About the Guest:
Karl Bode is a Seattle-based freelance reporter with two decades of experience covering tech, telecom, media, politics, and consumer rights. His writing has appeared at Techdirt, The Verge, Vice, Ars Technica, and numerous other publications, and he tracks the progress of the community-owned broadband movement for the Institute forLocal Self Reliance. Karl began his career in tech by doing legal industry IT support in NYC and helped build the broadband comparison website DSLReports.com before moving into reporting full time.
Episode Transcript:
Leah Dajches: The year is 1999. The millennium is upon us. As midnight ticks nearer, the news is awash with a wave of anxiety about what Y2K means for technology. For those who don't remember, the so-called millennium bug essentially came down to concerns that the way computers were programmed back in the '60s might mean that when the year changed to '00, computers would think it was the year 1900 rather than the year 2000, causing a major glitch in the system. Reporters amplified concerns that industries from banks to power plants to public transportation would fail leading to mass chaos. There was wall to wall news coverage of this potentially catastrophic situation spinning stories about a future that might come to pass. In the end, there were very few problems. And despite months of hype, the world as we know it continued. The point of my sharing this little anecdote with you is to illustrate that news related to technology has dominated the front pages for decades. Some of it has been alarmist in nature, and some has been more hopeful, touting the next thing that's going to change the world as we know it. These days, it's hard to consume a news story that doesn't have some mention of AI and its implications for virtually every aspect of our lives. That is not news. The real story is much deeper., And sometimes technology reporting seems to miss it. A This begs the question, what has technology reporting done well at and how has it failed to serve the public interest?
Matt Jordan: To help us answer this question, we're going to talk with Karl Bode, a Seattle based freelance reporter with two decades of experience covering tech, telecom, media politics, and consumer rights. His writing has appeared at Techdirt, The Verge, VICE, Ars Technica, and numerous other publications.
And he tracks the progress of the community owned Broadband Movement for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Karl began his career in tech by doing legal industry IT support in NYC and helped build the broadband comparison website dslreports.com before moving into reporting full time. Karl, thanks so much for being with us today.
Karl Bode: Thank you for having me.
Matt Jordan: Over the last 20 years or so, technology reporting has become a huge sector of news production. There's a whole beat on this. We have the World Desk, we have National Desk, and then we also just have technology desks as a way to consume this type of stuff. And there are many beat writers whose job it is to keep the public up on speed about what's happening in the world of big tech. How does big tech with its distribution aggregation and data gathering practices shape the news ecosystem?
Karl Bode: It's been an interesting track on that course because from 2000 to 2010, there was a lot of innovation and excitement going on. And then from 2010 to 2020, the VCs got involved. The bankers got involved. The moneymen realized how much potential for profit there was in this industry. So, things really started to shift. And you really just started—you started noticing the media generally focusing more on hype and less and less on substance as things went along. So, it became less important what a tech product did and it became more and more important to get the VC dollars flowing. And I think that influenced journalism progressively as you've seen.
Matt Jordan: So, I noticed in your writing, you used the word "innovation" a lot in quotation marks. Is this why, because despite the technology reporters constantly touting innovation, there's actually been very little of it in the tech sector?
Karl Bode: I think during that span from 2002 to 2010, the narrative was constantly that we were going to use technology to innovate our way around the major problems of the age. And then as we got past 2010, we noticed, oh, Facebook wasn't doing a very good job thinking about how its product impacted smaller countries, non-English speaking countries overseas, contributing to genocidal impulses in the population. We saw that Uber didn't really pay its employees very well. There's just a long list of these things. We're like, oh, this innovation didn't really wind up being innovative. It wound up being more of what we already were used to, which was people with wealth and power disenfranchising people without. And that's been pretty obvious through this recent trajectory. I do think there's a little bit of a course correction going on, but not significant.
Leah Dajches: So, what do you think that tech reporters did? Was it that they tried to keep the idea that there was innovation going on by talking about the big names of the tech world, but they weren't really looking at what was actually going on?
Karl Bode: I think, again, people—humans want to believe that our innovation and creative and intellectual spirit can overcome all challenges. And the narrative that was being pushed was that tech innovation would come in and fix problems that we've been struggling with for hundreds of years in some instances. And people like that idea. People don't really like to click on stories that explain complicated solutions to complicated problems. If you read most studies, most people don't make it past the headline or about 30% through the article. So, in my opinion, when we made journalism advertising housing based, it completely distorted all the motivations as to what was important and what news organizations were going to put out there. So, it's become much more about engagement and controversy and excitement and stories about innovative superheroes who are going to come in and save us from ourselves, and less about real complicated issues. How do we get clean water to towns? How do we get affordable broadband to places in the country, which is where I got my start covering broadband.
Matt Jordan: Is what you're describing in the tech journalism world this desire to write a story about innovation and the next great big innovative superhero that's going to fix everything for us? Is this something that contributes to that boom bust cycle? What is the role that tech journalism plays in feeding the hype and feeding the VC initial public offer cycle?
Karl Bode: Well, there's so many moving parts here. Journalism has just been incentivized in all the wrong ways. I mean, you see it through consolidated—most of the outlets became greatly consolidated. Most of them are run by billionaires who aren't particularly keen on having power and affluent interests question very much. So, I think the problem with tech journalism is mostly just a reflection of a broader problem in journalism in general, which is consolidation, an unwillingness to pay reporters a living wage, an unwillingness to pay reporters health insurance. This stuff is all working in very complicated ways to help encourage outlets to focus more on superficial hype and less on issues of substance. I don't know if that fully answered your question.
Leah Dajches: If I can jump in—I mean, I think it does to a degree. I think there is a link because they're covering the wrong story. Who is the next Steve Jobs? It seems like every story becomes that. I mean, if you look at the Fortune under 40 magazine headlines, basically, two years later, you see a mug shot that will replace them because they, meaning the tech reporters, seem to get this wrong a lot. So just to think back about the ways in which tech reporters have fed us this long stream of the next great innovator, from Steve Jobs to Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos, do you think that they're more credulous or more cynical and that they're missing the story, which is, what does this thing actually do?
Karl Bode: I think they were mostly overly credulous. Cynicism is punished in tech reporter to a point critical reporting is not really favored. I started to notice the problem when I was covering Broadband for many years. I would be studying what these companies—these regional monopolies that we have all over the country that charge consumers huge rates for slow spotty service. And I would read mainstream tech reporting on these issues, and they wouldn't mention that the monopolies existed. They wouldn't mention that competition didn't exist in these neighborhoods and that's why prices were high. They weren't telling the full story. And the reason they weren't telling the full story is they didn't want to upset advertisers. They didn't want to upset sources. They didn't want to upset the billionaires at the top of the media food chain who don't really want Comcast, NBC, Universal criticized at an NBC publication. So, I started noticing that was pretty all pervasive. And that extends to tech as well. There's a general reluctance to be truly critical of these companies given their political influence and their financial power.
Leah Dajches: If you’re just joining us, this is News Over Noise. I’m Leah Dajches.
Matt Jordan: And I’m Matt Jordan.
Leah Dajches: We're talking with freelance reporter Karl Bode about what makes for good technology reporting and what happens when it misses the mark. So, to get back to the story that existing journalism likes to write, one of the folks that tech reporters like to write about is Elon Musk, who has a hand in a lot of different tech industries. And so, year after year at Tesla, he'd have press conferences with annual shareholders meetings where he was talking about how autonomous driving was just six months away. And then the next year, he would get up and say, well, we think it's about nine months away this time. And this went on for a decade, basically. And yet every year, the tech reporters took what he said and reported it. And we had this overvaluation of Tesla's stock, which led him being able to buy half the world. So, in that case, we can see a definite problem with the lack of public interest journalism where the type of story that gets printed leads to an enormous misunderstanding about this particular individual and their credibility.
Karl Bode: Yeah. And I really haven't seen a lot of introspection by the tech press in terms of understanding their role in propping up his mythology. This is a man who doesn't have engineering degrees. He hasn't really done any engineering. I mean, some of his companies have succeeded, but it's arguable that they often succeed in spite of him—not because of him. But a lot of the folks in tech journalism that spent 15 years propping up the Musk mythology have now pivoted on a dime to pretend that they saw him for what he was the entire time. There hasn't been a lot of introspection in terms of their role in propping up his mythology. And if you read the stories today, you could read a 20, 25 paragraph story on his new AI project, and nowhere in that story will it mention that he bought a social media company and now traffics in racist memes for half the day. This is a man who holds multiple security clearances and is clearly having some significant problems after consuming a little bit too much fake news on the internet. And that stuff isn't discussed. And I don't see a great amount of introspection on the part of the press in their role of mythologizing this guy. And you see this through history. I always recommend that people go watch the movie The Lady and the Dale, which was about a con man who came in and convinced the country that a three wheeled car was going to be the future. And the press went right along with it. This was late '70s, I think. The press went along with it. And the older you get, the more you notice these cycles repeating themselves without America learning a whole lot from experience or repetition.
Matt Jordan: Well, I was noticing in the latest of these boom bust cycles of tech journalism, the Sam Bankman-Fried and the crypto bubble, a similar amount of lack of introspection. That the press really was the thing that fanned the flame, and it almost seems as if they're gullible agents or willing agents and a pump and dump scheme a lot of the time. And in fact, I just saw a story, a headline, the other day, which was saying, oh, now that Sam Bankman—SBF has been dealt with, crypto's moment is now. So, it's just like, set the repeat button on so that they're—so what do you—what's your take on crypto and the reporting on that one?
Karl Bode: It's the same problem. I saw that same story by the way. It was like, oh, this con man is out of the way. Everything's fine now. Let's get right back to hyping these products that don't actually do a whole lot. Again, the incentive—the interest is in making money. This is a country that is foundationally and primarily focused on making money. And that influences journalism to a severe degree, and that shows up. Crypto was a way for some speculative VC types and libertarian leaning guys to make a whole bunch of money with guesswork. And no matter how much they said it had practical implementations; nobody could actually show any examples. And then they realized that the power consumption of crypto was off the charts eroding any innovative potential that the technology had. That's not to say there might not be some practical implementations, but it is to say that it wound up being, as you noted, a pyramid scheme. And it wasn't just Bankman that was involved in it. It was massive. Celebrities hyped it at the Super Bowl. I mean, it was everywhere and unavoidable. And now we've just moved on to AI. It was as if the whole crypto bubble didn't happen. And now AI is the future, and there's just endless unskeptical tech coverage of what AI is going to do. And you see journalism running into AI without thinking about how or why they should implement it. Several outlets have implemented AI and found that it's so plagiarism prone that it costs them more money to bring an editor in to fix the problems that cost, and it saved them in the first place from using AI. Now, I will improve, but I'm not sure that a lot of the folks that run these media organizations are going to improve. And so, they mostly see AI as a frontal assault on labor and a way to cut corners and save money. They don't see it as a way to truly produce a better product. So, the hype cycle just continues. It's just cyclical and seemingly endless.
Matt Jordan: So, what would you—maybe slightly past peak AI, which I think was about midsummer. I think there was—that's where it was just being crammed into your cerebral cortex every day. What do you see that was right and wrong about the coverage of AI and tech reporting?
Karl Bode: Well, it's different because unlike NFTs, which were just silly, nonsensical, gibberish, the AI underlying language learning models have practical uses. There will be great applications through science, through writing, through journalism if applied correctly. So, it's going to be a little bit different in that I think AI will have a lot of useful use cases and won't prove to be just pure speculative nonsense. At the same time, the press is going to just make the same mistakes in terms of over—some company has a new badge that they were hyped over the last couple of weeks. It's AI powered badge that you wear on your chest, and it's supposed to replace your smartphone. But it does 30% of what a smartphone does. And it has a little AI client that tells you—tries to talk to you. It shines light on your hand instead of a screen. It's like basically they're trying to shortcut the smartphone. And I saw the press—pretty much every outlet that I listened to hyped this product because it came from a couple of Apple engineers. And there was a little bit of skepticism here and there, but I still generally don't think the press is good at critical thinking and isn't incentivized to do it.
Matt Jordan: So, it's just what—here's this new cool product. Look what it does. That takes their ball—their eye off the ball in a sense?
Karl Bode: Yeah. And maybe if you're lucky, somewhere in the 14th paragraph, they'll mention that this is a silly idea that people who aren't financially tethered to don't really think is going to succeed. But by and large, it's just the hype cycle. It's pretty endless.
Leah Dajches: So, I've been thinking of how the question we're always asking of AI is, can it essentially pass the Turing test, which essentially just means can it fool people into thinking that it's a human being? So, with all the endless—this hyping of AI and the things that it can do, do you think that we're essentially training people to think about other people like the Turing test? Can we fool the other person we're dealing with to think that I'm an authentic human being interacting with you when it's really just me and my AI interacting with you?
Karl Bode: Yeah. Well, these language learning models are so far off from the AI that we envisioned in sci-fi of the '70s, '80s, and '90s. These are not the same thing. They're not conscious. They're not aware. They're not truly intelligent. There's been some arguments that the narrative that AI is going to destroy the world is something that the tech giants encourage because it allows them to push for the idea of regulations that their lawyers will then write regulation that will entrench their position as the folks who have control over AI, that won't be open source. So, some of the apocalyptic stuff that tech companies put out there about taking over the world—and Elon Musk is one of them, is self-serving. They want to scare people. They want to get Congress to pass laws that are favorable to them that box out competitors and open source.
Matt Jordan: The dystopian story seems a lot more powerful to what they're doing than the story that says that chatbot keeps getting dumber by the day because it's learning from the internet. That seems like—
Karl Bode: Yeah. Right. And then you have the Twitter AI that's basically being Fed by all the nonsense that's going on the modern X platform right now. So, I just—I don't know. It's going to be an interesting year. The place I see AI being useful—and I use the term useful loosely, is in propaganda, online propaganda. Creating fake news stories really quickly to confuse the public. And also, there's been a plague of fake regulatory. When regulators make decisions, they found themselves consistently flooded with fake comments often from dead or completely manufactured people basically arguing in favor of industries preferred regulation. And I think that's going to be a big area where AI comes into place.
Matt Jordan: I was reading today about—it was a story with Gaza going on right now. What they're finding is that this is a major source of misinformation. This AI generated misinformation. And it's not just—there was a story about Adobe selling fake images of children in battle scenes and whatnot. And these were being picked up by major press organizations, news orgs and being used as if they were real. But also, the computational generation of both agreements to particular takes on the thing or just massaging the general public in a particular way on these platforms.
Karl Bode: Yeah. The goal of the modern propaganda efforts that we're seeing isn't always to mislead someone. The goal is to undermine any sense of real expertise. Is to confuse people so that they don't know who to turn to for accurate information. And that's where journalism was supposed to come into play. But you have these journalist outlets that aren't willing to do that, or they bring AI in to make half-cooked clickbait articles that don't inform the public either. So, it comes back to the fact that we need journalism that is not twisted by the financial incentives of industry. And the only way to do that, I tend to think, is to start exploring publicly funded journalism or one of several ways. There are other creative—I'm sure as you know, there's numerous proposals to pay journalists a living wage. But I think public funding is something that needs to be examined.
Leah Dajches: Well, one of the big mediators of all journalism right now, whether it's AI generated or people generated, is social media. And the social media platforms have responded to the problem of disinformation by essentially saying, whatever. So last year, Twitter dissolved its trust and safety team. And in June, this move was praised by Mark Zuckerberg. And last year, Meta dissolved its responsible innovation team that had evaluated the risks that some of Meta's products had on their impact on the information system. And both Meta and Twitter have laid off Tens of thousands of workers. And this seems to be an industry wide trend. And at a time when democracy is precarious, when there's conflict raging around the world. So, it's not surprising to me that there's a great deal of distrust of big tech and that there is congressional hearings about the role of big tech. What does this tell us about big tech's values? That at a moment when we need human agency and human criticism more than ever, that they're laying them off, them being humans? So, what do you think is the solution to this problem?
Karl Bode: Well, to be fair, content moderation at the scale that these companies operate—as my boss Mike Masnick at Techdirt always talks about, the scale of this is almost impossible to do well. So that's where you're starting. But these companies are also relentlessly bullied over the last couple of years to back even the feckless half competent content moderation they're already doing. A lot of GOP senators made a big push to pretend that they were interested in cracking down on monopoly power and corporate power. So, you saw—I don't know if you recall. A couple of years ago, they were really interested in antitrust reform, or the GOP claimed they wanted to engage in antitrust reform. And what that really was about was, they were seeking leverage to intimidate these companies telling them, don't moderate hate speech and political propaganda because it's useful to us. And so, tech companies have largely been willing to agree to that. They've backed off most of their efforts. And think that's massively problematic as we enter what's probably going to be one of the most bulls**t laden electoral cycles we've probably ever seen in American history.
Matt Jordan: What would you like to see? Do you think this is an FTC problem? Is this an FCC problem? Where would you like to see the policy come from on this and what might that policy be?
Karl Bode: It's really difficult for government to ever get involved here and say—even when government—even when the US government says, we going to look at propaganda and what we can do on social media, there's an immediate backlash, this being dystopian government overreach and free speech and all of that stuff happens. So, what think what's happening organically is people are fleeing to smaller, more manageable platforms. So, I think what you'll probably see is far less platforms where everybody, from your aunt to your punk rock college roommate, operate on one platform and a bunch of chaos. And I think people are going to increasingly flood to smaller social media outlets like maybe Blue Sky, ones that can competently do content moderation. That's a whole thorny subject, content moderation and doing it properly.
Leah Dajches: Well, one of these things these social media companies also do is data mine. They aggregate your data, and then they feed you the kind of stuff that you will engage with. Is that something that would help if they weren't able to use your data in that same way? So, would some regulation or policy decision have a positive impact in this area?
Karl Bode: This country is long overdue for a meaningful privacy law. So that's been foundational to a lot of our problems. I'm not sure it's as directly tethered to content moderation as other stuff, but yeah. You see everybody freaking out about TikTok and TikTok's ability to influence people at scale with propaganda. But they don't really talk as much about the fact that we have a massive industry of unregulated data brokers who are hoovering up every bit as much of data as TikTok and selling it to pretty much everybody on the internet, building very detailed profiles about people. And so, I think some of the hysteria about TikTok is to distract the broader public from the fact that we have been unwilling to pass even a basic internet-based privacy law or regulate data brokers. So that's foundational. Once you protect consumer data, you can start talking about other problems. But we have shown that we're not even interested in doing that. So, it's a very thorny problem.
Matt Jordan: So, let's paint a dystopic picture for our listeners. What is at stake when your data is being sold on the open market to any—by way of a broker to anybody who wants to get it? What does that leave you as a consumer vulnerable to?
Karl Bode: Well, some of the data being tracked is your daily movement. The big moneymaker for these companies has been location data on your cell phone coming from both your cell phone, your mobile carrier, your apps on your phone. They all track your daily location, sometimes down to the meter. So, they can tell when you've been to an abortion clinic. They can tell when you're at the homeless shelter. They can tell when you're at the doctor. That data is incorporated with other data about your income level, your education level, whether you're married, whether you're having a mental health crisis. It's all bundled into these giant profiles that are being built about Americans online. And then that data is shared pretty recklessly amongst dozens of data brokers with very little regard as to not only what they're collecting and how secure it is, but to who can buy it. So, you'll see the press gets very obsessed about simplicity like TikTok, but they don't talk about that whole deeper web of privacy concerns. One of the reasons we haven't passed a privacy law is because the US government has found it's very convenient to buy that data to bypass having to get a warrant. So, you've got the government culpable in this as well creating a privacy free for all. And it's not hard to think that could ultimately—if authoritarianism does take root in the United States, it's not very hard to see how that data could be exploited to track dissenters to attack abortion rights activists. So yeah, it's problematic. It's hugely problematic.
Matt Jordan: Why do you think Americans are so willing to get up in arms if the government would do this but seemingly look the other way if private companies are doing this?
Karl Bode: I don't know if—yeah. I don't know if they necessarily look the other way. There's a lot of disdain for big tech right now. There's a lot of complaint. Most people's broadband providers also are very terrible on privacy, and the public generally doesn't like them doing it either. I just think it speaks to the steady erosion of public trust in institutions, whether it's government or corporations or anything else. And that is where the propaganda comes in to help accelerate that lack of trust. And once you've got a public that doesn't know where to turn for truth and reality and facts, it's much easier to take power and to abuse them. And that's, again, where journalism is supposed to come in and play and be a firewall. But it's failed in that role.
Leah Dajches: Looking at some of your writing on broadband, one of these ideas that has been floated is this idea of community broadband as a way to escape this monopoly power. I mean, looking at our community, we're essentially like a one-horse town. So, we have Comcast as our provider. I think there's maybe one other that's trying to get in the market but hasn't really done so. But community broadband has been something that's talked about. And I think I just read that Cleveland was trying to get this online. What might that do for, say, news consumers if they got things like community broadband? How would that help in terms of getting all sorts of different types of content?
Karl Bode: Well, if you have a locally owned and operated broadband provider, they're going to be less inclined to rip you off because they live in the community. They're going to be less inclined to do things like limit your access to certain websites and certain speeds because they live in the community with you. They're more directly accountable. That shift towards community broadband is the direct result of decades of federal government policy dysfunction and consumer frustration at monopoly power. So, I think there's upwards of 900 communities that have now decided they're going to build their own broadband networks. And that's being aided hugely by this massive infusion of $42 billion in broadband subsidies from the infrastructure bill. So, one of my—part of my jobs is I pretty much spend every single week talking to different town or city around the United States and how they're dealing with this, what their plans are. And yeah, Cleveland is—Cleveland had suffered from redlining, which was the act of racial and class discrimination in terms of broadband deployment over decades. And so, they finally got tired of having poor terrible expensive broadband and decided they're going to build the network themselves. So, they're going to offer broadband for as little as $18 a month to some local low-income residents, which is a huge improvement. So, if you have that kind of local accountability, I think in the future of this country, everything is going to be local. Right now, our federal government is on its heels. There's a lot of incompetence. There's a lot of corruption. There's a lot of infighting. I think the real focus over the next few decades is going to be local fights, block by block fights. Cleveland building its own broadband infrastructure, local journalists building their own local journalist outfit. Because federally and nationally, we've got just so many problems. And I think we need to retool and reconsider and think locally.
Leah Dajches: Well, we'll end there, Karl. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing with us some of your insight about the tech world and some of its challenges.
Karl Bode: Thank you. I appreciate it.
Leah Dajches: I'm processing everything we just talked about. But I think the biggest takeaway is really understanding what tech reporting is and what tech journalism is. Prior to today, I'd never really thought much about the tech industry and how it was covered in the media. So, it was really interesting to learn more. And I think our conversation underscored the need for news and media literacy, especially as it relates to tech journalism. What did you think, Matt?
Matt Jordan: For me, one of the big reminders of this is that when we talk about big tech, the problem isn't the tech. It's big. The problem is scale. The problem is the way in which these things get beyond human control and go out of control. So, I think that's something that we would want more of in terms of coverage in the news.
Leah Dajches: That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guest was Karl Bode, a Seattle based freelance reporter with two decades of experience covering tech, telecom, media, politics, and consumer rights. To learn more, visit newsovernoise.org. I'm Leah Dajches.
Matt Jordan: And I'm Matt Jordan.
Leah Dajches: Until next time, stay well and well informed.
Matt Jordan: News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and WPSU. This program has been funded by the office of the executive vice president and provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State news literacy initiative.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]
Episode Credits:
Producer: Lindsey Whissel Fenton
Audio Engineers: Mickey Klein, Scott Gros, Clint Yoder
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications. This program has been funded by the office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
