Skip to the main content
Berkman Community Newcomers: James Losey

Berkman Community Newcomers: James Losey

This post is part of a series featuring interviews with some of the fascinating individuals who joined our community for the 2014-2015 year. Conducted by our 2014 summer interns (affectionately known as "Berkterns"), these snapshots aim to showcase the diverse backgrounds, interests, and accomplishments of our dynamic 2014-2015 community.

Interested in joining the Berkman Center community? We're currently accepting fellowship applications for the 2015-2016 academic year. Read more on our fellowships page.

Q&A with James Losey

Berkman affliate and PhD candidate at Stockholm University
@jameslosey
interviewed in summer 2014 by Berktern Ben Sobel

What was your career arc, and how did it lead you to your current graduate study at Stockholm University in Sweden?

I think, like many people that graduated my generation in university and ended up spending our first moments outside of school working on the Obama campaign, my real interest was policy work. From my vantage, there wasn’t a real opportunity to do that through the campaign. So when I found the opportunity, I ended up moving to DC. It’s a crazy story: I just wanted to live in DC and to do public policy work. Everybody tells you it’s about connections—I had none. I hardly had any money; I sold a few musical instruments and some furniture. I ended up living in a hostel for a few days. I didn’t have any friends, a place to stay, or a job. I then crashed in a punk warehouse up in Brooklyn for a couple months until I got an internship on Capitol Hill, which I got essentially by putting on the one nice outfit I had, printing up résumés and cover letters to each chief of staff of the offices I wanted to visit, knocking on doors, and asking if there were any openings.

That’s amazing.


Yeah, it was great. I started interning on the Hill for a new congressman out of Louisiana, just to get a different experience from the politics I was exposed to in the Bay Area of California. And then, about a year after I started working on the Hill, I spent some time with a congressional watchdog organization, CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington).

Then, in 2009, I started working with Sascha Meinrath at the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation. There were a lot of different issues I was covering: questions about the digital divide, questions of how to develop policies to increase broadband access to underserved communities in the US, questions around net neutrality, issues of intellectual property…But I wanted to go more international. Again, moving to DC gave me greater political perspective compared with the Bay Area. Moving to Europe would give me a perspective of how the same debates might be approached with different ideals or different interests.

What continental differences do you see in the way internet governance issues are perceived?

The telecommunications issues in the US are defined by business interests. My experience with these issues in Europe, and particularly in Sweden, is that it’s not necessarily the same way. A lot of the framing of policies in Europe seems more based on providing communications and providing openness, and not about the solicitation of profits in the same way that it is in the US.

Is part of the allure of Europe, then, that you can actually focus on what might seem to be more central issues rather than the business interests that bog things down in the USA? Has this opened up your research horizons at all?

The interesting thing is what potential there is to understand US-Europe relations, how the two economies fit in globally, and how these can be used as leverage points to promote more open, secure communications. A great example of that are the tensions from the revelations of US surveillance, which are leading a number of different countries to look into how to localize data as a response. Localization isn’t a great idea for an open internet, but it does demonstrate the relations between the interests, and how domestic debates do have international consequences.

In the long term, do you see yourself moving more towards academia or more towards making and advising on policy? How might the Berkman Center fit in as an intermediate step to whatever that end vision is for you?

I’ve spent a lot of time bridging different communities. In DC, the interface was between governments and society. When I went to Europe, I stayed to be a fellow at the Open Knowledge Institute, and a lot of my work bridged developer communities and policy communities. I wanted to understand how developers working on technologies for secure and unfettered online communications can be better connected with funding communities, college communities, and government actors. I ended up participating in a number of hackathons on most continents during my time as a master’s student, as well as organizing hackathons for the Swedish Foreign Ministry as part of the annual Stockholm Internet Forum. Coming out of the work on my PhD, my interest is to continue bridging academic and policy communities, and to think about where policy is actually going. I'm thinking about how to take advantage of the sometimes slower cycle of academia to target the research towards where policy debates are moving—and how to be more proactive rather than reactive, which was much of my experience in DC.

Being able to be a part of [Berkman’s] community of tremendous interdisciplinary expertise will help me take these ideas forward. I hope to be able to share my experiences in the trenches of the policy world, but also the experience I’ve had on working on these issues from a European perspective.

Are there any things you can point to as signs of heartening progress on this interdisciplinary dialogue between companies, developers, governments, users, and the like? On the flip side, are there any areas that are still particularly lacking?


Over time, debates have gotten more nuanced. There have been more engineers participating in net neutrality debates, and I think we have a much better understanding of how the internet functions and why it necessarily isn’t always a legal question but a technical question. Even for reports I would disagree with on intellectual property protection—proposals that are too strong and constricting and may do more harm than good—they’re still becoming more technically nuanced…

I don’t think that it’s perfect, and I think that I want to see more federal agencies and even committees on the Hill having on-staff technologists to sort out these questions, rather than just having a wealth of lawyers. But the technological aptitude is increasing in some regard. A lot of issues are still long uphill battles, like net neutrality. Still, what was once a very wonky issue receives a lot of public press and a lot of wide responses—over a million comments handed to the FCC, so that’s positive. What the question comes down to is, are policymakers bought out by companies or are they listening to the American people? And I think that’s an open question when we look at US politics. That’s why you see more leaders on technical issues—Larry Lessig and Tim Wu, to name a few—who are starting to look at questions of money in politics, look at the problems with the political system as something that needs to be targeted, rather than just trying to do better full-on policy.