Will AI improve our lives or exterminate the species?

What would it take to abolish poverty?

Are you eating enough fermented foods?

These are some of the questions we've tackled recently on the next big idea.

I'm Rufus Griscombe, and every week I sit down with the world's leading thinkers

for in-depth conversations that will help you live, work, and play smarter.

Follow the next big idea wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast. This is Alex Cantruitz, and we're going to kick off in style today because this is our first ever episode and joining us is Zaynep Tufekji.

She's a writer and researcher that's covered the social media driven network protests.

And if you've been paying attention to politics or our society or technology at all over the past 10 years,

you've probably seen these things all over the place.

They are fueled by social media,

so conversations on social media turn into action in the street, and they encompass everything

from Occupy Wall Street, to the Arab Spring, and to today's Black Lives Matter protests.

And I think if you start digging into these protests, you can learn a lot about our society today,

where we're going in our politics,

and how technology influences it all. So as it happened, Zainup and I happen to separately be at one

of these same protests at the same time in 2013 in Gesey Park in Istanbul, Turkey, which is close

to where Zainup grew up, where Turkish society poured out into the streets and protests of what they saw as the

Turkish government's overreaches. And it was a pretty intense movement. Thousands and thousands

of people showed up there. And I think by studying what happened in Gezi Park, you can learn a lot

about what we're going through in the U.S. and all over the world today as we look at

the Black Life Matter protests and how social media is influencing everything that we're

...