Revolution.Social

Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist, author, and host of the Team Human podcast, who has been advocating for human-centered technology since the early '90s. He believes venture capital turned social media into a strip mall, but that its fundamental values can be reclaimed and re-invented. “It was a wonderful chaotic thing,” Douglas says about Twitter. “It was not a mean, treacherous, troll-baiting, horrible thing … the bias was towards collaboration, cooperation, and certain social norms that emerged naturally. It didn't turn fucked-up and evil until the platform became about monetizing things." Today on Revolution.Social, Doug and Rabble discuss how the internet became an advertising-driven hellscape; what platform cooperatives could look like if workers owned the means of digital production; and why Mastodon failed where it should have succeeded. They also discuss te reo Maori Twitter, diVine’s anti-AI slop stance, AGI mythology, Peter Thiel’s craziest ideas, and why professional journalists are losing to professional liars. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:04:44 Renaissance vs. Simulation 00:08:29 Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus 00:12:29 Ev Williams' $4.3 Billion Problem 00:16:05 Jack Dorsey's Original Sin 00:19:43 Platform Co-ops 00:24:09 Interest-Bearing Currency and AGI 00:26:22 Peter Thiel's AI Monarchy 00:33:32 Do People Want Social Media to Be Social? 00:38:06 Te Reo Maori Twitter 00:40:40 diVine and Medium Follow Rabble on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rabble.nz Follow the podcast: https://episodes.fm/1824528874 This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm, and executive produced by Alice Chan from Flock Marketing. To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit https://revolution.social/

We need a more diverse approach to internet governance, says Jillian York, the director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). At the EFF, Jillian has studied the global impact of social media policies and advocated on behalf of global activists and others whose voices are often suppressed.  Today on Revolution.Social, she and Rabble talk about the challenges of content moderation, the importance of end-to-end encryption, and the unintended consequences of age-verification legislation aimed at protecting minors on the internet. They also discuss the theft of copyrighted works that helped train AI large language models, and the necessity of grassroots activism to preserve digital freedoms. Follow Rabble on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rabble.nz Follow the podcast: https://episodes.fm/1824528874 This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm, and executive produced by Alice Chan from Flock Marketing. To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit https://revolution.social/

In this live interview recorded in November at Web Summit 2025 in Lisbon, Cory Doctorow returns to Revolution.Social to talk about building alternatives to “enshittified” digital platforms.  "Apps are websites that are illegal to protect your privacy while you use them," Cory explains. "The reason companies are so horny to get you to use their apps is because they can't be modified in that way. No one's ever installed an ad blocker for an app."  Cory and Rabble also discuss how Europe could export jailbreaking tools as industrial policy, why other countries should respond to American tariffs with a targeted strike against the tech industry, and why tech workers should have unionized when they had leverage. Chapters: 00:00:00 Introduction 00:03:06 Anticircumvention Laws & GDPR 00:06:54 Apple and Google's DRM Controls 00:09:14 Chokepoint Capitalism and the EuroStack 00:11:10 Adversarial Interoperability 00:14:09 Printer Ink vs. Stallion Semen 00:15:38 The AI Bubble Will Pop 00:18:48 Tech Bosses Aren't Afraid of Their Workers Read Cory’s new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It https://bookshop.org/p/books/enshittification-why-everything-suddenly-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it-cory-doctorow/d3f8483b158906ce Follow Rabble on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rabble.nz Follow the podcast: https://episodes.fm/1824528874 This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm, and executive produced by Alice Chan from Flock Marketing. To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit https://revolution.social/

Designer, community-builder, and Flickr co-creator George Oates is now the executive director of the Flickr Foundation, which is working to preserve the platform's 21 years of photos for the next 100 years. She helped create Flickr's community guidelines, designed its nested privacy controls, and launched the Flickr Commons program, which partners with more than 100 institutions to make publicly held photography collections more accessible. “The Flickr community loved it, and actually would help the institutions by describing the photos, and in some cases identifying things like the location they were taken, who was in them, the events surrounding them, stuff like that,” George says. “This really important contextual metadata about these historic photos.” Today on Revolution.Social, George and Rabble talk about how the online multiplayer Game Neverending evolved into Flickr; the groundbreaking ways the site approached content moderation and avoiding context collapse; and why the sort of hypergrowth that makes Silicon Valley tick is “the antithesis of building a healthy, happy community.” Plus: The plan to save all of Flickr’s photos, no matter what happens. Follow Rabble on Bluesky Follow the podcast This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm, and executive produced by Alice Chan from Flock Marketing. To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit https://revolution.social/

Rabble and Alice Chan, Revolution.Social’s host and executive producer, talk about the launch and overwhelming reception to diVine, a new social video app that resurrects the six-second looping format of Vine and features archived original Vine content. This time, however, the app is built on open protocols and a promise to focus on real content made by real people, not AI. Within hours of announcing diVine at Web Summit in Lisbon, it had 10,000 signups on TestFlight, Apple’s developer testing app, and its beta program was full. Its early success is proof that new social apps can be built on the Social Media Bill of Rights and that consumers want better ways to connect and share online. "We accept that one person controls Instagram and one person controls Twitter, one person controls TikTok,” Rabble says. “That is a dystopian nightmare. And so diVine isn't just fun videos, but also shows us a future of social media where power is shared." You can join the diVine mobile app waitlist and preview the videos people are creating at https://divine.video/ Follow Rabble on Bluesky Follow the podcast This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod, and executive produced by Alice Chan from Flock Marketing. To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit https://revolution.social/