‘Hard Fork’ Live, Part 1: Satya Nadella and Cindy Cohn

21:49And then I talk to other people who say, I can't get enough engineers. I want more than I have. So where are you on that? In two years, you're going to have more engineers or fewer? Yeah. So I think in the early 80s, if someone had come to us and said, hey, we're going to have three and a half billion people in the world who are all going to be typists, we would have said, why does the world need three and a half billion typists? Except we do. We all get up in the morning and type. But we're doing, quote, unquote, information work, knowledge work, and so on. So that type of change is going to have to happen.

22:26And each of them will have a name and it'll have a wage support. That reinvention, right? So the software developer of the past to the software developer of the future may have the similar sort of skills. But the work they do is different because they're managing a group of 100 agents, 1 ,000 agents. In fact, there's a beautiful term one of my colleagues has, which is just like in software development, we already had this concept of test coverage. One of the new things that we are learning is what I'll call cognitive coverage, right? So what does a software developer do? I have a repo full of code that was written by agents.

23:06I am cognitively understanding what happened. And I now need tools for cognitive coverage on what that is built. That's the job, I think, of a software developer. But in order to do that, you've got to go to school, you've got to learn computer science and have cognitive coverage. And so this reinvention of work, the work artifact, the workflow, right? Because software went from input to output. That's a format change, an artifact change, the workflow has changed, and the work changes with it. I feel like what people really want to hear is some combination of like, your job isn't going to change that much, or if it does change, you're going to get paid more.

23:41Do you think that either of those things will be true for most people? I think that that's the thing. The wages have always been about what is it that we as a society value, right? I mean, we have grown in the last 200 years, 250 years, was about a particular form of expertise and accrual of knowledge. So when you have abundance of some form of expertise, what is that human ability to now build a new expertise that is not trainable, right? In fact, there was a nice blog I read this morning from Sarah Goh, which I thought was an interesting one, where she sort of mentions, hey, what is the untrainable part?

24:19And that applies to organizations and I think us as well. And we as humans have agency, ambition that should not be counted out. And if you look at even what is human capital today, the human capital, in spite of all the digital systems we have at our disposal, we do the glue work. we will discover the new glue work that happens with all this automation. And that, I think, is the process of change.

24:46Kevin Roose:One idea that's been floated recently, including by reportedly Sam Altman and President Trump has also weighed in on it, is the idea of having the U.S. government take direct investment stakes in frontier AI companies. Do you think that's a good idea? What percent of Microsoft would you like the U.S. government to own? And MSFT, you can trade. Do you think that is a way for the gains of AI to be more broadly felt? You know, look, this is all very new, right? I mean, the idea that there may be the United States, whether it has a sovereign fund and the sovereign fund has equity stakes and that somehow is part of what is considered the wealth of the citizens of this country.

25:33I think it's a novel idea. Other countries have done it. I think Alaska has some form of it in the state because of the oil wealth. So I'm not sort of opposed to innovative ideas like this. But at the end of the day, I mean, there's this entire movement of if only we had invested some portion of our social security in S &P 500, we would have a surplus or what have you. And so to the degree to which some of these ideas can be played out and they succeed, I think we'll all benefit from it. You told Dwarkesh Patel in February 2025 that your benchmark for achieving AGI was 10 % GDP growth. Seems like we're not super close to hitting 10 % yet.

26:15I'm curious how you view that kind of statement you made a year ago now, and do you see any sort of recent acceleration that makes you think it's more possible? In fact, it's one of the things that I think a lot about is the difficulty of even a very powerful general purpose technology and its diffusion and the amount of change management that is required, right? I mean, the systems, for example, one of the challenges right now that we're going to face in the next year, two years, is the economics of tokens. For example, the hard truth is that the marginal cost of productivity improvement has to match the marginal cost of the token.

27:00That's a management discipline, right? So you can't just say, hey, I love token maxing because it's sort of money in my bank. The business has to benefit from it. And that is what is going to really drive it. So in fact, it's fascinating. The equation for the 10 % growth would be when you have a perfect match between the marginal cost of the token to the marginal value, and it's priced, right? So that means it's the best way to get at it. If that happens, 10 % is definitely going to happen. But definitely what's happening right now where everybody goes and wipe codes and token maxes, that's not a way to achieve 10 % growth.

27:38How much sort of token maxing has been going on at Microsoft? A lot. Yeah. And I'm out of it. And what I mean by that is, you look, I want people to obviously, and myself, I'm like a token maxer too. So it's addictive. It's kind of like, hey, I love this thing. So then you have to step back when the novelty wears off to say, what is it that I'm trying to create? In fact, the thing that I love now in Copilot now is our auto mode. And so we now have a very good, we have an economic model that's feeding it as well. Basically, I say don't use frontier models for non-frontier problems, right? Please, let's kind of match these things such that you get the outputs, you get the economics, and it can't be a race to just doing things that just don't add value.

28:30Give us a flavor of like such as token maxing. Like what are some of your big token projects lately? Yeah. I mean, like the one thing that I recently built was, you know, I've always sort of felt that I want a repo that is in sync all the time with discussions that are happening out of band that I am not in, right? Think about even that concept. I like that thing because it is sort of not possible today, right? So you'll have essentially the ability now to have an agent that literally is looking at all the work discussions that may be related to your repo and creating the plan and executing the plan.

29:17And it's just, in fact, all I did was I put WorkIQ, which is the database underneath all of Microsoft 365 and as an MCP server and to my coding agent. And I said, keep watching that. And every time people discuss this repo, please change my repo. And it keeps working. And so this is the best way to keep your basically a model in sync with all requirements that ever come up.

29:42Kevin Roose:You've been thinking a lot about the political economy of AI. Obviously, the things you're talking about, about diffusion and adoption and GDP growth are all part of that. What do you think the people in San Francisco leading the AI companies here get wrong about the political economy of AI? I mean, I wouldn't say they're wrong about the political economy But I do think when I look back at the, you know, there's a very cool book I read, I think, in December. I may have the name wrong, but it's written by Joel Marquill and a couple of co-authors. I think it's called Paddle Paths to Prosperity. They describe a little bit of how the last thousand years, you know, the West grew and what was happening in China.

30:22So it was a thousand year history. But the fundamental thing when I take from that book and in general when I read history is the West in particular got three things into a virtuous cycle. They got technological revolutions and markets and democracy, both acting as a check on the other. that's why there is no such thing as an economy. It's a political economy. A democracy controls ultimately what happens in a market, and then technology sort of tries to disrupt the two, and then you keep sort of the checks and balances. That's magical. It's one of the most unbelievable social constructs ever to emerge in the world, right?

31:09Think about sort of, you know, It became the model. And we now need that same model to be redefined for this age, but it'll work. Because it worked the last time. And so therefore, I think us reminding ourselves that the balance, the checks that each one has on the other is what I think we have to aspire for, whether it's in San Francisco, whether it's in Washington, D.C., or quite frankly, anywhere else. hmm maybe just as a last question i'm still trying to like hone in on what i think kevin might call how agi pilled you are like there's a sense in the in silicon valley that it really is different this time and that the jagged frontier is going to keep advancing forever and all of a sudden the little tasks that ai can automate today are going to convert into full jobs how much do you buy that story look i i buy that anything where the loops can be closed right like coding in fact AI research is sort of possible to close I think we have now got sufficient I'd say evidence of that but is that enough I don't think so and when I think about you know people talk about how verifiable is this task and in the messy real world of even knowledge work, just saying I'm going to look at the traces of human activity is enough to close the loop?

32:43I don't think so. That, I think, is the challenge, which is when I am in a meeting, I say things, I note things, I may observe things, but what I do with it is not a trace today that I can RLE my way in, right? And that to me is where we're selling short what is, I would say, unverifiable part of the human capital. And so to me, that's where, so I believe the advances keep happening. I still am in the, more in the world of, hey, this is platforms tools, very powerful, very disruptive. I have a lot of sort of, I'd say, you know, humility to say a lot of things will change. But at the end of the day, so was electricity.

33:34So were a lot of other, you know, steam when it first came out and what have you. And so I'm not sort of sitting there and thinking this is the last technology we ever will invent. I don't buy that. I kind of feel like, yeah, this is in the pantheon of all technologies, a big step up. But I do think that, you know, there will be more to come. Very good.

33:53Kevin Roose:Well, Satya Nadella, thanks so much for joining us. please give Satya a hand. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you.

34:06All right. That was like sort of our big question before the show was like, you know, how AGI pilled this notchip?

34:12Kevin Roose:I thought it was, what is the unverifiable part of our human capital? What do you think yours is? I'm still working on that. We've got a lot of show to prepare for, so we'll get to the bottom of it. We'll be back with more Hardfoot Live after these messages.

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36:05Kevin Roose:I'm sure everyone in here is still thinking about those robot dogs like I am. Yeah, I was having trouble focusing on the interview because I had so many questions about the dogs. And we wanted to actually bring on someone who has been responsible for training and walking and taking care of these dogs to tell us why the hell they built such a terrifying thing. So our next guest is Phil Mohan. He's the executive director of Node, a digital art center in Palo Alto that is showing off these robot dogs as part of an art exhibit that runs through the end of the month. Please welcome to the stage our dog handler, Phil Mohan.

36:41Thanks, guys. Hey, Phil. Thank you. Oh, God, they're coming back. Oh, boy. Hey, that's... Heel! They're very lifelike in that they don't seem to respond well to instructions.

36:54Kevin Roose:Yeah. Okay, please go. Please leave. See you, guys. Yeah. Well, shall we have a seat? Yeah, let's have a seat. Now, I want to just describe these dogs a little bit for people who are going to be listening to this later. These are two unitary go-to robo-dogs with the faces of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. And as I understand it, they are part of a whole pack. So, Phil, tell us about these dogs. How many are there? And how can we protect our families from them? Yeah. By the way, when you said there was a whole pack, a chill fell through the crowd. Yeah. A little different from the last conversation.

37:27I think, so these are called the regular animals. And these were created by an amazing digital artist named Mike Winkleman or Beeple. How many people know Beeple in the crowd? Yeah. Okay. So for those of you who don't, I'm excited to share. Mike is an amazing artist. He has been creating a new piece of digital art every day for 20 years. And these dogs are his latest creation. They're called Regular Animals, and they're part of a show we're doing at Node in Palo Alto.

37:53Kevin Roose:And what made him or both of you together think of this project? What is the idea that you are trying to convey with these terrifying robot dogs? Yeah, what's wrong with you? Yeah, so I asked this question to Mike, actually, exactly that. Why did you do this? and Mike's entire practice is about taking technology to show you something you've never seen before. I think mission accomplished with these. There's actually six dogs in total. So there's Pablo Picasso, there's Andy Warhol, there's Mike, he put his own face on a dog, which is really interesting when you see him next to it. It's kind of the strange double take on Jeff Bezos as well.

38:31And I think with the regular animals in particular, so much of what we think about and our imagination of things comes from creatives. It comes from movies that we've seen or literature that we've read. But increasingly, the way that we see the world is coming through media and specifically digital media. And so the fact that half of the regular animals are media CEOs and technology executives, the other half are artists is not a coincidence. So you took these dogs out onto the streets of San Francisco recently. That's right. What happened once they were a set loose? Yeah, it was like the best social experiment of all time.

39:01I think there's a couple of common reactions. You know, it has a phone factor that's very high. So about 100 % of people take out their phones and take a picture. Kids, honestly, really like it. I think that there, of course, there's robot dogs. It's 2026. Why wouldn't there be? And I think most people, it feels like the future. It feels like maybe not the exact future that we're thinking about, but it feels like something you've never seen before. When you say this feels like the future, what do you imagine sort of like the role of robot dogs with human faces will be? Yeah. So part of what we do at Node is there's an amazing group of digital artists who are using software to create art.

39:41Now, I love Enterprise SaaS. I know you guys too. Shout out to Enterprise SaaS. There has huge, huge applause from the crowd here in San Francisco for Enterprise SaaS. There's got to be more. There's got to be more. And if software is the defining medium of our age, we think that there deserves to be a home for these artists who are defining digital culture. And I think that Mike is an excellent example of the type of artist who's working with this medium, but he's not the only one. And so we hope to give a home to these artists in Palo Alto.

40:09Kevin Roose:Phil, I have to ask you about, look at my card here and make sure I've got this right, poop mode? Yeah, poop mode. What is poop mode? So the dogs, they're constantly taking photos of their environment. And they will poop out these images. and we have a person at Node who's hired to pick up the poop and who certifies it and gives it out to guests. If anyone's looking for a job, by the way, we pay very well by the hour. Also, robot dog walker. These are the only two jobs in the future. That's right, yeah. So if you want to escape the permanent underclass, you know where to go. And so each dog, based on the head that it's wearing, the photos come out completely different.

40:49So the Picasso dog is sort of this cubist and the Mark Zuckerberg dog looks like it's in the metaverse. And it's just a reminder that, you know, the reality that you see is not always exactly the way that it is. Have you heard from the real Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk? You know, we've been trying to get them to come by, so if anyone's got a line, please send them before June 28th. Let me read you the sentence on the Node website that gave me a seizure. It says, What?

41:22Yeah, none of those words are in the Bible. You know, one of the challenges with creating digital art or using technology in general to create art, and there's a long tradition of this, you know, technology sort of begets new artistic movements. And the beginning of these movements sort of have to grapple with there not being good categories or there not being institutions that are purpose built for them. And in many of the conversations that we had with digital artists, they were trying to go to existing institutions and explain their work or explain, hey, I can use software or computers or computation to create these amazing works of art that make people feel things or make people see a future that only I can see.

42:02and the response that they got from institutions consistently was either we don't understand it or we have an opening in five years and maybe we'll talk to you then. Or even if they were interested and it wasn't pure apathy, our IT department can, and it's like this totally out of scope of what they're built for. And so this focus on preservation and around keeping the art available is a big part of what we do at Node. And I think that so much of what we build, and if you look at the history of software, it's all of these projects that get built and and they're amazing at the time, and then they're discarded.

42:33And art can't be like that. It has to exist for generations, and so that's part of what we're trying to do.

42:38Kevin Roose:That's all the time we have. Thank you, Phil, and please do not attach weapons to those robot dogs. They were scary enough. Not yet, no promises. As it is. Thanks for showing up. Thank you, Phil. Thank you. Thanks, guys.

42:55Kevin Roose:We'll be right back with more from Hard Fork Live.

43:01Thank you.

43:31without losing the legacy code your business was built on. Let's create smarter business. IBM.

43:38Kevin Roose:I'm Paul Tenorio. I cover soccer for The Athletic. And I'm Amy Lawrence. I cover football for The Athletic. Whatever you call it, the biggest competition in the sport is happening right now. And The Athletic's World Cup coverage has everything you need to follow the tournament. We've got more than 70 obsessive reporters on the ground. If you're eager to know more about the teams, the matches, all the stories on and off the pitch, we've got you sorted. Throughout the tournament you have free access to all the coverage in our app. Download the Athletic app and see you there. Please welcome to the stage Cindy Cohn!

44:14Hi. Hi Cindy. Hi Cindy. Hi Cindy. Thank you. I'm admiring your Let's Sue the Government shirt. Yes.

44:27Cindy Cohn:We have the best merch at EFF, and I know they made this especially for me.

44:32Kevin Roose:Cindy, how do we get those robot dogs banned?

44:36Cindy Cohn:They're creepy, aren't they? Do you have a call you could make

44:39Kevin Roose:in D.C.?

44:39Cindy Cohn:You know, the thing that's creepy about them is what he said at the end, which is they're taking photos all the time, and they're going to last forever, right? This kind of creepy mass surveillance in the form of a creepy dog. What could go wrong? Nothing. It could be a reason to sue the government, which is something that you did throughout your illustrious career at EFF. One of your first big fights back in the 90s was defending the cryptologist Daniel Bernstein against government restrictions on encrypted source code. 30 years later, we are still seeing fights between the government and private individuals over end-to-end encryption.

45:20How surprised are you that this battle is still going on? And how would you characterize the state of that fight today?

45:26Cindy Cohn:Yeah. I mean, look, we won the first round, which means that we have Signal and we have HTTPS. And when you lose your phone, you don't lose all the data on it because it's encrypted. So, I mean, that was great. But yeah, we continue to have to fight. And we, you know, in the meta social media case, they use the fact that they offered encryption as an argument of a product defect, right? So the fight continues. I think law enforcement's interest in making sure nobody can ever have a private conversation just never goes away. But our need to have a private conversation online doesn't go away either.

46:08Cindy Cohn:So, you know, I think in the United States, we've managed to fend off, you know, there's periodically, and the last bill was called Earn It, but different bills to try to, you know, restrict encryption. But, you know, the UK is a mess. Australia is a mess. We're going to have to, Canada now is debating something that Signal has said we're not going to be able to offer our product and our tool in Canada if they pass this law. So the fight just goes on. And I've kind of come to the sad conclusion that it's just something like free speech, like privacy, that we're just always going to have to stand up for.

46:49Kevin Roose:I remember when I started covering tech more than a decade ago, the EFF was known for taking on the government, primarily fighting government overreach. Now you also fight big tech overreach. So I'm curious, like, did that shift come as a surprise? And where does that leave you today in terms of allies? Like, who are the good guys?

47:07Cindy Cohn:Yeah, it's I would say in the 90s, we didn't anticipate that spying on everybody would become the number one business model of the Internet.

47:17Kevin Roose:It's very profitable.

47:18Cindy Cohn:It turns out. And it also, you know, has created this problem with the five big tech giants that control every, you know, the vast majority of people's experience online. And these two things together have really forced us to, you know, we don't make common cause with the tech giants anymore at the level that we used to because they used to stand up for their users and increasingly they're adversarial to their users. So what I tell all the tech companies is, look, if you stand with your users, we will stand with you. And if you stand against your users, we're going to be the first in line. And sadly, that second part has become bigger than I think it should.

48:03Cindy Cohn:But it's dragged us into these places where we're adversarial against the tech giants because they're not standing with users. I mean, I remember, you know, Kevin and I started covering tech around the same time. And I remember, you know, whenever you guys would put out a statement that, you know, like Google, Facebook, like Amazon were putting out statements like you guys were marching in lockstep. You just said that that united front is now broken. When did you first notice those cracks start to appear? I mean, it depends on the topic, right? You know, the early fights, EFF was involved a lot in trying to make copyright balanced in the digital age.

48:41Cindy Cohn:And we worked a lot with the companies on this because they wanted to give you the ability to make your own media and to rip, mix and burn, those kinds of things. And we would stand with them. Um, but I think again, as surveillance became the business model, as they became, you know, less interested in empowering their users and more interested in their surveilling their users, we've, we've, we've, we've, we've separated. And now, you know, we stand up for things like, you know, the section 230, the idea that, you know, the, nobody would host anybody else's speech if they were responsible for it.

49:23Cindy Cohn:So users need intermediaries to be able to speak. We've seen the tech companies roll over and support all of these exceptions, FOSTA, SESTA, and other things. And they're not even standing up for their own rights anymore. So it's really topic by topic and issue by issue. But I would say that in the last 10 years, it's less and less of the time that we end up standing with them because they don't stand with the users. It obviously seems like that has accelerated quite a bit since President Trump was reelected. There's been a major rightward shift in some of these companies. You've talked to these people for many, many years.

50:05How much do you think that is driven by something truly ideological? And how much of it is just, they think they can make more money this way?

50:13Cindy Cohn:It's hard to tell, honestly. I don't think they're being honest with themselves, much less the rest of us about it. And certainly not me, right? I mean, I'm the civil liberties lawyer who shows up to beat up on them. So, you know, I don't really have the ear of the billionaires. I never count out money and maximizing the amount of money that you can make as the driver for people who have devoted their lives to making money. But I really can't tell. And I do feel like they're in their own echo chamber now in a way that wasn't true before. and so they end up not understanding how they come off at a level that's pretty high and different than when I started out in this.

51:01I'm curious how you feel about it. I remember in the early 2010s, I found myself maybe somewhat embarrassingly carried away by some of the more grandiose pronouncements of these companies. They were going to organize the world's information and make it universally useful and make the world more open and connected. And while, you know, that was always obviously self-serving in some ways, I did talk to many employees who seemed sincerely moved by that mission. And they did talk about it all the time. And so I took them to be at least somewhat sincere. I no longer take them to be sincere about that.

51:34And I wonder, like, did you take them at their word back then? And as the sort of truth emerged, how did you feel about it?

51:40Cindy Cohn:I mean, I think it depends on who in Silicon Valley. Honestly, I think when you're at the top of the companies, it's a whole different feeling than when you're in the middle. You know, EFF has 30 ,000 members. I would say the vast, I don't know, we are a privacy organization. I don't know who those people are. But I think it's fair to say that a lot of them are people who work in these companies who still want to be in the business of making cool stuff for the rest of us, connecting all the world's people. I mean, we did that. The internet connects all the world's people in a way that is still magnificent.

52:19Cindy Cohn:So I think that the split isn't between, I mean, you're in Silicon Valley as well, but to me, it's not between tech and non-tech. It's between the top of tech, which is much more like the billionaires in any other industry and disconnected from the rest of tech. and we'll see, right? I mean, the AI founders have committed to a lot of things, um, uh, anthropic and, you know, the 80 % they're going to give away and things like that. So, I mean, time will tell, right? Are they going to walk their talk or is it just talk? And we'll just see. I mean, from EFF's perspective, again, if they walk their talk, we're there with them.

52:59Cindy Cohn:And if they're not, we're the ones who are probably going to be on the other side of the V in the lawsuit.

53:08Kevin Roose:Speaking of AI, there are many things to be concerned about from a privacy perspective when it comes to frontier AI systems. There's the risk of these things just becoming very charming and people entrusting them with private information. And maybe the company is not being responsible safeguards of that information. There are concerns about mass domestic surveillance that could become more salient with models that are very capable. Of all of the risks to privacy and user sovereignty posed by AI, which worries you the most?

53:40Cindy Cohn:Oh, God, it's a race to the bottom, isn't it? But I would say it's not a surprise to us that the two hard lines that Anthropic drew that got them in trouble with the Defense Department is mass domestic spying and autonomous weapons. Now, I don't know as much about autonomous weapons, but I've spent my career fighting mass domestic spying, And they're right. That will change the dynamic. It will change how democracy works. We need, I mean, this is part of the stuff I wrote about in my book is that people with less power need privacy to have protection against people with more power. and mass surveillance supercharged by AI tends to make us a lot less powerful compared to the people who are gonna know a lot about us and that can really impact our ability to vote out the people who we don't think are leaders, control what policy and law affects all of us, the political economy questions.

54:46Cindy Cohn:will turn, I think, on whether we can stop mass surveillance that's AI supercharged. Sketch out a bit how AI...

55:02For folks who may have spent less time contemplating worst case scenarios... I know, I live there, yeah. Can you sketch out for us a bit why AI makes surveillance particularly scary? Some folks might say, hey, I don't know, I'm already pretty scared. the FBI, you know, what do I care if they can read my chat GPT?

55:19Cindy Cohn:Well, I mean, I think that I think that we're living in a time where we're seeing that if you thought you weren't ever going to be a target of surveillance, that isn't a very safe bet anymore. Right. And, you know, I think the Dobbs decision, right, overturning Roe versus Wade suddenly made a lot of people who are engaged in reproductive assistance or needing reproductive help suddenly found themselves targeted by surveillance. We've got people who've gone to jail based upon their Facebook messages. So suddenly the capabilities of surveillance of people's online activities where they might have seemed completely innocuous and nothing that could ever be used against you is throwing your mom in jail, right?

56:07Cindy Cohn:That happened in Nebraska. and we are seeing the same things. You may be one of the few people who knows nobody with a green card, nobody with visa status, nobody's here on a student visa, nobody here's here with undocumented and there's nobody who you love or care about who is impacted by the fact that the government has decided that those people are in the crosshairs or you don't want to stand with them or protest with them, which is people who were exercising their First Amendment right to monitor the police were the two people killed in Minnesota. So even if you're none of them, I mean, you've got to start looking.

56:46Cindy Cohn:These circles are getting closer and closer to all of us. And if you think that the people in power who have control of this massive surveillance stuff will just never happen upon you or anyone you love, I think you're kind of living in a dream world. And that matters no matter what your politics is, because if this administration isn't the one that bothers you, when the administration change, it may. I mean, that's why right now Congress is debating renewing the big mass spying law, FISA Section 702. And there is this combination of Ron Wyden and Jamie Raskin, people on the left, and the Freedom Caucus, Andy Biggs and Rand Paul and Mike Lee, you know, people who do not agree with each other very much are all saying, look, we think the FBI needs a warrant before it starts searching the mass spying databases for its targets.

57:47Cindy Cohn:It's because I think those people on the far right realize that even if they're in power today, they may not be in power tomorrow. And it's better for all of us if we have due process and separation of powers kinds of things for mass surveillance. You brought up how immigrants to this country who are here on various different kinds of visas might find themselves subject to mass surveillance. And in fact, we just tell people who are applying for visas, like, we are going to scan your social media. You must submit it. We are going to review the contents of your social media and judge it based on your protected First Amendment speech.

58:26Correct.

58:26Cindy Cohn:That's one of our lawsuits. We're suing over that. So I want to talk about this because 10 or 15 years ago, this is something where I can imagine all of Silicon Valley standing up and saying, how dare you? This is outrageous. This is a clear violation of the First Amendment. They've been absolutely silent on this. Yes. Why? I don't know. I think you're at the New York Times. Would you go ask them for me? I really, I don't, I mean, I think they're afraid. I think that the administration, because they depend on HB1 visas. Like it used to be the only thing that Silicon Valley lobbied about was visas, right?

59:02Cindy Cohn:Right. That, you know, the workforce is heavily, you know, immigration dependent. And I agree with you. They would have been standing up for for this and they're not. And, you know, I I would argue it's because they're either cowed or they're in cahoots. Those are the two reasonable options. Cowed in cahoots. Two of the worst places you can find yourself.

59:28Kevin Roose:I think a lot of it, too, is that I don't think that there is a sense among just users of these platforms that privacy is a winnable fight anymore. I hear so much nihilism and fatalism about this when I talk to people and I'm asking them about their privacy practices. And they're kind of like, well, that ship has sailed. Like, the government has all my data anyway. What is the point of trying to fight? I'm sure you get this, too. What is your response to the privacy nihilist?

59:56Cindy Cohn:I think there's a couple of things. One is that this idea that because your information's already out there, it's all over. Like if you talk to people in intelligence or in, or cops, they will tell you that old information has a, it's a very short shelf life, right? So your information isn't all out there because you're continuing to live your life. And so yes, it would have been great if 10 years ago, we had passed a comprehensive privacy law that included law enforcement as well as the commercial entities. That's the first best time. The second best time is today, because if we can begin to cut the knees out from under this massive data collection, the information will get less and less important and their ability to spy on us will get smaller and smaller.

1:00:45Cindy Cohn:So it's never, I mean, if it were game over, they'd stop spying on us, right? Like they're not like, oh, we're going to unplug the spying machine because we've got everything we need folks. Like that would be a different world than the one we're living in. So one of the things is like, it's, it's never game over. It's not game over. I mean, it, it's ultimately game over when you're not alive anymore, maybe, but as long as you're living, your data is valuable to the, to the government and to the companies. And the minute we stop this business model, the better. The second thing I would argue is it's a, it's easy to say it's all over and there's nothing I can do if they're not sweeping up your grandma in an immigration raid.

1:01:30Cindy Cohn:But I think it's a bit of a denial or entitled position to think that you could not care and nothing, because what's going on there and the nihilism is I don't care about this. It feels like too big a fight and nothing will really happen to me or anyone I love if I don't care about this. And I think we're living in a time where that's not a safe assumption anymore. We have to fight for our privacy. Folks like Sam Altman have advocated for a form of privilege when you talk to a chatbot. So if you were to ask ChatGPT about a medical question, for example, Sam Altman says that information should not be sort of within the reach of law enforcement.

1:02:14Do you agree with that? And how much help would it do, do you think, if that were true?

1:02:19Cindy Cohn:I mean, I think conceptually, there ought to be privileged places and conversations which happen, I'm actually a little more interested in trying to not have the companies have all that information and trackable back to you. So I'm more interested in people who are developing ways that you can have anonymity in your use of these things so that they don't have anything that they can reveal about you. And I think that's a better way to go than expecting them to stand up and protect us Did something happen that damaged your trust in these companies? I mean, you know, it's an old video of the Facebook privacy promises, right?

1:03:01Cindy Cohn:I mean, and I'm an old lady, right? I remember when Facebook came out, they were the privacy protective social network. And then you can see their terms of surface shrink over time to what they're promising you about their privacy. And, you know, if their promises to you are up against their business model, I think you know which one is going to win. And so they're now all committed to mass surveillance as a business model. And I think that means that we need to take some policy and legal actions to try to cut that off at the knees. I'd like to end by asking about one of the longest ongoing fights in the relationship that Kevin and I have, which is whether or not you should tweet.

1:03:48Kevin still tweets. I do not tweet. Recently, you know, before you left EFF, you guys made the decision. You were leaving X. Tell us about that decision. And has it cost you anything?

1:04:00Cindy Cohn:It was a long time coming because there are, you know, there's plenty of people who are still on the platform who care about their rights. And it's always a hard decision because we always want to be able to talk to people who, you know, care about rights. And there are plenty of people on that platform who do. I mean, there's a couple of things that happened. We saw our reach just shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. Right. I mean, there was just recently the picture of who has reach on on the platform. And it's nobody who's talking about digital rights in the you know, on your side. Well, that's on you guys.

1:04:37Kevin Roose:Have you thought about posting more beheading videos or crypto scams?

1:04:41Cindy Cohn:Exactly.

1:04:41Kevin Roose:You know, these things can really increase your reach.

1:04:43Cindy Cohn:We also were seeing a lot of, you know, I'm also an employer. We were seeing a lot of really abusive things going to my staff and people who we talked about in our posts who, you know, were standing up for LGBTQ and we would post something about that. Those people would get abuse. And at some point we just decided it wasn't worth the candle anymore, you know. And it makes me sad because, again, I know there are plenty of people on that platform who are not hateful, but they are stuck in a place where the fundamental dynamic is really awful. And, you know, at some point, you know, it kind of I'm a free speech activist.

1:05:33Cindy Cohn:Like freedom of speech has to mean the right to leave. Like the idea that we should be forced to speak in a place is fundamentally inconsistent with the value of freedom of speech, which includes your ability to decide where you speak in the first place. And it's it kind of I have a hard time with people are like, you're a free speech organization, so you must post on this private platform. And I'm like, I don't think you know what free speech means. It means I get to decide who my audience is. And I'm sorry if you're hanging out in the Nazi bar and I can't I decide that that's not where I want to speak.

1:06:17Cindy Cohn:But again, I'm sad about it because there are a lot of people, especially a lot of politicians and other people who were trying to stop 702. There's a lot of audiences that it would be better if they weren't all on that platform. Well, fascinating conversation. Cindy, thank you so much. You're a legend. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. That was awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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1:07:32Kevin Roose:Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Viren Pavich. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Alicia B 'itup, Marian Lozano, Diane Wong, Rowan Nemisto, Alyssa Moxley, and Dan Powell. Video production by Sawyer Roque, Jake Nickel, and Chris Schaap. Special thanks to the New York Times Live event team who helped us put on Hard Fork Live this year. Hilary Kuhn, Beth Weinstein, Caitlin Roper, Chantal Regnier, Melissa Tripoli, Natalie Green, Kirsten Birmingham, Marissa Farina, Jennifer Feeney, Morgan Singer, Dana Praskowski, Hayley Duffy, Yanwei Liu, Matt Kaiser, Sarah Cheever, Johnny Marola, Victoria Kim, and SV Productions.

1:08:20Kevin Roose:Thanks also to everyone at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Blue Shield of California Theater where we held the event. They were so fantastic to work with. And a special thanks to Paula Schumann, Pui Wing Tam, and Dalia Haddad. You can email us, as always, at hardfork at nytimes.com or show up at one of our events if there are tomatoes at us.

1:08:56Thank you.