Alex Feerst on Trust and Safety, the Distributed Web, and Keeping Our Backstage Front and Center - Ep 9

Privacy is the New Celebrity

English - October 20, 2021 22:00 - 54 minutes - 37.2 MB - ★★★★★ - 7 ratings
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Previous Episode: Ep 8 - Jillian York on Corporate Censorship, Surveillance Capitalism, and the Problem with Content Moderation

Next Episode: Dr. David Bray on Ransomware, the Uncertainty of Change, and Working for the Government as a Teenager - Ep 10

In episode 9, Henry Holtzman interviews Alex Feerst, who served as head of trust and safety at Medium and general counsel at Neuralink. Currently, he is the CEO of Murmuration Labs and also sits on the board of the MobileCoin Foundation. Alex shares why the backstage should be front and center, explaining Erving Goffman's fantastic "backstage" metaphor for privacy. Henry asks what it's like to work in the evolving field of trust and safety, and Alex tells us about the human experience behind content moderation. Alex also explains the distributed web and weighs in on Facebook's latest scandal over harm caused by Instagram, pondering whether it's even possible for companies to act "ethically" in a late capitalist world.