Jeff Jarvis was born in 1954 and studied journalism at Illinois’s Northwestern University. He worked as a TV critic and created the magazine Entertainment Weekly, later leading the online arm of US media company Advance Publications. Since 2001, he has been blogging at Buzzmachine.com and in 2005 he became an associate professor at City University of New York’s graduate school of journalism, directing its new media programme before retiring last year. Jarvis, who lives in New York, is the co-host of the podcasts This Week in Google and AI Inside.
What made you want to write your new book, The Web We Weave?
My glib answer is that somebody has to defend the freedoms of the internet because I fear they’re under attack. It’s important to say that I’m not defending the corporations or current proprietors of the internet, but I do think that moral panic over the net will lead to regulation that will affect freedoms for all. This turned into more of a critique of media’s coverage than I had predicted.
Why do you think the media turned against the internet and big tech?
Media have been engaged in moral panics going way back. What separates this media moral panic from others is the conflict of interest involved: in the media’s view, this new technology competes with them for both audience and advertising dollars – and that is rarely revealed. In my book, I chronicle the failures of Rupert Murdoch on the internet and the billions of dollars that he wasted. He decided to turn on it because he couldn’t succeed at it. The Wall Street Journal fired the first shot with a series demonising the cookie and ad targeting.
Yes, but social media give a megaphone to our worst instincts and voices…
It does that, but it also enables communities who were not there before to come together. To be clear, I’m an old white guy who learns things very late in life, but I’ve learned a lot by reading the scholars of Black Twitter – André Brock Jr, Charlton McIlwain, Meredith Clark. The internet also enabled these communities to come together in a way that they could not gather because they were not heard in mass media.
In the book, you tell Shoshana Zuboff and other critics of surveillance capitalism to get a grip. Why?
I object to Zuboff’s use of the term “surveillance”, especially today when we have governments that have behind them the power of law, imprisonment, fine and weapons as they surveil populaces. And so to trivialise surveillance by characterising advertising cookies as that is offensive to me and overblown. Should there be changes around ad targeting? Sure, but I don’t think it starts with that kind of a klaxon call.
It feels intuitively right to me whenever someone says that phones and social media are negatively affecting our mental health. Why do you push back on that?
As I read the literature on this, it’s clear that the research is far from definitive either way. When we blame the phone for young people’s problems, we once again pass over the much more serious issues. In the US, children are afraid to go to school for [fear of] getting shot. Young women evermore have no control over their bodies. They are inheriting a climate that we fucked up. They are in the midst of a fascist takeover of the country. Oh yeah, let’s blame the phones.
What’s your take on AI?
I’m more frightened of the AI boys than I am of their AI. The problem is they have corrupted the language around it, so the word “safety” is now meaningless because the doomsters treat safety as them not destroying humankind, when there are very real safety issues that need to be dealt with around bias and fraud and the environment and so on. So it’s difficult to have the conversation now because we don’t have common terms.
What impact will the Trump administration have on regulation – and more broadly on your vision for reclaiming the internet?
I think you’re going to find the companies themselves not regulated, unless Donald Trump doesn’t like them. And this is what we saw at the last minute with [Jeff] Bezos’s horrid Washington Post editorial decision and with Meta trying to back away from all politics. No one wants to make judgments because it’s expensive and risky to do so. On the one hand, we’ll find companies and investors run wild. On the other, we will see some vindictive action from the Trumpists against certain companies because they have this belief that they’ve been discriminated against.
Are you surprised by how far to the right certain Silicon Valley billionaires have leaned?
I think one shouldn’t be surprised about the corrupting venality of billions of dollars and I think that’s what we saw at work in some of those cases. The argument that I heard during the election was: “Well, maybe the moguls have gone to the right, but the workers have not.” I don’t know. It wasn’t that long ago when employees at Google revolted over machine learning and defence. So far, I’m not hearing any rumblings of a worker revolt from Anthropic against working with evil empire Palantir for defence contracts. So I don’t know where the pulse of Silicon Valley will be, and I fear that it could go farther right all around or farther into a safety cave.
Do you think Trump’s relationship with Elon Musk will go the distance?
[laughs] God knows. It’s often said that they both want centre stage, so this won’t work, but Trump loves billionaires and crazy, outlandish talk. And Musk, obviously, loves being at the centre of power. His investment in Twitter seemed insane, and it certainly was damaging, but it gave him this power, and this power led to Tesla stock going up. So it probably turned out to be a good investment – in ruining America. I don’t think he’s going to disappear.
One of your solutions for making a better internet is to demote the geeks. That feels hard to imagine.
Yeah, but looking back at history, it becomes less difficult. Printers were all-important at the beginning, they made every decision and then they were just hired to do an industrial job. Radio, similarly, was a kind of mysterious technology until it wasn’t, and I think the same will be true of the internet and, eventually, AI. With AI, I think that, ironically – and unintentionally – it’s the geeks demoting themselves. I’m not a coder but I can now have a computer do what I want it to do without coders. Eventually, it’s not hard to imagine that anyone can tell the machine what they want to do and it will then do it without the technologists.
• The Web We Weave: Why We Must Reclaim the Internet from Moguls, Misanthropes, and Moral Panic by Jeff Jarvis is published by Basic Books on 5 December (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
