Sam Liebeskind

Decentralized networks are harder to infiltrate and harder to destroy. This movement is not leaderless, but leaderful, and there are no few specific people who could be arrested to stop the movement. Because it is built out of so many interlocking networks, even if a bad actor managed to disrupt an individual piece of the network (by, for example,... See more

A republic requires citizens; entertainment requires only an audience.

– Megan Garber

While prior work suggests that trolling behavior is confined to a vocal and antisocial minority, we demonstrate that ordinary people can engage in such behavior as well. We propose two primary trigger mechanisms: the individual's mood, and the surrounding context of a discussion (e.g., exposure to prior trolling behavior). Through an experiment... See more

In Facebook’s quest to “make the world more open and connected,” it succeeded in empowering individuals, but accidentally eroded the very notion of an authority – not just the notion of an objective truth, but the notion that any established institution could help us to understand truth. We underestimated bad actors, and the ways people would game... See more

Global mega-platforms under capitalism are structurally incapable of handling the business of civilization: of governance, of providing genuinely public infrastructure, of making knife-edge decisions about the balance of liberties and securities. It’s not what they do or what they want to do, and in many cases it’s in opposition to their actual... See more