The future of public discourse can't just be folksy, underpaid marketing, right? Right?Jake recounts a very bad night at a creator event, and describes the global pull away from thoughtful people investigating the truth online and toward everyone being paid peanuts to tell each other what to buy. This is a special reading from The Rip Current. To subscribe (it's free!) and hear and read more content like this, visit TheRipCurrent.com.
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9:07
Renee DiResta on Our Invisible Rulers and Building a Credibility Counterculture
Before she was an associate professor at Georgetown and a cofounder of Stanford’s Internet Observatory, which measured the disinformation campaigns at work in multiple presidential elections, Renee DiResta was a new mom at home getting bombarded with anti-vaccine ads on Facebook. “Why are they hitting me with this stuff?” she wondered, and her efforts to find out led her into being one of the world’s top experts on how we get worked by the illusion of popular sentiment online.Her new book is Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, and in it she dissects the mechanics that made possible scams like The Big Lie during and after the 2020 election. DiResta has both a very realistic yet very ambitious idea about how we can learn to fight back online, and explains it beautifully in this episode. Enjoy!
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1:04:37
Law Professor Lawrence Lessig on Corruption, AI, and the Need to Rethink Everything
The pioneer of open-source software and enemy of copyright tyranny has rethought his positions in the age of AI, but his fight against political corruption is more desperate than ever.When I was at a particularly despairing place about how quickly the world seemed to be doing exactly what I tried to warn against in my book The Loop: How AI is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back, I got an email out of the blue from Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, an icon of my early life thinking about the Internet. We’d never met. Here’s what he wrote me:Thank you for an incredibly valuable book — which complements and completes one I'm working on just now about AI and democracy.I was lost without it, but now I'm found!Endless gratitudeMan did that turn my week around. His encouragement helped me get up the courage to launch The Rip Current, and when I started putting a podcast together here I invited him on, and this episode is the result.At the end of my time with NBC News I talked a lot about the notion of “future crimes.” I thought of these as the kinds of misdeeds, made possible by technology, that are clearly intolerable in a civilized society, but fall outside the current bounds of the law. So when people talk about being “originalist” when it comes to the law and legal precedent, it makes me nuts. The idea that the founding fathers should be expected to have known exactly what was coming in the grand American Experiment, much less what new technology would be doing to it today — well, to someone who has covered the unexpected consequences of innovation for all this time, that’s crazy.Lessig agrees, and his life exemplifies this idea. He’s the author of 13 books, which run the gamut from his early belief in the need to rewrite copyright to make culture as open as possible to his latest book, still in the works, that he told me will argue technology has put democracy, not to mention human society, into a terrible dilemma. I found him open and thoughtful, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
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1:10:43
Journalist Kat Tenbarge on Misinformation, Media, and How Influencers Work You
Online culture was for years treated as a kid's beat, but Kat Tenbarge of Spitfire News has shown that the tactics and propaganda that are prototyped in the influencer world are now being used to manipulate us all.The public duels between celebrities like Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni aren’t just gossip fuel. They’re a vast business, one that’s also a thriving laboratory for experimenting with influence and public perception. Kat Tenbarge reports on these propaganda wars at Spitfire News, where she brings the dogged investigative techniques she honed at NBC News and Business Insider to bear on the professional fixers and manipulators that public figures pay to massage our opinion of them.In this episode of The Rip Current, Tenbarge teaches us about the business of public opinion, and just how cost-effective — and in some cases cheap — it is to mess with your ideas about famous people and their behavior. We also dig into the conservative media machine’s strangely warm reception on Gavin Newsom’s podcast, and why accepted terms like “misogyny” or even “liar” are so hard to get on air.(Also, if you listen closely you’ll hear the weird coincidence that connects this episode to last week’s conversation with Jennifer Freyd, who coined the term DARVO to describe the common misdirection tactics of accused wrong-doers.)
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1:06:09
Psychologist Jennifer Freyd on the Language of Betrayal
How do public figures slip out of trouble? Using a time-honored tactic: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. The scientist who discovered DARVO has a lot to teach us about the war on truth.We’re in an upside-down moment, in which there seems to be no cost for lying and no respect for honesty. How did we get here? Jennifer Freyd can explain. Since the 1990s she’s been tracking the misbehavior of public figures and the ways that institutions unwittingly betray us. And in the process she discovered and revealed the secret, specific choreography by which people accused of bad things fight back, and described it with the acronym DARVO. And once you hear her explain it, you’ll start to see it everywhere.Freyd and I were fellows together at Stanford University, where she taught me how to look for the denials, attacks, and victim reversals that have now become the daily language of American politics. Here she breaks down her personal experience of betrayal, her decades of research, and how all of it led her to create The Center for Institutional Courage, where she teaches companies, universities, and organizations how to protect, rather than betray, their people.
The Rip Current covers the big, invisible forces carrying us out to sea, from tech to politics to greed to beauty to culture to human weirdness. The currents are strong, but with a little practice we can learn to spot them from the beach, and get across them safely.
Veteran journalist Jacob Ward has covered technology, science and business for NBC News, CNN, PBS, and Al Jazeera. He's written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and is the former Editor in Chief of Popular Science magazine.
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