 my name is Ethan Zuckerman. I'm really thrilled to share the stage with so many scholars that I really admire and have learned from journalists who I've gotten a great deal out of reading and I'm thrilled to be with you because actually I want to make a plea for your help on this set of problems that we are collectively working on. So let's just talk briefly about the set of problems. Social media right now is not working well for us as citizens in democracy. We have serious concerns that it's increasing polarization. We have serious concerns that it is spreading, mis and disinformation. We have very real concerns that it is pushing people towards extremism and we have real concerns that the algorithms underlying these systems are deeply unfair in ways that are very very hard to counterbalance. And the first thing I want to say on this is we shouldn't be surprised. These tools that we've built were not intended necessarily to be a particularly healthy digital public sphere. They were intended to be tools that capture our attention, grab it, and repackage it for advertisers. And in the process if they can squeeze as much personal data out of us as possible that would be great. They've only become our digital public sphere because they got really really big really fast. And in the process they've become deeply unhealthy spaces to have civic dialogues. They're built around surveillance. They're at such scales that they become almost impossible to govern. And frankly the governance of them is treated as a cost not as something that you would actually want to take seriously. It's something that the companies try to spend as little on as possible and simply get on to selling more ads. The solutions that are being put on the table for the most part suck. They're terrible. They either involve asking the government to step in and regulate speech which is not a good idea in general and is really really hard in the United States. Or asking these incredibly powerful companies to regulate themselves and to regulate speech which is also not going to work very well. The set of suggestions that actually aren't so bad are around transparency. But transparency in the grand scheme of things is pretty weak T. It's necessary but not sufficient. We should have much more information about how these systems work but even armed with that information it's very hard to know how we make these better. What we are facing is a classic situation of market failure. We have let a largely unregulated market take over our public sphere. And that's a really poor idea. Now the good news is that we know something about how you correct market failures. There was a massive market failure in television in the United States in the 1960s. And you had Newt Minow, the new FCC commissioner under JFK, stand up in front of the National Association of Broadcasters and say if you watch your own programming what you will see is a vast wasteland. I've been thinking about that phrase a lot lately as someone who studies social media and who frankly has had a hand in building social media. But Minow's response to the vast wasteland was not to try to ban Gilligan's Island or I love Lucy. It was to try to build a whole new set of architectures and infrastructures on which a better future could be built. A future where we got better children's programming, better civic programming, better local news. And that meant doing things like investing in satellite systems to allow public broadcasters to share information back and forth. It meant the corporation for public broadcasting, NPR, PBS. It meant not just throwing ideas up there and hoping that they would work out. It meant really deep investments like children's television workshop which spent two years working with academics on what television might be able to be for preschoolers before it ended up creating Sesame Street. The failure we are dealing with is a failure of imagination. My friend Kara Swisher was up here before. She talked about this idea that there's really only two tech companies that matter, Facebook and Google. They've eaten the rest of them. And in the ad market that's absolutely true. And as a result we have not had much very interesting new thinking for the last ten years because what the market incents us to do is build something that's going to get bought by one of those companies as soon as possible. So we need a different way. Paul Romer, economist, won the Nobel Prize recently, pretty bright guy. He has proposed a tax on surveillance advertising. A big tax on surveillance advertising. He believes that advertising that tracks us, that sucks out our personal preferences, is corrosive to us living in a democracy. I agree with that. But I want to do something with that tax. I want to put a significant tax on Google, Facebook and others who are engaged in surveillance advertising. And I want to use that money to create the PBS of social media. I want to build something focused on digital public infrastructure. What are the tools that we collectively need so we can start creating an internet that's actually good for us as communities? What would it mean if instead of going into these social networks that support more than a billion people and outsource all of their community decisions to very poorly paid and poorly treated people in the Philippines, what if we were actually building tools alongside the communities that we all individually work with and serve? Why can't my town of 3,000 people have a social network that supports us when we have town meeting? And we can join it for four days before that meeting and we can get off of it a day afterwards. These things are technically possible. But they are not particularly profitable. And what they need is for us to let go of this notion that some genius in Silicon Valley is going to come up with something new and clever that is simultaneously going to solve our civic problems as well as make someone another trillion dollars. That's not going to happen. We need instead of trying to look at this space and abandon it and burn it to the ground despite the fact that that feels really appealing at times to lean into it in a very serious way. And that's why I'm giving this talk to this group of people. Because community foundations, local newspapers, the sort of people who come to a conference like this are the people that need to be thinking about what a different possible future might look like. Imagine for a moment that civic media, that social media, that digital media wasn't awful, wasn't corrosive, wasn't terrible. Imagine that it was the heart of rebirth and rebuilding our communities. What would that look like? And how can we build it? There are some amazing people who are in the early stages of trying to do this work. Sir Tim Berners-Lee is with us in the audience. His new project is one of dozens of projects out there trying to rethink from the ground up how we might build an Internet that is actually good for us. And I am asking you, I am begging you to get involved with this conversation early on. Do not be satisfied just with figuring out how we put some lightweight regulation on these tools. Take on the really hard question of what we could imagine these tools could do for us in society and in democracies and let's figure out a way to start getting these companies that have caused so much harm to put taxpayer money on the table and let us start figuring out how we build digital public infrastructure and actually build some alternatives.