This is a RadicalxChange production. Hello, and welcome to Radical Exchanges. Today, Matt has a conversation with Frank McCourt, the founder of Project Liberty, an initiative working to decentralize the Internet and restructure our digital infrastructure around human rights principles. Frank draws parallels to television's early public oversight, articulates how our full personhoods have become the exploited product, and makes the case for why new protocols and a movement informed by past struggles against oppressive systems are critical to giving individuals true data rights and agency online. The dialogue explores Frank's vision for reclaiming the Internet, and Project Liberty is a very important project to watch in the next few years. So it's useful to hear how Frank is thinking. Without further ado, here's Matt Pruitt and Frank Bacourt.

Yeah. It's a pleasure to be with you, Matt. How are you today?

Well, yeah, we'll have a good conversation. You'll feel better.

Yeah. I wrote I wrote, Our Biggest Fight to shed light on on Project Liberty and and, you know, some of the reasons I got into the work and why I think it's so, fundamentally important and and actually urgent. I I think part of it, Matt, comes from, you know, kind of a hardwiring. I I grew up in a big family. I'm one of seven sibs in in, Watertown, Massachusetts, a a town just outside of Boston. And, you know, we were all, you know, like many families, at the dinner table, we we're able to share lots of opinions and have lots of great conversation and and and, you know, very different opinions, as a matter of fact. And and and me and my sibs were pretty good at identifying problems, though, as most kids are. And and, you know, not a dinner would end without my mom saying, okay. Okay, kids. You've done a good job of, like, identifying the problem. Now now what are you gonna do about it? So that's pretty, you know, basic wiring for me. And and then also, I'm part of a a a family of of builders. I I represent, you know, a five generation, in going strong, you know, business that started, you know, by my great great grandfather back in the eighteen hundreds. And, you know, when he started building roads when Henry Ford started building cars, and and we've built lots of infrastructure over the last hundred and thirty one years. And, you know, we we kinda look at the world as, in a way that, you know, when you see a problem, go go fix it. And particularly, when you see an engineering or infrastructure problem, that can clearly be fixed and and without fixing it, lots of damage is being done. You know, you you you kind of first of all, you can't unsee it once you've seen it. And and secondly, you know, I do have my mom's voice in the back, you know, in the back of my head saying, get after it and fix it. So, that's what kinda brings me, you know, to the work. I've I've had all kinds of personal experiences with with, with this that just validate the work. But, I think that it's it's really, you know, seeing this broken Internet and and having some insight into how, it it it can be fixed is really motivating to me right now.

Yeah. The the you know, in infrastructure is, like you say, is a big broad category. Right? And there's all kinds of, of infrastructure. But maybe one way of thinking about it, and that is public versus private. You know? And that that's that's one way to, you know, to kinda slice it up and think about it. And we've we we have we've done a good job in in The United States, and not that people elsewhere haven't done a good job, but I'll focus for on America for a moment and a project the the American project, which is near and dear to me. We've done a a reasonably good job of building public infrastructure and then letting private capital and private actors, you know, entrepreneurs and so forth build on it. And, you know, a classic example that's used often is the interstate highway system. Right? That massive project to, you know, connect the country physically. And, you know, so there's a shared resource funded by taxpayers, you know, executed by the federal government in order to to make us safer, quite frankly. Right? So it it it had a defense purpose, I e, the ability to move, you know, machinery and men and women around the country. But it also had massive commercial, purpose and opportunity. And then what we saw is is all kinds of businesses build up, including the automobile business, by the way, but also, you know, businesses that that you know, there's a reason why office parks get built around highway interchanges, you know, and and so on and so forth. Public transit is another great example, right, where the public sector, builds it normally. And and then you see yeah. There's a reason why housing and and and commercial uses show up around, subway stops for instance. You know what I mean? And and transit transit stations. So, yeah, there's this there been this kind of public private partnership, and I'm gonna use that word loosely, over the years that we've seen the public kind of do a lot of the the policy thinking and the research, and then and then, you know, kind of build the enabling devices, and then the private sector kicks in. So, you know, the Internet, it was built the same way. Right? I mean, it was a project initially started for to make us safer. Right? Because a highly centralized communication system is vulnerable to attack. And, and this was the mentality, you know, during the Cold War. We didn't wanna have our telecommunication systems be disabled by an attack from what was then the, Soviet Union. And, so the government set out to build a decentralized communication system, and, you know, brought really smart people in from four universities to figure out how to do that, and they created this thing called the Internet. And and in 1983, when, you know, it was agreed by those individuals that they would adopt the, you know, simple protocol to connect devices, the Internet was created. It's highly decentralized by design, you know, built as a public resource that, everybody could use. And, you know, these researchers and universities continue to use it, but it was something that now the public could use and engage in. And, and then it was in 1989 when Tim Berners Lee, a a an Englishman came forward with a, he was with a, further innovation with yet another protocol, that called HTTP, which connected you know, create created data links. And so it was the the the creation of the World Wide Web and also very decentralized design very much to, keep you know, to empower us, to empower individuals and to make us smarter and to share information and advance civilization and, you know, set proverbial tide that lifts all boats. And and then, you know, people started building on it. And where things went sideways, and I would argue even backward, is, you know, when we entered this age where this decentralized, communications technology became highly centralized with, the rapid emergence of the app era, you know, where these big apps showed up, which became these big platforms now, and they adopted a, you know, let's scrape everybody's data and aggregate it, apply algorithms to it, and and and do stuff to make money. And, and then, you know, they learn they could do stuff to make money and actually influence Mhmm. Right, our behaviors and predict our behaviors and therefore influence them. And and that's when we've got it to, like, really dangerous territory when you have these, you know, a few big companies knowing more about each of us than we know about ourselves, making judgments about our our personalities and what will be our emotional reaction to information or triggering devices. And, having that power in the hands of a of a few platforms is very, very dangerous in my opinion, particularly if your your framework is, you know, democracy, you know, liberty, freedom, individual agency, autonomy, choice, you know, individual control and and, and so forth. So we now have this highly autocratic centralized surveillance based technology that's basically, you know, as or more powerful than our than our political system and, you know, which is designed to protect these liberties. And and now we're seeing these liberties, become diminished in this new new age because we're becoming subjects again. Right? We're just we're losing these freedoms and these rights to to, you know, to to think freely and act freely and and, behave freely. So in 2013, set out to start a public policy school in Washington, DC at Georgetown, thinking at the time that maybe policy could be the answer to get out ahead of all this and fix it before it was too late. New debt big data was important, so we have a massive data institute that we placed inside of the this new school and, you know, learned very quickly. Unfortunately, their policy was no match for the speed, the scale, the power, the money of big tech. And, so, started to think much more deeply about how to fix the tech or address the tech and and and and and have it operate in a way that's far more harm harmonious with the human rights that we, you know, allegedly have and, that are, you know, supposed to be protected by, you know, our political order. So, yeah, it was it was really, an awareness that this is tech that could do great damage going back into the two thousand ten, eleven era, thinking it might be able to be fixed by, you know, smarter policies and then realizing by 2015 that we need to fix the attack.

Yeah. I I think that's a really fantastic question and that it gets to the to the root of of the problem here. And and and before I answer it directly, let me add just two data points for you to see if you agree. In that in that 2008 to 2012 time frame, in addition to these big apps showing up, their enabling device showed up. Right? The the the smartphone. And so now we're connecting everyone to this powerful, you know, technology and, you know, the app builders understood that they could use this device, right, in everybody's hands to actually connect to billions of people. So, and I'll get back to that, in one moment. And secondly, and this is a a stunner to me. You know, when you start out building public infrastructure and something that's gonna be for the public as well as to be private, you know, to be commercial things being built around it. You know, the public has a rationale for building it, and then, businesses figure out models to to to then expand on it, right, and so forth. Like, the telecom we built a telecom company in my family starting in '93, and and we raised the funds to build the the fiber optic network throughout the country, and then built a better product so that we attracted customers that we could that would pay us so we could support the infrastructure we build. With with the Internet, we we it's been totally privatized, and yet somehow the public thinks that they still have the obligation of building it. So in this CHIPS Act, there's $50,000,000,000 to what? To build the the final most expensive parts of creating Internet accessibility to the final five or 10% of the population. And and here you have the biggest companies in the world that have exploited this public investment still sitting back, letting our our taxpayer dollars build the final mile for them so that they can collect all the money, which is it's just absurd that we haven't shifted our mentality from, oh, Internet is good. It connects everyone. It makes us smarter. It's it it's democratizing. Let's use public resources to, whoops, Somewhere along the way, all this was privatized. There's a few actors making all the money. Isn't that a problem, a? And b, why on earth would we pay taxpayer money to make them richer? It's just it's just nuts. So maybe that's a, you know, a conversation we can get back to later or for another day. But back to your issue about, like, what happened what's different about Internet infrastructure and highway infrastructure, for example. And I think the big difference, Matt, is that the stuff that that these platforms is scraping all of our data really is characterized. It's it's really not our data. It's our personhood in the digital age. It's everything about us. So, you know, the highway system didn't scrape information. You know, we chose to use it or didn't use it. And some some highways, we had to pay a toll because it was a, you know, a public turnpike, and and we and we had choices to, you know, whether we had a car or not. It had choices to whether we traveled on that highway or not. And we were never violated in the process. Right? It wasn't that that and and, you know, now ironically, on those same highways, we are being tracked, which is, you know, kind of the ultimate the irony here. But the point he in answer to your question, is that what's fundamentally different about what's going on now is the information that is created, the product that's created by, you know, connecting all of us, putting smartphones in our hands, having this Internet backbone that is so powerful, is that, you know, what these big platforms figured out is it's it's not just data that's important. It's our personal data that's important. Our social graph, our a a complete mapping, a, of society, and b, an incredibly intimate profiling of each of us. And and this information, if if we would never in a million years let our government surveil us and have all this information about us. But yet somehow, we've been asleep at the switch as these big platforms have, you know, scraped all of our data and and and and just built these incredible surveillance tools that are just data extraction machines and IE personhood extraction machines. So we're having the soul sucked out of us. You know, people talk about tech as dehumanizing. Well, it certainly is. When you take and you suck the humanity out of us and and and ingest it in machines, and those machines are programmed to to program us. Right? Have you ever wondered why every argument seems to be, like, 50% on one side and 50% on the other side? It's because the algorithms are working perfectly well. They're designed to keep us at odds with one another because that will keep us engaged longer. And not only will these platforms be able to sell us more stuff, they actually learn more about us. Because at this stage of the game, they have hundreds of thousands of data points on each of us. So they are micro targeting us at this stage of the game. And actually, as I said, making judgments about what makes us tick, who we are as as human beings. And that is a that that's that's something the interest interesting highway system never did. You know what I mean? Or some of this other form of of of, so it's it's the migration of the tech and the infrastructure to a tool of data extraction and surveillance and and and learning everything about us that is super creepy actually. And, you know, we see that happening in in China, and we say, oh, yeah. China that happens. I mean, like, this whole TikTok discussion is kind of interesting. Right? Because it's it's become a conversation about, oh, TikTok extracts information about a 170,000,000 Americans. That's not good because that information is going to Beijing. What we need to do is connect some dots here. The these American platforms are using the exact same model to collect data on all Americans and people elsewhere and using it to manipulate. So I get there's a difference between the data going to Beijing versus data going to Silicon Valley, but I don't know. You you want all your data going to Silicon Valley? I I don't want mine going there or Beijing. And and that's what we need to do, I think, with this TikTok situation is to get people to understand. And this is this is not about TikTok. This is let me rephrase. This is about more than TikTok. This is about, a surveillance model that extracts our personhood from us and and is, highly manipulative and highly dangerous. And and that's that's what we need to be talking about. And that's the difference between this technology and how it's being used or abused and other forms of infrastructure.

Yeah. Well, I I'm I'm not saying that regulation isn't part of the solution. What I meant to say is that regulation isn't the solution in its entirety, that it's no match for the power of the technology. Couple things that, were triggered by your your last, you know, the comments you made before this particular question about, you know, inter interstate highway, had lots of impacts on society, right, and industry and so forth. Probably, yeah, probably had no bigger impact than than on there's probably nothing that it had no bigger impact on than the railroad industry. Right? Right. In terms of, you know, displacement and and dislocation and, you know, we saw the complete reshaping of of of of of that industry. But but maybe maybe a better analogy is the emergence of television because, you know, at least with physical, infrastructure and I know there's a lot of controversy around eminent domain practices and so on and so forth, you know, taking private property for a public purpose, but at least people have to be paid for their property. Right? There's a there's a there's a an understanding that's quite fun fundamental that if I'm gonna take somebody's property to build a highway, I'm going to have to pay them for it. Right? And and have good reason, by the way, after going going through public hearings and lots of scrutiny and so on and so forth. So let's talk about TV broadcast for a second. So TV come comes comes on. This is public bandwidth, airwaves, owned by all of us. So who who are you gonna compensate? Right? So instead, the federal government wisely said, we're gonna license the bandwidth for a period of time, two entities that are responsible and agree to the terms of the license and, and, you know, abide by the rules. And so, you know, TV comes along and three licenses are granted, and those they that becomes ABC, CBS, and, NBC. And all kinds of things are are are imposed upon them, you know, that you you gotta provide public service announcements. You gotta, you know, air presidential debates. You need you can't have ads that are harmful to children, you know, and so on and so forth. And by the way, we're gonna keep Bandwidth back and hold it in the public domain for public broadcasting. Because we actually don't know what the impacts on children of this new technology are going to be. So, you know, we're gonna create something called the children's workshop, and we're gonna actually research the impacts on children while we're broadcasting to them. You know? And so Sesame Street Sesame Street, which is, you know, when bio when my older kids were growing up was was something that was very prevalent. And, you know, I didn't hesitate to have my kids watch Sesame Street because I knew there were people paying attention to the impacts on my kids and other kids, you know, based on that technology. And and we learned a lot before we allowed the business to grow and and so on and so forth. And, yeah. So when you're when you're talking about privatizing a public resource that nobody owns, but everybody owns, it's very different than a piece of real estate to build a piece of physical infrastructure. So that might be a better analogy than the interstate highways. And then, you know, think about now the Internet as bandwidth that's being, you know, used for, you know, theoretically, public purposes and and and and and and to enable some private businesses and all that. But the the the change the fundamental change here was in, you know, creating devices, apps that were, machine it's it was building machinery to scrape people's data and information. And by the way, this isn't just on smartphones. Right? This is we are all connected to the Internet now twenty four seven. You know, the the the so called Internet of things. Even our refrigerator and our dishwasher is collecting information about us. Our cars, our smartphones on wheels, our our our televisions are really just you know, they're they're data extracting mash extraction machines. You know, we walk down city streets, we're surveilled. Our our little camera that's watching our our newborn child is a data extraction machine. Our doorbell is have you ever wondered, Matt, why if you separate goods and services and, you know, consumer products into two categories, the things that people really need to live live a good, safe, healthy, happy life are much, much more expensive, like housing, food, health care, education, etcetera. And the things that collect our data are much, much more cheaper than they were before. Right? Television. You could buy a television and fill a whole wall of your house for what a television cost that was the size of this iPad I'm on. Phones. They give they give phones away now. Right? All these devices that collect our data, the the cost of the device is incidental. The value is what's what it's collecting about us and then being exploited. So that's that's what's happened. That's what's different. So and as I said earlier, it's not just data. A lot of people, when you have this conversation, they say data, it's a benign thing. It's abstract. What is it really? No. No. No. The the data we're talking about is our social graph information. It's everything about us in the in the digital world. So it's our digital DNA. It's our identity. It's who we are. It's every every bit as real as our biological DNA, which, by the way, is digitized now. Right? So, why on earth would we give up everything about us, our personhood, just to get to use the Internet? And what would should we have an Internet that actually is designed to optimize for, for our rights and and so forth? And, you know, we don't need a digital bill of rights. We need technology that respects the bill of rights that we already have. And this is, I think, fundamental to I mean, we're at this fork in the road where we're either gonna be dragged into a future by the machinery, and it's interesting that we're still a machine on the Internet. Right? We're still an IP address. We're not a person. Or we're gonna actually reclaim our personhood, and we're gonna put ourselves in charge of our life in the digital age and have technology that respects that. So your point about policy, policies will be important. There's no question about it. But the point I was making earlier is the policy making apparatus, especially our elected officials, are also disabled and dysfunctional because of the same technology. They're using it, right, to to extreme viewpoints gets raises money and gives them likes and followers. You know, look at any any politician that's reasonable and moderate, and you'll see they just don't get the attention. The technology is designed it's a it's a performance technology that's designed to to actually amplify extreme and, behavior, which which has no bearing on the truthfulness of it. It's just extreme, you know, kind of behavior. And it's it's the same, you know, reason why people slow down on the highway and look at the bad accident across on the other lane. You know, it's going the other direction. It's just there's a curiosity about it. So people pay attention to this extreme stuff. It's it's kinda hardwired. And these platforms know it, so they've baked it into their technology and and their algorithms. And now we see that they they actually are preying on young people and addicting young people to this technology. And unlike television and Sesame Street and the children's workshop, this is, you know, you know, where where by the way, if a million people watched an episode on television in its early days, never mind a million children, it would have been a huge audience. Now we have billions connected on this much more powerful technology, and and we're beginning to talk about privacy, and beginning to talk about safety, and beginning to talk about trust, and beginning to talk about the impact on society and democracy and children. It's it's too late to talk about it when 3,000,000,000 people are using it. The time to talk about it is when you're designing it. So this sadly, we have contaminated the soil that this technology has grown out of, and we need to clean the soil or find new soil and build a healthy stuff that can grow out of it and and not kid ourselves and think we're gonna just, you know, regulate something that is doing great harm and is highly toxic and, and and so forth. So I I think, we we need to fix this in a very, very fundamental way. Your point about Europe is very interesting. How many times have you heard that, you know, oh, American innovates and Europe regulates? To me, that's a tremendous talk track if you're big tech. You know? Right. Like, just Right. Just, you know, throw the just just make everybody think the regulators are you know, the European mentality is, like, somehow they're they're not with it. They don't get it. Right? And I spend a lot of time and Project Liberty is but, you know, also based in Europe as well as as The US. And these these, you know, people in Europe, they get it fundamentally. They care deeply about privacy and protecting people, and they have good reason to because they've many of them have lived through the thirties and the forties where they saw what happens and how democracies do fall, and and how autocratic, you know, autocratic behavior, can destroy, if if if not checked, you know, democracies and can do it very quickly. Autocratic technology, it will be the greatest tool of autocrats ever. So, yeah, we we have to have redecentralize the technology and have it optimized for democratic principles and human rights, in in in order to you know so so have our technology adapt and bend to the will of the of the democratic you know, to the to the the ambition of the democratic principles and the will of the people. Or guess what? Our democratic system is gonna bend and and alter itself to become a highly autocratic and bend to the to the technology. You can't they're not harmonious. In China, autocratic technology is very powerful tool for an autocratic regime, an autocratic form of government. So, yeah, I think that, we can learn a lot from the Europeans. Of course, they're stuck because they have GDPR and DMA and d s DSA, and they've been they've made their public policy objectives very clear, but but they don't have technology to implement that those policies. So it's in a way, you know, they're they're they're telegraphing the right set of principles, you know, generally speaking. And I'm and I'm not saying I've read every word of every, you know, every rule of regulation and adopt all of them. But, generally, they're very focused on protecting human beings and and our rights, but they don't have the technology to do it. So they're stuck with begging, you know, Facebook and Google and Amazon, etcetera, to to and now Apple and and Microsoft to to actually respect their rules and their laws. And, and, you know, big tech, you know, kind of, you know, euphemistically kinda just laughs because it's so pow it Matt, the technology is is so I mean, literally, imagine we're all connected and surve look. If I was ahead of the post office and I said to you, I have an idea. I'm gonna deliver your mail for free. You you you you probably, you know, say, well, tell me, what's the deal? And, well, I'm gonna put a listening device and a camera in every room in your house and in your car and in your workplace. And so if well, you'd probably look at me and say, well, that's creepy. You know? And and I said, well, it's free. And, oh, by the way, I'm gonna open your mail, and I'm gonna re you know, read it all, and now your relationships are mine. You know, your ideas are mine. Your thoughts are mine. Your emotions are mine. Everything about you is now mine. You'd say that's not fair. It's it's both creepy and unfair. And then when I add that I'm gonna read your 13 year old daughter's diary, and when she's a little you know, she's insecure like every 13 year old, and and in this particular case, by way of example, maybe it's her weight. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna send her stuff that makes her feel worse, not better, and then I'm a sell her stuff. And so I'm gonna profit, on that, you know, on that, exploited behavior and that in being predatory and so forth. So it's it's creepy, it's unfair, and it's harmful. And that's that's toxic soil. Right? That is we you can't just regulate that. You need to you need to thoroughly clean that soil or build on fresh soil.

Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. And you could go, you know, back to the, you know, the nineteenth century and talk about slavery too. Right? It's exploiting a a class of people or a group of people. In the in the twentieth century, you know, when, you know, slavery was had been banned, there was still exploitation. Right? And a lot of that exploitation were with was children and women. And and you had movements to to create laws and and, and and so on and so forth. What what's interesting is and it's gonna be fascinating to see how this all all plays out, and I and what is required, obviously, is a movement of some sort to to fix this because that's what changed, you know And brought new laws forward Outlaw outlawing slavery and and new laws forward outlawing, you know, child labor and exploiting women and and exploiting any of us. I mean, there there were, you know, unions and and and rules regarding, you know, all forms of labor. What's really, I think, insightful about your question is that we are all producing now the the currency for this for these big platforms. The data we produce individually, and the more time we're connected, the more data we produce, is the bounty for these few platforms. But when I said earlier, it's gonna be very interesting to see how this movement plays out rather than, you know, there were lots of businesses that resisted a change in our laws about slavery. Right? It it so much so that we had a civil war. Right? There were, lots of businesses that were, you know, against the change in labor laws. Right? There are very few businesses right now that are benefiting in the same way as the big five, and and we're all being exploited. That to me is the is why I say it's gonna be fascinating to see how this plays out because, yes, you're right. We need a movement. Yes. You're right. We're gonna need fundamental change, and that will, you know, that will require new laws and new policies and and especially new tech, which actually, you know, connects each one of us to our to our data and and gives us agency over how it's used. I mean, we need Internet where the new apps are clicking on our terms of use for our data, and we're not clicking on the term of use of, you know, three, four, five platforms. So it's quite clear what we need, and the tech is doable. You know, Project Liberty has put forward a a solution with a another thin layer protocol called DSNP, which would give us all agency over our data. And that is you know, we have to remember these protocols at the bottom of the stack are what enables the whole stack that gets built upon it. Right? So just as the declaration of independence and The US constitution and the bill of rights are relatively speaking, very thin layer documents. They don't embody everything. They're prescriptive. They say here are the the ideals and the principles that we're all agreeing to. TCPIP, HTTP, DSMP, these are thin layer protocols that are saying, here are the ideals, values, principles that we're all agreeing to. Now build accordingly. And that's clearly what we need. Look. It's been forty one years since the Internet was created. Why are we still a device on the Internet? Why aren't we a person on the Internet? Why can't we have verifiable human beings using the Internet so we know that there's accountability? There's a privilege for using it. It's it's not something to be, you know, to have machine bots just spewing, you know, whatever they want to to corrupt our information landscape because, you know, any foreign actor knows you corrupt the information ecosystem of a country, you have corrupted that country. You have disabled it. Because everything we build in the world of value is built on trust. You destroy trust. You dis you destroy the political system. You destroy trust, you destroy the mark the economic system. You destroy trust, there's no no no way that institutions can function without trust. There's no way individuals can function with one another without trust. That's why, you know, when we created a set of human rights in this country, we married it with a social contract that said, for these rights to matter, you have to respect them and other people. And so this is that's the bargain. That's the bargain. And without that bargain, what we have is one of two things, anarchy or autocracy, you know, where you have dictatorships, autocrats, authoritarians telling everybody, you know, what the rules are and punishing people if they don't obey, particularly if if if if they're doing things that are gonna reduce the power of the of the centralized force. So, you know, this isn't just me saying it. I mean, this is this is history of humankind. So if we want our great experiment in The US to continue and and and to be that, you know, that inspiration and that source of hope for lots of people around the world. We have to understand what makes it work fundamentally. Few simple concepts and have technology that embraces those concepts and is is actually subordinate to the concepts. Right? The technology, it should be optimizing for that, not optimizing for, you know, something that's entirely different. How do we say with a straight face to people that we're protecting your rights when you have no rights, you know, on the in the Internet today? You're everything about us is being stolen from us. I know the lawyers will say you clicked on that to get used to the app, and I say that's all BS. It's total BS. It's like it's like me saying, you know, I own this slave because I have a contract. No. No. No. There is a moral law that is that is far greater and more important than any law that man creates. And if we that's what created the country. It's it was it was created by people saying, we're not gonna be subjects anymore. We choose to be citizens. We choose to create that category, that status for us to live our lives as equals with other people, self government self governed. We can build a government and and of, by, and for people, and we can build it on a set of principles where humans have dignity. Right? They can own they own themselves. They're no longer owned by a king or by a dictator or by, you know, any autocrat. And that's that's that's the that's the simple thing. It's like a light bulb went off for, you know, for Thomas Paine when he wrote Common Sense. Right? And and and for the American public saying, well, I never thought of that. I never thought I could actually own me. I I thought, you know, because we lived in a in a world of, you know, monarchies and so on and so forth for six, seven, eight, nine hundred centuries that people that's all they knew. Right? And so they didn't it it took it took someone to say, no. It doesn't have to be this way. And now this technology has has put us in into a a place of it's almost like we're we're we're we're living in this haze, you know, where we've been brainwashed by this tech that it's this one somehow this wonderful thing, empowering thing. When if we just have a wind that blew away the haze and we saw it for what it is, it's actually it's actually taking everything we love away from us. Yeah. You know? How how is it that technology technology, these these platforms can should know more about our kids than we we do as parents? It's just insidious.

Totally. Totally. I mean, may you said analogy of of televisions, this great, you know, advance in in technology. What if what if it came with, it was actually a a a a device that went into all of our homes and surveilled us and and captured every moment of our of our physical existence, you know, in in in our house in our most private places. And and all that information was going to the government. So somebody sat there and sucked up all that information and said, jeez. I just heard a conversation with, you know, in Matt's family or Frank's family where they're against me. So send out people to punish them, you know, for being against, I I I guess, because we wanna, you know, kill our enemies within. You know, history shows us that the the the enemy outside is is less harmful than the energy inside. The enemy in inside. And, yes, TikTok is bad, but we have an apparatus to deal with China. A whole apparatus to defend ourselves from China. We we have no apparatus to defend ourselves from all these platforms that are killing us from inside. And this is a huge, huge problem that that's fixable, thankfully. Okay? It is fixable. And we just have to get people thinking differently about this and not going into their lawyer brain. Right. Or not going to their it can't be fixed brain. Right. Or their genie is out of the bottle brain. But go into the brain part of the brain that is about the reimagining the future. You know, it's the imagination part of the brain. Go there and say, okay. Somebody reimagined things in 1775, and we could become citizens instead of being subjects. So let's reimagine technology where we are citizens again, and we're not becoming subjects just to be able to use the Internet.

really good questions because they ope that you you opened a series of doors that made it very, very easy and natural for me to tell a story, and I could see your mind working as you were asking questions. So I'm I'm, I'm very, very appreciative of that and and impressed.

Thanks again to Matt Pruitt and Frank McCourt. The Radical Exchanges podcast is executive produced by g Angela Corpus and Matt Pruitt and is co produced and audio engineered by myself, Aaron Benavides. This episode was produced and recorded by Matt Pruitt. If you would like to learn more about Radical Exchange, please follow us on Twitter at radxchange or check out our website at radicalxchange.org. And if you'd like to join in the conversation, we'd love to hear from you. So hop on our Discord where we have channels discussing topics like what you heard today, as well as topics like plural voting, community currencies, soulbound tokens, and more. There will be links for all of these in the description. Have a great day, and stay radical.