Looks Like New

From subreddit rule pages to Mastodon server blocklists, the internet is full of quiet governance decisions most of us never see. On this episode of Looks Like New, Júlia Martins Rodrigues talks with Sohyeon Hwang about who's making them and what it would take to share this power.

Sohyeon is a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, about how everyday people build real power over the technologies shaping their lives. Hwang studies the "governance laboratories" of subreddits, fandom wikis, and Mastodon servers places where volunteer moderators write rules, borrow them from other communities, and improvise systems of collective self-governance in real time. Their conversation moves from where online community rules actually come from, to a framework for comparing decentralized protocols like ActivityPub, AT Protocol, Nostr, and Farcaster, to why Hwang believes governance is best understood not as an end state but as an ongoing, adaptable process built on trust.

On this episode of Looks Like New, MEDLab's Stephanie Abdalla speaks with Dr. Naim Aburaddi, artist, journalist, and PhD graduate whose work explores how immersive tech can document destruction. Aburaddi is the co-founder and co-director of the Phoenix of Gaza XR Project, an interactive virtual reality experience that documents life in Gaza through its culture, history and decades of subjugation by outside powers. It has been exhibited at institutions including MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Brown, and Yale, as well as internationally. Naim is A Data Justice Fellow at Princeton's Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab and recipient of the 2024 Mellon ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. His work has been featured by the BBC, WGBH, Colorado Public Radio, and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

Their conversation moves from the personal to the political, following Aburaddi's life growing up in Gaza and pursuing journalism abroad, to how storytelling became both a survival tool and a form of resistance.

MEDLab research fellow Kadallah Burrowes speaks with Lauren Gardner, Executive Director of Open Source Collective, about what it means to build infrastructure for the commons and why the lessons of grassroots arts spaces might hold the key to the future of collective digital life. Gardner stewards a network of over 2,500 open-source and community-driven projects, providing fiscal sponsorship and shared infrastructure to thousands of maintainers and contributors worldwide.

Her path to the global open-source movement runs through some of the most generative DIY spaces in recent memory: Babycastles, the New York arcade-turned-social-gallery that reimagined game culture, and the School for Poetic Computation, where code, critical theory, art, and collaborative practice converge. Their conversation asks what artists, technologists, and anyone interested in working collectively might learn from decades of building environments where creativity and the commons come first.

In this month's episode, in conversation with MEDLab fellow Stephanie Abdalla, Dr. Gebru discusses AI ethics research, the history of the AGI movement, and movements of resistance that can lead us to alternative AI futures.

Dr. Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR for short), an independent organization of academics, activists, and engineers who believe in technology that benefits everyone. Dr. Gebru is also the co-founder of Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility, and health of Black people in the field of AI, and is on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian and Jamaican high school students. She has received a number of accolades, including being named one of Nature’s Ten people who helped shape science and one of TIME 100’s most influential people.

In this episode of Looks Like New, MEDLab's Kadallah Burrowes sits down with political economist Nick Srnicek to examine the rise of platform capitalism and the forces shaping today’s digital economy.

The conversation moves beyond technological hype to focus on labor, automation, and political possibility. Rather than framing automation as a simple story of job replacement, Srnicek argues that digital systems reorganize work through surveillance, algorithmic management, and precarious employment structures. As platforms increasingly function as social infrastructure, questions of governance, ownership, and democratic accountability become unavoidable. This episode challenges listeners to see the digital economy not as inevitable, but as a political construction one whose future remains open to collective imagination and action.