1. We Are as Gods

From the rubble of the dot com crash, an ambitious young Harvard student with a passion for hacking and love of Roman emperors, sets up an exciting new website. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is an instant hit on college campuses. Soon it attracts the attention of Silicon Valley’s mo ...  Show more

The tech pioneers were right: all this connectivity and sharing is creating a new age of freedom and democracy. A global consciousness. Arab Spring, Barack Obama – both fuelled by social media - make the possibilities feel limitless.But, just as the dream to connect everyone is b ...  Show more

The internet was supposed to set us free. But somewhere along the way, it became a tool for surveillance, extraction, and control. What happened? And is there still time to reclaim the weird, untapped potential of the digital world? This week, Sean is joined by Douglas Rushkoff. ...  Show more

Twitter employees had always imagined the platform would be used for social good. Their idea was that free expression on the internet would lead to good things. But after the 2016 U.S. election, that notion would be put under stress. And Twitter would have to grapple with the que ...  Show more

In the early days of digital culture, Jaron Lanier helped craft a vision for the internet as public commons where humanity could share its knowledge -- but even then, this vision was haunted by the dark side of how it could turn out: with personal devices that control our lives, ...  Show more

The emergence of data-driven mass surveillance "is threatening to turn privacy into a relic of the 20th century," says the anonymous YouTube creator known as Ordinary Things. Meanwhile, state-funded troll farms are spreading disinformation and curating chaos on platforms meant to ...  Show more