Riotr

Podcast Transcript

“Welcome back to another episode of Tech Heck with Dwayne Jefferson. This is our 84th episode and today we’ll be talking to the creator of Riotr—an app that has revolutionized protesting in the United States and around the world. One of the biggest names in modern tech, ladies and gentlemen, Jim Dunne.”

“Hello.”

“Jim, it’s a pleasure to have you with us.”

“Happy to be here.”

“Now, for our three or four listeners who live under a giant boulder, can you give us a quick recap of your app, what it’s about, all that good stuff.”

“Sure. Riotr is an app that seeks to answer a simple question: ‘Where is change happening in the world and how can I be part of it?’”

“Wow.”

“As you know, social media has been huge for coordinating grassroots protest campaigns over the last fifteen years. Whether it’s the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, or BLM2020, the internet has been instrumental in giving a voice to the voiceless.”

“Powerful stuff. So what? I just create a name, log onto your app and I can see all the protests in my city? In my state?”

“Anywhere in the world, Dwayne. Where ever people are lifting their voice as one, Riotr is there helping to make it happen.”

“And I can just join in.”

“Or start your own. We provide the tools necessary for community leaders to amplify their outreach and generate the groundswell that leads to real world engagement with feet on the street.”

“That’s a good pitch, but first things first—the name. Speaking for myself, as a black man, I feel more comfortable calling this kind of action, this kind of movement, you know, a protest.”

“Right.”

“But you obviously have no problem using the term riot, which, given the racial history-”

“Right, right.”

“-do you worry about those connotations? Did you all think about calling it something different? Maybe Protestr?”

“We did, actually, and you know Paul—my lead developer Paul Subramanian—he was a big proponent for calling it that, calling it Protestr, because he felt riots are undignified.”

“Right.”

“You know, it’s thugs that go rioting, looting-”

“-right, that’s the history. You see a picture and it says underneath, thugs looting a store, and you already know who’s going to be in it, some poor mother and her babies-”

“Exactly. So I told Paul, the first thing I said is, a riot is the language of the unheard.”

“Martin Luther King, may he rest in power.”

“-and as someone who is himself biracial, a BIPOC, I am very familiar with the language used by those in power against us. And the reality is that the elites in power, the ones really in charge, are always going to call a protest a riot—if it’s effective. Because they have to shut it down.”

“Propaganda. They gotta do a hit piece on it.”

“Exactly, so if your protest never gets called a riot, it probably failed right? To me, that’s the litmus. If it was something the authorities felt comfortable ignoring, then it was no different from, say, a game of ball. A clambake at the park.”

“Put the chowder down and your hands up.”

“So the name Riotr is saying, there’s power here. There’s an edge. We have to be taken seriously.”

“Alright, alright, but aren’t you concerned about being held liable for- for property damage or- hell, for inciting a riot, which is, itself, against the law in most places?”

“Obviously, we want our users to obey all local, state, and federal laws and ordinances wherever they happen to be protesting. Our TOS on this is quite strict and we take quick, decisive action against repeat offenders after a thorough review.”

“Do you feel that there’s a tension there? ‘We’re dangerous but also please don’t break anything.’ Doesn’t feel very Rage against the Machine, does it?”

[Laughs] “No.”

“No, there’s no tension, or no on the Zack de la Rocha?”

“No on the tension.”

“Really.”

“Really! I was in front of congress earlier this month and they asked these same sort of questions—in a more legal, rigorous format—so if your listeners have an hour or two to kill and nothing better to do, I’m sure they can find my whole breakdown of it there.”

“Come on, you gotta give us something.”

“What I will say is, away from all the legalese, I’m a big believer in Nazoraeru.”

“Nah zoh what now? You speaking in tongues?”

“It’s a Buddhist term and it’s a- it’s a form of mimetic magic.

“This is a tech podcast, man. We ain’t our here trying to cast spells. I’m a god-fearing man.”

[laughs] “Just stay with me. Part of Nazoraeru is doing a thing even if you don’t have the power to do the thing.”

“Give us an example.”

“A poor man may not be able to build a temple to the Buddha, he may not have the money or the resources, but he can set a single pebble down with all the intention and determination that it would take to build that temple. And even though he hasn’t built it, the intentionality is there, you know? It stills counts on some level.”

“You’re saying, like, the power is there.”

“Exactly, and the first step to anything is to first do it in your heart. I had to visualize the company behind Riotr before I could build it.”

“I see, your talking like, manifesting that power. An Oprah kind of thing.”

“Right, and in the same way you build temples, you can tear down systems of oppression. So what I tell people is, when you go out to protest, you must riot in your soul. You riot with your voice. You protest in front of the capital or some other government building, and your voice is like the horn of Jericho. You shout as if the walls of power will crumble, as if you are going to push over those pillars yourself. But you don’t need to actually push them over, because your intentionality is there.”

“-because of Nazoraeru.”

“If you act with enough intentionality, I believe protestors will succeed in the same way I did with my company.”

“Inspiring.”

“Thank you.”

“Now, while it’s true you’ve been successful, you have no shortage of skeptics.”

“I’m aware.”

“What about people who say that Riotr is just another form of control—a way to consolidate the communication channels and keep tabs on all the usual people that the government likes to keep tabs on?”

“I hear this complaint all the time and I think what people are really whining about is our dominance in the market. It’s like people complaining about having to use Tinder for dates or Facebook for planning events.”

“If you don’t have an account, you get left out.”

“Right, and that’s what people are upset about. ‘If your protest isn’t on Riotr, it doesn’t exist.’ I’m not ashamed to say that has been our goal from day one, and if people want to participate they have to go where the userbase is.”

“Okay, but are you a fed?”

[laughs] “If I was, maybe they’d stop hounding me.”

“Got any good stories? Any run-ins with the men in black?”

“If I have, I can’t talk about it. I have met Will Smith though, who’s getting up there in age.”

“Bad Boys 5 was tight.”

“It was alright. But look, the reality is—a protest is a public event. You have to advertise, you have to recruit, you have to get the word out. That’s the reality. It’s not something you do in secret. Riotr is facilitating what was traditionally quite hard, and people either make use of it or they don’t. That’s on them.”

“So you don’t see any reason for people to have security concerns?”

“We’ve got the best cyber security experts in the field, multi-factor authentication is mandatory, and we use the latest decentralized, blockchain technology to ensure that every message sent is as secure as possible while in transit or at rest.”

“Sounds cutting edge.”

“It is.”

“There are many news outlets that have linked Riotr’s new Counterprotest feature to an increase in real world clashes and violence between ideologically opposed groups. I was reading a New York Times article the other day that described Riotr as a ‘blight upon the nation’ and a ‘downtown warzone generator.’”

“Nice.”

“There was also a National Review article about a woman that died at a protest in Boston and name-checked you specifically as being at fault, saying her blood was quote on your soft, silicon hands unquote.”

“I don’t think it’ll surprise you if I say those reports are overblown, or that it is grotesque to weaponize that poor woman’s death for a cheap click.”

“You’re right, it doesn’t.”

“Based on internal testing, our developers are extremely pleased with the Counterprotest feature, which, to be honest, puts guardrails around something that was already happening.”

“Yeah, I was going to say—I feel like Riotr protests have come with counterprotesting since the beginning.”

“They have and that’s a natural consequence of, again, your protest being made public and searchable. Opposing voices will show up. And that’s a good thing.”

“Is it?”

“Absolutely. The more people we get out there protesting, counter-protesting-”

“-counter-counter-protesting-”

“-the more we are shining a light on the multifaceted sides of any given issue. Because we all know it’s not just left vs right. Democrat vs Republican.”

“I can go down to Walmart and get 37 flavors of cola, but they expect me to pick Coke or Pepsi at the ballot box!”

“And they don’t even offer the political equivalent of RC.”

“Don’t start me on RC Cola, man. That’s my heroin.”

“For any given issue, there are a hundred ways to look at it, a hundred perspectives, and isn’t that the point of protesting in the first place? That we, the people, are finally heard?”

“But what about the physical safety concerns? Or the accusations that your app is, like everything else on the internet, creating division in our country and the world?”

“I’ll come back to the safety issue in a moment, since it segues nicely into the announcement I came to make today, but first I want to talk about the division.”

“Please do.”

“Division is something journalists love to talk about. Of course, they thrive off of it. These journalists, they love to take potshots at big tech like me, go for the clickbait, the outrage, and I don’t begrudge them for it.”

“You don’t?”

“No. It’s a matter of survival. Their content model is stuck in the past and the sad reality is that journalism—old school journalism—is dead. Before the internet, they had to work a local beat, make contacts, develop and deliver their own content. But now everything is global and no one cares about the local.”

“Or at least nobody has figured out a way to make caring about the local profitable.”

“Exactly, so all that’s left is the global and that’s what we deliver. Big tech. I mean, the only way they know where protests are happening is by looking on Riotr.”

“You’re basically doing their job for them.”

“So they have nothing to offer. All they can do is commentary and every piece they cook up comes with the same stale flavor of moral outrage and indignation.”

“Damn, Jim. Tell us what you really think.”

“Its the only way they can make money. In the global market, only the most outraged, the most indignant, can grab these flitting moments of online attention long enough to make a quick buck. Meanwhile, people like me are building apps—are building infrastructure—that get people to connect in the real world.”

“People, Jim Dunne is here and he is not holding back.”

“I have personally received letters thanking me—thanking me—for the ways that Riotr has changed people’s minds and lives. That real life exposure, not just to the ideas like you get on the internet, but to the people behind them, is what will ultimately heal this nation.”

“Don’t think we’ll see an NYT article saying that any time soon.”

“Probably not, but the idea that we are making the world less safe, or that we are a breeding ground for radicalism, or that we are responsible for what some lunatic chooses to do—it’s preposterous. The truth is that Riotr protests have an increased but proportional police presence, because of us.”

“Now you’re coming back around to the physical safety issue.”

“Like everyone else, police departments can see the data ahead of time, they can see how many people are going to be there, both protester and counter-protestor, and they can calculate how many officers are required for an appropriate, proportional response. They can send the right amount of people, the right amount of drones, the right amount of robot dogs. There are pieces of police software today that tap into our API to do just that.”

“And what about people who don’t trust the police?”

“That’s where the Riotr Police Accountability feature comes in, which keeps a database on every responding police officer in the country based on user submitted data and video, which can then be forwarded to the same journalists who despise us.”

“Man, something for everybody. So you hinted at it earlier, why don’t you tell us what you’ve come to announce?”

“Thank you, Dwayne. Today, I’m excited to announce a partnership with Apple and Google called Riotr Routes. Data from our app will allow map apps to predict and plan the quickest, safest trips around protests, and counter-protests, as they happen, keeping non-participants out of danger and mid-day traffic. You’ll even be able to look days into the future to determine if your favorite route will be open or if your better off taking the scenic route because of a march against police brutality.”

“Sounds like a life-saver to me. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve rolled up on a human chain and been late to work. I respect the struggle, but I gotta eat people.”

“This data will also be available via notifications and we encourage people to start checking for protests in the same way they check for bad weather. We’re even piloting a model where we roll this information out to local news and radio stations so they can work these announcements into their weather and local traffic spots. Naturally, even if you’re not planning to protest, the best way to get the latest information is to download our app.”

“Making the world a better place for people on and off the picket line. Jim, it was a pleasure to have you on today.”

“Thanks Dwayne.”

“I’ll let you have the last word, as long as it’s not Nazoraeru.”

“I invite everyone to join us on Riotr, join the revolution, make your voice heard. Only when we all come together and speak out as one, can democracy succeed. Oh also, please look forward to our new app releasing next week—RaceSpace.” Ω