Today, in Part I of a two-episode conversation, Matt Prewitt is joined by civic entrepreneur and Founder of Project Liberty, Frank McCourt, who is on a mission to reclaim the internet and prioritize human rights in our digital landscape. Drawing parallels between the early public oversight of television and the current state of the internet, Frank highlights the commodification of our data and identities online. He advocates for new protocols and a movement inspired by historical fights against oppression to secure genuine data rights and agency online. As we look to the future, Project Liberty's endeavors may play a crucial role. This interview is a fantastic opportunity to hear more about Frank's thinking.
Today, in Part I of a two-episode conversation, Matt Prewitt is joined by civic entrepreneur and Founder of Project Liberty, Frank McCourt, who is on a mission to reclaim the internet and prioritize human rights in our digital landscape. Drawing parallels between the early public oversight of television and the current state of the internet, Frank highlights the commodification of our data and identities online. He advocates for new protocols and a movement inspired by historical fights against oppression to secure genuine data rights and agency online. As we look to the future, Project Liberty's endeavors may play a crucial role. This interview is a fantastic opportunity to hear more about Frank's thinking.
Links & References:
References:
Bios:
Frank H. McCourt, Jr. is a civic entrepreneur and the executive chairman and former CEO of McCourt Global, a private family company committed to building a better future through its work across the real estate, sports, technology, media, and capital investment industries, as well as its significant philanthropic activities. Frank is proud to extend his family’s 130-year legacy of merging community and social impact with financial results, an approach that started when the original McCourt Company was launched in Boston in 1893.
He is a passionate supporter of multiple academic, civic, and cultural institutions and initiatives. He is the founder and executive chairman of Project Liberty, a far-reaching, $500 million initiative to transform the internet through a new, equitable technology infrastructure and rebuild social media in a way that enables users to own and control their personal data. The project includes the development of a groundbreaking, open-source internet protocol called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), which will be owned by the public to serve as a new web infrastructure. It also includes the creation of Project Liberty’s Institute (formerly The McCourt Institute,) launched with founding partners Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA, and Sciences Po in Paris, to advance research, bring together technologists and social scientists, and develop a governance model for the internet’s next era.
Frank has served on Georgetown University’s Board of Directors for many years and, in 2013, made a $100 million founding investment to create Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. He expanded on this in 2021 with a $100 million investment to catalyze an inclusive pipeline of public policy leaders and put the school on a path to becoming tuition-free.
In 2024, Frank released his first book, OUR BIGGEST FIGHT: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age.
Frank’s Social Links:
Matt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is the President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.
Matt’s Social Links:
Matt Prewitt: All right. Frank McCourt, thank you so much for joining me today.
Frank McCourt: Yeah, it's a pleasure to be with you, Matt. How are you today?
Matt Prewitt: I'm doing pretty well. A little sick, actually, from extensive travel, but hanging in there.
Frank McCourt: Yeah, we'll have a good conversation. You'll feel better.
Matt Prewitt: Super. So I guess let's, the first question I'd like to ask is, can you say a little bit more about, or a little bit about your inspiration for starting Project Liberty?
What, what inspired you to undertake on this? Undertake this journey and, and what are you seeking to accomplish?
Frank McCourt: Yeah, I wrote, our biggest fight to shed light on, on project liberty and, some of the reasons I got into the work and why I think it's so fundamentally important and actually urgent.
I think part of it, Matt, comes from, a hard wiring. I grew up in a big family, one of seven sibs and in Watertown, Massachusetts, a town just outside of Boston. And, we were All, like many families at the dinner table, we were able to share lots of opinions and have lots of great conversation and, and, very different opinions, as a matter of fact, and, me and my sibs were pretty good at.
Identifying problems though, as most kids are. and not at dinner would end without my mom saying, okay, kids, you've done a good job of identifying the problem now. Now, what are you going to do about it? So that's pretty, basic wiring for me. and then also I'm part of a, family of, builders.
I, I represent, five generation, in going strong. business that started, by my great grandfather back in the 1800s and, and he started building roads when Henry Ford started building cars and, we've built lots of infrastructure over the last 131 years.
And, we look at the world as, in a way that, when you see a problem, go, fix it. And particularly when you see a, an engineering or infrastructure problem, that can clearly be fixed and, without fixing it, lots of damage is being done. You you, first of all, you can't unsee it.
Once you've seen it. And secondly, I do have my mom's voice in the back, in the back of my head saying, get after it and fix it. that's what kind of brings me, to the work. I've, had all kinds of personal experiences with, with this that just validate the work.
But, I think that it's, really, seeing this broken internet and, having some insight into how, it, it. can be fixed is really motivating to me right now.
Matt Prewitt: You mentioned infrastructure and, there's all these different ways of thinking about what infrastructure is. And I know you've got experience not only with like physical infrastructure and transportation infrastructure, but also, like media.
And, I'm curious how, I'm curious how you, how your thinking evolved. Over the past sort of few decades, as you saw the Internet emerging, did you, when did you start to think that maybe there's something that needs to be fixed, with this, sort of new piece of vital infrastructure and, how did that, emerge?
Frank McCourt: Yeah, that, infrastructure is, you say, is a big broad category, right? And there's all kinds of, of infrastructure, but maybe one way of thinking about it, Matt, is public versus private, and that, that's, one way to, to slice it up and think about it. And we've, we, have, we've done a good job in, the United States and not that people elsewhere haven't done a good job, but I'll focus for on America for a moment.
And a project, the American project, which is near and dear to me, we've done a reasonably good job of, building public infrastructure, and then letting private capital and private actors, entrepreneurs and so forth. Build on it and, a classic example that's used often is the interstate highway system, right?
That massive project to, connect the country physically. And, so there's a shared resource funded by taxpayers, executed by the federal government in order to, make us safer, quite frankly. So it, it had a defense purpose, i.e, the ability to move machinery and men and women around the country.
But it also had massive commercial, purpose and opportunity. And then what we saw is, there's all kinds of businesses built up, including the automobile business, by the way, but also, businesses that- there's a reason why office parks get built around highway interchanges, and, and so on and so forth.
Public transit is another great example. Great example right where the public sector, builds it normally and then you see there's a reason why housing and commercial uses show up around, subway stops, for instance, And transit stations. yeah, there's this been this kind of public/ private, partnership, and I'm gonna use that word loosely, over the years that where we've seen, The public kind of do a lot of the, policy thinking and the research and then, build the enabling devices and then the private sector kicks in the internet, it was built the same way, right?
it was a project initially started for, to make us safer, right? Because a highly centralized communication system is vulnerable to attack. And, and this was the mentality, during the cold war, we didn't want to have our telecommunication systems be disabled by an attack from what was then the, Soviet union.
And, so the government set out to build a decentralized communication system. and, brought really smart people in from four universities to figure out how to do that. And they created this thing called the internet. And in 1983, when, it was agreed by those individuals that they would adopt the simple protocol to connect devices, the internet was created.
It's highly decentralized by design, built as a public resource that, everybody could use. And, these researchers and universities continue to use it, but it was something that now the public could use and engage in. And, and then it was in 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee, a, an Englishman came forward with a, he was with a, further innovation with yet another protocol, that called the HTTP, which connected, created data links.
And so it was the creation of the World Wide Web and also very decentralized design very much to, keep you to empower us. To part individuals and to make us smarter and to share information and advanced civilization. And, it's that proverbial tide that lifts all boats. And, then, people started building on it and where things went sideways.
And I would argue even backward is, when we entered this age where this decentralized, communications technology became highly centralized. With, the rapid emergence of the app era, where these big apps showed up, which became these big platforms now and they adopted a, let's scrape everybody's data and aggregate it and apply algorithms to it and, do stuff to make money and, and then, they learned they could do stuff to make money and actually influence.
behaviors and predict our behaviors and therefore influence them. And that's when we've got it to like really dangerous territory. When you have these, a few big companies knowing more about each of us than we know about ourselves, making judgments about our, personalities and what will be our emotional reaction to information or triggering devices.
And, having that power in the hands of a few platforms is very dangerous in my opinion, particularly if your, framework is, democracy, liberty, freedom, individual agency, autonomy, choice, individual control and, and so forth. So we now have this highly autocratic centralized surveillance based technology that's, basically, as or more powerful than our, political system and, which is designed to protect these liberties. And, now we're seeing these liberties, become diminished in this new age, because, We're becoming subjects again, right? We're just, we're losing these freedoms and these rights to, to, to, to think freely and act freely and, behave freely.
So in 2013 set out to start a public policy school in Washington DC at Georgetown. Thinking at the time that maybe policy could be the answer to get out ahead of all this and fix it before it was too late, new debt. Big data was important. So we have a massive data Institute that we placed inside of the this new school and, learn very quickly.
Unfortunately, the policy was no match for the speed, the scale, the power, the money of big tech. And, so,I started to think much more deeply about how to fix the tech or address the tech and, have it operate in a way that's far more harm harmonious with the human rights that we. allegedly have and, that are, supposed to be protected by, our political order.
yeah, it was, really, an awareness that this is tech that could do great damage going back into the 2010/11 era, thinking it might be able to be fixed by, Smarter policies and then realizing by 2015 that we need to fix the tech.
Matt Prewitt: Gotcha. Yeah. there's, there's a lot there, but in, in the, on the topic of infrastructure, one thing that strikes me is that.
When you, if you think about public infrastructure that has worked and public infrastructure that hasn't worked, it seems to me that it's not always just about a simple sort of public private distinction. It seems like basically, there are certain kinds of big infrastructure projects, whether publicly or privately, or both. Funded they get captured and some that don't right. for example, like the, interstate highway system certainly benefited a number of large private, businesses, more than the average person, but it was still somehow managed towards the public good and for the public benefit in a way that, in a way that seemed to, to work for everyone.
And there was never this kind of feeling of a very small number of businesses really extracting all of the value that that, network was creating. and the, the Internet, I think you identified pretty much the same turning point that I would have identified somewhere around that sort of app era transition, right?
Maybe. Between kind of 2008 to 2012, it starts to feel extremely captured, right? It starts to feel that, there are a handful of businesses that are really, really extracting most of the value and preventing the. Network as a whole from being managed in the public interest. And I'm curious what your thoughts are on, if you agree with that characterization first and second, how do you think that capturing happened?
what was the sort of door that was left unlocked that prevented that network from, continuing to benefit the public the way prior big infrastructure projects have.
Frank McCourt: Yeah, I think that's a really a fantastic question and that it gets to the root of the problem here. And before I answer it directly, let me add just two data points for you to see if you agree. In that, 2008 to 2012 timeframe, in addition to these big apps showing up, their enabling device showed up, right? The, smartphone. And so now we're connecting everyone to this powerful, technology and the app builders understood that they could use this device, In everybody's hands. To actually connect to billions of people. I'll get back to that, in one moment. And secondly, and this is a, stunner to me, when you start out building public infrastructure and something that's going to be for the public as well as to be private, to be commercial things being built around it, the public has a rationale for building it and then, businesses figure out models to, to then expand on it. And so forth, like the telecom, we built the telecom company. My family started in 93 and, we raised the funds to build the fiber optic network throughout the country. And then built a better product so that we attracted customers that we could, that would pay us so we could support the infrastructure we built
With, the internet, we, we, it's been totally privatized and yet somehow the public thinks that they still have the obligation of building it. So in this chips act is 50 billion to what, to build the final, most expensive parts of the internet. Creating internet, accessibility to the final five or one0 percent of the population.
And, here you have the biggest companies in the world that have exploited this public investment, still sitting back, letting our taxpayer dollars build the final mile for them so that they can collect all the money, which is, it's just absurd that we haven't shifted our mentality from internet is good.
It connects everyone. It makes us smarter. it's democratizing. Let's use public resources to "whoops!," somewhere along the way all this was privatized. There's a few actors making all the money. isn't that a problem? A and B. Why on earth would we pay taxpayer money to make them richer? It's just nuts.
So maybe that's a, a conversation we can get back to later or for another day. But back to your issue about what happened. What's different about Internet infrastructure and highway infrastructure, for example. And I think the big difference, Matt, is that the stuff that these platforms use is scraping all of our data really is miss, -characterized. It's really not our data. It's our personhood in the digital age. It's everything about us. the highway system didn't scrape information. we chose to use it or didn't use it. And some highways, we had to pay a toll because it was a, a public turnpike,
and we had choices to, whether we had a car or not, it had choices to whether we traveled on that highway or not. And we were never there. Violated in the process, right? It wasn't that and now, ironically, on those same highways, we are being tracked, which is, the ultimate the irony here.
But the point in answer to your question is that what's fundamentally different about what's going on now is the information that is created the product that's created by, connecting all of us putting smartphones in our hands, having this internet backbone that is so powerful is that you know what these big platforms figured out is it's not just data that's important.
It's our personal data that's important. Our social graph are a complete Mapping a of society and be a incredibly intimate profiling of each of us. and this information, if we would never in a million years, let our government surveil us and have all this information about us. But yet somehow we've been asleep at the switch as these big platforms have scraped all of our data and just built these incredible surveillance tools.
That are just data extraction machines and I eat personhood extraction machines. So we're having the soul sucked out of us. people talk about tech is dehumanizing. it certainly is when you take and you suck the humanity out of us and ingested in machines. And those machines are programmed to, to program us, right?
Have you ever wondered why every argument seems to be like 50 percent on one side and 50 percent on the other side? It's because the algorithms are working perfectly well. They're designed to keep us at odds with one another because that will keep us engaged longer. And not only will these platforms be able to sell us more stuff, they actually learn more about us because at this stage of the game, they have hundreds of thousands of data points on each of us.
So they are micro targeting us at this stage of the game. And actually, as I said, making judgments about what makes us tick, who we are as, human beings. And that is, That's something the interstate highway system never did. You know what I mean? Or some of this other form of, so it's, the migration of the tech and the infrastructure to a tool of data extraction and surveillance and, learning everything about us that is super creepy.
Actually. And we see that happening in China and we say, Oh yeah, China, that happens. And like this whole TikTok discussion is interesting, right? Because it's, it's become a conversation about, oh, TikTok extracts information about 170 million Americans. That's not good because that information is going to Beijing.
What we need to do is connect some dots here. These American platforms are using the exact same model to collect data on all Americans. And people elsewhere and using it to manipulate. So I get there's a difference between the data going to Beijing versus data going to Silicon Valley. I don't know you want all your data going to Silicon Valley.
I don't want mine going there or Beijing. And, that's what we need to do. I think with this TikTok situation is to get people to understand, and this is. This is not about TikTok, or this is, let me rephrase, this is about more than TikTok, this is about, a surveillance model that extracts our personhood from us and, is, highly manipulative and highly dangerous.
And that's what we need to be talking about. And that's the difference between this technology and how it's being, used or abused and other forms of infrastructure.
Matt Prewitt: Yeah, it's interesting. I'm, I'm curious whether you agree. But one way of thinking about it. It seems appealing to me is that I'm not sure at least I can't actually draw like a perfectly clear distinction between the kind of, the sort of, road network infrastructure, a thing and digital infrastructure networks or everything reason being that.
If you think about roads like they also totally reshaped our lives, right? They also they reshaped the way people live. They reshaped communities. They caused people to, move quite quickly from sort of one way of life to another way of life because of the way they affected real estate prices.
And, the, you've got the idea of the, Interstate, bypassing the old, the old state highway town, right? Which then, dies over the next decade. And, those people were just, we're not compensated for the, the, way that the interstate changed, their lives.
But, it was on the whole. Pretty clearly managed in the public interest, even though it had all those kinds of, of, sometimes not so pretty and sometimes quite, justly scrutinized collateral harms. Whereas, the degree to which the Internet has been captured, it's being managed entirely for shareholder interests, right?
There just seems to be a complete sort of lack of traction and the, The transition from into data, right? The sort of the way that data is now in play as the, the sort of engine of the business model seems different, right? It penetrates into our lives in a way that is actually deeper than the way that, the interstate highway reconfigured the way we live.
and, I think that sometimes these kind of, There are step functions where these differences in degree can become differences in, kind. and, I wonder if you can say a little bit more about, about the data business model and how you think that, actually, let me, pick up on one thing you said, which is the, the, the idea that we need to fix it by innovating instead of regulation. You mentioned that in 2013 you thought that, policy might be the, way to solve it, but that you now think, we need to actually work within the tech to change the dynamics of the, of the Internet. is. I guess I have two questions about that.
What one question is, that just because the tech lobby is too powerful? So it's not possible to get the, to get the legislation passed. or is it because you think that there's actually work that. We can do in the technology itself. That is the sort of, shortest route to a better, digital infrastructure. and what, and one sort of comment I want to put in the background of the question is, I sometimes reflect on the fact that, like these kinds of exploitative digital business models, they didn't emerge in Europe. I think that's interesting, actually, right? I think it's interesting that, and if you've gone back 15 years.
Everybody in Europe would have said, oh, my God, what can we do to create the next Silicon Valley? And now here we are thinking, maybe, maybe there was actually some wisdom and whatever they were doing to not create Silicon Valley. but, I'm just curious what what you think, why you think regulation is not part of the solution now, or if it is, to what extent and, And what can we actually do within the within technology to, to improve the dynamics?
Frank McCourt: Yeah, I'm not saying that regulation isn't part of the solution of what I meant to say is that regulation isn't the solution in its entirety, and it's no match for the power of the technology. A couple of things that were triggered by your last, the comments you made before this particular question about, interstate highway
had lots of impacts on society, right? And industry and so forth, probably had no bigger impact than, on, it's probably nothing that it had no bigger impact on than the railroad industry, right? In terms of, displacement and, dislocation. And, we saw the.
Complete reshaping of, of, of that industry. but maybe, a better analogy is the emergence of television. Because, at least with physical, infrastructure, And I know there's a lot of controversy around eminent domain practices and so on and so forth, taking private property for public purpose, but at least people have to be paid for their property, right?
There's a, an understanding that's quite fundamental that if I'm going to take somebody's property to build a highway, I'm going to have to pay them for it, right? And, have good reason, by the way. You have to go going through public hearings and lots of scrutiny and so on and so forth.
So let's talk about TV broadcast for a second. So TV comes, on. This is public bandwidth airwaves, owned by all of us. So who, are you going to compensate? So instead, The federal government wisely said, we're going to license the bandwidth for a period of time to entities that are responsible and agree to the terms of the license and, and, abide by the rules.
And TV comes along, and three licenses are granted, and that becomes ABC, CBS, and NBC, and all kinds of things are imposed upon them, that you've got to provide public service announcements, you've got to air presidential debates, you need, you can't have ads that are harmful to Children and so on and so forth. And by the way, we're gonna keep bandwidth back and hold it in the public domain for public broadcasting because we actually don't know what the impacts on Children of this new technology are going to be. we're gonna create something called the Children's workshop and we're gonna actually research the impacts on children while we're broadcasting to them, and so Sesame Street, which is, when my, older kids were growing up was, something that was very prevalent.
And, I didn't hesitate to have my kids watch Sesame Street because I knew there were people paying attention to the impacts on my kids and other kids, based on that technology. And, we learned a lot. Before we allow the business to grow and so on and so forth. And, yeah, so when you're talking about privatizing a public resource that nobody owns, but everybody owns, it's very different than a piece of real estate to build a piece of physical infrastructure.
So that might be a better analogy than the interstate highways. And then, think about now the Internet. As bandwidth that's being, used for, theoretically public purposes and, to enable some private businesses and all that. the change, the fundamental change here was in creating devices, apps that were, machine, it was building machinery.
Okay. to scrape people's data and information. And by the way, this isn't just on smartphones, right? This is, we are all connected to the internet now, 24 seven, the so called internet of things, even our refrigerator and our dishwasher is collecting information about us. Our cars, our smartphones on wheels, our, televisions are really just
they're data extracting extraction machines. We walked down city streets we're surveilled. Our little camera that's watching our newborn child is a data extraction machine. Our doorbell is, have you ever wondered that why if you separate goods and services and your consumer products into two categories, the things that people really need to live a good, safe, healthy, happy life are much, much more expensive. like housing, food, health care, education, et cetera. And the things that collect our data are much, much more cheaper than they were before, right? Televisions. You could buy a television and fill a whole wall of your house for what a television cost that was the size of this iPad I'm on.
Phones. They give, phones away now, right? all these devices that collect our data. the cost of the device is incidental. The value is what's what it's collecting about us and then being exploited. So that's what's happened. That's what's different. So and as I said earlier, it's not just data.
A lot of people when you have this conversation, they see data. It's a benign thing. It's abstract. What is it? Really? No, The data we're talking about is our social graph information. It's everything about us. in the, digital world. So it's our digital DNA. It's our identity, who we are. It's every, bit as real as our biological DNA, which by the way, is digitized now, right?
why on earth would we give up everything about us, our personhood, just to get to use the internet? It wouldn't, should we have an internet that actually is designed to optimize for, for our rights? And, so forth. And, we don't need a digital Bill of Rights. We need technology that respects the Bill of Rights that we already have.
And this is, I think, fundamental to, we're at this fork in the road where we're either going to be dragged into a future by the machinery. And it's interesting that we're still a machine on the internet, right? We're still an IP address. We're not a person, or we're going to actually reclaim our personhood.
And we're going to put ourselves in charge of our life. In the digital age and have technology that respects that. So your point about policy policies will be important. There's no question about it. But the point I was making earlier is the policymaking apparatus. Especially our elected officials are also disabled and dysfunctional because of the same technology they're using it right to extreme viewpoints gets raises money and gives them likes and followers, look at any politician that's reasonable and moderate and you'll see they just don't get the attention.
The technology is designed. It's a performance technology that's designed to actually amplify extreme and behavior, which, has no bearing on the truthfulness, of it. It's just extreme, kind of behavior. And it's the same, reason why people slow down on the highway and look at the bad accident across on the other lane, it's going the other direction.
It's just, there's a curiosity about it. So people pay attention to this extreme stuff. it's hardwired and these platforms know it. So they've baked it into their technology and, their algorithms. And now we see that they, actually are preying on young people and addicting young people to this technology.
And I'm like television and Sesame street and the children's workshop. This is, we're, by the way, if a million people watched an episode on television in its early days, nevermind a million children, it would have been a huge audience. Now we have billions connected on this much more powerful technology, and, we're beginning to talk about privacy and beginning to talk about safety and beginning to talk about trust and beginning to talk about the impact on society and democracy and children.
it's too late to talk about it. When 3 billion people are using it at times to talk about it is when you're designing it. So this, sadly, we have contaminated the soil. That this technology has grown out of and we need to clean the soil or find new soil and build a healthy stuff that can grow out of it and not kid ourselves and think we're gonna just you know, regulate something that is doing great harm and is highly toxic and so forth.
So I think We, we need to fix this in a very, fundamental way. Your point about Europe is very interesting. How many times have you heard that, Oh, American innovates in Europe regulates. to me, that's a tremendous talk track if you're big tech, like just, throw the, just, make everybody think the regulators are, the European mentality is like somehow they're, not with it.
They don't get it, right? And I spent a lot of time and Project Liberty is also based in Europe as well as the US and these, people in Europe, they get it fundamentally, they care deeply about privacy and protecting people, and they have good reason to because they've many of them have lived through the 30s and the 40s, where they saw what happens and how democracies do fall and, how autocratic, autocratic behavior, can destroy if, not checked.
Democracies and can do it very quickly autocratic technology. It will be the greatest tool of autocrats ever. yeah, we have to have re decentralize the technology and have it optimized for democratic principles and human rights. in, in, in order to, so have our technology adapt and bend to the will of the, democratic, to the ambition of the democratic principles and the will of the people or guess what our democratic system is going to bend and alter itself to become a highly autocratic and bend to the, technology. You can't, they're not harmonious. In China, autocratic technology is very powerful tool for an autocratic regime and autocratic form of government. So yeah, I think that, we can learn a lot from the Europeans. Of course they're stuck because they have GDPR and DMA and DSA, and they've been, they've made their public policy objectives very clear, but they don't have technology to implement that, those policies.
So it's, In a way, they're, telegraphing the right set of principles, generally speaking, and I'm not saying I've read every word of every, a very rule of regulation and adopt all of them, but generally, they're very focused on protecting human beings. And in our rights, but they don't have the technology to do it.
So they're stuck with begging, Facebook and Google and Amazon, et cetera, to, and now Apple and Microsoft to actually respect their rules and their laws and, and, big tech, euphemistically just laughs because it's so powerful. Matt, the technology is, literally imagine we're all connected and surveillance.
Look, if I was the head of the post office and I said to you, I have an idea, I'm going to deliver your mail for free. You probably, say, Tom, what's the deal? I'm going to put a listening device and a camera in every room in your house and in your car and in your workplace. And so if you'd probably look at me and say, that's creepy, and I said, it's free.
And oh, by the way, I'm going to open your mail and I'm going to read, read it all. And now your relationships are mine. your ideas are mine. Your thoughts are mine. Your emotions are mine. Everything about you is now mine. You'd say that's not fair. It's both creepy and unfair. And then when I add that I'm going to read your 13-year-old daughter's diary, and when she's a little, she's insecure every 13-year-old, and in this particular case, by way of example, maybe it's her weight.
And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to send her stuff that makes her feel worse, not better. And then I'm going to sell her stuff. And so I'm going to profit on that, on that, exploited behavior and that in being predatory and so forth. So it's, creepy, it's unfair and it's harmful.
And that's, toxic soil. You can't just regulate that. you need to thoroughly clean that soil or build on fresh soil.
Matt Prewitt: Yeah. one metaphor here, which I'm curious what you think about this is, if you look at other I like to look at history. I always like to find historical comparisons, try to train out.
I think in a way, there's things change, but in a way, there's nothing new. And it's often useful to orient ourselves, figure out what we can learn from the past. And one thing that I notice here is if you think about other times in history, when. Lots of people have been trapped in a, dehumanizing exploitative kind of industrial structures.
Solidarity has always been important, right? for example, you have, for example, you think about the early 20th century, you had lots of people in exploitative labor relationships, right? Whose humanity was being degraded in a way that is, not the same, but analogous to the way that, you know, to the way that it was.
our relationship with our digital services, basically. And, and at that time, there were so so how did it's not, the problems don't get solved. They get mitigated. And so how did that problem get mitigated? It got mitigated partly through probably the regulation, but also probably through labor, right?
Through labor organization and collective, collective bargaining. So to me, that difficult, That pattern seems to have some applicability to the moment that we're in now, which is why when I think about the data problem. I'm very interested in thinking about structures of collective organization around data.
in other words, and this is not to the exclusion of sort of individual data rights because we have to have individual data rights to have anything to go to collectively organize around. So the two are related, but I think that, for example, one thing is that the problem is in a way more difficult today.
The problem, the problem of. gaining leverage over. These systems through data is more difficult today than, the labor problem was, because it's a little bit, it's almost more unclear today. What sort of what we're organizing around, right? 100 years ago, it was like the people in the factory, right?
Have aligned interests. That's the organized unit that should be, finding solidarity and, asserting its interests today. It's like everyone. It's like these sort of just, chaotic, overlapping, yeah. Classes and groups and social networks and social graphs. It's like we all we're having trouble recognizing ourselves.
who, who should we who are we that need to, do a better job advocating for our interests in our information. so I'm curious what you think first about the sort of, collective bargaining framing around data and, and just whether that analogy makes sense to you.
Frank McCourt: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
and you could go, back to the, the 19th century and talk about slavery too, right? It's exploiting a class of people or a group of people. And in the 20th century, when slavery was, had been banned. There was still exploitation, right? And a lot of that exploitation work with, children and women and you had movements to, to create laws and, and, so on and so forth.
What's. What's interesting is, and it's going to be fascinating to see how this all, plays out, and I, and what is required, obviously, is a movement of some sort to, to fix this, because that's what changed, and brought new laws forward, outlaw, outlawing slavery and, new laws forward, outlawing, child labor and exploiting women and exploiting slavery.
Any of us. there were, unions and, rules regarding, all, forms of labor. what's really, I think it's insightful about your question is that we are all producing now that the currency for this, for these big platforms, the data we produce individually, and the more time, the more data we produce is the bounty for these few platforms. But when I said earlier, it's going to be very interesting to see how this movement plays out rather than, there were lots of businesses that resisted a change in our laws about slavery, right? It so much so that we had a civil war, right?
There were, lots of businesses. that were, against a change in labor laws, right? there are very few businesses right now that are benefiting in the same way as the big five. And, we're all being exploited. That to me is the is why I say it's gonna be fascinating to see how this plays out.
Because yes, you're right. We need a movement. Yes, you're right. We're going to need fundamental change and that will, that will require new laws and new policies and, especially new tech, which actually reconnects each one of us to our, data and gives us agency over how it's used.
We need an internet where the new apps are clicking on our terms of use for our data. And we're not clicking on the terms of use of, three, four or five platforms. So it's quite clear what we need and the tech is doable. Project Liberty has put forward a, solution with a, another thin layer protocol called DSNP, which.
Would give us all agency over our data and that is, we have to remember these protocols at the bottom of the stack are what enables the whole stack that gets built upon it. just as the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights are relatively speaking, very thin layer documents.
They don't embody everything, they're prescriptive. They say here are the ideals and the principles that we're all agreeing to. TCPIP, HTTP, DSNP, these are thin layer protocols that are saying here are the ideals, values, principles that we're all agreeing to. Now build accordingly. And that's clearly what we need.
Look, it's been 41 years since the internet was created. Why are we still a device on the internet? Why aren't we a person on the internet? Why can't we have verifiable human beings using the internet? So we know that there's accountability, there's a privilege for using it. it's not something to be, have machine bots just spewing, whatever they want to, corrupt our information landscape.
Cause you know, any foreign actor knows you corrupt the information ecosystem of a country. You have corrupted that country. You've disabled it because everything we build in the world of value is built on trust. You destroy trust. You just you destroy the political system. You destroy trust. You destroy the economic system.
You destroy trust. There's no, no way that institutions can function without trust. There's no way individuals can function with one another without trust. That's why, when we created a set of human rights in this country, we married it with a social contract that said for these rights to matter, you have to respect them and other people.
And so this is, That's the bargain. That's the bargain. And without that bargain, what we have is one of two things, the anarchy or autocracy, where you have dictatorships, autocrats, authoritarians telling everybody. the rules are and punishing people if they don't obey, particularly if, they're doing things that are going to reduce the power of the, centralized force.
This isn't just me saying, and this is history of humankind. So if we want our great experiment in the U S to continue and, to be that, that inspiration in that source of. hope for lots of people around the world. We have to understand what makes it work.
Fundamentally, few simple concepts and have technology that embraces those concepts and is actually subordinate to the concepts, right? The technology is should be optimizing for that, not optimizing for something that's entirely different. How do we say with a straight face to people that we're protecting your rights when you have no rights?
On the, in the internet today, you're everything about us is being stolen from us. I know the lawyers will say you clicked on that to get used to the app. And I say, that's all BS. It's total BS. It's like, me saying, I own this slave because I have a contract. No, There is a moral law that is far greater and more important than any law that man creates.
And if we, that's what created the country. It's, it was created by people saying, We're not going to be subjects anymore. We choose to be citizens. We choose to create that category, that status for us to live our lives as equals with other people, self government, self governed, we can build a government and, of, by, and for people, and we can build it on a set of principles where humans have dignity.
They can own, they own themselves. They no longer owned by a King or by a dictator or by, any autocrat and that's the simple thing. It's like a light bulb went off for, for Thomas Paine when he wrote common sense. and for the American public saying, I never thought of that.
I never thought I could actually own me. I thought, because we lived in a, world of. monarchies and so on and so forth for 6, 7, 8, 900 centuries that people, that's all they knew. And so they didn't, it took someone to say, no, it doesn't have to be this way. And now this technology has put us into a place of, it's almost like we're, living in this, Haze, where we've been brainwashed by this tech that it's this one, somehow this wonderful thing, a powering thing, when if we just have a wind that blew away the haze and we saw it for what it is, it's actually, taking everything we love away from us,
how is it that technology, these, platforms can, should know more about our kids than we do as parents.
It's just, it's idiot.
Matt Prewitt: It's actually, it's very powerful to hear you talk about moral rights like that, because, partly because I live in the haze of my lawyer brain. I'm always going to okay, but then, how do we codify it? how do we, what is it exactly, how are we exactly going to embody this kind of right or that kind of right?
And, and I think that when our, thinking, when the thinking of people like me, and probably other people too, shifts too quickly into that mode. We missed the, that you're making right now, right? Which is that there is, there's, just, there's an underlying moral, idea that is meant here when we talk, when we're talking about data ownership that, that actually carries a lot more weight is then the sort, of legal concept of ownership.
Does that make sense?
Frank McCourt: Totally. Totally. you said analogy of, televisions. This great, advance in, in technology. What if, it came with, it was actually a device that went into all of our homes and surveilled us and, captured every moment of our, physical existence, in, in our house, in our most private places.
And. And all that information was going to the government. So somebody sat there and sucked up all that information and said, geez, I just heard a conversation with, in Matt's family or Frank's family, where they're against me. So send out people to punish them, for being against, against, cause we want to, kill our enemies within. History shows us that the enemy outside is, is less harmful than the energy inside, the enemy inside. And yes, TikTok is bad, but we have an apparatus to deal with China, a whole apparatus to defend ourselves from China. We we have no apparatus to defend ourselves from all these platforms that are killing us from inside. And this is a huge, problem that's fixable, thankfully.
Okay? It_ is _fixable. And we just have to get people thinking differently about this and not going into their lawyer brain or not going to their, it can't be fixed brain or their genius out of the bottle brain, but go into the brain part of the brain that is about the re imagining the future. it's the imagination part of the brain.
Go there and say, okay, somebody re imagined things in 1775. Okay. And we could become citizens instead of being subjects. So let's reimagine technology where we are citizens again, and we're not becoming subjects just to be able to use the internet.
Matt Prewitt: I think that is a great place to close. thank you so much for the, I've got, if there's anything else you want to touch on, we can.
Frank McCourt: Okay. Thanks, Matt. Thanks for your time. Thanks for your questions, because they were really good questions. Because they, you opened a series of doors that made it very, easy and natural for me to tell a story.
And I could see your mind working as you were asking questions. So I'm, I'm very appreciative of that and impressed.
Matt Prewitt: Great. Thank you so much. Yeah. This was a pleasure. Thanks for doing it. And, we'll talk again soon.
Frank McCourt: Look forward to it. You take care of yourself. Bye.