Sam Liebeskind

Over the last year, I've had the privilege of leading Mozilla Foundation's reimagining of technical grantmaking. Alongside Mehan Jayasuriya, Lisa Gutermuth, and the wonderful Hannah Eaves who led our strategy design process, we met with past grantees, colleagues across Mozilla, and peers across the field. We asked - what if the problem isn't that... See more

Thus, the effectiveness of deliberative processes is threatened by what British political theorist Marit Hammond describes as “processes that may have the appearance of empowerment, but only serve to pacify democratic demands without actually submitting to their bottom-up force.”

We can immediately rule out reproducing the current system in which a tiny number of companies govern permissible speech and what safety means for billions of people. We don't want social media that's like Twitter except without a demented owner. You cannot fix social media by having a non-profit run it or by guiding it with some ethical principles... See more

There is evidence that participatory exercises tied to formal decision making processes - from participatory budgeting (C. Johnson, Carlson, and Reynolds 2021) to deliberative polling (Fishkin et al. 2024; “Collective Intelligence Case Studies,” n.d.) - lead to increased democratic engagement and satisfaction. This has the effect of bolstering... See more

21 best ideas in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on Self Reliance (via justin murphy)

1. Most people do not trust their own beliefs. The essence of genius is simply to trust yourself—to infer that whatever seems most true in your heart is most true in reality—and for everybody else, too, despite whatever they may claim.

2. There is hardly anything more painful

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Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom.... See more

In the 1970s and 1980s, the philosopher of technology Langdon Winner dismantled the idea that technology is a “neutral” tool (Winner, 1978). Winner’s work emphasized how those developing technology benefit the most while already disadvantaged individuals and groups pay the highest price, laying the philosophical foundation for subsequent work in... See more

Titled “A Bigger We,” FTF’s report argues that today’s democracy crisis is rooted in a crisis of agency, in that most Americans rarely, if ever, experience themselves as having the collective ability to change the world they live in. Or, to put it in a simpler vernacular: people don’t give a shit because they don’t think they matter. And too often,... See more