The Tech Policy Press Podcast

In the daily surge of news and headlines about technology, it can be hard for any journalist to fully contextualize the individual events they are reporting on and trace the underlying patterns, structures, and ideas that are producing them. Today’s guest excels at just that, covering one of the most complicated beats in technology journalism. Natasha Singer is a technology reporter for The New York Times, where she has spent more than a decade investigating how tech shapes schools. Her new book is Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools, published by W.W. Norton.

It’s a cliché to say that technology is changing war. But today, the pace of change is severe, not only because of advances in fields such as artificial intelligence, but also because of a range of trends and phenomena at the intersection of tech and geopolitics that are changing what it means for nations to compete, and to fight and defend themselves. Today’s guest is Steve Feldstein, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of Bytes and Bullets: Global Rivalries, Big Tech, and the New Shape of Modern Warfare, published by St. Martin’s Press.

How can you tell if an algorithm is any good? For University of Michigan assistant professor of information and public policy Ben Green, the answer lies less in accuracy scores, fairness metrics or any other technical measure than in what the system actually does once it’s out in the world. In his new book, Algorithmic Realism: Data Science Practices to Promote Social Justice (MIT Press), he offers data scientists a method for scoping, building and evaluating algorithms in the service of social justice.

Pennsylvania offers a particular case study in which to consider the political battle over data centers that is playing out across the United States and beyond. A new report from Data & Society, "The AI Factory: Data Centers, Power, and Resistance in Late Industrial Pennsylvania," draws on a year and a half of fieldwork across the state. It examines how boosters sell data centers by invoking Pennsylvania's industrial past, and why so many communities aren't buying the promises made by industry and politicians. Justin Hendrix spoke with Data & Society’s Maia Woluchem and Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes and People’s Tech Project’s Hannah Sassaman about its findings.

What should social media platforms do when the state itself becomes a threat to democracy? In a new paper published in the journal Information, Communication & Society, Daniel Kreiss and Lorcan Neill, both at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media and the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, borrow from "militant democracy," a framework scholars developed in the 1930s as fascists exploited democratic freedoms to seize power. They offer a framework for wedding platform policies to democratic principles.
With midterm elections just weeks away in the United States and elections playing out in Brazil and beyond, Justin Hendrix caught up with them about what the framework suggests, and what trust and safety executives can do even in a context where the interests of platform owners are fused with those of autocratic leaders.