Social Media Should Be Public Infrastructure (with Ben Cerveny)

"My thesis is that humans invent things all the time, and for the first 30 years, we call them technology," says Ben “Neb” Cerveny, president of the Foundation for Public Code. "And then if they work, we call them infrastructure." 

Ben was part of the original team that built one of the defining Web 2.0 platforms, Flickr, and he even gave Flickr its name. Currently, he is applying what he learned from building digital communities to the next wave of software, web services, and urban planning; Foundation for Public Code, he says, has helped convince most of Europe’s governments that tech solutions don’t need to be privately owned and controlled. 

Today on Revolution.Social, Ben and Rabble discuss the loss of human curation, which made early social media special; why software has just as much “terroir” as film or food; and how we might govern digital spaces by consensus. They also talk about the origins of Flickr, why Facebook is the fast food of social media, and how to build social platforms with civic intentionality.

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This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from ⁠⁠LightningPod⁠⁠, and executive produced by Alice Chan from ⁠⁠Flock Marketing⁠⁠.

To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit ⁠⁠⁠https://revolution.social/