Gizmodo has a podcast! Again!
Two years after The Gateway dug deep into the way YouTube algorithms enable larger-than-life personalities to develop followings online, we’re back with a new podcast. System Reboot is a weekly podcast exploring the big things that are broken and talking to very smart people who have ideas about how to fix them.
Gizmodo is not a place known for its optimism — I think when I first joined, then-editor-in-chief Katie Drummond had an editorial edict banning it. It’s even harder to be an optimist today, looking at a world of increasing inequality, dystopic technology surveilling our every move, misinformation running amok, and a climate crisis that has half the country on fire right now. Also a pandemic. Oh, and nobody in power seems to give a shit.
Just because things are broken, though, doesn’t mean they can’t be put back together. And we’re a bunch of smart-asses who know a lot of smart people with smart ideas. So why not talk to them about the problems and come away with a few actual ideas about solving them?
That’s the point of System Reboot. Each week, we’ll explore not just ideas, but actual actions all of us can take right now, from our homes, to help repair the systemic failures laid bare by covid-19. In our first four episodes, we’re tackling the thing central to our lives in 2020: the internet.
Our guests include Cory Doctorow, a science fiction writer and special adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who will talk about how big ISPs are killing your internet. We’ll chat with Abdul El-Sayed, a former Michigan gubernatorial candidate who firmly believes a lack of internet could be a public health crisis. We’ll also learn from Intel Labs’s Vida Ilderem, an architect of the growing 5G network, and Maddie Stone, a leading expert on how the internet is being hurt by climate change.
The podcast will be launching in a few weeks, but we’ve got a trailer live and we can be found pretty much everywhere you get your podcasts, including:
So download. Listen. Heck, go wild and like and subscribe if you’re feeling ready to get to work and reboot this busted system.