Robert W. Gehl Visiting Lecture

Please join us for "Move Slowly and Build Bridges: How Activists, Technologists, and Ordinary People Built an Alternative to X", a visiting lecture by Robert W. Gehl. Lunch and refreshments will be provided so please RSVP.

• Location: CMNS Conference room (K8652)
• Date: February 17th
• Time: 1:00pm

In his new book Move Slowly and Build Bridges, Robert W. Gehl tells the story of the activists, software developers, artists, and everyday people who have built the fediverse, a noncentralized alternative social media system. Unlike big tech corporations like Facebook, TikTok, or X, the fediverse is comprised of thousands of small, independent communities who use a Web protocol to communicate with one another. These small communities govern themselves and moderate content at the human scale — compare that to Facebook and X, which try to moderate global conversations. And the fediverse isn’t built in order to gather user data and sell attention to marketers — it’s a more privacy-respecting social media alternative. Making a noncentralized, ethically run social media system isn’t easy. The people building the fediverse have faced long hours, burnout, angry debates, and, worst of all, bigotry, death threats, and discrimination. They face constant, nagging doubts: Can we really do this? Can noncentralized social mediasurvive in a world that is used to corporate social media? Can we—all of us—have our own social media? As Move Slowly and Build Bridges shows us, the answer is yes, but it’s going to take a struggle.

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