Nina Jankowicz: Why Disinformation Is Still a Critical Issue for Democracy | Urgent Futures #24

09/11/24 • 88 min

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds signal in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.

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My guest this week is Nina Jankowicz.

Nina Jankowicz, the co-founder and CEO of The American Sunlight Project, is an internationally-recognized expert on disinformation and democratization, one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI, and the author of two books: How to Lose the Information War (2020), which The New Yorker called “a persuasive new book on disinformation as a geopolitical strategy,” and How to Be A Woman Online (2022), an examination of online abuse and disinformation and tips for fighting back, which Publishers Weekly named “essential.” Jankowicz has advised governments, international organizations, and tech companies, and testified before the US Congress, UK Parliament, and European Parliament.

In 2022, Jankowicz was appointed to lead the Disinformation Governance Board, an intra-agency best practices and coordination entity at the Department of Homeland Security; she resigned the position after a sustained disinformation campaign caused the Biden Administration to abandon the project. From 2017-2022, Jankowicz has held fellowships at the Wilson Center, where she led accessible, actionable research about the effects of disinformation on women and freedom of expression around the world. She advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry on strategic communications under the auspices of a Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship in 2016-17. Early in her career, she managed democracy assistance programs to Russia and Belarus at the National Democratic Institute.

Nina has lived a fascinating life, which is not to say that it’s always been easy. In many ways she has lived out the very things that she’s spent her career researching and working to address.

I first encountered Nina’s work in How to Lose the Information War, which really clarified my understanding of how Russian influence operations work. This was in 2020, when concern about disinformation and its impacts had reached all-time highs, especially with regard to the rise of conspiracy theories like QAnon, antivax communities, and more. How to Lose the Information War was a book that helped me see how these seemingly convoluted outcomes were grounded in basic, repeatable strategies (not just by Russians per se, but by anyone seeking to manipulate the information sphere at scale).

In recognition of her work and scholarship, Nina was tapped to lead the Disinformation Governance Board at the Department of Homeland Security in 2022. But her tenure was short-lived—in no small part because of the very influence operations and toxified media environment that she had been working to illuminate and address. We talk about this more in-depth in the episode.

Already in 2022 talk of disinformation and misinformation didn’t have the fangs that it had during the Trump years. In some ways that speaks to half of the American populace feeling like they could ramp down from the state of hypervigilance they’d maintained during the preceding years. But just because it wasn’t as hot of a topic of conversation anymore didn’t mean that bad actors weren’t still endeavoring to interfere with the information environment. If anything, the lack of a magnifying glass probably made for ideal conditions to build out new operations and social communities.

Which is why Nina’s latest effort, The American Sunlight Project feels like such an important organization at this moment. Yes, there are complicated questions about what means we use to determine if something is true, but at bare minimum we need an information space predicated on good-faith attempts to reach consensus, even if through debate. To do that, we need to understand the media environm...

My guest this week is Nina Jankowicz.

Nina has lived a fascinating life, which is not to say that it’s always been easy. In many ways she has lived out the very things that she’s spent her career researching and working to address.

Previous Episode

Michael Mezzatesta: Why Isn't the Economy Working? An Economist's Case for Post-Growth | #23

My guest this week is Michael Mezzatesta.

To say the economy is complex is an understatement. It’s among the most complex systems humanity has ever concocted, full of high-level math and specialized theory that makes it impenetrable to outsiders. Factor in the layers of financial apparatus and we’re talking about something that the average person is right to assume is totally beyond their grasp.

And yet, it’s absolutely vital that the public understands the basics of what’s going on and how we can participate in making change. This is what makes economics communicators so essential, and why I’m thrilled to share this conversation with Michael Mezzatesta. Over the past few years, he’s used his background as an economist to make economics and finance topics accessible to the public, and not just any economics topics, but specifically those related to growth and climate change. Over 99% of scientists agree that climate change is human-caused—and that the next few years will be critical in mitigating the effects of global heating caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

To take meaningful action, humanity will necessarily need to try a range of actions, and one critical lever is the economy. How might democratic societies induce systems change toward deemphasizing growth and prioritizing justice and wellbeing?

Yes, the scale of the problem is immense, but there are ideas, theories, and tactics that many of us have never considered or grasped in any depth. I believe that encountering these ideas, and being shown that we can understand them, is a critical first step toward generating action. This is why I view Michael’s work as so important: it builds baseline awareness and understanding, and invites solidarity and the belief that change is not only possible, but maybe even a lot closer to realizing than we’d ever imagine.

BIOMichael Mezzatesta is an economist and educator using social media to spread ideas for a better future. His videos analyze sustainability through the lenses of economics, finance, and culture. By highlighting intersectional issues and pushing for systemic solutions, Michael encourages people to think differently about climate change – and to imagine better futures. Previously, Michael got an economics degree from Stanford and spent a few years working as a consultant at McKinsey & Company before jumping into growth & marketing work at climate/technology startups in Los Angeles. He’s currently involved in a few organizations – including Earth4All, the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, and the Post Growth Institute – that advocate for economic justice and systems change.

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Guests on Urgent Futures are experts across art, science, media, technology, AI, philosophy, economics, mathematics, anthropology, journalism, and more. We live in complex times; these are the voices who will help you orient to emerging futures.

CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.

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Gerardo Ceballos & Paul R. Ehrlich: 'Before They Vanish'—All The Life We Can Still Save from the Sixth Extinction | #25

1 Recommendations

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds signals in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.

My guests this week are Gerardo Ceballos & Paul R. Ehrlich

Gerardo Ceballos, one of the world’s leading ecologists, is a professor at the Institute of Ecology at National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He has established more than twenty protected areas in Mexico and is the author or coauthor of more than 55 books. Ehrlich and Ceballos are coauthors of The Annihilation of Nature: Human Extinction of Birds and Mammals.

Paul R. Ehrlich is the emeritus Bing Professor of Population Studies in the Department of Biology and the president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University. He is the author of The Population Bomb and Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect.

I don’t even know where to begin with this conversation. On the one hand, I’m still a little dumbfounded that I had the opportunity to have a conversation with two of the world’s leading conservation scientists, whose contributions not only to their respective fields but to the planet are historically significant.

On the other hand, this is one of the most devastating conversations I’ve had on the show, rivaled only by my chat with William Rees, which I’d say is thematically linked. The inciting incident for the conversation is the publication of their incredible new book, Before They Vanish, which they co-authored with Rodolfo Dirzo, who wasn’t able to also join the call because he’s out in the field. As you might gather from the title, the book is part-blaring siren, part-love letter. In in, the authors highlight how precious life on Earth really is, detailing not only the sheer variety of flora and fauna we are blessed to share the planet with, but how entangled they all are within ecosystems we humans have done so little to understand, and therefore have allowed ourselves to push to the brink of extinction.

Before I go any further, I want to say what I always say in episodes like this: go buy the book. These conversations are invitations to the subject matter, and I do hope they’re illuminating, but the book is where you’ll have the necessary time and mental space to fully grapple with the ideas.

Anyway, however bad you imagine the present extinction crisis is, which some have called the sixth mass extinction, this book basically argues it’s worse even than that. That stems from several factors, including the lack of historical data, the amount of information we still don’t have about various ecosystems, and the way we tend to measure extinctions—at the species level rather than at the level of discrete populations. The book also outlines the drivers of the extinction crisis and steps that we could take individually and collectively to mitigate the harms of modern industrial society, and advocate for protections that will begin to heal the planet.

Before people get up in my comments: I’m well aware of how individual responsibility has been weaponized by fossil fuel companies, and I too am wary putting the onus on individuals. That said, through their careers, these three authors have shown how much individuals can actually do. And we’re in the all hands-on-deck, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink moment to protect biodiversity. We should want to protect biodiversity because life is sacred, but even if that doesn’t land, as Ehrlich says in the interview, if we destroy biodiversity, we humans likely won’t survive either.