The Tech Policy Press Podcast

On September 23, Tech Policy Press hosted an event at Betaworks in New York City with Gil Durán, the author of The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, the New York Times bestselling book published by Simon & Schuster. Alice Marwick, research director at Data & Society, joined the discussion with Justin Hendrix.

In the United States, the census touches tech policy at more points than you might realize. It's a massive data collection operation and a piece of democratic infrastructure all at once. danah boyd is the author of Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census, a new book from the University of Chicago Press that tells the story of the people who make the census, recounting how the 2020 census came together amid fractured politics and a raging pandemic. It’s a complicated story, and it has implications for the next census, which is already in planning, and is already a source of controversy and concern.

The study of how hate is expressed in digital media and its relationship to offline harassment and violence is a growing field that touches public policy, content moderation and platform policy, AI governance, and a variety of other topics at the intersection of technology and public discourse. This week, a new journal called the Digital Hate Review launched to give a new home to research and discourse on these issues. To learn more, Justin Hendrix spoke to its editor-in-chief, Matthias J. Becker, who has spent 15 years tracking how hate speech evolves online.

Amid a frenzy of headlines about AI safety and just two weeks out from a planned meeting of US President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping, Justin Hendrix moderated a discussion around the question, what does AI governance actually demand right now? Convened by the the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C., the discussion included Amba Kak from the AI Now Institute, Kat Duffy from the Council on Foreign Relations, Miro Plueckebaum from the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative, and Jack Shanahan from SAIS ACF and the Center for a New American Security.

Just ahead of the start of the new school year, districts across the United States are issuing new policies on the use of artificial intelligence applications in classrooms. Last Wednesday, New York City effectively banned most student facing AI in all K-8th grade classes while allowing a limited set of approved tools to be used for high schoolers for the upcoming school year. And on the same day, Los Angeles school officials announced the district was placing a one-year moratorium on generative AI for all of its estimated 378,000 students.
To learn more about these announcements and the politics driving them, Justin Hendrix spoke to two individuals who covered these matters for Tech Policy Press this summer: Tech Policy Press fellow Chris Mills Rodrigo and audio reporter Laura Karpas, who interned at Tech Policy Press this summer and is currently a graduate student at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.