86. danah boyd on freaks, geeks, queers, and lying to the US Census - Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
▻https://publicinfrastructure.org/podcast/86-danah-boyd
Ethan Zuckerman:
Hey everybody, welcome back to “Reimagining the Internet.” I am your host, Ethan Zuckerman. I am here today with a dear friend of mine, danah boyd is a partner researcher at Microsoft Research, a distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown. She’s the founder of the celebrated research institute Data and Society, where she remains an advisor. She’s one of the most cited scholars on social media. Her book, “It’s Complicated the Social Lives of network teens” is really one of the key works on understanding youth and the social internet. I could keep talking about her, but you would eventually turn off this podcast.
danah, it’s so great to have you. Welcome to the show.
danah boyd:
Thank you. It’s a total delight to be here with you today.
And so when we put in regulatory frameworks, where the goal is to segment young people from these other things, we’re doing it for a political agenda and we’re not focused on a socialization process. The key to speech for me is that you socialize young people and understanding the speech acts of our world, why they play out the way they do, what is really at play, what is being contested, how do you make sense of the language that’s being thrown around you?
Because the other thing that I also struggle with is in the United States where we valorize that idea of quote unquote freedom of speech. We miss the whole point of freedom of speech is to be able to be a responsible speaker for an informed citizenry. It doesn’t mean the right to be amplified. Those are two different things.
And so I think for me, it’s this process of like, what are the consequences of your speech? If your speech hurts another person, you have to learn to pay consequences for that.
And that’s by the way, what young people are learning, you know, even in the school environment, like we take something like bullying. Bullying is worse in the school than it ever is at home. And we’ve known that in our data for a very long time, the irony of COVID was that bullying is integrated.
Turns out when kids don’t go to school, they can get bullied. It’s not that they actually went up higher because of online. The online bullying went through the floor. So it was this weird natural experiment for all of us where like school actually turns out to be the main site of meanness and cruelty and nobody’s going to be sitting there like, “let’s ban school.”
You know, and again, we can take other parallels. Right? We have a law that says you cannot drink alcohol under 21. I’m sorry, we know the date on of this. This is not what stops people from drinking alcohol under 21. They drink it. But unfortunately they drink it in a way that they’re again not being socialized into thinking about it housely and anybody on a college campus knows that like the drinking dynamic in the United States is far more toxic than in most other countries around the world. And so this is where I find these bans are playing one set of politics and not thinking about the consequences of them, let alone how to negotiate it.
Ethan Zuckerman:
You and I are part of a generation who get dismissed as cyberutopians, but maybe a healthy way of looking at it is to say, we actually imagine these technologies being built consistent with our values and towards some of the goals that we hold dear, we did not did a good enough job politically ensuring that our values got built into those technologies. I think one of the interesting questions at this point is, you know, how redeemable are these spaces as we head into 2024 do we still have idealistic views of how these spaces might get used in the backdrop of our politics or is the project dismantling them building alternatives to them keeping them in a box to one extent or another?
danah boyd:
So I think my very definition of activism is to fight for a better future than a present. And one of the things that I love are the various versions of dreamers and activists who you do imagine and strive for and work towards a better future that doesn’t necessarily accept the present. And I think there’s really reasonable differences of view of how to get to that, you know, various versions of better futures, more inclusive futures, more equitable futures. And I think the things that I, you know, that has sort of shifted over my career is like certainly growing up as, you know, this queer kid in, you know, rural America, I saw technology in my youth as the thing that would be allowing me to go to that better future because the technology of my youth and the ways in which these technologies that I was living with were already marginalized, already appeared to align with it. So I thought that that was something I could hook to.
At this point, the technologies of the present are entirely entangled with forms of late-stage capitalism that are about exploitation at its core. So I’m not as committed to saying that hooking my activist future and my belief of towards a better future on a fight for these technologies is going to necessarily work towards an aligned arrangement. And so I think a lot of what I’m struggling with personally and intellectually is like, how do I fight for a better future? Because I’m not committed to thinking that it’s technology.
And this is where for me, I think like you, I was always seen as like, you know, a techno-optimist. And I think that that was, you know, a misnomer because I think that what I was, I’m an optimist that it’s possible to get to a better future. I for a long time saw technology as one of the tools in that and one of the sites where those things could play out. And I do believe that many, it’s been an amazing site of contestation that’s like made visible a whole set of values and enables so many people to come together.
But it’s not, I’m not a tech determinist. I don’t believe that the technology is the thing. It just, it was the thing that made sense to use at the time. And I think I’m asking myself, what are the things to use now to fight for a better future.
And so this is also one of those moments where it’s like, where do we have the political will? And we’re going to regulate technology. We’ve seen state level regulations. But I’d also like to note, most of these are actually to encourage parents to be more surveillant of young people.
And this is one of my also big sites of frustration because I think a lot of people think that that’s actually a good thing because they imagine all parents are good. And one of the heartbreaking things about my work is learning that, like, no, not always are parents the best actor for young people.
And it’s worse than that. When we’re in the middle of a cultural war, where we’re trying to actually encourage parents to have control over children’s bodies, you know, in this way that’s actually strategically oppressive, these are laws that are about trying to enable and encourage large mechanisms of oppression that will actually cause more damage long-term than they will actually address the problems at bay.
So this is one of the reasons why these current debates are very disheartening for me, very confusing for me, because it’s not actually about privacy, or it’s not actually about helping young people. It’s about maximizing surveillance, giving parents power over their children, and actually making certain that we cause more harm long term under this sort of fantasy of moral values and oppression. And that scares me.
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