RadicalxChange(s)

Christine Lemmer-Webber: CTO of Spritely Institute, ActivityPub Co-Editor, and User Freedom Activist

Episode Summary

In this exciting episode, Matt Prewitt speaks with the inquisitive and captivating Christine Lemmer-Webber, who is CTO of the Spritely Institute and whose lifelong work focuses on advocating user freedom. This philosophical and technical discussion focuses on the many ways to look at ethical methods of building technology without usurping the free agency of others; a pluralistic view of examining technical design with different lenses.

Episode Notes

In this exciting episode, Matt Prewitt speaks with the inquisitive and captivating Christine Lemmer-Webber, who is CTO of the Spritely Institute and whose lifelong work focuses on advocating user freedom. This philosophical and technical discussion focuses on the many ways to look at ethical methods of building technology without usurping the free agency of others; a pluralistic view of examining technical design with different lenses. 

NOTE: This is a regular season episode of the RadicalxChange(s) podcast. Our mini season of "A New Era of Democracy" will continue following this episode.

Things Mentioned: 

• Spritely Institute
• Scheme Primer from Spritely Institute
• Randy Farmer!
• FOSS and Crafts podcast (hosted by Christine Lemmer-Webber and Dr. Morgan Lemmer-Webber)
• The terms "context collapse" and "collapsed contexts" (the latter coined by technology and social media scholar danah boyd in the early 2000s).
• Neohabitat game
• Christine gives a shout-out to Leilani Gilpin's paper on  accountability layers (re: machine learning systems)
• Donate to the Spritely Institute! Funders email contact@spritely.institute.

Christine Lemmer-Webber (she/they) has devoted her life to advancing user freedom. She founded the MediaGoblin project because she believes that in order to allow people to express their agency, putting networking technology in the hands of users in a way that empowers them is fundamental. Realizing that the federated social web was fractured by a variety of incompatible protocols, she co-authored and shepherded ActivityPub's standardization, which as of 2020, is the most popular and widely deployed web-based decentralized social network protocol to date. Christine established the open-source Spritely Project to solve known problems in existing centralized and decentralized social media platforms and to re-imagine the way we build networked applications - work that now continues here at the Spritely Institute under her guidance as CTO.

Matt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.

Production Credits

• Produced by G. Angela Corpus.
• Co-Produced and Audio Engineered by Aaron Benavides.
• Executive Produced by G. Angela Corpus, Jennifer Morone, and Matt Prewitt.
• Intro/Outro music by MagnusMoone, “Wind in the Willows,” is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

This is a RadicalxChange Production.

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