for building digital public spaces of the future. It was built from two years of global research and feedback. Also read elis thought provoking article in the Atlantic. It's all about envisioning a future online that serves the public good

and supports a culture of democracy which is totally possible. Finally, in terms of publicly participating, I want you to try to find or create an online community in a space that isn't a giant shopping mall where you can practice some of the fourteen signals, but using a platform like highl h y l O or Mighty Networks. I think you could do that. I'm gonna try to now. Look, we've got links to all this and more over at how to citizen dot com, and please follow us on

Instagram shiny new account at how to Citizen. There you can share and learn from others on the journey. Next week, we talked to a tech designer, an activist who's got some very strong opinions about the birth of the Internet. People always complained it's like, oh, the Internet is full of idiots, because that's by design how we made it. I told you serious opinions. We aim for brutal honesty here, folks. Stay safe and stay tuned. We've got more imagination and

stories coming next time. Keep citizen and y'all. How to Citizen with barrettun Day is a production of I Heart Radio podcast and dust Light Productions. Our executive producers are me Barritton Day, Thurston, Elizabeth Stewart, and Misha Yusuf. Our senior producer is Tamika Adams. Our producer is Ali Kilts and our stint producer Sam Paulson. Stephanie Cone is our editor, Valentino Rivera is our senior engineer, and Matthew Laie as

our apprentice. Original music by Andrew Eapen, with additional original music for season three from Andrew Clauson. This episode was produced and sound designed by Tamika Adams. Special thanks to Joel Smith from My Heart Radio and Rachel Garcia at dust Light Production.