This month, President Donald Trump has threatened to ban the Chinese-owned platforms TickTock and WeChat. This comes after years of China banning major US platforms like Google and Facebook, and securing the purchase of Uber’s Chinese business by a Chinese company. Chinese tech activists Katt Gu and Suji Yan speak with us about how this conflict looks from where they live in Shanghai, and they describe some of the firewalls they’re building to help protect labor and privacy rights. As the US—long used to being on the offensive in the Internet economy—moves to the defensive, our guests will help us think through what kinds of sovereignty online might be worth having. MEDLab’s radio show and podcast, Looks Like New, asks old questions about new tech. Each month, host Nathan Schneider speaks with someone who works with technology in ways that challenge conventional narratives and dominant power structures. The name comes from the phrase “a philosophy so old that it looks like new,” repeated throughout the works of Peter Maurin, the French agrarian poet and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement. You can hear Looks Like New the fourth Thursday of every month at 6 p.m., or online as a podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.

Activist Adrienne Maree brown writes that the work of social change requires “science fictional behavior”— which is surely all the more true in the context of a global pandemic. To help us think through this crisis, we hear from Cadwell Turnbull, whose critically acclaimed first book, The Lesson, portrays an alien sort-of-invasion centered on his native US Virgin Islands. In addition to his storytelling, Turnbull is an activist working through social change through solidarity economics. He explores what it means to be a speculative fiction writer in especially science fictional times MEDLab’s radio show and podcast, Looks Like New, asks old questions about new tech. Each month, host Nathan Schneider speaks with someone who works with technology in ways that challenge conventional narratives and dominant power structures. The name comes from the phrase “a philosophy so old that it looks like new,” repeated throughout the works of Peter Maurin, the French agrarian poet and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement. You can hear Looks Like New the fourth Thursday of every month at 6 p.m., or online as a podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.

We are haunted and mobilized by images. The cellphone video of George Floyd’s death has set cities on fire, elevated Black struggles for justice, and reminded White Americans of violence that their society is organized to blind them to. We hear from Sandra Ristovska, a scholar and filmmaker at the University of Colorado Boulder who specializes in video evidence of human rights crimes. She explores the meaning of images in courts and social movements around the world.   https://objects-us-east-1.dream.io/kgnu-news/2020/06/6-25-20_ITE.mp3   MEDLab’s radio show and podcast, Looks Like New, asks old questions about new tech. Each month, host Nathan Schneider speaks with someone who works with technology in ways that challenge conventional narratives and dominant power structures. The name comes from the phrase “a philosophy so old that it looks like new,” repeated throughout the works of Peter Maurin, the French agrarian poet and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement. You can hear Looks Like New the fourth Thursday of every month at 6 p.m., or online as a podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.    

Often, discussions about diversity in the tech industry focus on mere representation. But in this discussion from Boulder Startup Week, we take inspiration from the Zebras Unite network, which seeks not just to change representation superficially but to change models of business and culture. We hear from information scientist Shamika Goddard, startup co-founder Corey Kohn, and neuro-engineer Shaz Zamore—each of whom is working on strategies to create a more radically inclusive relationship with technology.     MEDLab’s radio show and podcast, Looks Like New, asks old questions about new tech. Each month, host Nathan Schneider speaks with someone who works with technology in ways that challenge conventional narratives and dominant power structures. The name comes from the phrase “a philosophy so old that it looks like new,” repeated throughout the works of Peter Maurin, the French agrarian poet and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement. You can hear Looks Like New the fourth Thursday of every month at 6 p.m., or online as a podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.

How can we collaborate at a distance? The COVID-19 pandemic has many of us rapidly changing how we work—and wondering how many of the changes will stick. To guide us through this process, we hear this month from Natalia Lombardo and Richard D. Bartlett, founders of The Hum, an organization that supports teams with self-organization and decentralized collaboration. They are already accustomed residents of the world many of us are just beginning to enter. MEDLab’s radio show and podcast, Looks Like New, asks old questions about new tech. Each month, host Nathan Schneider speaks with someone who works with technology in ways that challenge conventional narratives and dominant power structures. The name comes from the phrase “a philosophy so old that it looks like new,” repeated throughout the works of Peter Maurin, the French agrarian poet and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement. You can hear Looks Like New the fourth Thursday of every month at 6 p.m., or online as a podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.

Today’s guest is Evan Ravitz, a proponent of direct democracy, who served on the City of Boulder’s Campaign Finance and Elections Working Group. Ravitz has been critical of the City of Boulder’s delays in rolling out a voter approved initiative allowing electronic signatures to be submitted to get an initiative on the ballot. https://objects-us-east-1.dream.io/kgnu-news/2020/03/03-26-20_ITE.mp3 (Download Audio) MEDLab’s radio show and podcast, Looks Like New, asks old questions about new tech. Each month, host Nathan Schneider speaks with someone who works with technology in ways that challenge conventional narratives and dominant power structures. The name comes from the phrase “a philosophy so old that it looks like new,” repeated throughout the works of Peter Maurin, the French agrarian poet and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement. You can hear Looks Like New the fourth Thursday of every month at 6 p.m., or online as a podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.

The cultures of computer hacking have made their way from marginal subcultures to becoming driving forces in the world as we know it. Facebook’s headquarters is on a street called Hacker Way. A hack of the Democratic National Committee’s emails helped elect the current US president. Free Software produced by volunteer hackers around the world powers the internet. Hackers have been noble whistleblowers, supporters of authoritarian states, and White supremacists. Our guide to it all is anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, who has immersed herself in these cultures for many years now, the author of several books and co-founder of a new website on hacker ephemera, Hack_Curio.     MEDLab’s radio show and podcast, Looks Like New, asks old questions about new tech. Each month, host Nathan Schneider speaks with someone who works with technology in ways that challenge conventional narratives and dominant power structures. The name comes from the phrase “a philosophy so old that it looks like new,” repeated throughout the works of Peter Maurin, the French agrarian poet and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement. You can hear Looks Like New the fourth Thursday of every month at 6 p.m., or online as a podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.    

While digital privacy issues often get a lot of attention and even alarmism, it rarely seems to change behavior. Even if it did, do individual choices really make a difference? Amie Stepanovich is a veteran policy expert and advocate who argues that we need to think about these questions not just as individuals but as a society. She is executive director of Silicon Flatirons a center on technology and law at the University of Colorado Boulder. Before that, she worked in policy roles at Access Now and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.     MEDLab’s radio show and podcast, Looks Like New, asks old questions about new tech. Each month, host Nathan Schneider speaks with someone who works with technology in ways that challenge conventional narratives and dominant power structures. The name comes from the phrase “a philosophy so old that it looks like new,” repeated throughout the works of Peter Maurin, the French agrarian poet and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement. You can hear Looks Like New the fourth Thursday of every month at 6 p.m., or online as a podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.

There is a kind of dream out there that, once we get the gizmos set up just right, work will be transformed. While many speculate about this, Kevin Owocki, founder of the Colorado-based startup Gitcoin, is in the thick of it. Not only is Gitcoin trying to create a new way for software developers to get paid, it is using blockchain technology to re-imagine how we steward and fund freely available public goods.     MEDLab’s radio show and podcast, Looks Like New, asks old questions about new tech. Each month, host Nathan Schneider speaks with someone who works with technology in ways that challenge conventional narratives and dominant power structures. The name comes from the phrase “a philosophy so old that it looks like new,” repeated throughout the works of Peter Maurin, the French agrarian poet and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement. You can hear Looks Like New the fourth Thursday of every month at 6 p.m., or online as a podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.