Episode description:

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg—longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

On this show we often describe the news and information system as an ecosystem, and it’s a good metaphor. The media landscape is complex, interconnected, dynamic—and, right now, deeply out of balance. The guest today, Courtney Radsch, has spent her career studying the system from many angles: as a journalist, a scholar, and now as director of the Center for Journalism and Liberty at the Open Markets Institute.

In ecological science, a keystone species is one on which other elements of the system depend. Courtney argues that in the information ecosystem, journalism is the keystone. Without trustworthy gatherers of news, the rest of the ecosystem—commentators, podcasters, social media influencers, informed citizens, ultimately democracy—can’t exist. Courtney and I will discuss why that is and why “information resilience” is the key measure of system health. We’ll also talk about where reform should begin—at the individual, institutional, or systemic level.

 

Transcript

 

Eric Schurenberg (00:02.934)
Courtney Radsch, welcome to In Reality.

Courtney Radsch (00:06.468)
Thank you, pleasure to be here.

Eric Schurenberg (00:08.916)
You’re the director of the Center for Journalism and Liberty at the Open Markets Institute. I think that the names of those two organizations kind of speak for themselves, but you’re also a speaker on a number of, for a number of other organizations at a number of other events on the topics of freedom of the press, democracy, and so on. And one of them,

is, I think, particularly interesting to the audience of InReality. For an organization known as the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, you conceived of the information environment in which we all swim as an ecosystem. It’s a term that we come up with a lot here on InReality, but you’ve broken it down in a number of useful and specific ways. if you could, just starting at the top line, can you give us a summary of that ecosystem perspective for what it means.

Courtney Radsch (01:04.528)
Sure, thanks for the question. And I thought a lot about, you know, what is the right heuristic? So initially, I was asked to develop a taxonomy, but as I was thinking through how does information flow, the infrastructure, the people, individual systems, I thought, you know, we really need a more comprehensive way to understand, evaluate, and assess how information flows, the infrastructure, the systems, how people’s individual beliefs and social beliefs and understandings are developed. And so I did a lot of reading and I came up with the idea of an ecosystem because an ecosystem has both natural and manmade. So both, you know, animate and inanimate objects are part of it. And there were a lot of discussions around information pollution and polluting the information environment. And environment didn’t seem like it was quite enough. Because when I think about an ecosystem, I think about you have the soil. And so in our information ecosystem, the soil is like the infrastructure, the technological infrastructure in which information producers, consumers, flows are embedded. And I thought of those like less like soil and more like gears because they all influence each other. But even in soil, right, you have the pH balance, you have water, you have et cetera. So these interactive components. And then I thought about, you know, and I did a lot of reading about ecosystem analysis.

And there is this concept of lots of different species in an ecosystem, some of which are keystone species. If that species disappears or is eradicated, then the ecosystem can fail. And that really resonated to me as I’ve spent much of my career focused on journalism and the media ecosystem. media ecosystem is too small. Journalism is also too small because people get their information through entertainment, through user generated content. But journalism is a keystone species. Without journalism, we cannot have healthy information ecosystems. Yeah.

Eric Schurenberg (04:32.056)
Courtney, let me stop you right there. So what makes media or journalism rather, the keystone species? As you noted, there are an awful lot of the information that flows through the ecosystem today comes from user generated content over social media. What makes journalism unique?

Courtney Radsch (04:52.388)
Yeah, that’s a great question. And I guess in order to answer that, I should have spoken first about what makes something a healthy information ecosystem, right? So we’re not, the goal is how do we create healthy information ecosystems? And so looking at ecosystem studies, the idea is that it’s balanced, that you have keystone species that continue to survive and the ecosystem thrives. You you can have some that die off, institutions that die off, you know, things can get out of balance, but it doesn’t destroy the whole ecosystem. you know, healthy, it’s really about that balance.

Other aspects of that ecosystem, for example, is transparency. you know, ecosystems, they need the sun, right? You have the sun. So you think about transparency as a form of sunlight. Journalism is a fundamental institution that helps provide transparency into other institutions that provide information and create meaning in our world, in our information systems. We’re all embedded in these. And journalism helps create community and connections and shared understanding and facts and all of these really fundamental components that go into enabling human-centered governance, democratic governance that go into ensuring an informed public so that people can make their own decisions and come up with informed beliefs. And so that’s really why I think I came up with the idea that journalists, journalism is a keystone species.

Eric Schurenberg (06:31.63)
Okay, good. That makes a lot of sense. I love the idea of an ecosystem with all the interconnected parts. You pull one string, as it were, and everything else is affected. you can, starting with the infrastructure, the technological infrastructure, soil or gears, as it was. You’ve written about also as part of this, the need for information resilience.

When I thought of that term before, I’ve always thought of it meaning something like a government or corporate ability to defend against a rebound from attacks on their information infrastructure. But in your analysis, it seems like a much deeper line of defense that goes throughout society and includes news consumers. Can you help me understand how you’ve expanded the definition?

Courtney Radsch (07:23.919)
Yeah, so I think resilience is actually really useful to think about in the sense of an ecosystem, right? So a healthy ecosystem needs to be resilient against attacks, against disease, against any single powerful actor that tries to dominate it. And so I like the idea of resilience more broadly because it encompasses the idea, I think, of pluralism. They’re really, you know,

We know that, you know, bigness, unitary, single things tend not to be resilient. You need duplication, you need, you know, backups, all of that. And so for me, that encapsulates this concept of pluralism. So pluralism, whether we’re talking about ownership, whether we’re talking about technological infrastructure, pluralism, whether we’re talking about at the individual level in terms of information sources, you know, really pluralism as this,

value this sense of which we’re embedded that helps bring resilience. And similarly, competition, right? Pluralism and competition go hand in hand. It’s really hard to have pluralism if you don’t have competition. And resilience, know, part of being a resilient species or having a resilient information ecosystem is that you have competition that does not lead to the death of keystone species. For example, like journalism.

And so I found that to be, again, a helpful heuristic to think about how we can understand these moving dynamics and make sense of them and think about how choices in the private sector or the market affects other parts of the ecosystem, even if they’re not in the same exact market, right? Those market dynamics shape the resiliency of institutions.

Eric Schurenberg (08:51.619)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (09:12.216)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good. I think it’s a wonderfully useful way to think about it. So here’s the obvious question to follow up with is, do you think that the American information ecosystem in the first quarter of the 21st century is healthy?

Courtney Radsch (09:31.093)
No, I do not. think it is very unhealthy. And I think we can look at various facets at both the individual and the collective level and the systemic level. So, you know, to the point about pluralism and competition, we have, you know, these massive companies, corporations that are dominating vast swaths of our information ecosystem, whether we’re talking about

Eric Schurenberg (09:32.876)
Why not?

Courtney Radsch (10:00.024)
major media corporations wanting to lift their ownership caps beyond 39 % so that they can compete with the even bigger tech companies and streaming companies that dominate how we get our entertainment, how we get our news, social media, search, app stores, AI, all of these being dominated by a handful of firms that own the infrastructure and control the logic.

And that’s a really important concept because that’s the logic of competition, the logic of how does the economy operate, what game are we playing, right? And right now that’s a really dangerous game, right? The logic of our information system is based on engagement, it’s based on attention, it’s based on datafication, monitoring, and surveillance.

All of which are detrimental to democracy, to human liberty and agency, and I think undermine the health of the information system. And we see this at the individual level as well, where we see a loss in faith of all types or loss of trust rather in all types of institutions, where we see an increasing inability or undesirability to distinguish reality and fact from belief and assumption.

And of course, with the generative AI evolution and the ease of creating videos and entire, we can spin up entire little bits of this information ecosystem now. With a prompt, we can create fake websites, fake videos, fake people. So our ability to figure out what is real, what isn’t, is really coming under attack now.

And of course, that’s made worse by our political leaders and our business leaders who are increasingly aligned in a really dangerous coalition with enormous power and control over how we receive and impart information.

Eric Schurenberg (12:14.51)
So, well, with that rosy picture that you’ve just painted for us, let’s dig a little bit deeper into what you mean by logic. So the way I was listening to you and what I was hearing was the incentives that are built into the ecosystem, what makes the creators of information and the distributors of information prosperous.

algorithms that sort of the, I guess, sort of advertising attention driven click bait kind of focus of a lot of social media platforms and also, you know, let’s be honest, some legacy media organizations as well. Do I have that right? Or how else would you expand the definition of the logic driving the ecosystem?

Courtney Radsch (13:11.086)
Yeah, so I would use Shoshana Zuboff’s term surveillance capitalism. So we’re certainly in a capitalist system where profit-driven organizations that are in many cases led by single male billionaires, in many cases in governance structures that do not actually give their boards very much say over them, are in control of these massive

Eric Schurenberg (13:16.195)
Mm-hmm.

Courtney Radsch (13:41.107)
And I will say here, the digital organizations specifically, the digital corporations, because they are the ones that are rendering our data. And when I say data, I’m not just talking about your personal data. You think about your address or your phone number, your biometric data, your face, your location. Increasingly, they are able to read your neural senses. And so you’ve got Neuralink, you’ve got Meta creating wearables that can read your brainwaves.

All of this is open for monitoring and datafication. And the logic of turning anything and everything that can be turned into a bit or a byte, right, turning anything that can be datafied into something that can be a piece of data means that we can do more monitoring and more surveillance has profound implications for how people behave, how they express themselves, and for what type of system we’re going to live in. I think a lot about the competition with China trope. I wrote a piece a few years ago about weaving the Panopticon, building the Panopticon, and we are building the same systems. The only difference is that we have different institutional safeguards and fewer state-owned enterprises, but we’re seeing those barriers breakdown, right?

We are seeing democratic erosion here at home. We’re seeing these tech corporations that control a lot of our information environment being joining the military. They’ve been designated as I forget, it was like a captain or a general, sorry, I’m not good at military rankings. They are infiltrating all of the government systems. We now have grok AI and they’re increasingly opaque.

There is an inability to provide oversight to either the companies or the systems. And so I think we have gone from surveillance capitalism, which is all about the datafication and rendering our data into something that can be sold to advertisers. And now we’re adding a layer of obscurity. There are no rules right now that say a chat bot that you’re chatting with has to work in your best interest. What is preventing an advertiser or a politician from paying to have your AI companion or your chat GPT interface try to get you to believe or buy something. There’s nothing there. There’s no liability.

So I think we’re in a really challenging time when the logic of surveillance capitalism is being still the dominant logic. And now it’s the competition and AI competition and innovation without any discussion about what are we innovating towards? Because right now we’re innovating towards an increasing surveillance system or competition. Why are we competing with China to do more surveillance, more monitoring?

Eric Schurenberg (16:45.934)
Well, I can speak for the arguments that we need to have this, as I understand it, that the argument is that we need to have a kind of an unbridled kind of expansion of AI powers, because if we don’t, China will, and they’re a global rival of ours, and for military and national security reasons, we want to have the best AI.

I understand that argument. It’s the way it’s filtered into the private sector and created the kinds of perverse incentives that you described there, I think hasn’t been adequately addressed. You and I were on a panel yesterday that talked about sort of the evolution of

from one kind of artificial intelligence, was search engine optimization to answer engine optimization, which basically means that the media for its own survival and its own sort of advertising imperatives is now kind of playing second fiddle to artificial intelligence driving, you know, answer engines, which are replacing search engines.

It seems to me like kind of, you know, the new boss is same as the old boss. Do you regard it that way?

Courtney Radsch (18:19.585)
Definitely the new boss is the same as the old boss and it might look like there are new companies, but they all have investments and partnerships with the same big tech firms that have dominated the first social media wave. So very much the same. And I think that the journalism and media and creators of all kinds are getting into the same problem that we saw at the

I don’t want to say the internet age. Actually, the internet was great. It was an open protocol. Anyone could post. We had copyright. Just because you put something online doesn’t mean that you’re giving up your copyright. The problem was the platformization, right? The colonization of the open internet and enclosure by these so-called walled gardens, right? By these platforms that had their own operating systems, their own logic, their own terms of service.

and kept you in those enclosures. So, you know, it’s not that journalism or media are playing second fiddle to answer engines. They are serfs, right? They are literally have provided, not provided, they have been stripped of their intellectual property. It’s been, in my opinion, stolen. That has been used to then create artificial intelligence that is both dependent on and replacing of the material that it used to develop without realizing that AI and journalism are symbiotic. They increasingly need each other, right? We’re not gonna see journalism without AI and there’s lots of interesting tools that AI can help journalism translate, know, do all data analysis, you know, these big investigative journalism projects, there’s lots of interesting case studies, right?

But, you know, they can’t do that if there is no way to earn money, right? What is the economic model when you have a hundred different chat GPT newspapers, when you have, you know, things like Particle, when you have these answer engines that are not just training, not just building their systems on that raw material that we provided, that journalists who went to the front lines and put their lives and livelihoods on the line to bring us the news provided, but also now through RAG, the Retrieval Augmented Generation Process that makes sure you can update a model that’s more static with real-time information often pulled from the open web.

Now, you need to figure out how do we keep those quality information producers able to continue doing those observations, those facts, that timely information, especially going back to the issue of competition with China, what happens if all of the information producers that do good quality information are like, well, we can’t have our information stolen. We can’t have it taken for free. We’re going to put it off limits. We’re not going to allow web crawlers to do that anymore. And now Cloudflare has said, you know, we’re going to default to that for our customers and they control 20 % of the web.

So more and more of the web is going to be off limits. You know who’s not putting their content behind paywalls or restricting it from being crawled by AI crawlers? Russia, China. And they have actually upscaled their use of generative AI to create entire information ecosystems, to create generative synthetic content with the express purpose of training these AI of being resources for this AI. And it’s interesting if you look at Musk, he is now proposing Grokopedia, which would be an alternative to Wikipedia, which is a really important information source for many models because he thinks it has the wrong ideology. all of this is interconnected. And I think we have to be really smart about how we

Eric Schurenberg (22:26.318)
Mm-hmm.

Courtney Radsch (22:30.797)
regulate and not just think that like we need innovation and AI without describing what it is we want out of this system. And why not double down on a rights-based human empowering AI as opposed to this idea of AGI, which people think is going to take over the world and destroy it. There’s a non sequitur here.

Eric Schurenberg (22:54.926)
Let’s drill down on one particular development in the news recently that I’m sure you’ve been following closely, which is the Pentagon’s recent proposal of rules that would limit press access to information from the Department of Defense. Proponents of that rule say that this is necessary to protect operational security. Critics say that the rules muzzle accountability. Would you recommend in a healthy ecosystem balancing those two imperatives?

Courtney Radsch (23:29.547)
I think we know that transparency is really important and sunlight is the best disinfectant. So if we think about the need for accountable democratic governance, then we need to have transparency. And journalists are the kind of mechanism by which a lot of that transparency happens. So certainly the proactive provision of information, yes. But just think about all of the things we know from people who have leaked information to journalists because they couldn’t get it out through the proper channels or they were afraid of retaliation. We cannot hold our governments or corporations accountable if we only rely on the information that they want to willingly give us. And so I think it’s very dangerous, particularly as we see democratic deterioration across the United States and many of our institutions.

Eric Schurenberg (24:03.608)
Mm-hmm.

Courtney Radsch (24:24.076)
the rewriting efforts to rewrite history, taking entire data sets offline, stopping the collection of data, attacking university and independence. All of these things are part of this effort to control information, to reduce the supply of information that does not adhere to the ideology of the regime, to make it harder to get information, to raise the risks that an individual has to face in order to do that, whether you’re the whistleblower or the journalist.

So I think it is very, very dangerous, very problematic. We just got out of a 20 year war that did nothing, right? I think, I remember Knight Ritter being one of the only news organizations that was questioning the evidence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and countering the dominant hegemonic narrative, right?

We know about the Pentagon Papers, what about the Pegasus Papers? We also know that there’s a huge return on investment for citizens when you are able to speak to journalists and have that sort of coverage. If you look at the Global Investigative Journalism Network and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which led the Pegasus Papers and the Pana Papers, which revealed corporate and government malfeasance around the world, it resulted in

billions of dollars being returned to public coffers. So not only is it critical for accountable governance, it’s also good for the bottom line and for addressing our deficits that a lot of people think are such an issue.

Eric Schurenberg (26:01.804)
Mm-hmm.

We have seen efforts in the past by American administrations, presidential administrations, to limit press access. National security is sometimes used to curb pure scrutiny. And we can think of everyone from FDR to Barack Obama, who wielded that particular axe.

What would you learn from those precedents? We survived them all. Is this a different order of magnitude or is it just a continuation of a kind of built in tension between a free press and a particular administration that’s in power?

Courtney Radsch (26:48.94)
think it is both. Certainly I think there are lots of efforts to control information. I’m glad you mentioned Obama because he really was made a big effort to restrict the information, this effort to only allow information out from agencies through public affairs officers and some of the less sexy things that we know about. Snowden, we know all about the revelations of corporate state

collusion to surveil American and foreign citizens because of whistleblowers and journalists that those whistleblowers worked with in order to responsibly release that information. I think that journalists play an important role because there is a professional ethos. There is or a

Some people don’t like to call it profession, but a trade, but there is an ethos. There is an ethic. There is a set of values and rules that define something as journalism as opposed to propaganda or PR. And so, and part of that is responsibility and orientation towards the public interest. And so that’s why it’s important to have journalists able to do this sort of coverage because they are oriented towards the public interest. I mean, in an ideal world, right? This is not about their own self-interest, et cetera. So we need that.

Eric Schurenberg (28:06.53)
Mm-hmm.

Courtney Radsch (28:07.393)
But it is also different because we are seeing attacks on knowledge, information, research, independence of institutions on a scale and scope that I’ve never seen. I’ve been working on global human rights, authoritarianism, digital rights and journalism for the 20 years of my life. I’ve worked as a journalist in the Middle East in authoritarian regimes. did my…

doctoral research in Egypt leading up to the Arab Spring. So I have deep personal and academic familiarity with authoritarianism. What we’re seeing happening in the United States with the breakdown and the assault on everything everywhere all at once is really astounding and concerning because it makes something like a restriction on press access and ability to talk to Pentagon officials much more concerning and existential.

And, you know, this is, I don’t think we really think about this enough in the US, but if you choose to violate something like that and risk getting fired, it’s not only that you lose your livelihood, you lose your health insurance, your family might lose your health insurance. And that’s like, that’s really existential. And I, I was

fired and kicked out of Dubai for an article I wrote about safety problems on the national airline. And it was a really hard decision to know that by refusing to take down this really important public safety article, I was going to lose my job, get kicked out of country, like have to, my partner also, you know, the same. So it’s not easy to ask somebody to put their livelihood on the line. And that’s part of the reason why we want to have permissive rules.

Eric Schurenberg (29:36.974)
Mm-hmm.

Courtney Radsch (30:00.704)
so that you don’t open up that threat vector, you don’t open up that attack.

Eric Schurenberg (30:04.782)
Of course, in the social media area, there are other threats besides removal of you from your job and your health insurance. There are doxing attacks and kind of very extensive threats of violence that journalists and others have faced who run afoul of particular interests online. Let’s pivot to solutions.

Courtney Radsch (30:21.227)
huh.

Eric Schurenberg (30:33.774)
One of the takeaways that I had from your ecosystem vision was that there is no one solution. You can’t just reform journalism or media business models or social media algorithms. The whole thing needs collaboration to recover information integrity.

Dick Toffle, who’s the co-founder of ProPublica, his newsletter today argued that citizens have to assert their support for free press. Considering the intricacy of the information ecosystem today, where do you start to begin to rebuild trust and health throughout the ecosystem?

Courtney Radsch (31:23.903)
Well, luckily, we have lots of different institutions and entities that should be able to do several things at the same time. So I think we need to acknowledge that it’s not an either or. We don’t only need to do one thing. But one of the reasons that my career has evolved from focusing, I worked for many years at the Committee to Protect Journalists and Freedom House is

you know, from working on the individual journalist level, the online harassment, the imprisonment, the death is, know, those are horrible things, very important. But I found myself, you know, really wanting to work at the structural level to work on solutions that would have broad-based repercussions that could improve things for everyone. And, you know, working with tech companies on online harassment was so frustrating or on, you know, content moderation issues and thinking like,

Why do these companies have so much power instead of being guided by a set of rules and regulations that set out how we want these really important intermediaries to operate in the public interest? so I think these, would say focusing on breaking up dominant monopolies is very important because with this much power and wealth,

that translates into political power. It translates into power not only in the United States, but around the world. They can buy up other sectors. These companies, these tech corporations are multifaceted companies that own everything from underwater sea cables, social media platforms, media production companies to the satellites in the sky.

they dominate and take over all of this public infrastructure, not public, it’s private infrastructure, but infrastructure that in the past we have regulated in a way to ensure that it serves the public. So railroads, for example, can’t exclude certain competitors. They can’t, you know, they have to be interoperable, right? We have the same thing with our telecom system, right? They’re not allowed to listen into our phone calls and figure out.

Courtney Radsch (33:43.862)
Who are we calling and what are we talking about so they can sell that information to advertisers and make money off of us, right? We have imposed rules like common carriage, like interoperability, like non-discrimination, like must carry. And I think we need to look at some of those frameworks. A, use the competition authorities we have to break up monopolies, prevent anti-competitive practices, particularly in AI.

Why are all the dominant tech companies also dominant in AI? Sure, there’s competition, but they are among the leading competitors because they have that pre-existing advantage. They have access to data. They can self-preference. They can push AI products into the other monopolies that they have, like our operating systems, our social media, our phones, our search engines. So we’ve got, I think we really have to break up that power.

Eric Schurenberg (34:22.872)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (34:33.373)
Our search engines.

Courtney Radsch (34:40.233)
The tech industry spends more money in Washington and Brussels than pretty much any other industry. Those companies are now many of them are worth trillion dollars. You’ve got companies that are raising billions of dollars in venture capital funding with no business model, but is premised on a really problematic logic. So I think we focus on that. yes, individuals should absolutely

do what they can. But this is, it is not fair to put the onus only on individuals or only on, you know, the journalism sector or a certain sector in business, because we can’t tell the difference between AI generated and non AI generated content anymore. That’s just not a useful heuristic. There’s only so much media and information literacy, you know, that that’s only going to get you so far. You know, you can’t ask

journalism to come up with new business models in a rigged system in an anti-competitive market where there are massive imbalances, right? So I think we have to equalize out that. And I would also say, I would look at laws like liability laws. I think we need to get those in place right away with respect to AI generated content, chat bots, so liability. And I think we need things like fiduciary responsibility.

Right? So if you’re providing a product that provides therapy or, you know, provides a companion, you have fiduciary responsibility to that individual that you’re serving. You have a liability that will impose safeguards that will require them to come up with safety. And we need to stop this ridiculous conversation about hallucinations because it’s not a hallucination. These are not anthrop… This is a very anthropomorphic term that…

impedes us from understanding that these are errors. These are, you know, as one person called it recently, co-fabulation or fabrications. We can talk about error rates, right? What is the acceptable error rate if you’re providing a, you know, therapist app or a companion app, right?

Eric Schurenberg (36:35.79)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (36:52.64)
A recent article you wrote was about why we should embrace the ideals of lead-idism, not sort of the opposition to progress and technological progress, but the demand that technological progress be mapped to human flourishing and that these harms that you’ve just described be taken into account at a governmental level before technology is allowed to advance. I fear that your very convincing argument that you’ve just made that the best way to solve these problems is at a systemic level. So changing any competitive trade practices and making companies liable for the harms that they cause and so forth is not on the horizon in this particular administration.

I wonder if you can point to signs of progress or green shoots of hope that suggest that we can actually, as a society, roll back the monopolization of power by all the actors that you’ve just identified.

Courtney Radsch (38:12.213)
Well, we are headed to Brussels, in fact, to do a big event there on free speech and democracy, in part because the European Union is a relatively powerful market and they have existing rules, including the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act, the AI Act that empower them to a greater extent.

to set the rules of the road and govern some of these very large online platforms and tech companies that we in the United States have really failed to do. They also have a privacy law. I think it needs some work, but at least it’s something which we don’t have in the country of the United States. So one of the things that I’m doing and that we’re doing with our allies is trying to ensure that countries that, democracies that do have

these mechanisms and regulations and laws and market inquiries are able to enforce those and to counteract the narrative from the Trump administration that somehow regulating digital platforms is akin to censorship or anti-Americanism or that digital taxes are somehow anti-Americanism. mean, it’s really amazing to hear

administration being so overt about just how much it’s trying to promote American hegemony through, you know, through these tech platforms and American dominance. And so part of it is to, you know, helping other countries be strong and stand up for their rights, because it does feel like we need the support of other countries right now that have tried to reign in this power, because there’s so little appetite here. I mean, we’ve seen just how much

Eric Schurenberg (40:03.79)
Mm-hmm.

Courtney Radsch (40:05.685)
there has been personal enrichment. If you look at, for example, what many have characterized as the bribes paid by major media companies to settle frivolous lawsuits brought by President Trump, who’s a public figure and where, I mean, no one realistically thinks any of those defamation claims would have stuck, where you see massive multimillion dollar donations by

the tech brolegarchy to his campaign, you know, where they’re getting positions in the administration and getting lots of government contracts and subsidies while we’re cutting all of these public services. Like we have to, you know, we have to try to take back control. We can’t only wait for elections. I also think that people can think about what are the platforms they’re using, you know, what does that say about your values? And think about like, we don’t, we didn’t talk about it.

But the environmental footprint of AI is existential. And a lot of people do care about the climate and they care about what the future of our Earth ecosystem is in addition to our information ecosystem. And these are increasingly intertwined. So I think based on where your passion is, where your interests lie, there are things that you as an individual can do that you can pressure.

Eric Schurenberg (41:04.686)
Mm.

Courtney Radsch (41:28.306)
your policymakers to do and where you can increase your knowledge about how these issues interrelate and try to gain back some agency while pressing for systemic change.

Eric Schurenberg (41:43.264)
Okay. That green shoot of hope, I think, is where we’ll end it there, that you can find the thing that motivates your passion in this intricate information ecosystem and pull on that and use your power as a voter to influence policymakers. And hopefully Europe will lead the way and…

that American policymakers may eventually follow. Courtney, thank you so much for your time. Good luck in Brussels with the work that you’re doing. And thank you for the work that you are already doing and for this very, very helpful and insightful metaphor for the information environment.

Courtney Radsch (42:31.156)
Well, thanks so much for having me, Eric. And thank you to all the listeners who are people, citizens, users, consumers. You have lots of power. Let’s use it.

Eric Schurenberg (42:43.672)
Terrific. Thank you.

Courtney Radsch (42:44.373)
Thanks.

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Created & produced by: Podcast Partners / Published: Oct 16 2025

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