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
Scott Reich recently took the TED Democracy stage in Philadelphia to argue that a renewed ethos of service could help repair our fractured country. He joins Dave Troy for a conversation that runs from ancient Athens to a modern "GI Bill for civic service," by way of Robert Putnam, the 1917 baseball All-Star Game, and the simple, radical idea that citizens owe something to one another.
Reich and Troy arrived at similar conclusions by different paths: that social mixing across background, region, and class — not screens and headlines — is how a democracy rebuilds trust. Together they make a hopeful (and stubbornly non-partisan) case for citizenship as a practice, not merely a slogan.
(Production note: a couple of brief internet dropouts affected Scott's audio; we've worked around them.)
Guest:
Scott Reich - presidential historian and attorney; author of "The Power of Citizenship: Why JFK Matters to a New Generation" and the forthcoming "One Day in September: Baseball, Brotherhood, and the Birth of the All-Star Game"; board member of the JFK Library Foundation and a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania.
Chapters:
00:00 Cold open: why national service
01:18 Meet Scott Reich and the TED Democracy talk
04:34 Citizenship: rights, but also obligations
05:43 From "impossible" to practical: connection and service
07:45 The baseball "farm system": start with the young
10:18 What we stopped teaching: civics and Western civ
12:30 The proposal: a modern GI Bill for civic service
14:03 Ancient Greece and the making of a citizen
15:29 Mandatory or voluntary? Incentives over mandates
18:01 Reviving civic life: Peace Corps, clubs, and lost associations
19:55 The commoditization of youth sports
22:53 We've always argued: Adams, Jefferson, and healthy disagreement
24:49 "One Day in September": how Americans used to gather
29:02 Putnam, disinformation, and the loneliness crisis
30:29 Social mixing as national security
32:54 Cohorts across difference: rural Iowa to the Bronx
37:42 Service, not servitude: beyond the military
43:59 Overestimating the other side
46:05 Leaders as vehicles: JFK and the power of citizenship
50:22 What tragedy teaches: our capacity to unite
54:29 What can one person do? Small acts of citizenship
1:01:13 Outro and links
Host Dave Troy writes at https://america2.news and https://washingtonspectator.org
Dave Troy Presents is published by America 2.0. https://america2.news