Sam Liebeskind

WhatsApp initially achieved that global dominance in large part by doing just one thing very well: enabling cheap, private, and reliable messaging on almost any phone, almost anywhere in the world. But in the decade since Meta acquired WhatsApp for an eye-watering $22 billion in 2014, the app has been transformed from a narrowly focused utilitarian... See more

Sometimes it can feel like the online spaces you spend time in are working against you, pushing you toward things that their owners value instead of what you value—and harnessing your energy to fuel the very things you hate. Like me, you probably know the feeling of spending too much time gorging on digital junk food, wasting precious moments of... See more

When you bring together the facts that these companies operate in a largely lawless environment (the supranational environment) that offers no checks and balances, impacting more lives than the largest democracies, and with an explicitly authoritarian mode of governance (which has been the case for years but has become harder to ignore) then you... See more

When Colorado Springs turned off the streetlights in 2010, they launched a secure website that allowed residents to log on and pay to turn their lights back on. It’s not hard to imagine a cash-strapped municipality taking a list of parks they can’t build or maintain posting projects to Kickstarter or Neighbor.ly, seeking crowdfunding for their... See more

Marshall Ganz is someone that we've both worked with in different ways. He says that social change always begins with people who have “both a critical eye and a hopeful heart.” That quote is exactly right. And this is why young people are so often at the forefront of social change: because they have the critical eye and they have no choice but to... See more