INTERVIEWER: What does public interest technology mean to you, and what are the core principles in your mind?
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: For me, public interest technology is the useful little bit of language that I have for when students come to me and say, “I really want to work in technology but I also don't want to be evil.” And it's sort of shorthand for this very complicated set of ideas. A lot of the ways in which we use technology in the modern world are about making a buck, they're about startups that seek monopoly, they're about grabbing human attention and exploiting it, and so on and so forth. Public interest technology is sort of a way of saying there's a whole other way of working in this space, and it's a way of working where you put human beings and human values first. You're less concerned about making money or making a profit, you're more concerned about how technology is advancing human values, whether technology is negatively impacting people and how we might mitigate those impacts, whether technology can be used as a force for good around broader social problems. So I sort of see public interest tech as almost this sort of shibboleth: when someone says it I kind of know that we can have a different conversation. If someone tells me that they're really interested in technology, and then I ask them what they want to do, and they tell me that they want to be a product manager, or they want to do the startup thing, like that's fine, and you know it's great: we need young people to go into those spaces. But it's really helpful and wonderful that we have language for people who want the human values and the social change aspects of things to come up first.
INTERVIEWER: What was your journey to PIT?
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: I think probably the easiest way to explain this is to just talk a little bit about my history. I graduated from college in 1993. I moved to West Africa, to Ghana, to study, to be a musician. Did music and ethnomusicology, started grad school in 1994, and pretty quickly dropped out and joined the very first generation of the web industry. And so I was involved with building an early web company called Tripod.com, which was one of the very first user-generated content companies. We made it possible for people to have their own home pages on the web. People used that capability for all sorts of things, sometimes very positive, sometimes quite negative. But in many ways it kind of anticipated a whole lot of the controversies around content moderation, what are people doing with the web, sort of all of those things.
So not very long after I graduated from college, I found myself working on an early dotcom company and helping to create this sort of new space of user-generated content. That company was pretty successful and I eventually had enough of my own money to buy my time for a while, and what I decided to do was see whether the Internet (which had enabled us to build this company in the small town I lived in in Western Mass) was having any impact in sub-saharan Africa. And so I started an NGO called Geekcorps, which basically recruited people out of the tech industry and said, “We'll make it fiscally possible for you to come to Ghana or Rwanda or Armenia—eventually all sorts of places around the world—and work on technology projects with local partners and help train them in technology skills.” We funded Geekcorps for about two years with my money and the money of other people that I knew from the startup community. We eventually realized that the only way to do this was to work closely with the US government, because they were really the only people who had sufficient money to pull this off. And so we became USAID contractors, for better or for worse.
After a couple of years of that, it just wasn't much fun for anyone involved, and I ended up pulling away from it. But what it meant was by about 2003 or 2004, I'd spent quite a bit of time thinking about how the internet was and wasn't reaching the Global South, and I had a lot of practical experience working on internet projects in the Global South. That turned out to be very useful expertise, both as an academic researcher, which is what I started doing as my day job, and in my work with another sort of public interest tech startup called Global Voices, which was using first blogging and then eventually social media to help change the perception of the Global South in the broader world—trying to sort of expand visibility and understanding of different parts of the world.
INTERVIEWER: How did your educational background prepare you for working in public interest technology?
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: I think that the biggest thing was that my formal education was all over the map. I graduated with a degree in philosophy, but I barely took any philosophy, it was just the major in which I had enough classes that I could manage to graduate. Going to a great liberal arts institution I was able to take advantage of all of the other educational opportunities outside of the classroom. I played in an African music ensemble all four years that I was there, and that's what ended up sending me to Ghana in the first place. And had I not gone to Ghana it's pretty clear to me that I never would have started along this path.
I think the other thing to say is that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I started as an undergrad, the Internet itself was an esoteric, outside-of-academic interest. Computer science was a pretty small major—not a lot of people were doing it. The people who were doing it were rarely thinking about the Internet and they certainly weren't looking at the Internet from a cultural point of view, which was a lot of what I was trying to do. I was super interested in online communities like MOOs and MUDs and how discussions were unfolding on Usenet. None of that was being taught in the classroom. But the thing about a liberal arts education is that you sort of learn to fight to have your space taken seriously. And so this whole idea of “look, I know we don't study this, but I'm going to study this” was a big part of my educational experience, and I think probably prepared me very, very well for my PIT career. I think the fact that I have a background in ethics—that I've taken classes on ethics, that I understand what it would mean to be a deontological ethicist—does occasionally come in handy. But more than anything else, I think it's this notion that you don't know what's going to be worth exploring, and you have to be open to the idea that something may turn out to be worth exploring, even if everybody else disagrees with you—that’s been the most useful to me.
INTERVIEWER: Tell us more about Global Voices.
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: My work on Geekcorps sent me over to Harvard's Berkman Center and I felt a little bit like a provocative outsider there. We participated in a meeting in 2004 at Blogger Con, which was this giant conference on political blogging. Bloggers believed, not entirely without reason, that they could be a major political force in US politics. A lot of people who had been involved with the 2004 Howard Dean campaign were getting together there, and my colleague, Rebecca MacKinnon, and I basically said, “Hey, this isn't just about US politics, this is also about what's happening in the Global South. You've really got to get a much more global set of people around the table. We've got to talk about how this affects countries other than the United States.” And the people we brought to that gathering became Global Voices. So it was very much this oppositional, “Hey, Harvard, let's stop talking about the fringes of the Democratic party. Let's talk more broadly.” This sort of notion of challenging what we were going to study, what we were going to pay attention to, what was worthy of academic exploration, that felt somewhat radical.
Global Voices is now about to celebrate its twentieth anniversary, and it’s kind of at a turning point. We have all sorts of interesting questions and challenges. This began as a volunteer nonprofit with bloggers all over the world, agreeing that we were going to read and pay attention to each other's work. It's become much more formalized, much more professionalized. It has editors, it has translators. It still doesn't have a ton of money. Anyone who studies digital media will tell you that no one's really figured out how to build sustainable businesses in this space. I mean, Sports Illustrated ran ads alongside the most popular topic in the world, and then periodically spiced it up with pictures of people in bathing suits, and they couldn't even make a go of it. So we're going to have a real hard time sustaining ourselves when we’re talking about how to change perceptions of Pakistan, or give an on-the-ground point of view from Zimbabwe. And so it’s going to be a real challenge as we try to figure out what's the next generation of this.
The flip side is, I am obscenely proud of the fact that this community has been going for almost 20 years. We have hundreds of people who got a start in the community as writers about their culture, and many of whom have gone on to professional careers in journalism, who've gone on to academic careers. There are all sorts of wonderful examples of people getting involved with Global Voices and going on to amazing places in their lives.
I have always looked at the Internet as something that can make the world a bigger and wider place. The Internet helped me decide to move to Ghana in the first place, it became the space in which I was able to run this nonprofit and spend a lot of time and really work with people in West Africa. It's made Global Voices possible, which has been going on for the last two decades of my life. I think so much about the potential for the Internet to build a wider world, and the fact that it doesn't always work that way.
INTERVIEWER: What do you see as the future of PIT?
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: We're at a very weird early stage with PIT. Even at UMass, where we've made a campus-wide commitment to thinking about technology in the public interest, it’s a controversial idea. You'll find people within our computer science department who basically say, “Until you can show me jobs that require PIT, why are you doing this?” I've had students sort of come to me and say, “You know, my counselor has basically said, ‘Don't get the PIT concentration. There are no jobs around it.’” And it may be that we're very early on in the same way that something like data science once was. It may also be that we don't have the right conceptual language to talk about this. Clearly there is something interesting about approaching technology from a critical values frame. Like, I think there's no doubt that that's the way to go. But PIT is based on this very specific idea. It came out of the Ford Foundation. It refers back to public interest law, and this idea that the legal profession had to sort of recognize that there needed to be an approach to law that wasn't just about serving the people with the most money, but serving the public interest as well. I don't know what it really means to be a technologist working in the public interest, despite the fact that I think I am a technologist who works in the public interest. I feel pretty comfortable doing that at a university, because I can train and that feels sort of uncomplicated. Can you be a public interest technologist working for Facebook? I would hope so. I would hope that a lot of the people who are working on transparency, who are working on trust and safety, see themselves coming from a public interest technology frame. But I can also imagine people looking at that and saying, “Well, you know you can't be, you're at Google, that's not a viable sort of way to go about this.” I am wondering whether this is a field or a practice, or whether we have the right name. But I think that this question of how do you make sure that the public has a seat at the table in discussions about technology—whether you're working for an NGO and trying to help them level up in their technological understanding, or whether you're working within a big corporation and advocating for pro-social uses of technology—it feels like all of that should be able to fit. But I'm trying to be very open to the question of: Have we found the right way to talk about this yet? Are we doing this right, or do we still have more work to do as far as figuring out what are the questions that we're asking and how we're inviting people into this set of questions?
Creating a new field isn't easy, and it's a pretty broad field. And you know, maybe it's not all one field. Maybe the people who work on Trust and Safety are going to be different from the people who work on critiquing AI. There are what feel like some pretty tough barriers in our space right now. Folks who are coming primarily with a critical lens are not always super sympathetic to people who are working in a corporate context. I think they're often not very accepting of this sort of notion that, at the end of the day, before we end settler colonialism and late stage capitalism, it would be nice if, you know, fewer people harassed each other on Facebook. But those are different approaches. If what you're really trying to do is dismantle structural racism under capitalism, do you see as fellow travelers people who are trying to make existing systems better? Or do you view them as sort of insufficiently bought into the transformative proposition? That feels really challenging to me. I'm not sure how we handle that. Tensions like that might well mean that this ends up not being a single field. It might end up being different related fields that have, as a common touch point, the idea of trying to make tech better for humans rather than worse for humans.