The Tech Policy Press Podcast

This was a landmark week for tech accountability in US courts. Juries in New Mexico and California delivered verdicts finding tech giants Meta and Google liable for harms to young users on their platforms, decisions that are projected to open the door to more lawsuits alleging that social media creates addiction or endangers kids.
Today’s guest sees these developments as positive and in line with the types of thinking he believes will help improve the internet. Olivier Sylvain is a professor at Fordham Law School and the author of a new book titled Reclaiming the Internet: How Big Tech Took Control—and How We Can Take It Back, published by Columbia Global Reports.
Justin Hendrix interviewed him at Book Culture, a bookstore on 112th Street in New York City.

AI hype is everywhere, and the CEOs of many tech firms are promising that the tech will soon eclipse human intelligence. The trillions in investment towards this goal and the massive deployment of capital and the human and natural resources it purchases both requires this kind of hype and causes it to compound.
Today’s guests are studying this phenomenon from a variety of perspectives, building out a line of inquiry they call "Hype Studies." It's the subject of an occasional series of contributions to Tech Policy Press. Guests include:
Jascha Bareis, a postdoctoral political scientist at the University of Fribourg;
Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves, a sociologist of design and technology pursuing a PhD at the Tecnopolítica unit of the Open University of Catalonia;
Marché Arends, a South African independent investigative journalist.

Across the world, governments and other institutions are racing to apply artificial intelligence in countless ways. In a draft paper forthcoming in the UC Law Journal titled "How AI Destroys Institutions," Boston University law professors Woodrow Hartzog and Jessica Silbey argue that the design of AI systems—from large language models to predictive and automated decision tools—is fundamentally incompatible with the civic institutions that hold democratic society together, including the rule of law, universities, a free press, and civic life itself. This isn't necessarily because AI is being misused or falling into the wrong hands, they say—in most instances AI is working exactly as intended and, in doing so, eroding the expertise, decision-making structures, and human connection that give institutions their legitimacy.

Early this year, following the deaths of Keith Porter, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents and the violent immigration raids on communities across the United States, 1,500 Google workers signed a new petition demanding the company cut contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Justin Hendrix spoke to two of the employees who signed the petition about why they signed it, the environment inside the company, and how they think about the risk they face for speaking out.

Online fraud has become one of the fastest-growing criminal enterprises on the planet. Deepfake fraud cases are surging, and Deloitte analysts project that generative AI-driven banking fraud alone could climb to roughly as much as $40 billion in the US alone by 2027.
The problem is not just the volume. It's the architecture. These are no longer opportunistic scams—they are industrialized, AI-assisted operations, and the synthetic media tools that power them are becoming cheaper and more convincing by the month.
A new report on deepfake financial fraud from Data & Society maps this threat. Justin Hendrix spoke to its authors, including:
Alice Marwick, director of research at Data & Society, and
Anya Schiffrin, co-director of the tech policy and innovation concentration at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.