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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Congressman Ro Khanna is with us. He's a leader in the House Progressive Caucus, a deputy whip as they call it. His district covers much of Silicon Valley, the biggest tech hub of the United States, as we all know, including San Jose, Santa Clara, Cupertino, and other places around there. Ro Khanna is the son of immigrant parents from India and is a Yale law school grad. The progressive newspaper, The Guardian calls him by far the most tech-savvy of Congress. It says even more remarkable for a Congressman whose district includes Apple, Google, Intel, and Yahoo.

Khanna is one of the few who refuses to take campaign money from political action committees. Congressman Ro Khanna has a new book called Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us. Talk about how possible that is and how he thinks we can get there. Also about the politics of this moment in 2022 and the implications of the politics of right now for control of Congress in November. Congressman Khanna, thanks so much for making this one of your stops. Welcome to WNYC.

Ro Khanna: I'm honored to be on. I appreciate your work, particularly after the fairness doctrine was repealed in trying to improve public discourse. I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Brian Lehrer: Huh. Thank you for being a little familiar with the show and for people not from your district around the country or who haven't seen you much in your national media appearances, which are many, do I have it right that you didn't grow up around Silicon Valley, but rather in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, North of Philly, just across the New Jersey line?

Ro Khanna: I was born there, raised there. There I went to Council Rock High School till I was 18. I was born in Philadelphia, actually, in our bicentenary year in 1976. My folks are still in Bucks County.

Brian Lehrer: What brought you to Silicon Valley?

Ro Khanna: During law school, I was enamored by what was going on there. I thought the most interesting questions of law would be at the intersection of technology and law. There was a Professor, Larry Lessig, who wrote one of the most brilliant books, Code, where he argued that engineers were actually making the decisions for us in how to structure society. I did work for him and then I went out to Silicon Valley to see what the place was like

Brian Lehrer: A brilliant man, Lawrence Lessig, who's been on the show among everything else that he's done. The Guardian review of your book says you're right with the idealism and optimism of a first-generation American who still marvels at the opportunities he has had. Would you describe yourself that way?

Ro Khanna: Yes, I would. You have my story. My grandfather spent 15 years in India's independence movement, four years in jail alongside Gandhi during the 1940s during Guit India. My parents then immigrated here. They came after the civil rights movement. Until 1965, as you know, 90% of immigration was European because we had strict quotas for people from India or China. I was, as I mentioned in Philadelphia our bicentenary. Then at the age of 40, this country elects me to represent arguably the most economically prosperous place in the world.

It's a district that's majority Asian American. Anyone who has my story I think would have an optimism, a hope about America. That doesn't mean I am unaware of the injustices and the struggles and also the fate and restrictions on other communities that have been much severer than that I've faced. It does give me a hope for the country to become a multiracial, multiethnic democracy.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. I actually want you to talk about that a little more because optimism is let's say not dominant in our national mood these days, including among progressives who often focus on the persistence of racism and inequality and right-wing threats to democracy. How do you integrate that into what you see as your progressive worldview? Your optimism and your progressiveness?

Ro Khanna: If there's one thing I hope your listeners will read after this interview more than my book, it is Frederick Douglass's Composite Nation, which I end the book with in chapter 10. I think next to the Lincoln's inaugurals and maybe one of the greatest speeches in American history. Here you have Frederick Douglass who was a slave for 20 years, who was in slave for 20 years defending in 1869 Chinese Immigration. He says that he still has a belief that America will become a multiracial, multiethnic democracy, a composite nation, as he says, with people from all over the world, including African-Americans, and that we all would have an ability to contribute as equals to building this composite nation.

I guess my view is if you have people like Frederick Douglass or W.E.B Dubois, who talks about the aspiration of all Americans to be coworkers in the kingdom of culture or my late colleague, John Lewis, who was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, or my grandfather who spent four years in jail against colonialism. If you have all of those individuals believing in the possibility of freedom and sacrificing for it, it seems our challenges seem rather insignificant or not as significant as what they had to overcome. It would be the height of complacency for us embrace a doomerism when the odds of our struggle are less than what people have had to endure before us.

Brian Lehrer: It's good to have a long view of history. Congressman Ro Khanna, our guest, the subtitle of your book, How Tech Can Work for All of Us. Is that even possible? The trajectory of the last generation or so of time seems to be from optimism about tech as a democratizer of information and power to a wasteland of disinformation, a social media culture ruinous to many young people's mental health, especially girls, a course field of hate speech and Silicon Valley giants greed, you know all these things. We've seen the tech haves and have nots exacerbate learning inequality in the pandemic, remote learning era, that difference. Can tech ever work for all of us or is the job right now more to minimize its dystopian effect?

Ro Khanna: We need more humanistic thinking and regulations for it to work for all of us, but I believe it can. Let's take two different issues. The citizenship question and the economic question. On the citizenship question, you pointed some of the things that tech has gotten right. The fact that we have a Me Too movement, that we have the Black Lives Matter movement on social media, that we have more decentralization of giving people a voice has been a good thing, but there has also been a naivete, an absolute defense of the First Amendment thinking just having people speak on a platform inside of how going to improve public discourse.

That has been exclusionary by the rampant racism and sexism online, making it hard for people to participate as equals. There has been, as you pointed out, a lot of terrible design, which has led to depression and suicide among teenage girls, in particular, with Instagram. There's been the targeting of people with their data and making them vulnerable and that's how you've had the growth of QAnon. What I have said is you need to have certain rules, both the government rules in terms of not allowing the incitement of violence on speech, which still is allowed.

In terms of having consumer protection laws, in terms of preventing these companies from getting your data and then targeting you so that we can improve the public discourse. In antitrust laws, we have a plurality of discourse of speeches. I'll let you respond to that and then we can get into the economics part of it.

Brian Lehrer: Sure. Listeners, if you're just joining us, my guest is California Congressman RO Khanna, a member of the Progressive Caucus. His district is basically Silicon Valley. His new book is called Dignity In a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us. We can take some phone calls and tweet for Congressman Khanna on this theme of tech working for all of us or anything else that you want to ask a member of the Progressive Caucus here at this political moment in our country. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet at @BrianLehrer. Let me do this next. Let me play a very short clip of Frances Haugen, the Facebook Whistleblower, and then a very short clip of Mark Zuckerberg and get your take on whether both things can be true. Here's Frances Haugen after she revealed some internal Facebook documents.

Frances Haugen: I saw Facebook repeatedly encounter conflicts between its own profits and our safety. Facebook consistently resolved these conflicts in favor of its own profits. The result has been more division, more harm, more lies, more threats, and more combat. In some cases, this dangerous online talk has led to actual violence that harms and even kills people. This is not simply a matter of certain social media users being angry or unstable, or about one side being radicalized against the other.

It is about Facebook choosing to grow at all costs, becoming an almost trillion-dollar company by buying its profits with our safety. During my time at Facebook, I came to realize a devastating truth. Almost no one outside of Facebook knows what happens inside of Facebook. The company intentionally hides vital information from the public, from the US government, and from governments around the world.

Brian Lehrer: That was about a minute of Frances Haugen. That was a little longer than I thought it was going to be but here's 20 seconds of Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg: I think if you look at the grand arc here, what's really happening is individuals are getting more power and more opportunity to create the lives and the jobs that they want and to connect with people they want and to connect with the ideas that they want and to share the ideas that they want. I just think that that will lead to a better world.

Brian Lehrer: Zuckerberg, Facebook's creator, of course. For you, Congressman, are both things true? Can they coexist at all or does one person necessarily wind up telling the truth and the other person lying?

Ro Khanna: I've met Frances Haugen. I think she's telling the truth. The reality is when it comes to the specific information that she discussed, that Facebook knows that their product is causing depression, suicidal thoughts, and anxiety among teenagers. They know this. They are not taking any action to change it. They could make sure that Instagram wasn't amplifying and putting on steroids our worst experiences in junior high.

They're not doing that. They could stop the targeting of teenage girls who may have eating disorders or who may have particular mental health issues. They're not doing that. In my belief, and actually, I'm working on a bill right now is that you ought to have the FTC and the FCC given power to regulate this product just like you would any product that was causing consumer harm.

Brian Lehrer: One thing that you write about in the book is the opportunities for individual and family economics through the new work from home era that the pandemic has brought on. Of course, that intersects with the tech capabilities of today to work from home. Can you expand on your vision of that?

Ro Khanna: This gets to the economic part of can tech work for all of us? We have an economy right now. $11 trillion of market cap in my district. It's going up 40% during the pandemic. Apple has gone from $1 trillion to $3 trillion. The economy is working for many people in my district, not for all the service workers, but many young folks, they're very optimistic about America. Yet, the new economy has not worked for so many people across this country where you've seen jobs go offshore, deindustrialization, people saying that their kids are having to leave their hometown.

They're talking about a brain drain in many parts of this country. My argument is that we have to make sure these 25 million new digital jobs are decentralized, that we need place-based policy that actually brings these jobs to communities as opposed to telling people, ''Go move and go leave the towns that you grew up in and may love.'' We can do it. Intel going to Ohio is a great example of what I'm talking about creating 3,000 manufacturing jobs, 7,000 construction jobs, bringing $20 billion there a part of the economic revival of that part of Ohio. We need more of that and policies that will encourage that.

Brian Lehrer: Did you have a position on Amazon wanting to build a second headquarters in New York City and bring-- they said 20,000, 25,000 jobs, but it being rejected because people in the nearby neighborhoods fear gentrification?

Ro Khanna: I thought it was unfortunate that Amazon after talking about all the places they would put jobs were just talking about a few of the big cities where these jobs have already been concentrated. I rather that they had gone across the country in places maybe that didn't have them. In general, I think these jobs should be welcome if you have a couple of stipulations: that they pay well, that there is going to be affordable housing in a community, and that you actually have the opportunities for service workers to make enough wage in these communities that it doesn't get them rent burden. Overall, I am for tech jobs and tech opportunities with two provisions, good wages, and affordable housing.

Brian Lehrer: Christine in West Chester, you're on WNYC with Congressman Ro Khanna. Hi, Christine.

Christine: Hi. Can you hear me?

Ro Khanna: Hi, Christine.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, we got you. Hi. Christine. You're on.

Christine: I wanted to speak to the idea of free speech in social media. I'm a progressive. I have other progressive friends who are more-- they describe themselves perhaps as free speech absolutists. On the other hand, I'm very convinced by the work of Shoshana Zuboff and others that demonstrate that social media is not the public square. We're being manipulated so they can hoover up our information. In fact, the least truthful information often is what's the most beneficial to the social media companies. Do you have any thoughts about how to bridge this disagreement between people on the left?

Ro Khanna: I'm a big fan of Shoshana Zuboff's work on surveillance capitalism. I had sent earlier drafts of my book, and she was helpful in her comments. I would say two things. First, the First Amendment even under Brandenburg is an absolute. You can't have imminent threats of violence. There is no argument in my view when Facebook knew before January 6th that there were specific time and place threats on their platform for assassinating lawmakers that they shouldn't have said on that information.

They should have reported that to the federal government, and they should have removed that from their platform. The fact that they have such a broad Section 230 immunity is wrong and we need to reform Section 230 at least so it doesn't apply to incitement of illegal conduct that's not right under Brandenburg. The second thing I would put out, and this is where I rely on Habermas, who I think is one of the great philosophers of the 20th century in discourse theory is to get to the truth, to get to morality, to have a public sphere, which is a word he actually coined in 1962.

It doesn't just mean everyone gets to speak. It means everyone has to speak as an equal, that that speech has to have a reciprocity of good intention, that it has to be informed dialogue. There has been a naivete in my view in social media that just put everyone together, and on top of that, monetize it and target people with some types of information, and that that's going to have good outcomes. Frankly, if I had one recommendation to the social media companies, I'd say hire philosophy majors, hire humanists, hire liberal arts majors. Embrace the challenge that people have been thinking about how to have thoughtful discourse for generations. We need to do a much better job of how that would happen on new media platforms.

Brian Lehrer: Christine, thank you for your call. Congressman, you call yourself a progressive capitalist. How is that different from, say, a Bernie Sanders democratic socialist who calls himself a progressive just as you do?

Ro Khanna: Well, I would say it was a co-chair of Senator Sanders's campaign. I admire him very much and I support the policies of Medicare for all. I support the policy of free public college, I support the $15 minimum wage. The way I frame these things is these are the basic things that you need to be successful in a market economy. I guess I probably have a little bit more of appreciation or faith in the power of innovation and entrepreneurship.

I believe people should be free to trade things in a market, to invent things. You shouldn't have the government making all decisions about an economy and that's why I embrace innovation and entrepreneurship. I just want to make sure everyone has the shot that I did: healthcare, education, nutrition, a safe community, to have a real chance of success in this market economy.

Brian Lehrer: The conversation that we had before you came on was about the Spotify, Joe Rogan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell controversy. Spotify is not just a platform, but a producer of podcasts. Now it has a big stake in Joe Rogan. It isn't just a neutral platform for it. A listener tweeted near the end of that, ''The conversation you're having right now is only one reason why the world of Web3 exists. That is music, NFTs, and decentralization. Some of that is still over my head. I have to admit. I get NFT's now, I think, but I've only heard the term Web3 a few times. Is this something you're familiar with and does this come into your positive vision of tech future?

Ro Khanna: It's something that I am somewhat familiar with. As I understand NFTs and Web3, it is the idea that you can have blockchain technology allow for the decentralization of transactions. Let me give you a concrete example. Let's I've written this book Dignity In a Digital Age, and it needs to be read in different college campuses. Right now it costs a lot of money, unfortunately, I have no say over that. It costs $28, $26 to buy the book. What if you could actually have an NFT book that would allow it to be distributed throughout where would still be compensated for their intellectual capital, but it would significantly decrease the cost of the distribution?

That strikes me as a good thing. You could see that application and smart contracts. You could see that application in allowing for money transmittances across the world without the same fees. You could see actually creating companies with giving people more ownership by giving them these tokens. Now, there are scams as well in terms of the investment on this and that needs to be regulated. We need to regulate some of the uses of this for illicit activity. It has to be well regulated, but I do think the underlying technology does have some value beyond being digital gold

Brain Lehrer: On the government doing too much to take over the tech industry, take over is much too strong, but to more strongly regulate the tech giants. Here's an interesting question from a listener who tweets, ''Would the Congressman like to see Donald Trump's FCC and Federal Trade Commission be in charge of social media because eventually, that's what would happen?'' Now, whether or not Trump actually gets elected in 2024, eventually there'll be another Republican president who might have a very different approach to the government's relationship with tech. How much is that from your progressive standpoint a risk of getting the government too involved?

Ro Khanna: Well, it's a risk in that you don't want the government being an arbiter of the truth. That is undoubtedly the case, but the reality is that you can't use Donald Trump as a test case for any regulation. He could abuse every regulation and that's what he tried to do in many cases. In that world, you wouldn't have any regulation. I think let's just use a normal Republican because the challenge with Trump is to make sure he doesn't abuse his authority. There is even in a normal Republican, or a view that you don't want to give these agencies too much power to censor speech.

I have defended actually a lot of even speech that the liberals didn't like it being on these platforms, but just because you don't want to censor viewpoints doesn't mean that you can't have regulations about consumer safety so that you don't have a product that is causing harm to teenagers or public health safety. You don't have a product that is actually leading to deaths because of misinformation about vaccines. As you know, because you're on broadcast radio, we have some standards for radio and television. I would argue that standards for the internet probably have to be less because you have millions of people, but it's fair to argue that you need some standards. That it shouldn't just be the Wild West.

Brain Lehrer: Listener tweets for Ro Khanna, ''What is the role of tech in battling climate change and what are its downfalls?''

Ro Khanna: On the positive side, we need technological innovation for climate change. We need to make sure how we can innovate on new batteries, innovate on scaling solar, innovate on the smart grid. So much of the challenge of climate change is not just regulatory, it requires innovation. On a challenging part is the climate disinformation. Let me say two things on social media. One, you have Sunrise Movement and a lot of the climate activists were using the tools of social media very effectively. It's allowing mobilization, but you also have huge pockets of climate disinformation on social media. I chair the environment subcommittee in Congress. We had big oil hearings about how big oil basically lied to us about climate for the last 40 years. We're actually going to be having a hearing on social media's role in climate disinformation to explore exactly these issues.

Brian Lehrer: Can you talk a little more about that? What's your premise going in regarding social media's role on climate disinformation?

Ro Khanna: Well, the premise is that there is a lot of climate disinformation that is out there in the social media space. There is information that, for example, human activity doesn't cause climate change. That's just false. Well, what is the obligation of social media companies when it comes to climate disinformation given their own goals that they care about the Paris Accords? It may be hard there to have a regulatory fix. You may not be able to have the government serve as an arbiter of truth on what is climate disinformation and not, but certainly, you could have more editorial responsibility by social media companies themselves. That's what we will explore in these hearings.

Brian Lehrer: My guest for another few minutes is Congressman Ro Khanna, a leader of the Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives and the Representative from the Silicon Valley area. An author of a new book called Dignity In a Digital Age. Congressman, a couple of things before you go. One, I want to make sure you get this part of your book out here a little bit. You've written an internet bill of rights. Can you enumerate some of those for us?

Ro Khanna: Absolutely. The point should be that when you go online, your data should not be taken without your affirmative consent and used in ways to support candidates that you don't support or to target teenagers in ways that you don't support or to be used to create profiles that end up helping grow social media followings on QAnon in ways you don't support. People often say, ''Well, what difference does it make if it's my data that's being taken? My life is okay,'' but there's a societal harm to these companies having all of this data, constructing social profiles and using it to target the most vulnerable.

The Internet Bill of Rights, at first instance, would stop that data accumulation. I think that would make for a much better public sphere. This is just one step of what would help address this surveillance capitalism that Shoshana Zuboff writes about so brilliantly, but at least it'll mitigate some of those problems.

Brain Lehrer: Last thing just turning to the politics of 2022, how do you think Democrats can hold Congress this year?

Ro Khanna: We need to do a better job telling our story. The entire democratic part already should be in Ohio saying under president Joe Biden, we brought $20 billion to the Midwest. When did Donald Trump do that? We're bringing new jobs. The job growth is tremendous. The economic recovery is tremendous. We've passed bipartisan infrastructure, something we haven't done in decades. We're getting rural communities connected to broadband. We're making broadband affordable for communities left out. We're removing lead pipes.

We had the American rescue plan that helped prevent a massive recession that got people payments, that cut child poverty. We need the Congress to continue progress for working families, and we should resist this-- there's this too much gloom and doom, I think, in our party. We are at a point where we have the most diverse Congress ever. We are getting closer to becoming a multiracial, multicultural democracy. Yes, Trump was a huge setback and there wasn't a linear line from Obama to a multicultural, multiracial democracy. What we're trying to do is never been done before in the history of the world. We ought to approach it with a sense of optimism that we will get there and a recognition that these are the struggles that we have to go through to do something that's really going to be historically unique.

Brain Lehrer: Congressman Ro Khanna. His new book is called Dignity In a Digital Age: Making Tech Work For All of Us. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your ideas and taking calls and tweets from our listeners. I really, really appreciate it.

Ro Khanna: I appreciate you having me. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, stay with us.

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