Half a percent doesn't sound like much. In a close midterm, it is everything.
Dr. Jen Golbeck has spent two decades as a computer scientist studying what the internet can figure out about you without being told — and she now spends her nights as a working journalist inside the most extreme corners of American politics. Both halves of that job point at the same machine: an economy built on collecting everything about everyone, and online communities that offer people the one thing they most want, which is belonging.
Dave and Jen talk about how far surveillance has actually gone, why she thinks the AI bubble is at its top edge, what a decade inside far-right forums has taught her about how ordinary people radicalize, what she saw on the street in Minneapolis during the ICE protests, and what is genuinely worth doing between now and November.
Guest
Dr. Jen Golbeck — Professor at the University of Maryland's College of Information and director of the Social Intelligence Lab. She writes the daily MAGAReport newsletter and reports for HuffPost and Esquire.
MAGAReport | UMD faculty page | HuffPost | Esquire: a weekend with the Proud Boys | TED: Is AI progress stuck?
Also mentioned: the Electronic Frontier Foundation's legislation tracker.
Chapters
00:00 - Cold open and intro
01:28 - Meet Dr. Jen Golbeck
03:52 - Surveillance, extremism, and the American ideal
06:07 - How bad has surveillance actually gotten
07:49 - The phone-number trick and the data-broker machine
10:01 - The TEDx talk that made the tech bros angry
13:46 - A 24-hour amnesty: 40 percent of the class confesses
17:05 - Data centers, bad neighbors, and democratic control
19:18 - The dot-com parallel: is this a bubble?
20:26 - Open source, local models, and the business-model problem
24:52 - Typing pools and the job-apocalypse story
27:37 - The antisocial internet: from privacy to radicalization
29:19 - A weekend with the Proud Boys in North Carolina
32:43 - The symbolic show of strength
36:56 - What cults know about belonging
38:58 - Minneapolis, ICE, and the feel of a civil war
44:26 - What the Charlie Kirk killing revealed
47:13 - Civil war, or Costco?
49:31 - The Facebook experiment: half a percent
52:09 - Citizens United, money, and media consolidation
56:07 - Into the midterms: troops, fraud claims, and lawsuits
58:59 - Why the election infrastructure should hold
1:02:00 - Flock cameras and warrantless tracking
1:03:24 - EFF's tracker: pick one thing and be annoying
1:08:33 - Outro and links
Dave Troy Presents is published by America 2.0. america2.news
Dave Troy Presents
Dave Troy is a technologist, historian, and researcher who has studied disinformation and extremism online since the earliest days of the internet.
