On this month’s episode of Looks Like New, we’re bringing you a conversation between guest mentors from MEDlab’s Open Social Incubator, where community organizers from all over the world come together to explore alternatives to dominant corporate platforms. These innovators prioritize community building, safety features, and governance structures in their designs. The discussion featured Rudy Fraser, founder of BlackSky on Bluesky; Evan Henshaw-Plath also known as Rabble, a former Twitter developer now working on Nostr; and Christine Lemmer-Webber, a leading author of the ActivityPub protocol, software developer, and Executive Director of the Spritely Institute.

These speakers, alongside audience questions, shared insights into the challenges and opportunities of creating open social software. They explored ways to prevent the re-centralization of power and ensure the protection of marginalized users.

To answer these questions we spoke to Marjorie Kelly, a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the Democracy Collaborative, author of The Making of a Democratic Economy (co-authored with Ted Howard), Owning our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution, and The Divine Right of Capital. For years Kelly has been a thought leader in the next generation of employee ownership, impact investing, and the construction of a community-rooted democratic economy.  

In this episode, we explore Marjorie Kelly’s long list of experiences and unique perspectives on the economic situation we all find ourselves in. MEDLab director  Nathan Schneider moderates a discussion with Marjorie Kelly and a cast of live audience members about our unique socio-economic challenges and what we can do about them. 

What does it mean to be a fan in the digital age? What do fan practices look like?

In this episode Dr. Jenkins takes us through fan activism to purchasing practices in China as he discusses research on emerging fan cultures. In this episode we will learn all about the new landscape of global fandom in an increasingly digitally mediated world.

She serves as a lecturer in digital cultures at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, Ireland. Her first book, Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform, was published in 2023.

Rachel’s work digs into the complexity of financial exchange. How especially in the digital era, payment and the platforms and tools that we use to do it bring different social relations into being. Her work offers an ethnography of sorts, drawing on real-life research she’s conducted into money burners and Bitcoin fanatics.

She’s a bracing critic of the connection between big tech and big finance yet offers frameworks for a hopeful future.

In this month’s episode, we dive into what tokens are, what makes them different from regular money, and how they matter today.

How can blockchain help build an ecosystem where artists and galleries support each other – one where creators have sovereignty over their data, and see it preserved for generations to come? In this episode, we hear from Kelani Nichole, the founder of TRANSFER Gallery, which exhibits digital art both online and IRL. She explains the challenges of preserving and maintaining media art, why “artist data sovereignty” is so important, and where blockchain fits into her vision of digital art’s sustainability.