Looks Like New
Episodes
Who owns the commons?
23 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
MEDLab research fellow Kadallah Burrowes speaks with Lauren Gardner, Executive Director of Open Source Collective, about what it means to build infras...
can ai be rebuilt to serve communities?
26 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this month's episode, in conversation with MEDLab fellow Stephanie Abdalla, Dr. Gebru discusses AI ethics research, the history of the AGI movement...
what is the future of digital capitalism?
26 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Looks Like New, MEDLab's Kadallah Burrowes sits down with political economist Nick Srnicek to examine the rise of platform capitali...
What Can Ancient Cosmologies Teach the Future?
22 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Looks Like New, host Kadallah Burrowes is joined by Ytasha Womack, author, filmmaker, and independent scholar whose work has been f...
What is the future of the sacred space in a digital world?
25 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On this month's episode of Looks Like New, MEDLab’s Stephanie Abdallah speaks with Dr. Nesrine Mansour about rethinking architecture in the age of d...
How Has Colonialism Evolved Under Big Tech?
27 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this month’s episode, MEDLab’s Stephanie Abdalla interviews Dr. Nick Couldry about the intricate relationship between media, power, and societa...
What stories do our machines tell and what do they remember?
23 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this month’s episode of Looks Like New, hosted by MEDLab’s associate director Júlia Martins Rodrigues, we speak with Camila Galaz, an interdis...
Who will own the future of gig work?
25 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Who will own the future of gig work? In this month's episode of Looks Like New, MEDlab Associate Director Júlia Martins speaks with Minsun Ji, Execut...
How are video games rewriting narratives?
28 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Looks Like New, host Júlia Martins Rodrigues speaks with Warren Liu, a Media Studies doctoral student. Liu examines how video game...
Who gets to belong in the digital future?
24 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Who gets to participate in society—and how do we build systems that serve everyone, not just the privileged few? In this episode of Looks Like N...
Are you being trained?
29 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
AI is advancing at lightning speed—so fast that questions of ownership and data use often get left behind. What control do we really have over our d...
Is anything new in influencer marketing?
24 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s easy to look at today’s pop culture and advertising and feel nostalgic for earlier generations—but were those eras really so different? Wha...
Are our health apps negatively impacting us?
27 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the digital age, it's hard to resist free conveniences—but are they really free? So much of our data is constantly being bought and sold without ...
How is open-source software like magic?
27 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Writing code can be like casting a spell: magic words, written in a special language, bring new worlds into existence. But spells can have consequence...
What if social media were under our control?
23 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Political discourse around social media has become increasingly significant, particularly during the recent presidential transition. Debates about Tik...
How has racism held back economic democracy?
26 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How connected is the struggle for racial justice and the fight for a democratic economy? How has racism hindered the fight, and how can activists work...
Is online life heading into dark forests?
28 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In an ever more messy online media environment, it can be hard to know where to let ourselves be truly creative. This month on Looks Like New, MEDLab ...
What does digital privacy mean for young people?
24 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Whether or not we have children of our own, many of us have wondered how we approach their privacy in the digital world. What's the best way we can ap...
Where did our economic system go wrong?
19 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Every one of us has felt the impact of the shortcomings within our current economic system. Where did this system go wrong? More importantly, what can...
What can social work teach us about media literacy for children?
29 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Within a rapidly evolving digital landscape, it can be difficult to identify the more harmful effects of digital media use on children. This month ...
Can technology help us obtain a brighter future?
25 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This month we interviewed Dr. Shamika Klassen, a User Interface Scientist and recent graduate of C.U. Boulder’s Department of Information Science. ...
How can technology effectively relay academic knowledge to mass audiences?
28 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Christopher Bell is a culture consultant at Skydance, Disney, and Pixar as well as a Associate Professor of Media Studies at C.U. Boulder, "Harry ...
How do you give a technology to its community?
23 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Online technologies have often taken on a life of their own when a community forms around them. Users put their tools to use in ways the designers nev...
What comes after social media?
25 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A new kind of social media is emerging that is open, interoperable, and not controlled by any one company. One iteration of it is called Bluesky. Blue...
What does fan culture look like in the digital age?
30 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On this episode we have the privilege of hosting a distinguished returning guest, who’s groundbreaking research has reshaped the landscape of media ...
What exactly are tokens, anyway?
22 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Rachel O’Dwyer is a writer and researcher whose work looks at digital economies and culture. Her writing touches on online transactions, art markets...
Is there space for generative AI in participatory culture?
25 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On this episode, we host Dr. Henry Jenkins, an esteemed scholar of fan studies, participatory culture, and transmedia. As the director of the MIT C...
What is the new language of AI?
29 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This month we welcome Benjamin Edwards, AI and Machine Learning Reporter for Ars Technica. He specializes in computer and video game history, has been...
Can blockchain offer artists and galleries a way to work together?
15 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
With the rise of NFTs, blockchain and cryptocurrency took the art world by storm. But often, this meant doubling down on art’s status as a financial...
Who is keeping an eye on AI?
27 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As AI systems become more widespread, it is becoming all the more important to know we can trust them. This month, Rohit Taware interviews Co-Founder ...
Can open social media help nonprofits?
28 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
With the rise of open social media platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky, nonprofits have new opportunities to develop close conversations with the comm...
How did open social media platforms originate?
23 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the aftermath of a chaotic Twitter takeover, many people have moved away from centralized social media platforms to a new set of social platforms t...
What difference will quantum computing make?
25 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
At a time when many people are focused on recent advances in artificial intelligence, another transformative technology is quietly emerging to reshape...
How does broadband policy affect our Internet access?
26 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
IMAGE BY Alexis Kenyon via DALL-E Many of us assume everyone has access to the Internet. In light of the last few years of global pandemic, however, w...
How is crypto taking hold in India?
23 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Being an entrepreneur in the international cryptocurrency market involves numerous challenges—from government regulations to cultural context. These...
Are blockchain developers creating the new internet?
01 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Blockchain was created to build democratic systems but more often than not we see stories of scams, frauds and attacks. Despite these allegations, the...
Will ChatGPT really change everything?
26 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
ChatGPT, short for “Conversational Generative Pre-training Transformer,” is an advanced language model developed by OpenAI that can unders...
Can blockchain technology support mutual aid?
22 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Cryptocurrency has been in the news this past month after a cascade of bankruptcies unraveled a web of fraud. This comes after a year of already decli...
Can a small newsroom survive the attention economy?
23 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
With the journalism industry dwindling across the country, journalists formed the Colorado Sun as a beacon of hope. The Colorado Sun is a small but mi...
What was the earliest social media like?
25 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Do social media networks have to be addictive, or polarizing, or advertising-funded? This conversation explores lessons from the past that could help ...
What Comes After Democracy?
29 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Democracy seems to be in crisis around the world. Aspiring dictators are on the rise in many countries, and the flows of information are under the con...
Can Blockchains Stop War Crimes?
23 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
These days it seems like cryptocurrencies and blockchains are mostly enabling abuses: speculative bubbles, malware attacks, and money laundering for r...
Can the Internet be a public space?
26 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When we think about social media platforms and online interactions, it might seem like we are merely experiencing feeds of information that are curate...
How real are esports?
28 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Competitive entertainment has always been an essential part of human culture. Traditionally, sports have been the preferred form of competition, howev...
What should we decolonize?
24 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
News headlines have been full of debates about Critical Race Theory (CRT), books and topics being banned in schools, and calls to remove statues of co...
Can algorithms be fair?
25 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If you’ve noticed your social media platforms and web searches are giving you personalized results or advertisements, you might be curious about how...
What can the Internet learn from the past?
27 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When we design the future, we rely on history, whether we like it or not. In December 2021, the MEDLab and the United Nations Internet Governance Foru...
What is Black Twitter?
24 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Twitter is a social media platform that has played a significant role in everything from politics, news, to social justice organizing. How do marginal...
What has happened to Lebanon?
26 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
News from the Arab world tends to come to us in the United States in the form of dramatic spectacle that oversimplifies complex situations. Lebanon is...
Where did public media come from?
28 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Long before our present day audio boom, public broadcasting in the United States flourished. Radio, a powerful way to connect people, underwent many t...
Can social media be ethical?
24 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
With all of the headlines about scandals and issues within technology companies and social media platforms, one may ask how we got where we are today....
What happens when we wear our tech?
27 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
You have likely heard of or used FitBit, Apple Smartwatches, GoPros or other devices we affix to our bodies each day. Despite the rapid development of...
Tensions in the Archive: Rediscovering The Non Aligned Movement with Mila Turajlić
22 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How did the Global South once inscribe its battle for liberation into media archives and how does accessing and viewing this material change through t...
How Are 24 Colorado Newspapers Staying Locally Owned?
25 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
After years of shedding reporters and newsrooms, Colorado is home to a new experiment in sustainable journalism. In early May, the National Trust for ...
Mutualist infrastructure: A conversation with Sara Horowitz
28 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
As the US federal government considers once-in-a-generation investments in infrastructure, is it possible to also enable a new commitment to a democra...
Why Do We Turn to the Internet for Support?
23 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the last year, many of us have relied on the Internet even more than before. As we process life’s individual and collective trauma, do we turn to...
What Is the Internet Doing to the Environment?
25 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Most of us use the Internet each day with our smartphones and devices. But too rarely do we consider how our connections are possible. How does the In...
What Is a Black Media Philosophy?
26 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
A lot of us are thinking about the legacies of racism these days, and about a media ecosystem that seems to hinder any hope of progress. But too rarel...
Can Software Handle Ethics?
29 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Free and open-source software is a kind of miracle. It’s community-created technology, a commons that anyone can contribute to and use. But thos...
Could online justice be restorative?
25 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The stakes for moderation and governance in online communities are getting higher and higher. Harms can be very serious, from election manipulation to...
Can artists control their own business?
27 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Art has often been the vanguard of new tech. It was through art that many people got interested in the Internet to begin with, or became willing to pa...
Does News Need New Tech?
23 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Brick House is a new news organization that calls itself “the wolf-proof media cooperative.” It has emerged in part out of a failed experi...
Should we all have a Great Firewall?
26 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This month, President Donald Trump has threatened to ban the Chinese-owned platforms TickTock and WeChat. This comes after years of China banning majo...
How do you invent the future?
03 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Activist Adrienne Maree brown writes that the work of social change requires “science fictional behavior”— which is surely all the more ...
Which images count as evidence?
25 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We are haunted and mobilized by images. The cellphone video of George Floyd’s death has set cities on fire, elevated Black struggles for justice...
What Makes Tech Inclusive?
29 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Often, discussions about diversity in the tech industry focus on mere representation. But in this discussion from Boulder Startup Week, we take inspir...
How can we collaborate at a distance?
28 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How can we collaborate at a distance? The COVID-19 pandemic has many of us rapidly changing how we work—and wondering how many of the changes will s...
What is direct democracy?
01 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s guest is Evan Ravitz, a proponent of direct democracy, who served on the City of Boulder’s Campaign Finance and Elections Working ...
What happened to hacktivism?
28 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The cultures of computer hacking have made their way from marginal subcultures to becoming driving forces in the world as we know it. Facebook’s hea...
Who Cares About Privacy?
28 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
While digital privacy issues often get a lot of attention and even alarmism, it rarely seems to change behavior. Even if it did, do individual choices...
Can Networks Liberate Work?
27 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
There is a kind of dream out there that, once we get the gizmos set up just right, work will be transformed. While many speculate about this, Kevin Ow...
Can Business Account for Care Work?
21 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
This month, Spanish activist Stacco Troncoso and his collaborators released the DisCO Manifesto (disco.coop), which proposes a new model for organizat...
What’s Wrong with Unicorns?
24 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Unicorns are mythical animals. It’s also the name for a mythical idea that drives the tech startup economy. In that context, a unicorn is the rare $...
What’s New With Textiles?
26 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
We might not think about textiles as advanced technology, but in fact it was textile looms that helped inspire the designs of the earliest computers. ...
What is public-benefit journalism?
22 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The priorities of community journalism have often come into conflict with corporate priorities—something we know well in Colorado. A new publication...
What makes computers happy?
29 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
More and more people feel uncomfortable with the role of big tech companies in their everyday lives, but they don’t feel they have any other opt...
What makes education technology ethical?
27 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Educators today feel pressured to keep up with the latest technology, and big tech companies are eager to turn that pressure into a market for themsel...
Is Information a Public Good?
23 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Longmont, Colorado is considering a new way of funding news—through a proposed library-district tax. This idea builds on a model, the Community Info...
What is next for democracy?
25 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
We’re in a moment of crisis for democracy around the world. But democracy doesn’t just need defense. Santiago Siri believes it needs a bet...
What is a human?
29 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
This month’s guest is Douglas Rushkoff, one of our most prominent and provocative thinkers on technology and culture. In his latest book, a mani...
How Can We Self-Organize at Scale?
04 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
This month’s guest is Nathalia Scherer of DAOstack who asks How Can We Self-Organize at Scale? Can we create big, ambitious projects without cor...
What is a Lab?
04 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
What Is a Lab? With Lori Emerson of the Media Archaeology Lab CU Boulder’s Media Archaeology Lab is a place where artists, scholars, students, a...