Evan Greer Asks the Tech Accountability Movement to Draw a Line

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

At its November 21st "Summit of the Future of the Internet," billionaire Frank McCourt's Project Liberty hosted a panel discussion featuring Congresswoman Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, on a panel with Congressman Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, that was moderated by the media personality Charlemagne Tha God. Last month, Congresswoman Mace led an effort to ban transgender women from using female bathrooms at the US Capitol in response to the election of Sarah McBride, who is set to be the first openly transgender person in Congress representing voters in Delaware. Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a tech advocacy organization, took the opportunity to confront Congresswoman Mace's bigotry during the Project Liberty conference.

I spoke to Evan last week about the incident, where she believes the tech accountability and digital rights movement should draw the line when it comes to engaging with far-right politicians, and how we can go about building spaces where we can imagine a different future that is truly just and liberatory.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC):

… but we have a lot of responsibilities too. Ro and I…

Evan Greer:

I'm sorry you're living with that in real time right now. This is ridiculous. It's the day after trans day of visibility. We have had dozens of trans people die this year because of the hate and lies that you are spreading. And if we want an internet, are we building an internet with free speech for everyone or just the privileged few? Are you going to stand up for the lives of trans people, Black and brown people? Are we fighting for justice or are we fighting for big tech?

Charlemagne Tha God:

We respect freedom of speech.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC):

God loves him. I love him. But his penis isn't going to be in my bathroom. So at any rate, but we have a responsibility... (Audience boos) If you're pro-man watching the undress in a dressing room, you're part of the problem. But we're here to talk about the internet, and Ro being a progressive Democrat…

Justin Hendrix:

What you just heard was a clip of an incident that occurred in a November 21st conference called The Summit of the Future of the Internet, which was hosted by Project Liberty, an organization founded by the billionaire Frank McCourt that says its goal is to quote, “take back control of their digital lives by reclaiming a voice, choice, and stake in a better internet.” Project Liberty invited Congresswoman Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina to join a panel with Congressman Ro Khanna, a democrat from California, that was moderated by the media personality Charlamagne Tha God. Last month, Congresswoman Mace led an effort to ban transgender women from using female bathrooms at the US Capitol in direct response to the election of Sarah McBride, who was set to be the first openly transgender person in Congress representing voters in Delaware. Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a tech advocacy organization, took the opportunity to confront Congresswoman Mace's bigotry during the Project Liberty Conference. I spoke to Evan last week about where she believes the tech accountability movement should draw the line when it comes to engaging with far right politicians and how we can go about building spaces where we can imagine a different future that is just and truly liberatory.

Evan Greer:

My name's Evan Greer. I'm the director of Fight for the Future, and my pronouns are she/her if you use them.

Justin Hendrix:

Evan, thank you for joining me and welcome back to the podcast. It's been a little while since I had the opportunity to have you on. I want to ask you about an experience you had last week at a tech conference in Washington DC hosted by Project Liberty. Can you just start out by telling us what happened from your perspective?

Evan Greer:

Yeah, for sure. So I was invited to the Project Liberty Summit on the future of the internet, and it seemed like an interesting opportunity to connect with other folks in the tech policy advocacy space and other people who are involved in building interesting, decentralized open-source tools, all stuff that I'm very interested in and care quite a bit about. So I said yes. The day before the conference, I started reaching out to some of my friends and colleagues in DC to ask, Hey, are you going to be at this thing? Let's meet up. And I started to notice a bit of a pattern, which was that none or almost none of my friends from civil rights organizations, racial justice groups, civil liberties organizations, LGBTQ groups, et cetera, had been invited or even seemed to know that the event was happening. And so that was the first alarm bell for me.

Then a friend of mine flagged for me that Representative Nancy Mace was actually going to be one of the opening keynote speakers at this event. Of course, anyone who's been paying attention to the news knows that Representative Mace has really catapulted herself into the headlines over the last week or so by basically branding herself as the most violently transphobic member of Congress. That's been her entire brand. She has gone on a massive online harassment campaign targeting her incoming colleague, Representative Sarah McBride, who's the first transgender person elected to Congress and has introduced or proposed legislation that would effectively ban trans women from using the bathrooms at the capitol. And I saw this, I started chatting with some friends and other trans folks in the community and thinking through what would make sense to do. I thought about reaching out to the organizers of the conference and expressing my dismay.

I was frankly surprised that that hadn't already happened or just that there was a lot of people invited to this event and it would've been nice if other CIS folks perhaps had spoken up and said that this was just an unacceptable person to invite to an event that's supposed to be discussing a future of an internet. That's for everyone. But after talking with my community, I decided that it was actually important that I take the opportunity to directly confront Representative Mace and the organizers of this event who had invited her. And really what was going through my mind was thinking about giving a voice to the people who aren't invited into these types of rooms. I think it's important to say clearly that the people who are most harmed by Representative Mace's bigoted and vile rhetoric are not even other members of Congress, are not people like me who perhaps are trans, but run an advocacy organization.

They are the folks that never get invited to a conference like this. They're low income trans people, they're trans people of color, they're trans people in rural areas. These are the folks that experienced the most harm because of this type of hateful rhetoric. And so I wanted to take the opportunity to speak up since I was invited into the room and it's my job to be a rabble-rousing activist, so I'm not going to get fired from my job for speaking up. And so I went to the conference. I got a chance to meet with some good folks ahead of time, and when Representative Mace started speaking, she immediately launched into basically complaining about the online backlash that she has received for launching this harassment campaign. And so I stood up and I spoke out. I said that I thought it was ridiculous that we were here listening to her.

In my adrenaline rush, I said, it was the day after Trans Day of Visibility. I actually meant it was the day after Trans Day of Remembrance and that it was a day where we had remembered the fact that dozens of trans people have died just this year due to violence, and that violence is directly correlated with the type of hateful rhetoric that Representative Mes is speaking. And then I addressed the audience and asked them, are we here talking about a future of an internet that has free expression and safety and human rights for everyone, including trans people, including black and brown people, or are we talking about internet that's really for the privileged view? And that was about all I had time to get out before I was escorted out of the room by security, which I fully expected would likely happen. I did not expect a high level staffer from Project Liberty to put his hands on me, which did happen.

But for me, I want to be clear that I didn't do this act of protest to try to convince bigots like Nancy Mace to stop being bigots. I did it to spark a much needed conversation within the tech policy and philanthropy space about what our strategy is going to be going into these next four years. And I think there are some within our community that are all too ready and willing to cozy up to bigots and authoritarians and want to be fascists in pursuit of common ground as long as those people claim to be against big tech or calling for regulation when the reality is that these people have diametrically opposed values to ours and are not fighting for the same things that I hope we're all fighting for. And so for me, this was about calling that question and saying, are we going to work with people who do not believe in basic human rights for everyone? Or are we going to draw a line in the sand and build a meaningful movement that can resist the role that technology will play in carrying out human rights violations and carrying out the authoritarian agenda of the incoming administration and Congress?

Justin Hendrix:

I want to get a little more into that question about how folks in the tech accountability or the tech and human rights space should comport themselves in the future. But I just want to ask you a little more about the moment itself. I mean, it's kind of a strange moment. You've got Representative Mace on stage, you've got Representative Ro Khanna and also I believe Charlemagne Tha God. I mean, this was a kind of spectacle to begin with.

Evan Greer:

And you'd have to go ask Charlemagne how he got there, but I do think it's worth just sort of noting who was at this conference and who wasn't. And I guess from my perspective, so Project Liberty is the brainchild of Frank McCourt who is a billionaire. He's probably best known for launching a bid to purchase TikTok. And like I said in the piece that I wrote about this, I think Frank and the team that he's assembled largely have their hearts in the right place. I think they care about a lot of the same things that I care about in terms of being concerned about big tech companies being concerned about surveillance capitalism as a business model, being concerned about centralization monopoly power. But in the end, you also kind of see this conference is like the conference that one billionaire pulled together based on who he thought needed to be in the room having a conversation about the future of the internet.

And I think the attendees reflect that there certainly was a fair amount of flash celebrities like Charlemagne Tha God, lawmakers, et cetera. But as I mentioned previously, it was very noticeable to me who was not in the room, particularly folks from the civil rights community who have really been on the forefront of fighting on some of these tech policy issues. And I just don't think that you can actually have a real conversation about the future of the internet, if you mean in a future of the internet that's going to be truly democratic, truly accountable to the communities that have been most impacted by technology and the rules governing it if you don't have strong representation in the room from organizations that actually represent those impacted communities, having Charlemagne and Ro Khanna, Nancy Mace open the conference, I think was interesting, an interesting choice. And what I'll also say is I think it was particularly upsetting to me that Representative Nancy Mace was there.

There are lots of members of Congress who I vehemently disagree with on a wide range of issues, but who I could have a substantive policy focused debate with as I wrote in my piece. I am not a big fan of Marsha Blackburn. I think that she has been wrong on almost every policy issue that has come across her desk. She and I could have a substantive debate about something like Section 230 or the Kids' Online Safety Act. We would strongly disagree. These are issues that she has worked on extensively for years. Representative Nancy Mace does not have a strong background in tech policy to my knowledge. She has one or two bills that she's put her name on this issue area. She has made vague remarks about big tech and tat support for the cryptocurrency industry, but she is not a serious player in these tech policy debates.

She didn't have anything particularly meaningful or substantive to add to this conversation, and it felt like she was really there for the sole purpose of throwing a bone to the far right and showing the incoming administration and its cronies that yeah, we're all willing to work together and find common ground at a time when, from my view, doing so and in this case, clearly doing so involved, throwing a marginalized community under the bus by inviting someone who has spent the last several weeks using their bully pulpit to bully one of the most vulnerable communities in our country and inviting them to this conference where they didn't have anything particularly substantive to add. That basically to me suggests we are willing to throw trans people under the bus if it means we can curry favor with this administration toward some specific goals that we have. And I don't think that's acceptable. And I think it's important that we as a community, if we're truly fighting for justice, if we're truly fighting for technology to be a force for liberation and a tool for social movements rather than technology being a force for tyranny and exploitation and greed, then it's important that we be clear about where we stand and that we refuse to throw marginalized people under the bus in pursuit of policy goals or regulatory goals.

Justin Hendrix:

As you say, this is going to be a difficult patch for folks who have to make decisions about who to engage with earnestly and who to recognize as fundamentally outside of the realm of negotiation on certain things. Fight for the Future. For instance, has said recently that folks like Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr would be a disaster, at least from your perspective, on tech policy. So that would be a principled position that fight for the future would take based on policy. I'm not aware of Brendan Carr engaging in actively bigoted statements, but it's very hard sometimes to distinguish when you start to look across the Republican party and the MAGA movement at this point, who is willing to engage in the type of bigotry that Mace espouses and who is willing to draw a line. It's a very hard thing to do. Is there, I don't know, some way that you think about this or some way that we can go about thinking about how to engage in politics over the next bit?

Evan Greer:

Yeah, I mean, look, Fight for the Future, our background and our expertise has always been in grassroots mobilization, so getting ordinary people mobilized to have a voice in Washington dc. But that said, I've been working here long enough that I've also spent enough time engaging with the kind of inside game of dealing with folks on the Hill and the Capitol. I've been in meetings and on phone calls and even on panels with people who I, again, vehemently disagree with on a wide range of issues, but where there is a clear strategic path where working together will meaningfully benefit the people most impacted. And to me, that's what it's all about. This is not about some purity contest of I can't shake hands with someone because they're too gross. It's about what are we accomplishing? What is our goal? And if there is a clear path toward achieving something that meaningfully benefits the lives of marginalized people, that meaningfully advances human rights and getting there involves having some conversations with people who I really despise.

Look, I'm all about getting things done. What I think we should refuse to do is kowtow, capitulate cozy up to or otherwise try to curry favor with powerful people and institutions just for the sake of having a shot or a seat at a table that frankly we shouldn't even be sitting at. And so I think if someone has a clear path and a strategy for ending the role that facial recognition will play in carrying out mass deportations and they think they need to talk to some Republican lawmaker with crappy LGBTQ politics to get it done, go forth, godspeed, I will not tell you to knock it off because that would meaningfully benefit people, that would meaningfully change the conditions for people that are going to be on the receiving end of the bulk of harm and suffering caused by this incoming administration. I think it's important that we be pragmatic, but I also think it's important that we don't throw people under the bus to not even achieve anything, which I think is often what we've seen platforming someone like Representative Mace at this conference is not going to convince the incoming Trump administration to not leverage technology to carry out their human rights abuses.

It's not going to accomplish the goals that we're talking about here. And so I think for me, that's really what it's all about. I think we as a movement need to get really clear on what we're trying to accomplish and whether cosying up to these type of people is actually going to help get us there. And frankly, I just don't think it's Fight for the Future. And many other organizations are looking at ways that we can mobilize at the local and state level to enact strong policies to at least throw some sand in the gears and reduce the harm of tech enabled human rights abuses under this incoming administration and to fight back against some of the types of regressive policies we expect will be coming out of this incoming Congress. There are ways that we can pressure companies to change their policies even as the government is perhaps inept or unwilling to act. There are things that we can do, but in the end we need to be asking ourselves, are we building power for the people who are most impacted by these issues? Are we building a movement that can bring forth the type of world and the type of internet that we all want to have, or are we capitulating to people who want a world that's very different and want a world where technology is a force for control rather than a force for good?

Justin Hendrix:

Sometimes I think about the words involved in things. I suppose as an editor, I look at words lot. The word liberty stands out to me in this context, a kind of irony. This incident occurred under the banner of Liberty, but another word it did unfold under is the future. This was a ‘summit on the future of the internet,’ and you of course work for an organization which calls itself Fight for the Future. I find myself lately thinking a lot about how we do build spaces to imagine the future and how rare it is. It seems to me to find a space that truly can separate from our current politics, our current understanding of the tech industry, how tech works can truly imagine a liberatory future, a future that's more just and more sustainable.

Evan Greer:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think you mentioned imagination there too. And so much of my work and our analysis at Fight for the Future is informed by the writing and research of predominantly black women academics and particularly those that have written about police and prison abolition. And I always constantly, when I'm thinking about these questions around big tech and the future of technology, I think about Angela Davis who wrote about our kind of deficit of imagination, our inability to imagine a world without mass incarceration as a practice when the reality is Matt's incarceration is something that's only existed for a blip in the timeline of human history. And the same is true for Instagram and Meta and YouTube and Apple and Google and this small handful of companies that have positioned themselves as the internet. The same is also true for this kind of small handful of billionaires who are vying to reshape technology in their image.

And whether those are more well-intentioned, more progressive leaning billionaires or folks like Elon Musk, on the other end of the spectrum, I do think we have to ask ourselves, are we stuck imagining we could have this kind of internet run by these types of billionaires or this other type of internet run by these other types of billionaires? And those are the only choices that we have, or can we push ourselves to imagine a world beyond big tech, a world beyond surveillance capitalism as a business model, a world beyond a corporatized, privatized internet, and a world where technologies are built and controlled and governed by the communities that use and need them, where technologies are built for the purposes of uplifting humanity versus for the perfect purposes of extracting as much profit in as short a time as possible. And I believe that world can exist.

I guess maybe it's my job to be a perpetual optimist, but I'm not someone who thinks that we should just go back in time and not invent the wheel. I actually do believe that technologies, including social media can be empowering, but only if we can unlock ourselves from the tether of only being able to imagine what we have now or perhaps what we have now with a few more guardrails in place or what we have now with slightly less bad content or slightly less data harvesting. I believe that the internet could be fundamentally different than it is now. I believe we could have social media that looks more like Wikipedia than a billboard or a shopping mall. And I think there are folks that are out there doing that work and trying to build that world right now. And in some ways, our role at Fight for the Future is fighting for policies that lead us there and that help dismantle the types of business models and business practices and elite thinking that has brought the current internet we have and empowers those that are imagining worlds and technologies. Beyond that.

Justin Hendrix:

Evan, did you hear anything from Project Liberty or anyone associated with the conference after you were ejected?

Evan Greer:

I've received a lot of love and support from folks in the trans community and others in the tech justice space. I've received a lot of hate and death threats and harassment primarily on Twitter from Representative Nancy Mace, her supporters. She's literally been tweeting about my genitals, which is not something I expected to wake up to anytime this year. But here we are, but I have not heard anything from Project Liberty or from any of the other sponsors of the event.

Justin Hendrix:

I'm speaking to you on the day before Thanksgiving. I hope that you have a peaceful day, can take a little break and hopefully not check your mentions for a little while. I appreciate you talking to me. And also I think drawing a line and posing an important question that all folks who are working on issues at the intersection of tech and democracy, tech and society should be thinking about as we head in the 2025.

Evan Greer:

Thanks so much for chatting, Justin. And yeah, I know I'm not the only one thinking about these questions, but I also know it's a scary time to speak out, and I know a lot of folks are worried to speak out because they're worried about losing funding or they're worried about repercussions from the incoming administration. And I guess I don't want to say that I'm not scared of those things too, but what I'm more scared of is if we're not as a space able to rise to meet this moment, because I truly do believe we're at a crossroads where the decisions that we make about technology and the rules governing it are going to define not just what these next four years look like, but what the future that our children and our children's children are growing up in looks like. And so I think these are some of the most important questions of our moment, and I hope that my loud mouth can help at least get some other folks talking about these questions because I know that I don't have all the answers. I don't think anyone has all the answers, but we all got to sit down and talk and ask these questions because the stakes could not be higher.

Justin Hendrix:

Evan Greer is the director of Fight for the Future. You can find out more about what they get up to at FightfortheFuture.org. Also, a “trans femme punk rocker,” as you say yourself. You can check out Evan's music, I believe, across streaming services. So Evan, thank you so much for speaking to me.

Evan Greer:

Yeah, thanks for having me on.