Ethan Zuckerman

Twenty years ago, my day job was researching internet censorship, and my side hustle was advising activist organizations on internet security. I tried to help journalists in China access the unfiltered internet, and helped demonstrators in the Middle East avoid having their online content taken down.
Back then, unfiltered internet meant “the internet as accessed from the United States,” and most censorship-circumvention strategies focused on giving someone in a censored country access to a U.S.

In a booth at Ted’s Fish Fry, in Troy, New York, my friend Daniel Beck and I sketched out our plans for the metaverse. It was November 1994, just as the graphical web was becoming a thing, and we thought that the 3-D web could be just a few tweaks down the road. In our version of the metaverse, a server would track the identity of objects and their location in virtual space, but you’d render the objects locally, loaded to your hard drive off of a CD-ROM.

Hospitals in the United States are again filling up with COVID-19 patients, most of whom have refused COVID-19 vaccinations, likely due in part to medical misinformation circulating online and on television. We are eight months removed from a violent attack on the nation’s capital, organized online and carried out by individuals who believe—incorrectly—that the 2020 election was stolen.

Over the past six months, it has seemed like every news story is about the coronavirus, or President Donald Trump’s failed response to it. It’s been a challenge for even crucial issues like racial justice and police violence to break into the media agenda for more than a few days at a time.