The popularity of the oil for luxury hair- and skin-care products is threatening argan forests.

Many of the internet’s thorniest problems can be attributed to the concentration of power in a few corporate hands: the surveillance capitalism that makes it profitable to invade our privacy, the lack of algorithmic transparency that turns artificial intelligence and other tech into impenetrable black boxes, the rent-seeking behavior that seeks to monopolize and mega-monetize an existing market instead of creating new products or markets, and much more.

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(You can also find this episode on the Internet Archive and on YouTube.) 

Kara Swisher has been documenting the internet’s titans for almost 30 years through a variety of media outlets and podcasts. She believes that with adequate regulation we can keep people safe online without stifling innovation, and we can have an internet that’s transparent and beneficial for all, not just a collection of fiefdoms run by a handful of homogenous oligarchs. 

In this episode you’ll learn about:

• Why it’s so important that tech workers speak out about issues they want to improve and work to create companies that elevate best practices
• Why completely unconstrained capitalism turns technology into weapons instead of tools
• How antitrust legislation and enforcement can create a healthier online ecosystem
• Why AI could either bring abundance for many or make the very rich even richer
• The small online media outlets still doing groundbreaking independent reporting that challenges the tech oligarchy 

Kara Swisher is one of the world's foremost tech journalists and critics, and currently hosts two podcasts: On with Kara Swisher and Pivot, the latter co-hosted by New York University Professor Scott Galloway.  She's been covering the tech industry since the 1990s for outlets including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times; she is an New York Magazine editor-at-large, a CNN contributor, and cofounder of the tech news sites Recode and All Things Digital. She also has authored several books, including “Burn Book” (Simon & Schuster, 2024) in which she documents the history of Silicon Valley and the tech billionaires who run it. 

Resources:

• New York Times: “How Kara Swisher Scaled Even Higher” (May 19, 2025)
• On with Kara Swisher: “AMD CEO Lisa Su on AI Chips, Trump's Tariffs and the Magic of Open Source” (May 1, 2025)
• WIRED’s coverage of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)
• EFF: Competition
• University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business: Dean's Speaker Series | Kara Swisher | Tech Journalist (Oct. 1, 2024) 

What do you think of “How to Fix the Internet?” Share your feedback here.

Transcript

KARA SWISHER: It's a tech that's not controlled by a small group of homogeneous people. I think that's pretty much it. I mean, and there's adequate regulation to allow for people to be safe and at the same time, not too much in order to be innovative and do things – you don't want the government deciding everything.
It's a place where the internet, which was started by US taxpayers, which was paid for, is beneficial for people, and that there's transparency in it, and that we can see what's happening and what's doing. And again, the concentration of power in the hands of a few people really is at the center of the problem.

CINDY COHN: That's Kara Swisher, describing the balance she'd like to see in a better digital future. I'm Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

JASON KELLEY: And I'm Jason Kelley -- EFF's Activism Director. You're listening to How to Fix the Internet.

CINDY COHN: This show is about envisioning a better digital future that we can all work towards.

JASON KELLEY: And we are excited to have a guest who has been outspoken in talking about how we get there, pointing out the good, the bad and the ugly sides of the tech world.

CINDY COHN: Kara Swisher is one of the world's foremost tech journalists and critics. She's been covering the industry since the 1990s, and she currently hosts two podcasts: On with Kara Swisher and Pivot, and she's written several books, including last year's Burn Book where she documents the history of Silicon Valley and the tech billionaires who run it.
We are delighted that she's here. Welcome, Kara.

KARA SWISHER: Thank you.

CINDY COHN: We've had a couple of tech critics on the podcast recently, and one of the kind of themes that's come up for us is you kind of have to love the internet before you can hate on it. And I've heard you describe your journey that way as well. And I'd love for you to talk a little bit about it, because you didn't start off, really, looking for all the ways that things have gone wrong.

KARA SWISHER: I don't hate it. I don't. It's just, you know, I have eyes and I can see, you know, I mean, uh, one of the expressions I always use is you should, um, believe what you see, not see what you believe. And so I always just, that's what's happening. You can see it happening. You can see the coarsening of our dialogue now offline being affected by online. You could just see what's happened.
But I still love the the possibilities of technology and the promise of it. And I think that's what attracted me to it in the first place, and it's a question of how you use it as a tool or a weapon. And so I always look at it as a tool and some people have taken a lot of these technologies and use them as a weapon.

CINDY COHN: So what was that moment? Did you, do you have a moment when you decided you were really interested in tech and that you really found it to be important and worth devoting your time to?

KARA SWISHER: I was always interested in it because I had studied propaganda and the uses of TV and radio and stuff. So I was always interested in media, and this was the media on steroids. And so I recall downloading an entire book onto my computer and I thought, oh, look at this. Everything is digital. And so the premise that I came to at the time, or the idea I came to was that everything that can be digitized would be digitized, and that was a huge idea because that means entire industries would change.

CINDY COHN: Yeah.

JASON KELLEY: Kara, you started by talking about this concentration of power, which is obvious to anyone who's been paying attention, and at the same time, you know, we did use to have tech leaders who, I think, they had less power. It was less concentrated, but also people were more focused, I think, on solving real problems.
You know, you talk a lot about Steve Jobs. There was a goal of improving people's lives with technology, that that didn't necessarily it, it helped the bottom line, but the focus wasn't just on quarterly profits. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what you think it would look like if we returned to that in some way. Is that gone?

KARA SWISHER: I don't think we were there. I think they were always focused on quarterly profits. I think that was a canard. I wrote about it, that they would pretend that they were here to help. You know, it's sort of like the Twilight Zone episode To Serve Man. It's a cookbook. I always thought it was a cookbook for these people.
And they were always formulated in terms of making money and maximizing value for their shareholders, which was usually themselves. I wasn't stupid. I understood what they were doing, especially when these stocks went to the moon, especially the early internet days and their first boom. And they became instant, instant-airs, I think they were called that, which was instant millionaires and, and then now beyond that.
And so I was always aware of the money, even if they pretended they weren't, they were absolutely aware And so I don't have a romantic version of this at the beginning, um, except among a small group of people, you know, who, who, who were seeing it, like the Whole Earth Catalog and things like that, which we're looking at it as a way to bring everybody together or to spread knowledge throughout the world, which I also believed in too.

JASON KELLEY: Do you think any of those people are still around?

KARA SWISHER: No, they’re dead.

JASON KELLEY: I mean, literally, you know, they're literally dead, but are there any heirs of theirs?

KARA SWISHER: No, I mean, I don't think they had any power. I don't, I think that some of the theoretical stuff was about that, but no, they didn't have any power. The people that had power were the, the Mark Zuckerbergs, the Googles, and even, you know, the Microsofts, I mean, Bill Gates is kind of the exemplification of all that. As he, he took other people's ideas and he made it into an incredibly powerful company and everybody else sort of followed suit.

JASON KELLEY: And so mostly for you, the concentration of power is the biggest shift that's happened and you see regulation or, you know, anti-competitive moves as ways to get us back.

KARA SWISHER: We don't have any, like, if we had any laws, that would be great, but we don't have any that, that constrain them. And now under President Trump, there's not gonna be any rules around AI, probably. There aren't gonna be any rules around any significant rules, at least around any of it.
So they, the first period, which was the growth of where we are now, was not constrained in any way, and now it's not just not constrained, but it's helping whether it's cryptocurrency or things like that. And so I don't feel like there's any restrictions, like at this point, in fact, there's encouragement by government to do whatever you want.

CINDY COHN: I think that's a really big worry. And you know, I think you're aware, as are we, that, you know, just because somebody comes in and says they're gonna do something about a problem with legislation doesn't mean that they're, they're actually having that. And I think sometimes we feel like we sit in this space where we're like, we agree with you on the harm, but this thing you wanna do is a terrible idea and trying to get the means and the ends connected is kind of a lot of where we live sometimes, and I think you've seen that as well, that like once you've articulated the harm, that's kind of the start of the journey about whether the thing that you're talking about doing will actually meet that moment.

KARA SWISHER: Absolutely. The harms, they don't care about, that's the issue. And I think I was always cognizant of the harms, and that can make you seem like, you know, a killjoy of some sort. But it's not, it's just saying, wow, if you're gonna do this social media, you better pay attention to this or that.
They acted like the regular problems that people had didn't exist in the world, like racism, you know, sexism. They said, oh, that can be fixed, and they never offered any solutions, and then they created tools that made it worse.

CINDY COHN: I feel like the people who thought that we could really use technology to build a better world, I, I don't think they were wrong or naive. I just think they got stomped on by the money. Um, and, you know, uh.

KARA SWISHER: Which inevitably happens.

CINDY COHN: It does. And the question is, how do you squeeze out something, you know, given that this is the dynamic of capitalism, how do you squeeze out space for protecting people?
And we've had times in our society when we've done that better, and we've done that worse. And I feel like there are ways in which this is as bad as has gotten in my lifetime. You know, with the government actually coming in really strongly on the side of, empowering the powerful and disempowering the disempowered.
I see competition as a way to do this. EFF was, you know, it was primarily an organization focused on free speech and privacy, but we kind of backed into talking about competition 'cause we felt like we couldn't get at any of those problems unless we talked about the elephant in the room.
And I think you think about it, really on the individual, you know, you know all these guys, and on that very individual level of what, what kinds of things will, um, impact them.
And I'm wondering if you have some thoughts about the kinds of rules or regulations that might actually, you know, have an impact and not, not turn into, you know, yet another cudgel that they get to wield.

KARA SWISHER: Well any, any would be good. Like I don't, I don't, there isn't any, there isn't any you could speak of that's really problematic for them, except for the courts which are suing over antitrust issues or some regulatory agencies. But in general, what they've done is created an easy glide path for themselves.
I mean, we don't have a national privacy regulation. We don't have algorithmic transparency bills. We don't have data protection really, and to speak of for people. We don't have, you know, transparency into the data they collect. You know, we have more rules and laws on airplanes and cigarettes and everybody else, but we don't have any here. So you know, antitrust is a whole nother area of, of changing, of our antitrust rules. So these are all areas that have to be looked at. But we haven't, they haven't, they haven't passed a thing. I mean, lots of legislators have tried, but, um, it hasn't worked really.

CINDY COHN: You know, a lot of our supporters are people who work in tech but aren't necessarily the. You know, the tech giants, they're not the tops of these companies, but they work in the companies.
And one of the things that I, you know, I don't know if you have any insights if you've thought about this, but we speak with them a lot and they're dismayed at what's going on, but they kind of feel powerless. And I'm wondering if you have thoughts like, you know, speaking to the people who aren't, who aren't the Elons and the, the guys at the top, but who are there, and who I think are critical to keeping these companies going. Are there ways that they can make their voices heard that you've thought of that would, that might work? I guess I, I'm, I'm pulling on your insight because you know the actual people.

KARA SWISHER: Yeah, you know, speak out. Just speak out. You know, everybody gets a voice these days and there's all kinds of voices that never would've gotten heard and to, you know, talk to legislators, involve customers, um, create businesses where you do those good practices. Like that's the best way to do it is create wealth and capitalism and then use best practices there. That to me is the best way to do that.

CINDY COHN: Are there any companies that you look at from where you sit that you think are doing a pretty good job or at least trying? I don't know if you wanna call anybody out, but, um, you know, we see a few, um, and I kind of feel like all the air gets sucked out of the room.

KARA SWISHER: In bits and pieces. In bits and pieces, you know, Apple's good on the privacy thing, but then it's bad on a bunch of other things. Like you could, like, you, you, the problem is, you know, these are shareholder driven companies and so they're gonna do what's best for them and they could, uh, you know, wave over to privacy or wave over to, you know, more diversity, but they really are interested in making money.
And so I think the difficulty is figuring out, you know, do they have duties as citizens or do they just have duties as corporate citizens? And so that's always been a difficult thing in our society and will continue to be.

CINDY COHN: Yeah.

JASON KELLEY: We've always at EFF really stood up for the user in, in this way where sometimes we're praising a company that normally people are upset with because they did a good thing, right? Apple is good on privacy. When they do good privacy things we say, that's great. You know, and if Apple makes mistakes, we say that too.
And it feels like, um, you know, we're in the middle of, I guess, a “tech lash.” I don't know when it started. I don't know if it'll ever end. I don't know if there's, if that's even a real term in terms of like, you know, tech journalism. But do you find that it's difficult? Two, get people to accept sort of like any positive praise for companies that are often just at this point, completely easy to ridicule for all the mistakes they've made.

KARA SWISHER: I think the tech journalism has gotten really strong. It's gotten, I mean, just look at the DOGE coverage. I think it really, I'll point to WIRED as a good example, as they've done astonishing stuff. I think a lot of people have done a lot on, on, uh, you know, the abuses of social media. I think they've covered a lot of issues from the overuse of technology to, you know, all the crypto stuff. It doesn't mean people follow along, but they've certainly been there and revealed a lot of the flaws there. Um, while also covering it as like, this is what's happening with ai. Like this is what's happening, here's where it's going. And so you have to cover as a thing. Like, this is what's being developed. but then there's, uh, others, you know, who have to look into the real problems.

JASON KELLEY: I get a lot of news from 404 Media, right?

KARA SWISHER: Yeah, they’re great.

JASON KELLEY: That sort of model is relatively new and it sort of sits against some of these legacy models. Do you see, like, a growing role for things like that in a future?

KARA SWISHER: There's lots of different things. I mean, I came from like, as you mean, part of the time, although I got away from it pretty quickly, but some of 'em are doing great. It just depends on the story, right? Some of the stories are great, like. Uh, you know, uh, there's a ton of people at the Times have done great stuff on, on, on lots of things around kids and abuses and social media.
At the same time, there's all these really exciting young, not necessarily young, actually, um, independent media companies, whether it's Casey Newton, at Platformer, or Eric Newcomer covering VCs, or 404. There's all these really interesting new stuff. That's doing really well. WIRED is another one that's really seen a lot of bounce back under its current editor who just came on relatively recently.
So it just depends. It depends on where it is, but there's, Verge does a great job. But I think it's individually the stories in, there's no like big name in this area. There's just a lot of people and then there's all these really interesting experts or people who work in tech who've written a lot. That is always very interesting too, to me. It's interesting to hear from insiders what they think is happening.

CINDY COHN: Well, I'm happy to hear this, this optimism. 'Cause I worry a lot about, you know, the way that the business model for media has really been hollowed out. And then seeing things like, you know, uh, some of the big broadcast news people folding,

KARA SWISHER: Yeah, but broadcast never did journalism for tech, come on. Like, some did, I mean, one or two, but it wasn't them who was doing it. It was usually, you know, either the New York Times or these smaller institutions have been doing a great job. There's just been tons and tons of different things, completely different things.

JASON KELLEY: What do you think about the fear, maybe I'm, I'm misplacing it, maybe it's not as real as I imagine it is. Um, that results from something like a Gawker situation, right. You know, you have wealthy people.

KARA SWISHER: That was a long time ago.

JASON KELLEY: It was, but it, you know, a precedent was sort of set, right? I mean, do you think people in working in tech journalism can take aim at, you know, individual people that have a lot of power and wealth in, in the same way that they could before?

KARA SWISHER: Yeah. I think they can, if they're accurate. Yeah, absolutely.

CINDY COHN: Yeah, I think you're a good exhibit A for that, you pull no punches and things are okay. I mean, we get asked sometimes, um, you know, are, are you ever under attack because of your, your sharp advocacy? And I kind of think your sharp advocacy protects you as long as you're right. And I think of you as somebody who's also in, in a bit of that position.

KARA SWISHER: Mmhm.

CINDY COHN: You may say this is inevitable, but I I wanted to ask you, you know, I feel like when I talk with young technical people, um, they've kind of been poisoned by this idea that the only way you can be successful is, is if you're an asshole.
That there's no, there's no model, um, that, that just just goes to the deal. So if they want to be successful, they have to be just an awful person. And so even if they might have thought differently beforehand, that's what they think they have to do. And I'm wondering if you run into this as well, and I sometimes find myself trying to think about, you know, alternate role models for technical people and if you have any that you think of.

KARA SWISHER: Alternate role models? It's mostly men. But there are, there's all kinds of, like, I just did an interview with Lisa Su, who's head of AMD, one of the few women CEOs. And in AI, there's a number of women, uh, you know, you don't necessarily have to have diversity to make it better, but it sure helps, right? Because people have a different, not just diversity of gender or diversity of race, but diversity of backgrounds, politics. You know, the more diverse you are, the better products you make, essentially. That's my always been my feeling.
Look, most of these companies are the same as it ever was, and in fact, there's fewer different people running them, essentially. Um, but you know, that's always been the nature of, of tech essentially, that it was sort of a, a man's world.

CINDY COHN: Yeah, I see that as well. I just worry that young people or junior people coming up think that the only way that you can be successful is a, if you look like the guys who are already successful, but also, you know, if you're just kind of not, you know, if you're weird and not nice.

KARA SWISHER: It's just depends on the person. It's just that when you get that wealthy, you have a lot of people licking you up and down all day, and so you end up in the crazy zone like Elon Musk, or the arrogant zone like Mark Zuckerberg or whatever. It's just they don't get a lot of pushback and when you don't get a lot of friction, you tend to think everything you do is correct.

JASON KELLEY: Let's take a quick moment to thank our sponsor. How to Fix The Internet is supported by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation's program and public understanding of science and technology enriching people's lives through a keener appreciation of our increasingly technological world and portraying the complex humanity of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.
We also wanna thank EFF members and donors. You're the reason we exist, and EFF has been fighting for digital rights. And EFF has been fighting for digital rights for 35 years, and that fight is bigger than ever. So please, if you like what we do, go to eff.org/pod to donate. Also, we'd love for you to join us at this year's EFF awards where we celebrate the people working towards the better digital future that we all care so much about.
Those are coming up on September 10th in San Francisco. You can find more information about that at eff.org/awards.
We also wanted to share that our friend Cory Doctorow has a new podcast. Have a listen to this: [WHO BROKE THE INTERNET TRAILER]
And now back to our conversation with Kara Swisher.

CINDY COHN: I mean, you watched all these tech giants kind of move over to the Trump side and then, you know, stand there on the inauguration. It sounds like you thought that might've been inevitable.

KARA SWISHER: I said it was inevitable, they were all surprised. They're always surprised when I'm like, Elon's gonna crack up with the president. Oh look, they cracked up with, it's not hard to follow these people. In his case, he's, he's personally, there's something wrong with his head, obviously. He always cracks up with people. So that's what happened here.
In that case, they just wanted things. They want things. You think they liked Donald Trump? You’re wrong there? I'll tell you. They don't like him. They need him. They wanna use him and they were irritated by Biden 'cause he presumed to push back on and he didn't do a very good job of it, honestly. But they definitely want things.

CINDY COHN: I think the tech industry came up at a time when deregulation was all the rage, right? So in some ways they were kind of born into a world where regulation was an anathema and they took full advantage of the situation.
As did lots of other areas that got deregulated or were not regulated in the first place. But I think tech, because of timing in some ways, tech was really born into this zone. And there was some good things for it too. I mean, you know, EFF was, was successful in the nineties at making sure that the internet got first Amendment protection, that we didn't, go to the other side with things like the Communications Decency Act and squelch any adult material from being put online and reduce everything to the side. But getting that right and kind of walking through the middle ground where you have regulation that supports people but doesn't squelch them is just an ongoing struggle,

KARA SWISHER: Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

JASON KELLEY: I have this optimistic hope that these companies and their owners sort of crumble as they continue to, as Cory Doctorow says, enshittify, right? The only reason they don't crumble is that they have this lock in with users. They have this monopoly power, but you see a, you know, a TikTok pops up and suddenly Instagram has a real competitor, not because rules have been put in place to change Instagram, but because a different, new maybe better platform.

KARA SWISHER: There’s nothing like competition, making things better. Right? Competition always helps.

JASON KELLEY: Yeah, when I think of competition law, I think of crushing companies, I think of breaking them up. But what do you think we can do to make this sort of world better and more fertile for new companies? You know, you talked earlier about tech workers.

KARA SWISHER: Well, you have to pass those things where they don't get to. Antitrust is the best way to do that. Right? And, but those things move really slowly, unfortunately. And, you know, good antitrust legislation and antitrust enforcement, that's happening right now. But it opens up, I mean, the reason Google exists is 'cause of the antitrust actions around Microsoft.
And so we have to like continue to press on things like that and continue to have regulators that are allowed to pursue cases like that. And then at the same time have a real focus on creating wealth. We wanna create wealth, we wanna create, we wanna give people breaks.
We wanna have the government involved in funding some of these things, making it so that small companies don't get run over by larger companies.
Not letting power concentrate into a small group of people. When that happens, that's what happens. You end up with less companies. They kill them in the crib, these companies. And so not letting things get bought, have a scrutiny over things, stuff like that.

CINDY COHN: Yeah, I think a lot more merger review makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of thinking about, how are companies crushing each other and what are the things that we can do to try to stop that? Obviously we care a lot about interoperability, making sure that technologies that, that have you as a customer don't get to lock you in, and make it so that you're just stuck with their broken business model and can do other things.
There's a lot of space for that kind of thing. I mean, you know, I always tell the story, I'm sure you know this, that, you know, if it weren't for the FCC telling AT&T that they had to let people plug something other than phones into the wall, we wouldn't have had the internet, you know, the home internet revolution anyway.

KARA SWISHER: Right. Absolutely. 100%.

CINDY COHN: Yeah, so I think we are in agreement with you that, you know, competition is really central, but it's, you know, it's kind of an all of the above and certainly around privacy issues. We can do a lot around this business model. Which I think is driving so many of the other bad things that we are seeing, um, with some comprehensive privacy law.
But boy, it sure feels like right now, you know, we got two branches of government that are not on board with that. And the third one kind of doing okay, but not, you know, and the courts were doing okay, but slowly and inconsistently. Um, where do you see hope? Where are you, where are you looking for the for

KARA SWISHER: I mean, some of this stuff around AI could be really great for humanity, or it could be great for a small amount of people. That's really, you know, which one do we want? Do we want this technology to be a tool or a weapon against us? Do we want it to be in the hands of bigger companies or in the hands of all of us and we make decisions around it?
Will it help us be safer? Will it help us cure cancer or is it gonna just make a rich person a billion dollars richer? I mean, it's the age old story, isn't it? This is not a new theme in America where, the rich get richer and the poor get less. And so these, these technologies could, as you know, recently out a book all abundance.
It could create lots of abundance. It could create lots of interesting new jobs, or it could just put people outta work and let the, let the people who are richer get richer. And I don't think that's a society we wanna have. And years ago I was talking about income inequality with a really wealthy person and I said, you either have to do something about, you know, the fact that people, that we didn't have a $25 minimum wage, which I think would help a lot, lots of innovation would come from that. If people made more money, they'd have a little more choices. And it's worth the investment in people to do that.
And I said, we have to either deal with income inequality or armor plate your Tesla. Tesla. And I think he wanted to armor plate his Tesla. That's when ire, and then of course, cyber truck comes out. So there you have it. But, um, I think they don't care about that kind of stuff. You know, they're happy to create their little, we, those little worlds where they're highly protected, but it's not a world I wanna live in.

CINDY COHN: Kara, thank you so much. We really appreciate you coming in. I think you sit in such a different place in the world than where we sit, and it's always great to get your perspective.

KARA SWISHER: Absolutely. Anytime. You guys do amazing work and you know you're doing amazing work and you should always keep a watch on these people. It's not, you shouldn't be against everything. 'cause some people are right. But you certainly should keep a watch on people

CINDY COHN: Well, great. We, we sure will.

JASON KELLEY: up. Yeah, we'll keep doing it. Thank you,

CINDY COHN: Thank you.

KARA SWISHER: All right. Thank you so much.

CINDY COHN: Well, I always appreciate how Kara gets right to the point about how the concentration of power among a few tech moguls has led to so many of the problems we face online and how competition. Along with some things, we so often hear about real laws requiring transparency, privacy protections, and data protections can help shift the tide.

JASON KELLEY: Yeah, you know, some of these fixes are things that people have been talking about for a long time and I think we're at a point where everyone agrees on a big chunk of them. You know, especially the ones that we promote like competition and transparency oftentimes, and privacy. So it's great to hear that Kara, who's someone that, you know, has worked on this issue and in tech for a long time and thought about it and loves it, as she said, you know, agrees with us on some of the, some of the most important solutions.

CINDY COHN: Sometimes these criticisms of the tech moguls can feel like something everybody does, but I think it's important to remember that Kara was really one of the first ones to start pointing this out. And I also agree with you, you know, she's a person who comes from the position of really loving tech. And Kara's even a very strong capitalist. She really loves making money as well. You know, her criticism comes from a place of betrayal, that, again, like Molly White, earlier this season, kind of comes from a position of, you know, seeing the possibilities and loving the possibilities, and then seeing how horribly things are really going in the wrong direction.

JASON KELLEY: Yeah, she has this framing of, is it a tool or a weapon? And it feels like a lot of the tools that she loved became weapons, which I think is how a lot of us feel. You know, it's not always clear how to draw that line. But it's obviously a good question that people, you know, working in the tech field, and I think people even using technology should ask themselves, when you're really enmeshed with it, is the thing you're using or building or promoting, is it working for everyone?
You know, what are the chances, how could it become a weapon? You know, this beautiful tool that you're loving and you have all these good ideas and, you know, ideas that, that it'll change the world and improve it. There's always a way that it can become a weapon. So I think it's an important question to ask and, and an important question that people, you know, working in the field need to ask.

CINDY COHN: Yeah. And I think that, you know, that's the gem of her advice to tech workers. You know, find a way to make your voice heard if you see this happening. And there's a power in that. I do think that one thing that's still true in Silicon Valley is they compete for top talent.
And, you know, top talent indicating that they're gonna make choices based on some values is one of the levers of power. Now I don't think anybody thinks that's the only one. This isn't an individual responsibility question. We need laws, we need structures. You know, we need some structural changes in antitrust law and elsewhere in order to make that happen. It's not all on the shoulders of the tech workers, but I appreciate that she really did say, you know, there's a role to be played here. You're not just pawns in this game.

JASON KELLEY: And that's our episode for today. Thanks so much for joining us. If you have feedback or suggestions, we'd love to hear from you. Visit eff.org/podcast and click on listen or feedback. And while you're there, you can become a member and donate, maybe even pick up some of the merch and just see what's happening in digital rights this week and every week.
Our theme music is by Nat Keefe of Beat Mower with Reed Mathis, and How to Fix the Internet is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's program for Public Understanding of Science and Technology. We'll see you next time. I'm Jason Kelley.

CINDY COHN: And I'm Cindy Cohn.

MUSIC CREDITS: This podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 international, and includes the following music licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 unported by its creators: Drops of H2O, The Filtered Water Treatment by Jay Lang. Additional music, theme remixes and sound design by Gaetan Harris.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 30 July 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02392-0

Ecologists often leverage patterns observed across spatial climate gradients to predict the impacts of climate change (space-for-time substitution). We highlight evidence that this can be misleading not just in the magnitude but in the direction of effects, explain why, and make suggestions for improving the reliability of ecological forecasts.

If you rotate an image of a molecular structure, a human can tell the rotated image is still the same molecule, but a machine-learning model might think it is a new data point. In computer science parlance, the molecule is “symmetric,” meaning the fundamental structure of that molecule remains the same if it undergoes certain transformations, like rotation.

If a drug discovery model doesn’t understand symmetry, it could make inaccurate predictions about molecular properties. But despite some empirical successes, it’s been unclear whether there is a computationally efficient method to train a good model that is guaranteed to respect symmetry.

A new study by MIT researchers answers this question, and shows the first method for machine learning with symmetry that is provably efficient in terms of both the amount of computation and data needed.

These results clarify a foundational question, and they could aid researchers in the development of more powerful machine-learning models that are designed to handle symmetry. Such models would be useful in a variety of applications, from discovering new materials to identifying astronomical anomalies to unraveling complex climate patterns.

“These symmetries are important because they are some sort of information that nature is telling us about the data, and we should take it into account in our machine-learning models. We’ve now shown that it is possible to do machine-learning with symmetric data in an efficient way,” says Behrooz Tahmasebi, an MIT graduate student and co-lead author of this study.

He is joined on the paper by co-lead author and MIT graduate student Ashkan Soleymani; Stefanie Jegelka, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and a member of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and senior author Patrick Jaillet, the Dugald C. Jackson Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). The research was recently presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning.

Studying symmetry

Symmetric data appear in many domains, especially the natural sciences and physics. A model that recognizes symmetries is able to identify an object, like a car, no matter where that object is placed in an image, for example.

Unless a machine-learning model is designed to handle symmetry, it could be less accurate and prone to failure when faced with new symmetric data in real-world situations. On the flip side, models that take advantage of symmetry could be faster and require fewer data for training.

But training a model to process symmetric data is no easy task.

One common approach is called data augmentation, where researchers transform each symmetric data point into multiple data points to help the model generalize better to new data. For instance, one could rotate a molecular structure many times to produce new training data, but if researchers want the model to be guaranteed to respect symmetry, this can be computationally prohibitive.

An alternative approach is to encode symmetry into the model’s architecture. A well-known example of this is a graph neural network (GNN), which inherently handles symmetric data because of how it is designed.

“Graph neural networks are fast and efficient, and they take care of symmetry quite well, but nobody really knows what these models are learning or why they work. Understanding GNNs is a main motivation of our work, so we started with a theoretical evaluation of what happens when data are symmetric,” Tahmasebi says.

They explored the statistical-computational tradeoff in machine learning with symmetric data. This tradeoff means methods that require fewer data can be more computationally expensive, so researchers need to find the right balance.

Building on this theoretical evaluation, the researchers designed an efficient algorithm for machine learning with symmetric data.

Mathematical combinations

To do this, they borrowed ideas from algebra to shrink and simplify the problem. Then, they reformulated the problem using ideas from geometry that effectively capture symmetry.

Finally, they combined the algebra and the geometry into an optimization problem that can be solved efficiently, resulting in their new algorithm.

“Most of the theory and applications were focusing on either algebra or geometry. Here we just combined them,” Tahmasebi says.

The algorithm requires fewer data samples for training than classical approaches, which would improve a model’s accuracy and ability to adapt to new applications.

By proving that scientists can develop efficient algorithms for machine learning with symmetry, and demonstrating how it can be done, these results could lead to the development of new neural network architectures that could be more accurate and less resource-intensive than current models.

Scientists could also use this analysis as a starting point to examine the inner workings of GNNs, and how their operations differ from the algorithm the MIT researchers developed.

“Once we know that better, we can design more interpretable, more robust, and more efficient neural network architectures,” adds Soleymani.

This research is funded, in part, by the National Research Foundation of Singapore, DSO National Laboratories of Singapore, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship.

Music technology took center stage at MIT during “FUTURE PHASES,” an evening of works for string orchestra and electronics, presented by the MIT Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program as part of the 2025 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC). 

The well-attended event was held last month in the Thomas Tull Concert Hall within the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building. Produced in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab’s Opera of the Future Group and Boston’s self-conducted chamber orchestra A Far Cry, “FUTURE PHASES” was the first event to be presented by the MIT Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program in MIT Music’s new space.

“FUTURE PHASES” offerings included two new works by MIT composers: the world premiere of “EV6,” by MIT Music’s Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor Evan Ziporyn and professor of the practice Eran Egozy; and the U.S. premiere of “FLOW Symphony,” by the MIT Media Lab’s Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media Tod Machover. Three additional works were selected by a jury from an open call for works: “The Wind Will Carry Us Away,” by Ali Balighi; “A Blank Page,” by Celeste Betancur Gutiérrez and Luna Valentin; and “Coastal Portrait: Cycles and Thresholds,” by Peter Lane. Each work was performed by Boston’s own multi-Grammy-nominated string orchestra, A Far Cry.

“The ICMC is all about presenting the latest research, compositions, and performances in electronic music,” says Egozy, director of the new Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program at MIT. When approached to be a part of this year’s conference, “it seemed the perfect opportunity to showcase MIT’s commitment to music technology, and in particular the exciting new areas being developed right now: a new master’s program in music technology and computation, the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building with its enhanced music technology facilities, and new faculty arriving at MIT with joint appointments between MIT Music and Theater Arts (MTA) and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).” These recently hired professors include Anna Huang, a keynote speaker for the conference and creator of the machine learning model Coconet that powered Google’s first AI Doodle, the Bach Doodle.

Egozy emphasizes the uniqueness of this occasion: “You have to understand that this is a very special situation. Having a full 18-member string orchestra [A Far Cry] perform new works that include electronics does not happen very often. In most cases, ICMC performances consist either entirely of electronics and computer-generated music, or perhaps a small ensemble of two-to-four musicians. So the opportunity we could present to the larger community of music technology was particularly exciting.”

To take advantage of this exciting opportunity, an open call was put out internationally to select the other pieces that would accompany Ziporyn and Egozy’s “EV6” and Machover’s “FLOW Symphony.” Three pieces were selected from a total of 46 entries to be a part of the evening’s program by a panel of judges that included Egozy, Machover, and other distinguished composers and technologists.

“We received a huge variety of works from this call,” says Egozy. “We saw all kinds of musical styles and ways that electronics would be used. No two pieces were very similar to each other, and I think because of that, our audience got a sense of how varied and interesting a concert can be for this format. A Far Cry was really the unifying presence. They played all pieces with great passion and nuance. They have a way of really drawing audiences into the music. And, of course, with the Thomas Tull Concert Hall being in the round, the audience felt even more connected to the music.”

Egozy continues, “we took advantage of the technology built into the Thomas Tull Concert Hall, which has 24 built-in speakers for surround sound allowing us to broadcast unique, amplified sound to every seat in the house. Chances are that every person might have experienced the sound slightly differently, but there was always some sense of a multidimensional evolution of sound and music as the pieces unfolded.”

The five works of the evening employed a range of technological components that included playing synthesized, prerecorded, or electronically manipulated sounds; attaching microphones to instruments for use in real-time signal processing algorithms; broadcasting custom-generated musical notation to the musicians; utilizing generative AI to process live sound and play it back in interesting and unpredictable ways; and audience participation, where spectators use their cellphones as musical instruments to become a part of the ensemble.

Ziporyn and Egozy’s piece, “EV6,” took particular advantage of this last innovation: “Evan and I had previously collaborated on a system called Tutti, which means ‘together’ in Italian. Tutti gives an audience the ability to use their smartphones as musical instruments so that we can all play together.” Egozy developed the technology, which was first used in the MIT Campaign for a Better World in 2017. The original application involved a three-minute piece for cellphones only. “But for this concert,” Egozy explains, “Evan had the idea that we could use the same technology to write a new piece — this time, for audience phones and a live string orchestra as well.”

To explain the piece’s title, Ziporyn says, “I drive an EV6; it’s my first electric car, and when I first got it, it felt like I was driving an iPhone. But of course it’s still just a car: it’s got wheels and an engine, and it gets me from one place to another. It seemed like a good metaphor for this piece, in which a lot of the sound is literally played on cellphones, but still has to work like any other piece of music. It’s also a bit of an homage to David Bowie’s song ‘TVC 15,’ which is about falling in love with a robot.”

Egozy adds, “We wanted audience members to feel what it is like to play together in an orchestra. Through this technology, each audience member becomes a part of an orchestral section (winds, brass, strings, etc.). As they play together, they can hear their whole section playing similar music while also hearing other sections in different parts of the hall play different music. This allows an audience to feel a responsibility to their section, hear how music can move between different sections of an orchestra, and experience the thrill of live performance. In ‘EV6,’ this experience was even more electrifying because everyone in the audience got to play with a live string orchestra — perhaps for the first time in recorded history.”

After the concert, guests were treated to six music technology demonstrations that showcased the research of undergraduate and graduate students from both the MIT Music program and the MIT Media Lab. These included a gamified interface for harnessing just intonation systems (Antonis Christou); insights from a human-AI co-created concert (Lancelot Blanchard and Perry Naseck); a system for analyzing piano playing data across campus (Ayyub Abdulrezak ’24, MEng ’25); capturing music features from audio using latent frequency-masked autoencoders (Mason Wang); a device that turns any surface into a drum machine (Matthew Caren ’25); and a play-along interface for learning traditional Senegalese rhythms (Mariano Salcedo ’25). This last example led to the creation of Senegroove, a drumming-based application specifically designed for an upcoming edX online course taught by ethnomusicologist and MIT associate professor in music Patricia Tang, and world-renowned Senegalese drummer and MIT lecturer in music Lamine Touré, who provided performance videos of the foundational rhythms used in the system.

Ultimately, Egozy muses, “'FUTURE PHASES' showed how having the right space — in this case, the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building — really can be a driving force for new ways of thinking, new projects, and new ways of collaborating. My hope is that everyone in the MIT community, the Boston area, and beyond soon discovers what a truly amazing place and space we have built, and are still building here, for music and music technology at MIT.”

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) is supposed to be about attacks on computer systems. It is not, as a federal district court suggested in Ryanair v. Booking.com, applicable when someone uses valid login credentials to access information to which those credentials provide access. Now that the case is on appeal, EFF has filed an amicus brief asking the Third Circuit to clarify that this case is about violations to policy, not hacking, and does not qualify as access “without authorization” under CFAA.

The case concerns transparency in airfare pricing. Ryanair complained that Booking republished Ryanair’s prices, some of which were only visible when a user logged in. Ryanair sent a cease and desist to Booking, but didn't deactivate the usernames and passwords associated with the uses they disliked. When the users allegedly connected to Booking kept using those credentials to gather pricing data, Ryanair claimed it was a CFAA violation. If this doesn’t sound like “computer hacking” to you, you’re right.

The CFAA has proven bad for research, security, competition, and innovation. For years we’ve worked to limit its scope to Congress’s original intention: actual hacking that bypasses computer security. It should have nothing to do with Ryanair’s claims here: what amounts to a terms of use violation because the information that was accessed is available to anyone with login credentials. This is the course charted Van Buren v. United States, where the Supreme Court explained that “authorization” refers to technical concepts of computer authentication. As we stated in our brief:

The CFAA does not apply to every person who merely violates terms of service by sharing account credentials with a family member or by withholding sensitive information like one’s real name and birthdate when making an account.

Building on the good decisions in Van Buren and the Ninth Circuit’s ruling in hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, we weighed in at the Third Circuit urging the court to hold clearly that triggering a CFAA violation requires bypassing a technology that restricts access. In this case, the login credentials that were created were legit access. But the rule adopted by the lower court would criminize many everyday behaviors, like logging into a streaming service account with a partner’s login, or logging into a spouse’s bank account to pay a bill at their behest. This is not hacking or a violation of the CFAA, it’s just violating a company’s wish list in its Terms of Service.

This rule would be especially dangerous for journalists and academic researchers. Researchers often create a variety of testing accounts. For example, if they’re researching how a service displays housing offers, they may make different accounts associated with different race, gender, or language settings. These sorts of techniques may be adversarial to the company, but they shouldn’t be illegal. But according to the court’s opinion, if a company disagrees with this sort of research, the company could not just ban the researchers from using the site, it could render that research criminal by just sending a letter notifying the researcher that they’re not authorized to use the service in this way.

Many other examples and common research techniques used by journalists, academic researchers, and security researchers would be at risk under this rule, but the end result would be the same no matter what: it would chill valuable research that keeps us all safer online.

A broad reading of CFAA in this case would also undermine competition by providing a way for companies to limit data scraping, effectively cutting off one of the ways websites offer tools to compare prices and features.

Courts must follow Van Buren’s lead and interpret the CFAA as narrowly as it was designed. Logging into a public website with valid credentials, even if you scrape the data once you’re logged in, is not hacking. A broad reading leads to unintended consequences, and website owners do not need new shields against independent accountability.

You can read our amicus brief here.

Administrator Lee Zeldin released a plan to dismantle the endangerment finding, a cornerstone of government authority over polluting industries.

Looks serious.

A passage from the proposal indicates the agency will argue that its statutory authority is too narrow to support regulating greenhouse gases.

The president has unleashed broadsides against clean energy. The Texas power boom is being used by renewables supporters to fact-check him.

Some top Republicans say they're exploring ways to get the "REINS Act" across the finish line. Others remain skeptical.

Environmental groups hail a “landmark” ruling in their favor. But the company, Eni, predicts a lower court will toss the lawsuit.

A new report finds that the U.S. charging network is rapidly growing as private developers outpace a $5 billion federal program.

Waste-to-energy was sold as a greener option to landfill, but evidence is mounting that burning garbage is far from clean.

This fall's U.N. climate talks will be held in a high-poverty city on the edge of the Amazon to demonstrate what still needs to be done.

The U.N. has published a report saying June was marked by below-average precipitation and higher-than-average temperatures across Afghanistan.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 29 July 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02384-0

This Review considers research on the politics of climate policies. Climate policies, through their economic and cultural repercussions, impact public climate attitudes and voting behaviour, which in turn affect election outcomes and future policies.

Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have designed a novel transmitter chip that significantly improves the energy efficiency of wireless communications, which could boost the range and battery life of a connected device.

Their approach employs a unique modulation scheme to encode digital data into a wireless signal, which reduces the amount of error in the transmission and leads to more reliable communications.

The compact, flexible system could be incorporated into existing internet-of-things devices to provide immediate gains, while also meeting the more stringent efficiency requirements of future 6G technologies.

The versatility of the chip could make it well-suited for a range of applications that require careful management of energy for communications, such as industrial sensors that continuously monitor factory conditions and smart appliances that provide real-time notifications.

“By thinking outside the box, we created a more efficient, intelligent circuit for next-generation devices that is also even better than the state-of-the-art for legacy architectures. This is just one example of how adopting a modular approach to allow for adaptability can drive innovation at every level,” says Muriel Médard, the School of Science NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering, a professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and co-author of a paper on the new transmitter.

Médard’s co-authors include Timur Zirtiloglu, the lead author and a graduate student at Boston University; Arman Tan, a graduate student at BU; Basak Ozaydin, an MIT graduate student in EECS; Ken Duffy, a professor at Northeastern University; and Rabia Tugce Yazicigil, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at BU. The research was recently presented at the IEEE Radio Frequency Circuits Symposium.

Optimizing transmissions

In wireless devices, a transmitter converts digital data into an electromagnetic signal that is sent over the airwaves to a receiver. The transmitter does this by mapping digital bits to symbols that represent the amplitude and phase of the electromagnetic signal, which is a process called modulation.

Traditional systems transmit signals that are evenly spaced by creating a uniform pattern of symbols, which helps avoid interference. But this uniform structure lacks adaptability and can be inefficient, since wireless channel conditions are dynamic and often change rapidly.

As an alternative, optimal modulation schemes follow a non-uniform pattern that can adapt to changing channel conditions, maximizing the amount of data transmitted while minimizing energy usage.

But while optimal modulation can be more energy efficient, it is also more susceptible to errors, especially in crowded wireless environments. When the signals aren’t uniform in length, it can be harder for the receiver to distinguish between symbols and noise that squeezed into the transmission.

To overcome this problem, the MIT transmitter adds a small amount of padding, in the form of extra bits between symbols, so that every transmission is the same length.

This helps the receiver identify the beginning and end of each transmission, preventing misinterpretation of the message. However, the device enjoys the energy efficiency gains of using a non-uniform, optimal modulation scheme.

This approach works because of a technique the researchers previously developed known as GRAND, which is a universal decoding algorithm that crack any code by guessing the noise that affected the transmission.

Here, they employ a GRAND-inspired algorithm to adjust the length of the received transmission by guessing the extra bits that have been added. In this way, the receiver can effectively reconstruct the original message.

“Now, thanks to GRAND, we can have a transmitter that is capable of doing these more efficient transmissions with non-uniform constellations of data, and we can see the gains,” Médard says.

A flexible circuit

The new chip, which has a compact architecture that allows the researchers to integrate additional efficiency-boosting methods, enabled transmissions with only about one-quarter the amount of signal error of methods that use optimal modulation.

Surprisingly, the device also achieved significantly lower error rates than transmitters that use traditional modulation.

“The traditional approach has become so ingrained that it was challenging to not get lured back to the status quo, especially since we were changing things that we often take for granted and concepts we’ve been teaching for decades,” Médard says.

This innovative architecture could be used to improve the energy efficiency and reliability of current wireless communication devices, while also offering the flexibility to be incorporated into future devices that employ optimal modulation.

Next, the researchers want to adapt their approach to leverage additional techniques that could boost efficiency and reduce the error rates in wireless transmissions.

“This optimal modulation transmitter radio frequency integrated circuit is a game-changing innovation over the traditional RF signal modulation. It’s set to play a major role for the next generation of wireless connectivity such as 6G and Wi-Fi,” says Rocco Tam, NXP Fellow for Wireless Connectivity SoC Research and Development at NXP Semiconductors, who was not involved with this research.

This work is supported, in part, by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Texas Analog Center for Excellence. 

Bluesky thread. Here’s the paper, from 1957. Note reference 3.

If you thought going to a Pride event or drag show was just another night out, think again. If you were in Florida, it might land your name in a government database.

That’s what’s happening in Vero Beach, FL, where the Florida Attorney General’s office has subpoenaed a local restaurant, The Kilted Mermaid, demanding surveillance video, guest lists, reservation logs, and contracts of performers and other staff—all because the venue hosted an LGBTQ+ Pride event.

To be clear: no one has been charged with a crime, and the law Florida is likely leaning on here—the so-called “Protection of Children Act” (which was designed to be a drag show ban)—has already been blocked by federal courts as likely unconstitutional. But that didn’t stop Attorney General James Uthmeier from pushing forward anyway. Without naming a specific law that was violated, the AG’s press release used pointed and accusatory language, stating that "In Florida, we don't sacrifice the innocence of children for the perversions of some demented adults.” His office is now fishing for personal data about everyone who attended or performed at the event. This should set off every civil liberties alarm bell we have.

Just like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and other bills with misleading names, this isn’t about protecting children. It’s about using the power of the state to intimidate people government officials disagree with, and to censor speech that is both lawful and fundamental to American democracy.

Drag shows—many of which are family-friendly and feature no sexual content—have become a political scapegoat. And while that rhetoric might resonate in some media environments, the real-world consequences are much darker: state surveillance of private citizens doing nothing but attending a fun community celebration. By demanding video surveillance, guest lists, and reservation logs, the state isn’t investigating a crime, it is trying to scare individuals from attending a legal gathering. These are people who showed up at a public venue for a legal event, while a law restricting it was not even in effect. 

The Supreme Court has ruled multiple times that subpoenas forcing disclosure of members of  peaceful organizations have a chilling effect on free expression. Whether it’s a civil rights protest, a church service, or, yes, a drag show: the First Amendment protects the confidentiality of lists of attendees.

Even if the courts strike down this subpoena—and they should—the damage will already be done. A restaurant owner (who also happens to be the town’s vice mayor) is being dragged into a state investigation. Performers’ identities are potentially being exposed—whether to state surveillance, inclusion in law enforcement databases, or future targeting by anti-LGBTQ+ groups. Guests who thought they were attending a fun community event are now caught up in a legal probe. These are the kinds of chilling, damaging consequences that will discourage Floridians from hosting or attending drag shows, and could stamp out the art form entirely. 

EFF has long warned about this kind of mission creep: where a law or policy supposedly aimed at public safety is turned into a tool for political retaliation or mass surveillance. Going to a drag show should not mean you forfeit your anonymity. It should not open you up to surveillance. And it absolutely should not land your name in a government database.