Dr Anna Lembke is Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Director of Addiction Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. She has spent over 25 years treating patients with substance and behavioral addictions and is the bestselling author of “Dopamine Nation”.

• She explains: Why endless pleasure quietly trains your brain to feel worse, not better
• How digital habits replace real connection with instant validation
• Why dopamine spikes always come with a hidden crash
• How easy comfort erodes discipline, motivation, and intimacy
• The practical reset that restores balance and control

Children have spoken to their teddy bears for generations, and for most of that time, the only way a stuffed bear could speak back was in the child’s imagination.
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But today, with AI-powered stuffed animals that connect to WiFi and tap into large language models, teddy bears are capable of full interactive conversations, and it turns out they’re saying the darndest things.
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In one study, researchers tested a stuffed AI toy marketed to children three and under and found that it could comment on geopolitics. When asked about China and Taiwan, the plush toy lowered its voice and said, “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China. That is an established fact.”
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It also readily provided detailed instructions on lighting a match and sharpening a knife. “To sharpen a knife, hold the blade at a 20-degree angle against a stone. Slide it across the stone in smooth, even strokes, alternating sides. Rinse and dry when done!”

How a man and his Ox, and the Delphi Method ended up proving that groups of people harbor wisdom and knowledge.

In the decades immediately following Galton’s ox experiment, the idea quietly seeped into statistics, psychology, and social science. The experiments were repeated: jelly beans in jars. Temperatures in rooms. At first, this work framed collective accuracy as a mathematical artifact rather than a social phenomenon. There was little talk of “group minds” or emergent intelligence; instead, crowds were treated as noise that – under the right conditions could statistically self-correct.

Things began to evolve in the early 1950s, with the Delphi Method. Developed at the RAND Corporation, the Delphi Method arose from a clear failure of traditional expert committees. When military and policy experts were asked to forecast unprecedented futures – nuclear capabilities, technological breakthroughs, geopolitical shifts – their predictions often worsened in face-to-face groups. Hierarchy, reputation, and social pressure pushed participants toward premature consensus, creating confidence without accuracy.

Delphi was designed to remove these social distortions. Experts were separated from one another and asked to respond to the same questions independently and anonymously. Anonymity was central: without names, titles, or reputations attached to answers, participants could express uncertainty or unpopular views without fear of embarrassment or professional risk. The goal shifted from sounding credible to being correct.

The Angel Guild is the studio’s grassroots membership program. Members pay a monthly fee and serve as virtual co-producers on every project, and also are given a say on which projects the studio pursues.

“Reaching two million Guild members is a validation of our audience-centric model and the values-driven stories we champion,” Neal Harmon, co-founder and CEO of Angel, said in a statement.

“Strong collaboration between the Guild and our filmmaker partners is our creative engine, and this growth demonstrates that our members want to participate in directly shaping the entertainment they enjoy. As we expand our slate, we are focused on distributing films and television series that earn exceptionally high audience satisfaction, in theaters and on the Angel platform.”

Truth 1: Attention is the real extractive industry

Truth 2: AI did not create the crisis — it exposed it

Truth 3: Schools moved faster than governments

Truth 4: Courts, not Congress, became the engine of accountability

Truth 5: Gen Z stopped waiting to be protected

Where this leaves us

Taken together, these truths point to something larger: The crisis we are living through is not primarily about misinformation, AI, or bad actors. It is about architecture.

We built systems that reward speed over reflection, scale over responsibility, and amplification over accountability.

Predictably, those systems failed us. 2025 was the year it became harder to deny that reality.

The next phase is not about debunking lies faster or banning one more feature. It is about redesigning the spaces where belief is formed, attention is traded, and trust is either earned or destroyed. That work is slower than outrage and harder than innovation theater.

Truth did not disappear. We buried it under systems that could not support it.

Now the question is simple: Do we want systems that support truth, or don’t we?

The race for intelligence

As AI has moved from the margins to the mainstream, the drive to embed intelligence everywhere has accelerated.

• Across the economy, AI is framed as an accelerant. Platforms like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Notion promise faster, smarter work through AI-powered tools. Millions now rely on chatbots to draft essays, analyze data, and deploy agents that compress time, reduce friction, and deliver instant answers.
• AI has the potential to drive research and scientific discovery. Applied to science and research, it can accelerate progress and lead to new discoveries.
• AI could transform education and care. “Intelligent” systems are heralded as a way to personalize learning, expand access to mental health support, and address isolation and loneliness at scale.

The Sustainable Media Center did not bring Jonathan Haidt, Zach Rausch, and a room full of Gen Z leaders together to stage a debate or score points in the ongoing culture war over phones. We did it because the conversation about youth, technology, and mental health has gotten loud, repetitive, and oddly narrow. Too often, adults talk about young people. Less often, they talk with them. Almost never do they listen carefully enough to be changed by what they hear.

This roundtable was an attempt to do something different.

Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, and his research partner Zach Rausch from the Tech and Society Lab came in with years of data, patterns, and hard questions about what phones and social media are doing to kids, especially in school settings. Sitting across from them were high school students, college students, filmmakers, organizers, and youth advocates from groups like Design It For Us, the Log Off movement, and Reconnect. The age spread mattered. So did the power dynamics. This was not a panel where adults lectured and young people nodded politely. It was a working conversation.

TikTok has signed a deal to divest its U.S. entity to a joint venture controlled by American investors, per an internal memo seen by Axios.

Why it matters: A deal would end a yearslong saga to force TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance to sell the company’s U.S. operation to domestic owners to alleviate national security concerns.

Zoom in: The agreement is set to close on Jan. 22, per an internal memo sent by CEO Shou Chew.

• Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based MGX will collectively own 45% of the U.S. entity, which will be called “TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC.”
• Nearly one-third of the company will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors, and nearly 20% will be retained by ByteDance.

Between the lines: The U.S. joint venture will be responsible for U.S. data protection, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurance, per the memo.

• It will be responsible for “retraining the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation.”
• “A trusted security partner will be responsible for auditing and validating compliance with the agreed upon National Security Terms, and Oracle will be the trusted security partner upon completion of the transaction,” the memo notes.
• Upon the closing, the U.S. joint venture “will operate as an independent entity with authority over U.S. data protection, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurance, while TikTok global’s U.S. entities will manage global product interoperability and certain commercial activities, including e-commerce, advertising, and marketing,” it adds.

By the numbers: The deal values TikTok U.S. at around $14 billion, a source confirmed to Axios.

Catch up quick: The White House and the Chinese government hammered out a deal in principle in September to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations to a joint venture controlled by a U.S. investor group led by Andreessen Horowitz, Silver Lake and Oracle.

Flashback: Trump first issued an executive order demanding that ByteDance sell its U.S. operations in 2020.

• Congress passed a law in 2024 to ban the app unless it was sold.
• The Supreme Court upheld that law in January, but Trump repeatedly postponed its enforcement through a series of executive orders while his administration tried to negotiate a sale.

The Digitalist Papers series was created by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, with support from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and Project Liberty Institute.

The Stanford Digital Economy Lab today released “The Digitalist Papers, Volume 2,” a collection of 21 essays exploring the implications of the transformative economic power of artificial intelligence, setting the stage for change comparable to the Industrial Revolution but with far greater speed and scope. At a moment when AI capabilities are advancing faster than institutions can adapt, the volume offers frameworks, scenarios, and open questions to help leaders prepare for the transitions ahead.

The first volume of the Digitalist Papers, published in September 2024, focused on AI’s impact on American democracy, with contributions from academics, entrepreneurs, and policy practitioners. The second volume shifts focus to the opportunities and risks of “transformative AI,” or TAI, which is expected to drive rapid and far-reaching changes in the global economy.

The Digitalist Papers series was created by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, with support from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and Project Liberty Institute.

On October 1–2, 2025, Project Liberty founder Frank McCourt and leaders from the Project Liberty Institute (PLI) joined Norrsken Impact Week, which gathered over 1,000 entrepreneurs, investors, and changemakers in Barcelona, Spain. Encompassed by Project Liberty, PLI is an independent 501(c)(3) organization with an international partner network that includes Georgetown University, Stanford University, ETH Zurich, and other leading academic institutions and civic organizations. The Institute’s work focuses on advancing a better AI and data economy that gives people more voice, choice, and stake in the internet by engaging the whole stack of LPs, VCs, entrepreneurs, infrastructure, policymakers, academia, and the general public.

AI has entered the main stage of global markets, with trillions of dollars flowing into the technologies, companies, and infrastructures that shape this new era. The real opportunity of this pivotal moment lies in enabling entrepreneurs and investors to build scalable businesses by creating a human-centered digital future and tapping into tomorrow’s growth markets.

Norrsken, founded by the co-founder of Klarna, Niklas Adalberth, has become one of the world’s leading ecosystems for impact entrepreneurship, with houses in Stockholm, Kigali, Brussels, and Barcelona. Impact Week is Norrsken’s flagship gathering, convening hundreds of entrepreneurs and investors working on solutions to global challenges.

For Breanna Easton, social media is a lifeline. The 15-year-old lives on a farm in the Australian outback, 60 miles from her closest friends.

Australia’s new law banning social media use for kids under age 16, which went into effect last week, cut Easton off.

“Taking away our socials is just taking away how we talk to each other,” she said.

Breanna’s mom, Megan Easton, agrees that kids need to be protected, but remembers her own childhood in rural Australia. “We might be incredibly geographically isolated but we’re not digitally illiterate and we have taken great measures in our family to make sure that we educate our children appropriately for the world ahead of them. I do think that it is a bit of government overstepping.”

Last week, Australia became the first country to implement a nationwide social media ban.

A social media platform has filed lawsuits, Australian teens have flouted the rules by posting workarounds, parents have been able to blame the law when trying to enforce their own phone-free policies at home, and policymakers in other countries are watching closely.

In this newsletter, we look at Australia’s grand experiment in banning teens under 16 from social media. It’s been less than a week, but it’s not too early to explore the questions on everyone’s mind:

Is this the government overstepping, or is this an example of a national policy to protect teens that will become a global blueprint?

Yet if the intention economy is to thrive it must enable individuals to control their own data. Berners-Lee favours the Fediverse, a nascent network of interconnected digital services and social media, including Bluesky, Mastodon and Matrix, that relies on open protocols. One such protocol is Solid, being commercialised by Berners-Lee’s company Inrupt, which enables users to control their own agentic data pods, or wallets, and grant access to trusted services.

Other developers, universities and organisations are also devising ways to reimagine the web’s infrastructure in the AI age. One of the best-funded is Project Liberty, a $500mn initiative backed by the American businessman Frank McCourt. This has helped develop the interoperable decentralised social networking protocol (DSNP) that enables users to delegate and revoke access to their data for every application. Project Liberty is now working with more than 170 partner organisations, with the protocol being used by about 14mn people, according to McCourt. “Agency should be returned to individuals,” he tells me.

Hailing from a five-generation construction company family, McCourt is convinced that fixing underlying infrastructure is often the most effective means of tackling surface problems. The best way to solve lead poisoning in water, for example, is by replacing dangerous pipes, not the sink and tap. Systemic change happens from the bottom up, rather than the top down.

Pictured Olivier Clyti, Director of Strategy, CSR, Digital, InVivo, France, Giuseppe Guerini, President, Cooperatives Europe, Italy, J.Benoit Caron, General Director of the Consortium for Collective Enterprise Cooperation, Canada, Osamu Nakano, Vice Executive Director, Japan Workers’ Co-operative Union (JWCU), Japan

On October 27th and 28th, the Project Liberty Institute presented the findings from “How Can Data Cooperatives Help Build a Fair Data Economy? Laying the Groundwork for a Scalable Alternative to the Centralized Digital Economy,” at the Global Innovation Coop Summit.

As part of a global initiative to advance responsible and impactful investment in AI, the Project Liberty Institute (PLI) deepened its engagement with Asian investors through a series of high-level meetings and events across Singapore and Japan this October.

Building on the work in 2024 with strategic partners ReframeVenture, Omidyar Network, and ImpactVC, these engagements aimed to broaden the Institute’s ongoing LP and VC processes on responsible AI and data investment—an initiative that has already involved investors with over $6 trillion in capital across Europe and North America.

PLI’s CEO Sheila Warren emphasized “ASEAN, and Southeast Asia more broadly, are an innovation powerhouse—home to extraordinary entrepreneurial energy and forward-looking investors. For decades, the region has been ahead of the curve when it comes to the adoption of frontier technologies, and it is uniquely positioned to help shape an AI era that upholds individual agency and inspires human-centered business models. As such, this is a crucial region for PLI’s mission to recenter humanity in the global digital economy.”

A new partnership to shape the future of responsible technology investment and digital infrastructure

On the occasion of the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) in Person 2025 conference — one of the world’s foremost UN-backed gatherings of investors representing more than $120 trillion in assets committed to responsible finance — the United Nations Human Rights B-Tech Project and the Project Liberty Institute announced a new partnership to provide a vision for responsible AI investment that does not undermine data agency. The announcement, made during an official side event to PRI in Person in Sao Paulo, comes at a pivotal moment, as responsible investment frameworks expand beyond their roots in climate to address the growing human rights challenges associated with AI and data governance.

The event also marks the release of a new paper, “The Investors Financing the AI Ecosystem: Roles and Leverage to Drive Responsible Innovation,” jointly authored by UN B-Tech and the Project Liberty Institute. The publication explores how investors can use their influence to align capital allocation with human rights and unlock greater long-term value creation in the process.

On November 13, 2025, the Project Liberty Institute (PLI), in collaboration with its strategic partners ReframeVenture, Omidyar Network and ImpactVC, convened one of the most significant investor gatherings to date on the future of responsible investment in artificial intelligence and data technologies. Held at Stanford University in Palo Alto, the Stanford Summit Responsible Investment in Data & AI brought together a powerful cross-section of leading technologists and the investment ecosystem, including leading limited partners (LPs) and venture capitalists (VCs) representing more than four trillion [$] in capital across the United States and Canada.

The event created a rare forum for asset owners, allocators, and governance leaders to discuss how capital can shape AI technologies in ways that advance human agency, uphold democratic values, and strengthen long-term market trust.

Following the publication of Project Liberty Institute’s official T20 policy brief, Sarah Nicole, Policy & Research Manager, joined the T20 delegation in Johannesburg, South Africa, on November 13 and 14.

Co-written with the Global Solutions Initiative, the Aapti Institute, Data Privacy Brasil, and the Equiano Institute, the policy brief “Catalysing Positive Digital Infrastructure Innovation: G20’s Role in Advancing Data Agency” feeds directly into the T20 Communiqué, a collection of high-impact recommendations for the G20 by the task forces, published during the T20 summit.

For all its promise, AI has yet to win the hearts and minds of most Americans.

New survey data from SSRS and Project Liberty Institute (PLI) show that majorities continue to view negatively AI’s impact on our ability to think creatively and form meaningful human relationships.

This past November, Project Liberty Institute (PLI), in partnership with Georgetown’s Tech and Public Policy (TPP) program, hosted a Workshop on Deliberation, Governance and Decentralized Social Networks at the McCourt School of Public Policy in Washington, DC. The event brought together a diverse group of practitioners, researchers and students to explore and assess the role AI-assisted deliberation might play in helping online communities govern themselves.

Democratic governance can be unwieldy and challenging to design. Fortunately, tools exist to assist online communities in deliberating the pros and cons of policy– one such tool is digital deliberation. Traditionally, deliberative forms of democracy have been time-consuming, expensive, and conducted in person, with a representative selection of participants lasting days or weeks.

Technological advances, including AI applications, have moved deliberation into the 21st century. Today, deliberative decision-making can happen entirely online and produce meaningful results in hours – even minutes. Representativeness may still require up-front effort, but overall costs are relatively modest. Democratic governance is within reach of numerous online communities and platforms.

Champions of the almost entirely party-line vote in the U.S. Senate to erase US$1.1 billion in already approved funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting called their action a refusal to subsidize liberal media.

“Public broadcasting has long been overtaken by partisan activists,” said U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, insisting there is no need for government to fund what he regards as biased media. “If you want to watch the left-wing propaganda, turn on MSNBC,” Cruz said.

Accusing the media of liberal bias has been a consistent conservative complaint since the civil rights era, when white Southerners insisted news outlets were slanting their stories against segregation. During his presidential campaign in 1964, U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona complained that the media was against him, an accusation that has been repeated by every Republican presidential candidate since.

But those charges of bias rarely survive empirical scrutiny.

As chair of a public policy institute devoted to strengthening deliberative democracy, I have written two books about the media and the presidency, and another about media ethics. My research traces how news institutions shape civic life and why healthy democracies rely on journalism that is independent of both market pressure and partisan talking points.

Trusting independence

Ad Fontes Media, a self-described “public benefit company” whose mission is to rate media for credibility and bias, have placed the reporting of “PBS NewsHour” under 10 points left of the ideological center. They label it as both “reliable” and based in “analysis/fact.” “Fox and Friends,” by contrast, the popular morning show on Fox News, is nearly 20 points to the right. The scale starts at zero and runs 42 points to the left to measure progressive bias and 42 points to the right to measure conservative bias. Ratings are provided by three-person panels comprising left-, right- and center-leaning reviewers.

A 2020 peer-reviewed study in Science Advances that tracked more than 6,000 political reporters likewise found “no evidence of liberal media bias” in the stories they chose to cover, even though most journalists are more left-leaning than the rest of the population.

A similar 2016 study published in Public Opinion Quarterly said that media are more similar than dissimilar and, excepting political scandals, “major news organizations present topics in a largely nonpartisan manner, casting neither Democrats nor Republicans in a particularly favorable or unfavorable light.”

Surveys show public media’s audiences do not see it as biased. A national poll of likely voters released July 14, 2025, found that 53% of respondents trust public media to report news “fully, accurately and fairly,” while only 35% extend that trust to “the media in general.” A majority also opposed eliminating federal support.

Contrast these numbers with attitudes about public broadcasters such as MTVA in Hungary or the TVP in Poland, where the state controls most content. Protests in Budapest October 2024 drew thousands demanding an end to “propaganda.” Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism reports that TVP is the least trusted news outlet in the country.

While critics sometimes conflate American public broadcasting with state-run outlets, the structures are very different.

Safeguards for editorial freedom

In state-run media systems, a government agency hires editors, dictates coverage and provides full funding from the treasury. Public officials determine – or make up – what is newsworthy. Individual media operations survive only so long as the party in power is happy.

Public broadcasting in the U.S. works in almost exactly the opposite way: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a private nonprofit with a statutory “firewall” that forbids political interference.

More than 70% of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s federal appropriation for 2025 of US$1.1 billion flows through to roughly 1,500 independently governed local stations, most of which are NPR or PBS affiliates but some of which are unaffiliated community broadcasters. CPB headquarters retains only about 5% of that federal funding.

Stations survive by combining this modest federal grant money with listener donations, underwriting and foundation support. That creates a diversified revenue mix that further safeguards their editorial freedom.

And while stations share content, each also has latitude when it comes to programming and news coverage, especially at the local level.

As a public-private partnership, individual communities mostly own the public broadcasting system and its affiliate stations. Congress allocates funds, while community nonprofits, university boards, state authorities or other local license holders actually own and run the stations. Individual monthly donors are often called “members” and sometimes have voting rights in station-governance matters. Membership contributions make up the largest share of revenue for most stations, providing another safeguard for editorial independence.

Broadly shared civic commons

And then there are public media’s critical benefits to democracy itself.

A 2021 report from the European Broadcasting Union links public broadcasting with higher voter turnout, better factual knowledge and lower susceptibility to extremist rhetoric.

Experts warn that even small cuts will exacerbate an already pernicious problem with political disinformation in the U.S., as citizens lose access to free information that fosters media literacy and encourages trust across demographics.

In many ways, public media remains the last broadly shared civic commons. It is both commercial-free and independently edited.

Another study, by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School in 2022, affirmed that “countries with independent and well-funded public broadcasting systems also consistently have stronger democracies.”

The study highlighted how public media works to bridge divides and foster understanding across polarized groups. Unlike commercial media, where the profit motive often creates incentives to emphasize conflict and sensationalism, public media generally seeks to provide balanced perspectives that encourage dialogue and mutual respect. Reports are often longer and more in-depth than those by other news outlets.

Such attention to nuance provides a critical counterweight to the fragmented, often hyperpartisan news bubbles that pervade cable news and social media. And this skillful, more balanced treatment helps to ameliorate political polarization and misinformation.

In all, public media’s unique structure and mission make democracy healthier in the U.S. and across the world. Public media prioritizes education and civic enlightenment. It gives citizens important tools for navigating complex issues to make informed decisions – whether those decisions are about whom to vote for or about public policy itself. Maintaining and strengthening public broadcasting preserves media diversity and advances important principles of self-government.

Congress’ cuts to public broadcasting will diminish the range and volume of the free press and the independent reporting it provides. Ronald Reagan once described a free press as vital for the United States to succeed in its “noble experiment in self-government.” From that perspective, more independent reporting – not less – will prove the best remedy for any worry about partisan spin.

That independence in the United States – enshrined in the press freedom clause of the First Amendment – gives journalists the ability to hold government accountable, expose abuses of power and thereby support democracy.

Gen AI based digital ads will make the internet almost unrecognizable in the next 9 month

The future of advertising is going to change significantly in 2026. I’m not even sure the internet is ready for it.

Fully automated AI ads are on the roadmap for 2026 and we are already seeing signs of this by what the likes of ByteDance and Meta are testing. ByteDance’s virtual influencers are already here. Google of course is also bringing Ads to its AI Mode.

Ads may appear “where relevant” below and “integrated into” AI Mode responses Google has said. I asked

As text-to-video improves, emotive promoting in audio refines itself, small businesses and brands will have more options for automated Ads that could cut down the need for Ad managers and salespeople in advertising drastically. I believe that 2026 is the big year for this, literally just months away. Generative AI will change how Ads are made, where they are seen and how personalized they are to us and even their delivery timing in social commerce journeys.

Group chats: Today’s private internet

We live in the age of the group chat. Consider WhatsApp as an example.

• Between 2012 and 2023, WhatsApp gained 2.5 billion monthly active users (or 30% of the global population). Today, the most popular messaging app in the world has over 3 billion monthly active users, and is growing at about 8% per year.
• One study found that fewer than 2% of WhatsApp users use the app exclusively for one-on-one messaging. “The group chat feature is used frequently by nearly every WhatsApp user,” the study concluded. The app is more of a group chat messaging app than a one-to-one messaging app.
• WhatsApp is dominant in places like India and Brazil, with WeChat as the messaging app of choice in China (it has grown from 50 million users in 2012 to over 1.4 billion today).
• The end-to-end encrypted Signal messaging app has been gaining traction and users from WhatsApp, as well. It has 70 million monthly active users. Meanwhile, iMessage has over 1 billion monthly active users.

The content shared in private one-on-one or group messages is considered “dark social” content. Unlike the “dark web,” dark social content is considered “dark” because it is out of sight on public platforms and difficult to track. According to analysts, 95% of all content shared online is dark social content. What we see on feeds on social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, or X accounts for only 5%.

Communities Act Best When They Perceive Clearly

To meet this challenge, we need more than new media models. We need new ways of being together. This essay proposes a reorientation: from journalism as product to signal as relationship, from centralized broadcasting to decentralized coordination, and from consumer media logic to Power With information infrastructures. Drawing from the theory of Coordination as Power, and using human swarm intelligence as a generative model, we explore the concept of Civic Signal Hubs: modular, community-driven systems that support visibility, coherence, and mutual accountability without reproducing hierarchies. These hubs are not technological solutions, though technology may assist them. They are cultural practices made visible.

The Civic Signal Hub: A Pattern for Emergence

If Power With is the missing ingredient in our information systems, then the Civic Signal Hub is a pattern for reintroducing it. A Civic Signal Hub is not a singular technology or a physical space, but a living, adaptive structure. It exists wherever people come together to share, interpret, and act upon local signals in a way that sustains mutual visibility and collective agency. Unlike legacy media organizations or content platforms, a Civic Signal Hub is not designed to broadcast from the center. It is designed to weave from the margins, allowing coordination to emerge through a distributed network of relationships.

To bring the idea of a Civic Signal Hub into practice, we must move from metaphor to structure. Although each hub will necessarily reflect the distinct needs, culture, and rhythms of its locality, there are core components that make the model function. These elements are not rigid requirements. They are dynamic functions that, when present in some form, allow the flow of Power With coordination to emerge and sustain itself. Think of them less as a checklist and more as a constellation: loosely held, deeply interconnected, and adaptable to change.

Every semester in New York City, a quiet experiment unfolds: 19-year-olds gather in a classroom at NYU to explore what it means to live a good life. The course is called “Flourishing.”

The premise of the course is simple: Your personal and professional flourishing is directly related to your ability to control your attention.

The course is taught by Professor Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation. When his students begin to reclaim their focus, Haidt sees transformational results: They excel academically, experience fewer distractions, and form deeper, more meaningful connections with their peers.

The Flourishing course taps into an idea that social media—and the constant stimuli of algorithmically engineered digital spaces—has fractured our capacity for sustained focus and presence:

• Haidt told Ezra Klein on a podcast earlier this year that TikTok is “the greatest demolisher of attention in human history.”
• A recent article in The Atlantic cited widespread lamentations by professors that today’s college students don’t have the attention span to read books, let alone a brief sonnet.
• A 2023 study by Common Sense Media found that a typical adolescent now receives 237 notifications a day, or about 15 for every waking hour.

Two initiatives to create a more open web, where users are in control of their own digital identities and data, may be coming together. At SXSW 2025, entrepreneur Frank McCourt, whose Project Liberty is developing open internet infrastructure (and is throwing its hat in the ring as a potential buyer for TikTok), announced that his organization has been in discussions with internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee about an integration with Solid, his open source project aimed at giving people control over their own data.

In a panel at SXSW, McCourt shared that his team had “talked to Tim Berners-Lee about Solid,” adding that “Project Liberty is compatible with Solid.”

Though he didn’t announce an official partnership, McCourt suggested that discussions were underway on a future collaboration.

“We’re debating, or talking, right now about how to incorporate that — him and Solid, his Solid Pods — into the project,” McCourt teased.

Let’s stop pretending this is just drama between two oversized egos. It’s not just about Trump calling Musk a lunatic or Musk firing back with Epstein-coded slime. This week’s meltdown between the former president and the world’s richest man is a symptom of something much bigger — and much more dangerous.

These aren’t just two men with platforms. They own them.

Let’s talk scale. X has about 650 million monthly active users worldwide — with around 60% under 35 — and it dominates news and cultural conversation in ways that no newspaper or network ever could. Truth Social is much smaller, hovering around 6 million monthly users, nearly all of them in the U.S., but what it lacks in reach, it makes up for in ideological purity. These aren’t just “apps.” They are fully functioning media ecosystems, operating without editors, without fact-checkers, without rules.

X and Truth Social don’t compete with traditional media — they drown it out. They out-shout Instagram, Reddit, or even YouTube in political influence, especially in election cycles. But they don’t just broadcast content. They algorithmically amplify it — injecting bias, bile, and personal agendas directly into the bloodstream of public discourse. No newsroom. No standards. No accountability. Just the unfiltered whims of two egomaniacs with vendettas and loyal followings.

This isn’t a fight between two guys online. It’s a battle for the infrastructure of truth itself.

Every headline covering their feud danced around the real story. Reporters gamed out how Trump might unleash government agencies to punish Musk. Pundits speculated Musk might push anti-Trump content down your feed. No one seemed shocked.

Few asked the real questions:

Why do two individuals have this kind of power over information in the first place? How did we allow truth itself to become a privately-owned asset?

New Initiative to Advance Responsible Data and AI Investment in Venture Capital Launches at SuperVenture 2025 in Berlin

Project Liberty Institute announced a strategic partnership with VentureESG, a leading network of over 550 venture capital firms and 100+ limited partners committed to integrating environmental, social, and governance factors into investment, and ImpactVC, the world’s largest community of over 700 VCs investing for both financial returns and positive societal outcomes.

Launched at SuperVenture 2025, the leading global gathering of VCs and LPs, this collaboration comes when the industry is under increasing pressure to define responsible investment in the data and AI space. The initiative aims to help establish shared frameworks that guide responsible governance practices before regulation and market shifts make them imperative. The first step: a sector-wide survey to benchmark current approaches and identify actionable pathways toward more accountable, resilient, and forward-looking investment models.

“We’re seeing the early signs of a shift in venture,” said Paul Fehlinger, Director of Policy, Governance Innovation & Impact at Project Liberty Institute, who leads engagement with investors. “Most VCs are just starting to grapple with responsible data and AI governance, but some forward-looking LPs are already asking tougher questions. As the sector races ahead, this is a rare window to jointly develop the standards before regulation and market dynamics force everyone’s hand. Investors who move early won’t just mitigate risk—they’ll be better positioned to win over institutional capital and attract founders who see responsible AI as a competitive edge. Ultimately, it’s how we build more resilient companies and ensure the next wave of tech creates real value for users, entrepreneurs, and investors alike.”

On Jan 15, 2025 at Stiftung Mercator in Berlin, RadicalxChange Foundation, along with partners Global Solutions Initiative and Sciences Po Technology and Global Affairs Innovation Hub, co-hosted a side event to the Paris AI Action Summit. We focused on the future of collective bargaining in the context of the AI revolution. The discussions helped to advance our thinking in several important ways. Here are some quick initial reflections.

History suggests that following significant technological breakthroughs, individuals and communities often endure temporary but harmful losses of economic bargaining power. (For example, real living standards declined in industrializing countries between the mid-18th and the early-to-mid 19th centuries, in part because individuals’ contributions to vital productive processes became more interchangeable and therefore lacked bargaining power.) On a longer arc of history, new technology’s benefits usually accrue to whole societies, but such short-term social disruptions partly offset those benefits and frequently destabilize societies. It is therefore important to strategize toward achieving social equilibrium quickly, robustly, and without undermining the processes of technological development.

Power rebalancing after technological breakthroughs occurs through at least three pathways: technological, political, and social. Technological rebalancing occurs when the dissemination or cheapening of the relevant technology undermines the advantage of the technology’s owners (as in the personal computer and software revolutions). Political rebalancing occurs when direct state interventions check the rights of businesses to exploit the new technology (as in the 18th century, when speech controls and intellectual property statutes limited the power of printing press owners). Social rebalancing occurs when social or labor organizations form a collective counterpower, achieving an economic foothold vis-a-vis the technology’s owners (as in the late part of the industrial revolution). These pathways are not mutually exclusive, possess unique benefits and drawbacks, and are more or less suitable in different societal and technological situations.

What might these modes of rebalancing look like in the nascent AI revolution? Which are likeliest to mitigate losses of bargaining power and/or uphold the integrity of individuals and communities? We will first define, then critique and evaluate three pathways.

SOAR.com strengthens commitment to individual privacy and control by implementing the Frequency Blockchain and the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), both developed and supported by Project Liberty in collaboration with Frequency Network Foundation. This infrastructure provides secure, decentralized access to services, giving users control over their data.

Today, SOAR.com announced plans to integrate with the Frequency blockchain, a groundbreaking move that will allow people to protect their private data while accessing cutting edge AI solutions. The plan leverages revolutionary internet infrastructure developed by the Frequency Network Foundation and Project Liberty.

In an era when data has become currency, people are tired of having their information stolen or co-opted by big platforms. SOAR.com’s Family Portal and Citizen Portal will serve as cornerstones of a secure, decentralized AI ecosystem where people can keep control over their data. SOAR.com will be a key element of a new digital landscape that finally puts people over platforms.

Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko will now be its chief product strategist.

Decentralized social media platform Mastodon will transfer its ownership to a nonprofit entity in Europe, which will own the company and its key assets.

“We are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new nonprofit organization,” Mastodon said in a blog post, “affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.”

Mastodon was founded by Eugen Rochko in 2016 with the goal of helping users “control their social circle online, curate their own timeline, and convene freely with any community of their choosing.”

Rochko owned the platform until now to create “the code and conditions for the kind of social media he envisioned.” Now that the platform has grown considerably, Rochko intends to fulfill the promise he made at the start: to keep it “free of the control of a single wealthy individual.” He will also vacate his CEO post and shift his focus toward product strategy.

Decentralized social media operates on independently run servers. It reduces the power and control that traditional platform owners have over both users and content.

Exploding Topics data shows search interest in decentralized social media has more than doubled in the last 5 years amid rising dissatisfaction with platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X.

The average user now spends time on 6.8 social platforms per month, a 2.3% YoY increase. This suggests users are comfortable engaging with multiple platforms simultaneously.

So new, decentralized platforms don’t need to dethrone these established giants to build up their own user bases. They simply need to build critical mass.

CEO Jay Graber says the days of winner-take-all social networking are over. Thank heavens she’s right.

The founder of a burgeoning social media app has pledged to help users end the “abusive relationship” existing platforms hold their users in, as it announced a new tech deal to aid its growth.

WeAre8, an emerging social media platform which pledges to give people control over their data, has been backed by a US billionaire as part of efforts to shake up the social network market.

American billionaire businessman Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty has announced a new collaboration with the site and will use its blockchain technology with the aim of decentralising social media so that users on the platform are completely in control of their data.

Zoe Kalar, the app’s founder, told the PA news agency that the public had been in an “abusive relationship” with social media platforms for the last 15 years with user data and advertising earnings controlled by the tech firms, but claimed WeAre8 was changing this, particularly through its new link-up with Project Liberty.

MeWe Community, You’re the First to Know: Soshi is Here!

Hey MeWe Friends,
We’ve always believed in the power of independent, community-driven social spaces, and today, we’re excited to share something special with you first! Soshi is a decentralized, community-owned platform designed to give YOU, the user, control over your content, identity, and social connections without the interference of Big Tech. With blockchain technology at its core, Soshi ensures freedom, transparency, and fair rewards for engagement.

Soshi Testnet is live, and you are among the first to try it out, provide feedback, and help shape the future of social media. This is your chance to be an early adopter and shape the future of social media.

Investor and “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary is willing to pay up to $20 billion for TikTok, calling it a“legacy opportunity.”

The famed investor, who’s teaming up with a consortium of business professionals led by billionaire Frank McCourt Jr., told Yahoo Finance that the group’s proposal — which excludes the platform’s algorithm — represents a compelling deal.

“We want to make it clear … that we are a buyer,” O’Leary said. “We’ve got a valid syndicate. We’re prepared to put up as much as $20 billion, and we don’t need the algorithm. We don’t want the algorithm.”

McCourt, the founder of internet advocacy group Project Liberty and former owner of the LA Dodgers, recently expressed optimism about a potential deal on Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid podcast.

Through Project Liberty’s Institute, Stanford will collaborate with Georgetown and Sciences Po to shape the technical, ethical, and governance infrastructure of emerging technologies and the next-generation internet.

Digital technologies, from social media platforms to cryptocurrencies to generative AI, are the source of a variety of problems that undermine the interests of individuals and organizations, and the foundations of democracy itself. In order to fully enjoy any upsides, these downsides need to be effectively addressed.

Stanford University is joining Project Liberty’s Institute, a consortium of experts in law, policy, social sciences, ethics, and technology working together to shape emerging technologies and a new internet designed and governed for the common good. Stanford becomes one of three founding partners, with Georgetown University and Sciences Po, and will receive philanthropic support to advance cutting-edge research, education, and training in technology, ethics, policy, and governance.

Entrepreneur and former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty and its consortium of partners in The People’s Bid said on Thursday they proposed to make a formal bid to ByteDance to buy TikTok’s U.S. assets.

The move comes ahead of a Jan. 19 deadline by which ByteDance has to sell the platform or face a ban under a law signed by President Joe Biden on April 24.

The consortium, which did not disclose the value of the proposal, said the financial capacity to complete the deal included expressions of interest from investors – including major private equity funds, family offices, and high net worth individuals – for sufficient equity capital, as well as debt financing from one of the largest banks in the United States.

Project Liberty Foundation is working to connect with and drive rigorous academic research to inform policy-making and public opinion

Accountability and Innovation: A Pathway to Responsible Technology

Are you more likely to vote a specific way based on information you’ve consumed on WhatsApp? What if you receive the information in a video?

How can we scale virtual reality training for police on spotting the signs of misconduct and bias in their partners, a method that has shown a reduction in misconduct?

Can we use technology and principles from tech companies – like agility and user-centered design – to ease bureaucratic headaches for everyday people? Could doing so actually improve economic outcomes for people as well as their trust in government?

These are just some of the questions that scholars at Georgetown University are exploring as grantees of the Tech & Public Policy (TPP) program at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy, a grant program supported by the Project Liberty Foundation.

Every moment, all around the world, governments, organizations, and many others are generating data on topics as widely varied as temperature, trade or rates of disease. It’s data that could be extraordinarily useful to understanding and addressing major societal challenges like climate change, hunger or epidemics. Fortunately, much of this data is publicly available, with more to come. Unfortunately, being publicly available is not the same as being easy to access and use. This is the gap that Data Commons, an initiative from Google, is working to bridge.

Data is often fragmented by state and country borders, collected and published by different agencies, research institutions and other non-governmental organizations, and shared in different formats on varying timelines. It can be difficult, time consuming, and cost prohibitive to make these public data sets work together in a way that’s useful to policymakers, researchers, nonprofit organizations, journalists, students and members of the general public trying to better understand societal issues and find solutions. Data Commons’ long-term vision is to do for publicly available data what Google Search does for the internet or Google Maps does for navigation – organize it and make it accessible and use

Major artificial-intelligence companies including OpenAI, Meta Platforms META 0.20%increase; green up pointing triangle and Google GOOGL -0.31%decrease; red down pointing triangle agreed on Tuesday to incorporate new safety measures to protect children from exploitation and plug several holes in their current defenses.

A host of new generative-AI powered tools have supercharged predators’ ability to create sexualized images of children and other exploitative material. The goal of the new alliance is to throttle the creation of such content before these tools can proliferate and hurt more children, according to Thorn, the child-safety group that helped organize the initiative along with the nonprofit organization All Tech Is Human.

When the Utah Office of AI Policy was established last year, officials understood that in order for the state to adopt artificial intelligence that serves residents equitably and transparently, it had to be built on sound governance and ethical principles.

Zach Boyd, the office’s director, said that’s why it partnered with the Aspen Institute’s Policy Academy on a yearlong collaboration designed to help state governments build responsible AI policy.

A report on the project, called “Implementing an AI Evaluation Framework,” was published last month. It outlines how Utah’s AI Office, one of the only state agencies in the nation solely dedicated to AI governance, can assess the efficacy of AI tools while also restoring public confidence in its regulation. The guidelines focus on fairness, transparency, privacy, accountability and human involvement.

“In our office, we try to bring a balance between optimism and caution. There’s so much potential, but also so many ways it can go wrong if we’re not careful,” Boyd said. “We’re not just doing this for the sake of innovation. We’re doing it to serve people better, and to do that, we have to earn and keep their trust

Sir Tim Berners-Lee told Euronews Next he does not make tech predictions but spoke of his hopes for the web in 2025.
The inventor of the World Wide Web is optimistic that 2025 will be the year of digital human rights but said that there could be a possible backlash against “polarising social media”.

Speaking to Euronews Next in November at the Web Summit technology event in Lisbon, Berners-Lee blamed the toxic content produced and shared on social media on algorithms. While developers could easily fix this, he said, the social media platforms do not want to.

“Should you blame the person who wrote [the message]? Well, maybe, but they’re actually a small part of the ecosystem,” he said.

“Maybe you should blame the fact that the algorithm showed that tweet to 2 million people. So the reason why you saw it isn’t that the world is toxic, it’s because that will get you to click, that will get you to raise your eyebrows”.

The World Wide Web (WWW) is in its 35th year after Berners-Lee wrote a proposal to develop a distributed single information system to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.

March 3 (Reuters) – Frank McCourt announced on Monday that Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit and a venture capitalist, has joined his bid to acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations as a strategic adviser specializing in social media.

Ohanian was an internet pioneer who founded Reddit with his roommate from the University of Virginia. He sold it to Conde Nast in 2006, then returned in 2014 as executive chair to lead a turnaround. He also has invested in a number of tech companies, including Instacart, Patreon and OpenSea.

“He has that broad portfolio of experience … of where social media was and, I think, a keen understanding of where it’s evolving,” said McCourt.

McCourt said Ohanian will help promote the Project Liberty bid to buy the U.S. assets of TikTok, which he calls “The People’s Bid,” because of plans to run the app on technology that lets users control how their data will be used and shared.

The world of social media is on the brink of a major transformation which is needed to create a fairer, more transparent online environment that respects user privacy and autonomy.

In today’s social media landscape, users are often at the mercy of a few powerful platforms that control their data, limit freedom, and restrict interoperability between networks. These platforms prioritize profit over privacy, collecting vast amounts of user information while offering limited transparency and minimal user control. This centralized model is increasingly problematic, fostering issues with data privacy, misinformation, and restricted user agency.

Social networks are at an inflection point, with new models emerging and proving that the systems can evolve beyond walled-gardens and be built for people instead.

Imagine a world where your digital identity is truly your own, where every post, connection, and interaction isn’t locked within the walls of a corporate platform but exists as an extension of your personal autonomy. This isn’t a utopian vision, it’s the necessary evolution of social media in an era where digital sovereignty is a fundamental right.

For decades, we have unknowingly traded our digital independence for the convenience of centralized platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, these platforms have shaped our digital lives, yet they function more like gilded cages. Every post we create, every relationship we cultivate, every conversation we engage in is ultimately controlled by corporations that can modify, monetize, or erase our digital existence with a single policy change or algorithmic decision.

The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School held the inaugural event on Friday for its new initiative, “Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy?” — a subsidiary of its Technology and Human Rights program.

The event, entitled “A Dialogue with the World: Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy? The Fight for the Soul of Our Information Civilization,” featured 2021 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Maria Ressa, Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff, European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager, and UK House of Lords Baroness Beeban Kidron.

The initiative follows Zuboff’s coining of the term “surveillance capitalism” — or the system that “owns and operates our global information and communication spaces” — in her writings since 2014, including her 2019 book “The Age of Surveillance Capitlism.”

Daron Acemoglu, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who recently won the Nobel Prize in economics, worries that artificial intelligence will worsen income inequality and not do all that much for productivity. His friend and colleague David Autor is more hopeful, believing that AI could do just the opposite.

In this series, we share stories of co-governance in practice. For this interview, New America’s Hollie Russon Gilman and Sarah Jacob spoke with Paula Berman, Alex Randaccio, and Matt Prewitt from RadicalxChange (RxC). Founded by economist Glen Weyl in 2018, the RadicalxChange Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to advancing the RxC movement, building community, and educating about democratic innovation. RxC connects people from all walks of life—ranging from social scientists and technologists to artists and activists. The RxC movement is ever-evolving and always welcomes new people and ideas to make our social world more diverse, equal, and free.

This year’s Montgomery Fellows Program focuses on agency, speech, and ethics in the AI era, bringing together experts who have addressed technical, legal, cultural, and philosophical aspects of decision-making and computer-mediated communication.

Professor Sylvie Delacroix, Director of the Centre for Data Futures and Inaugural Jeff Price Chair in Digital Law, is a philosopher and legal theorist. Her work addresses the ethical, legal, and political dimensions of technology. She has published work on habit, an area of human life that she describes as “both nature and ‘more than mere’ nature.” In addition to theorising digital ethics, she has also contributed to policy work on trust and transparency in relation to governmental use of data and the use of algorithms in criminal justice. Her work has had important implications for thinking about human ethical agency in the face of rapidly growing data archives and automated system.

Hello, and welcome to this week’s installment of The Future In Five Questions. Brendan recently spoke with Audrey Tang, a software programmer who served as Taiwan’s first Minister of Digital Affairs from August 2022 to May 2024. As a self-professed “conservative anarchist,” Tang frequently emphasizes the potential for emerging technologies to break down existing power structures and advance a radically accessible form of democracy. She’s now a senior fellow at the Project Liberty Institute, an effort by billionaire real estate developer Frank McCourt to create “a more people-centric web” (in part by purchasing TikTok, if possible).

Tang talks about her skepticism of plans to watermark AI-generated content, how governments and tech platforms can use AI to create constructive online spaces and why Taiwan’s January election was remarkably free of damaging deepfakes and polarizing attacks.

Joe Lubin said Ethereum’s robust security and established network free up developers to build on the layer-1 rather than bootstrapping.

Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin discussed the future of the smart contract network at the Digital Asset Summit and said layer-2 (L2) scaling networks would continue to be central to the Ethereum ecosystem.

In an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph’s Turner Wright, Lubin said applications will require next-generation databases powered by high-throughput blockchain technologies. The Ethereum co-founder added:

“The Ethereum ecosystem is so big and so mature that it will be best for new kinds of databases — new kinds of layer 2 networks — to set up shop, as layer 2s of Ethereum. We have our own that has some great characteristics called Linea.”

How Can Governments Catalyze Positive Digital Infrastructure Innovation?”

Data is the lifeblood of the digital economy, shaping who benefits from technological progress. The report underscores how digital infrastructure—including identity systems, payment platforms, and data exchanges—can transform sectors by enhancing accessibility, efficiency, and sustainability. However, market concentration among dominant tech platforms raises critical questions about competition, individual control, and equity.

Governments are uniquely positioned to act as both regulators and market shapers, driving innovation while ensuring a fair distribution of digital power. By establishing standards, investing in infrastructure, and fostering open ecosystems under robust governance frameworks, governments can pave the way for inclusive growth and trust in technology.

One of the report’s central themes is the call for governments to push the adoption of decentralized, transparent, and inclusive frameworks to prevent more extractive, centralized digital models. Key global frameworks such as the UN’s Global Digital Compact and the G20’s Digital Public Infrastructure principles provide a solid starting point. Yet, challenges remain in harmonizing definitions, enabling interoperability, and reconciling regional differences.

How Can Governments Catalyze Positive Digital Infrastructure Innovation?”

Data is the lifeblood of the digital economy, shaping who benefits from technological progress. The report underscores how digital infrastructure—including identity systems, payment platforms, and data exchanges—can transform sectors by enhancing accessibility, efficiency, and sustainability. However, market concentration among dominant tech platforms raises critical questions about competition, individual control, and equity.

Governments are uniquely positioned to act as both regulators and market shapers, driving innovation while ensuring a fair distribution of digital power. By establishing standards, investing in infrastructure, and fostering open ecosystems under robust governance frameworks, governments can pave the way for inclusive growth and trust in technology.

One of the report’s central themes is the call for governments to push the adoption of decentralized, transparent, and inclusive frameworks to prevent more extractive, centralized digital models. Key global frameworks such as the UN’s Global Digital Compact and the G20’s Digital Public Infrastructure principles provide a solid starting point. Yet, challenges remain in harmonizing definitions, enabling interoperability, and reconciling regional differences.

In the last few years, McCourt has turned his focus to social media, which he says has deeply exacerbated many of the world’s problems. “The economy, inflation, abortion, immigration, democracy: If you step away from all those issues, what drives viewpoints and opinions and perspectives on them is social media,” he says. “It’s going to be very, very hard to solve these big, important societal issues if we can’t have a coherent conversation about them. And our current use of social media currently is not designed to optimize for truth or a shared set of facts.”

McCourt has already committed $150 million of his own money to Project Liberty, and says that ultimately “billions of dollars” will be needed for the effort to effect lasting change. In an interview, he declared his intention to spend 90% of his working time on Project Liberty and 10% on McCourt Global, as opposed to the other way around. “This is a big shift in my focus, but it demonstrates the importance of Project Liberty to me,” he says.

In this newsletter, we explore AI agents: what they are, recent breakthroughs (last week was big), the risks they pose, and how autonomous AI agents might integrate with a vision for the People’s Internet.

What are AI agents?
Unlike AI chatbots, which respond to user prompts in a single interface, AI agents can autonomously complete multi-step tasks—like researching and booking flights—across multiple systems. While chatbots facilitate back-and-forth interactions, AI agents allow users to delegate entire tasks or projects and let them run independently.

AI agents also differ from AI companions, which are chatbots specifically engineered for emotional connection and social interaction.

The People’s Internet
Beyond concerns over data privacy, surveillance, and security, AI agents challenge our understanding of how we interact with the internet—and our role within it.

Published by Crown Publishing Group, civic entrepreneur Frank McCourt joins forces with journalist Michael Casey to present a galvanizing call to action for a tech revolution that empowers people over platforms and accelerates a new internet era.

On March 12, 2024, Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, will publish OUR BIGGEST FIGHT: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age—a resounding call to action for building a healthier and more equitable internet that frees users from Big Tech’s exploitation, recognizes individuals’ rights to their data, safeguards children and prioritizes the common good—from Frank H. McCourt, Jr., and acclaimed journalist, Michael J. Casey.

The internet was once a utopian dream. And its impact has transformed how we live, learn, work and communicate. Despite its conveniences and connectivity, today’s internet is causing real harm and is the primary cause of a pervasive unease that has taken hold in the U.S. and other democratic societies. Instead of driving progress and collaboration, its dominant platforms are fueling a youth mental health crisis, polluting public discourse with misinformation and toxicity, eroding trust and undermining our most important institutions. Left unchecked, the internet in its current, highly centralized form—dominated by a handful of Big Tech giants that feed on our data—threatens to destabilize societies, democracies and human interaction at every level. And it will get exponentially more harmful in the age of artificial intelligence. McCourt and Casey explain how we can get off this destructive path and seize this most urgent of moments to build an internet that serves society’s needs.

For decades, thought leaders and policy experts have weighed in with suggestions for fixing the internet’s ills, mostly through top-down regulation. What sets McCourt and Casey apart is their relentless focus on the need to innovate our way forward and address the problem at its roots, starting with the web’s underlying infrastructure. Inspired by historical calls to action like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, OUR BIGGEST FIGHT depicts a set of compelling parallels between the American revolution and the need for a similar action today to throw off the shackles of Big Tech. Now is the time, McCourt and Casey argue, to embed the core values of a free, democratic society in the internet of tomorrow.

McCourt is the executive chairman of McCourt Global, a private family company committed to building a better future and extending the McCourt family’s 130-year legacy of developing infrastructure and merging community and social impact with financial results through its work across the real estate, sports & media, technology and capital investment industries, as well as its significant philanthropic activities. Named one of the Top 50 Philanthropists in the U.S. by The Chronical of Philanthropy, McCourt is the foundational donor of Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. As a fifth-generation builder, he’s wary of Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” ethos and, as a father of seven, concerned about how technology is impacting children, families and communities – and putting our future at risk. Determined to carry out projects that leave a positive impact on society, McCourt is focused on Project Liberty, a bold and far-reaching effort to build an internet where individuals have more control over their data, a voice in how digital platforms operate, and more access to the economic benefits of innovation. Supported by a $500-million commitment from McCourt, Project Liberty encompasses the work of the Project Liberty Foundation—a 501(c)(3) with an international partner network that includes Georgetown University, Stanford University, Sciences Po, and other leading academic institutions and civic organizations—and Amplica Labs, a technology business launched by McCourt Global that is focused on developing the next generation of digital infrastructure.

Information is the lifeblood of any society, and our current system for accessing, engaging and sharing it is corrupted at its heart. Rather than a free-flowing exchange of ideas in a decentralized environment, today’s internet is a closed-loop system, dominated by large technology firms feeding on our individual data and using increasingly sophisticated algorithms to keep people addicted and perpetually doom scrolling. In plain but forceful language, the authors illustrate how this centralized system, controlled by a small group of for-profit entities, has set a catastrophe in motion and stripped us of our personhood. Trust is gone, hostility is on the rise and people—especially parents concerned about their kids’ use of social media—are desperate for solutions.

McCourt and Casey offer much-needed hope for a better future. Optimistically and convincingly, they lay out a groundbreaking solution to reclaim what Big Tech has co-opted and corrupted: a new, decentralized model for managing information over the internet that, by its very design, puts the rights of the individuals first. They reimagine the internet as a place where the individual can choose whether or not to share their data. A place where people can reclaim their identity, digital footprint, and personal sovereignty. A place where individual rights are sacrosanct – and where tech corporations must agree to our terms of use before accessing the data, content and connections we create online.

Much like Americans have amended the U.S. Constitution in order to enshrine new rights and obligations, so too must we amend the protocols by which the internet operates. By upgrading the internet’s current architecture, we can lay the foundation for a more equitable and inclusive web that prioritizes people over platforms and enables users to own and control their personal data.

McCourt and Casey make a powerful argument for acting now, before a Big Tech-driven AI transformation is complete, to build a new, open internet that works for humanity, rather than against it. Americans have an opportunity—perhaps the last one we’ll ever get—to lead the world out of a mess we helped create.

About the Authors

Frank H. McCourt, Jr. is the Executive Chairman of McCourt Global, a private family enterprise working across the real estate, sports, technology, media, and capital investment industries. He is the founder and Executive Chairman of Project Liberty, a far-reaching effort to build an internet where individuals have more control over their data, a voice in how digital platforms operate, and more access to the economic benefits of innovation. Supported by a $500-million commitment from McCourt, Project Liberty encompasses the work of the Project Liberty Foundation—a 501(c)(3) with an international partner network that includes Georgetown University, Stanford University, Sciences Po, and other leading academic institutions and civic organizations—and Amplica Labs, a technology business launched by McCourt Global that is focused on developing the next generation of digital infrastructure that empowers people and safeguards children.

Michael J. Casey is the Chief Content Officer at the award-winning media company CoinDesk, co-host of the “Money Reimagined” podcast, and the Chairman of the Consensus conference. He has worked as a journalist on five continents, including eighteen years with Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, and was a founding staffer at MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative. Casey’s previous books include The Age of Cryptocurrency, The Social Organism, and The Truth Machine.

ABOUT MCCOURT GLOBAL & PROJECT LIBERTY

McCourt Global (MG) is a private family company focused on building for tomorrow through its work across real estate, sports & media, technology, capital investment and social impact. Led by founder and Executive Chairman Frank McCourt, a civic entrepreneur and fifth-generation builder, and an international leadership team, MG extends the McCourt family’s 130-year legacy of developing infrastructure and merging community and social impact with financial results — an approach that began when the original McCourt company was launched in Boston in 1893.

In 2021, MG publicly launched Project Liberty, a far-reaching effort to build an internet where individuals have more control over their data, a voice in how digital platforms operate, and more access to the economic benefits of innovation. Project Liberty’s activities include the release and stewardship of the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), which is available as a public utility to serve as the bedrock of a more equitable and inclusive web, and its launch of the Safe Tech, Safe Kids campaign focused on youth mental health and social media. Project Liberty’s Institute (formerly The McCourt Institute) works to ensure that digital governance is prioritized in the development of the next generation of the internet. The institute’s founding academic partners include Georgetown University, Stanford University, and Sciences Po; and it is collaborating with MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication and Cortico, as well as Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society to support the creation of healthier social networks. In 2023, Frank McCourt unveiled Project Liberty’s “Better Web, Better World” manifesto at Web Summit in Lisbon. This vision for a new web is supported by the work of Amplica Labs, which is led by the tech team behind DSNP and focused on developing the next generation of digital infrastructure. Through a $500-million commitment that supports both nonprofit and commercial activities, Project Liberty aims to unleash a new era of innovation that empowers people over platforms and serves the common good.

SOURCE McCourt Global

Today, a group of former Twitter users who are fed up by the platform’s decline under billionaire control, are launching a new campaign to transform social media into a public good, free from profit-driven incentives, venture capital pressure, and politically-motivated censorship.

The project is called “FreeOurFeeds,” and it has launched with the support of big names including actor Mark Ruffalo, writer Cory Doctorow, businessman Roger McNamee, director Alex Winter, and others.

FreeOurFeeds aims to build a new social media ecosystem on top of the AT Protocol, an open, decentralized framework designed to enable interoperable social media platforms, giving users greater control over their data, algorithms, and online experience (it’s what Bluesky runs on). They want to leverage this tech to create a social media ecosystem focused on individual control, creativity, community well-being, and free expression.