Frank McCourt shares five key insights from his new book with Michael J. Casey, “Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age.”
Frank McCourt is the executive chairman of McCourt Global, a private family investment firm. He is also the founder and executive chairman of Project Liberty, a broad-based effort to build a better web for a better world. The project includes the development of an open internet protocol (the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol), which shifts data rights from platforms to people.
Michael Casey is Chief Content Officer at the CoinDesk media company, host of the Money Reimagined podcast, and the Chairman of the Consensus conference. He has worked as a journalist, including eighteen years with Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, and was a founding staffer at MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative.
Below, Frank shares five key insights from his new book with Michael, Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age.
1. The internet is broken.
Despite the connectivity and conveniences today’s internet provides, its current user experience is broken. The tech that underpins our daily lives is doing real damage. It’s fueling a youth mental health crisis, incentivizing the spread of misinformation and inflammatory content, breaking down civil discourse, and undermining our democratic institutions. These destructive trends all connect back to a corrupted and disabled information system.
From my perspective as a fifth-generation builder, the problem starts with the web’s basic architecture. For more than 130 years, my family has been developing infrastructure in America, starting with roads in the late 19th century and, eventually, the fiberoptic systems that enabled the internet back in the 1990s. We have an infrastructure and engineering problem; a design deficiency. The internet’s flawed design is the root cause of incredible harm.
The problems we’re seeing today are not an accident. It’s what happens when technology is co-opted and corrupted in ways that prioritize a few platforms, rather than the people who use it.
To read the remaining 5 insights – or to listen to Frank read them himself – visit Next Big Idea Club’s website. You can learn more about OUR BIGGEST FIGHT: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age on ourbiggestfight.com.