Making Sense - Sam Harris


Making Sense of Social Media and the Information Landscape ｜ Episode 8 of The Essential Sam Harris

Topics
attention economy smartphone addiction advertising and algorithmic behavior modification peak social media creating in-between institutions Twitter controversies
Hosted by
Sam Harris
Mentioned
Gary Kasparov Jasmine Lane Jack Dorsey Tristan Harris Jonathan Haidt Zeynep Tufekci Cass Sunstein Bing

Episode Stats


Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we continue our compilation of Sam Harris's conversations on the topic of Social Media and the Information Landscape. This compilation extends the considered issues of social media well beyond personal engagement and into the many ways in which the surveillance economy generally has warped our politics, social relations, and moral psychologies. In this compilation, we'll hear the natural overlap with theories of moral and political philosophy, belief and unbelief, and artificial intelligence. We'll also be situating the social media question in a broader context of the business model which enables it, something that s been called surveillance capitalism by its critics, and personalized advertising by its more supportive advocates. We'll be zooming in on some of the specific technologies upon which all of this is built, including an episode with Jaron Lanier, which is included in the compilation. And at the conclusion, we ll offer some reading, listening, and watching suggestions which range from fun and light to densely academic. This is episode 304: Why I Left Twitter. Why I left Twitter? is an update before we jump into this compilation. Since the initial writing and recording of the episode, Sam quit Twitter entirely, he recorded a solo episode entitled, "Why I Left. which explains his reasoning and thought process for that decision. We ll be wandering through the same roadmap through these clips, and what we re going to see for ourselves in the next few episodes of this series. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore it s made possible entirely through the support of our listeners. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a patron of The Making Sense Podcast. Become a patron and become a supporter by becoming one of our patron. You'll get access to the full-time supporter of The Essential Sam Harris Podcast, wherever you get your ad choices are available. Thanks to our sponsorships, and we'll get a better idea of the best listening experience. of what s going to be covered in the podcast. . If you like what you're listening to, you'll get 10% off your ad-free version of Making Sense of the Podcast? Subscribe to the Making Sense: The Podcast, Subscribe to our podcast, Subscribe at Making Sense? Subscribe at Audible Become one of us on iTunes Learn more about your ad choice, and get 20% off the podcast on Audible, too!

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.
00:00:08.820 This is Sam Harris.
00:00:10.880 Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber
00:00:14.680 feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.
00:00:18.420 In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at
00:00:22.720 samharris.org.
00:00:24.060 There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with
00:00:28.360 other subscriber-only content.
00:00:30.520 We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support
00:00:34.640 of our subscribers.
00:00:35.900 So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
00:00:47.540 Welcome to the Essential Sam Harris.
00:00:50.760 This is Making Sense of Social Media and the Information Landscape.
00:00:55.480 The goal of this series is to organize, compile, and juxtapose conversations hosted by Sam
00:01:01.760 Harris into specific areas of interest.
00:01:05.380 This is an ongoing effort to construct a coherent overview of Sam's perspectives and arguments,
00:01:10.800 the various explorations and approaches to the topic, the relevant agreements and disagreements,
00:01:17.140 and the pushbacks and evolving thoughts which his guests have advanced.
00:01:20.620 The purpose of these compilations is not to provide a complete picture of any issue, but
00:01:27.700 to entice you to go deeper into these subjects.
00:01:30.940 Along the way, we'll point you to the full episodes with each featured guest.
00:01:35.620 And at the conclusion, we'll offer some reading, listening, and watching suggestions, which range
00:01:41.120 from fun and light to densely academic.
00:01:43.520 One note to keep in mind for this series, Sam has long argued for a unity of knowledge where
00:01:50.880 the barriers between fields of study are viewed as largely unhelpful artifacts of unnecessarily
00:01:56.360 partitioned thought.
00:01:58.100 The pursuit of wisdom and reason in one area of study naturally bleeds into, and greatly
00:02:03.500 affects, others.
00:02:05.480 You'll hear plenty of crossover into other topics as these dives into the archives unfold.
00:02:10.160 And your thinking about a particular topic may shift as you realize its contingent relationships
00:02:16.060 with others.
00:02:18.220 In this topic, you'll hear the natural overlap with theories of moral and political philosophy,
00:02:23.720 belief and unbelief, free will, and artificial intelligence.
00:02:28.960 So, get ready.
00:02:31.560 Let's make sense of social media and the information landscape.
00:02:35.340 One very important update before we jump into this compilation.
00:02:41.840 Since the initial writing and recording of this episode, Sam quit Twitter entirely.
00:02:48.500 He recorded a solo episode entitled, Why I Left Twitter, which explains his reasoning and
00:02:54.520 thought process for that decision.
00:02:56.800 We, of course, recommend listening to that, in addition to the included conversations here.
00:03:02.180 The knowledge that Sam eventually walked away from social media platforms places an interesting
00:03:08.880 lens over his conversations on the subject from the previous decade.
00:03:13.180 Though, as you'll hear, this compilation extends the considered issues of social media well
00:03:19.340 beyond personal engagement and into the many ways in which the surveillance economy generally
00:03:24.680 has warped our politics, social relations, and moral psychologies.
00:03:29.660 Why I Left Twitter is episode 304.
00:03:35.040 And now, back to the episode.
00:03:40.620 Social media is one of those topics that everyone seems to have strong opinions about.
00:03:45.940 That fact in itself, the idea that our feelings on just about everything seem to have gotten
00:03:51.220 stronger, inflamed by the advent of social media, is something we'll fold into the discussion
00:03:56.740 during this compilation.
00:03:57.740 Like just about all of us, Sam has gone through, and continues to go through, a strained relationship
00:04:06.440 with social media.
00:04:08.340 Apparently, even the most practiced meditators can be hijacked by algorithms that target our
00:04:13.160 propensity for outrage, adulation, annoyance, and disgust.
00:04:18.120 The beast of social media is strong.
00:04:20.460 But of course, social media also has positive potential, and its own success stories.
00:04:28.000 There are unignorable societal benefits that must be evaluated and considered.
00:04:32.960 This compilation contains plenty of critique and perspective regarding the darker sides of
00:04:37.580 social media, and the economic model which has provided its scaffolding.
00:04:41.280 But the criticism should not completely crowd out or invalidate the defenders and believers
00:04:46.500 and its positive possibilities.
00:04:48.980 We're also going to be situating the social media question in a broader context of the
00:04:53.800 business model which enables it, something that's been called surveillance capitalism by
00:04:58.840 its critics, and personalized advertising by its more supportive advocates.
00:05:03.620 We'll also be zooming in on some of the specific technologies upon which all of this is built.
00:05:11.520 In the introduction to an episode with Jaron Lanier, which is included in this compilation,
00:05:17.000 Sam identified three main lines of inquiry for this topic.
00:05:21.260 The first is economics, and the question of incentives in the face of automation and artificial intelligence.
00:05:27.220 The second is politics, and the question of how we can cooperate and cohere on ideas in a space
00:05:34.360 where truth is being hollowed out.
00:05:36.720 And the third is psychology, and how our attention and well-being are being assaulted by the power
00:05:42.580 of the surveillance economy and social media.
00:05:45.660 We'll be wandering through that same roadmap through these clips.
00:05:49.540 There won't be a ton of deep philosophical lessons and thought experiments to walk you through
00:05:53.900 in this episode.
00:05:54.660 Much of what we'll be tackling is plain for most people to see and experience for themselves.
00:06:00.920 We're going to hear Sam's conversations with defectors from the ranks of the architects
00:06:05.100 of information ecosystems in Silicon Valley, like Tristan Harris and Jaron Lanier.
00:06:10.920 We're going to hear some of Sam's conversation and pseudo-interrogation of Jack Dorsey himself,
00:06:16.520 the co-founder of Twitter, who was also its CEO at the time of their conversation.
00:06:20.680 And we're going to hear from authors like Jonathan Haidt and Cass Sunstein, who have studied
00:06:26.340 and continue to investigate the impacts of social media on individuals and the health
00:06:31.700 of democracy.
00:06:33.440 We're also going to broaden our lens and listen in on a conversation with Zeynep Tufekci, an
00:06:39.440 author who focuses on global movements and geopolitics, and consider how social media fuels,
00:06:45.340 diverts, or otherwise confuses political efforts.
00:06:50.060 And finally, we're going to tiptoe into the emerging deepfake technology, which threatens
00:06:55.380 to pour even more fuel on the fire of the collapsing integrity of global information.
00:07:01.540 So let's start with Sam talking to Tristan Harris.
00:07:05.340 No relation, by the way.
00:07:07.340 Tristan has been called the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience.
00:07:11.620 Tristan had just appeared in a documentary entitled The Social Dilemma when he spoke to
00:07:17.280 Sam.
00:07:18.120 So much of their conversation references the film, which is certainly recommended viewing
00:07:22.420 for this topic.
00:07:25.280 Tristan has been laser-focused on the problems of social media after spending years working
00:07:30.660 as a designer for Google and seeing firsthand the potent attention-harnessing techniques that
00:07:36.240 lurk behind the apps on your phone.
00:07:37.800 If you listen to our compilation about artificial intelligence, you'll be familiar with a concern
00:07:43.820 about our strengths and competencies being squashed by technology.
00:07:48.180 Here, you'll hear Tristan flip that concern around with a sharp observation.
00:07:53.780 Tristan has appeared on Making Sense twice.
00:07:56.760 This is from the more recent conversation from episode 218, Welcome to the Cult Factory.
00:08:02.220 Let's take it from the top here.
00:08:08.720 What's wrong with social media at this point?
00:08:12.240 If you could boil it down to the elevator pitch answer, what is the problem that we're going
00:08:20.260 to unspool?
00:08:21.780 Well, it's funny because the film actually opens with that prompt, the blank stares of
00:08:24.940 many technology insiders, including myself, because I think it's so hard to define exactly
00:08:29.520 what this problem is.
00:08:30.580 There's clearly a problem of incentives, but beneath that, there's a problem of what those
00:08:36.000 incentives are doing and where the exact harms show up.
00:08:39.300 And the way that we frame it in the film and in a big presentation we gave at the SF Jazz
00:08:43.460 Center back in April 2019 to a bunch of the top technologists and people in the industry
00:08:48.980 was to say that while we've all been looking out for the moment when AI would overwhelm human
00:08:54.980 strengths and when we would get the singularity, when would AI take our jobs?
00:08:58.060 Why wouldn't it be smarter than humans?
00:08:59.980 We missed this much, much earlier point when technology didn't overwhelm human strengths,
00:09:04.900 but it undermined human weaknesses.
00:09:07.580 And you can actually frame the cacophony of grievances and scandals and problems that we've
00:09:11.700 seen in the tech industry from distraction to addiction to polarization to bullying to harassment
00:09:18.620 to the breakdown of truth, all in terms of progressively hacking more and more of human
00:09:24.160 vulnerabilities and weaknesses.
00:09:25.620 So if we take it from the top, you know, our brain's short-term memory system have seven
00:09:30.260 plus or minus two things that we can hold.
00:09:32.720 When technology starts to overwhelm our short-term and working memory, we feel that as a problem
00:09:37.380 called distraction.
00:09:38.380 Oh my gosh, I can't remember what I was doing.
00:09:40.440 I came here to open an email.
00:09:41.580 I came here to go to Facebook to look something up, but now I got sucked down into something
00:09:44.240 else.
00:09:44.960 That's a problem of overwhelming the human limit and weakness of just our working memory.
00:09:49.840 When it overwhelms our dopamine systems and our reward systems, that we feel that is a
00:09:54.920 problem called addiction.
00:09:56.880 When it taps into and exploits our reliance on stopping cues that at some point I will stop
00:10:02.340 talking and that's a cue for you to keep going.
00:10:04.360 When technology doesn't stop talking and it just gives you the independent bottomless
00:10:07.400 bowl, we feel that as a problem called addiction or addictive use.
00:10:10.980 When technology exploits our social approval and giving us more and more social approval,
00:10:16.300 we feel that as a problem called teen depression because suddenly children are dosed with social
00:10:20.780 approval every few minutes and are hungry for more likes and comparing themselves in terms
00:10:24.900 of the currency of likes.
00:10:26.640 And when technology hacks the limits of our heuristics for determining what is true, for example,
00:10:31.340 that that Twitter profile who just commented on your tweet five seconds ago, that photo
00:10:35.360 looked pretty real.
00:10:36.180 They've got a bio that seems pretty real.
00:10:37.680 They've got 10,000 followers.
00:10:39.200 We only have a few cues that we can use to discern what is real and bots and deepfakes and
00:10:44.300 I'm sure we'll get into GPT-3 actually overwhelm that human weakness.
00:10:48.640 So we don't even know what's true.
00:10:50.560 So I think that the main thing that we really want people to get is through a series of misaligned
00:10:55.120 incentives, which we'll further get into, technology has overwhelmed and undermined human
00:10:59.540 weaknesses and many of the problems that we're seeing as separate are actually the same.
00:11:03.720 And just one more thing on this analogy, it's kind of like, you know, collectively this digital
00:11:07.840 fallout of addiction, teen depression, suicides, polarization, breakdown of truth.
00:11:13.180 We think of this as a collective digital fallout or a kind of climate change of culture that
00:11:18.260 much like the, you know, oil extractive economy that we have been living in an extractive race
00:11:23.400 for attention, there's only so much when it starts running out.
00:11:26.200 We have to start fracking your attention by splitting your attention into multiple streams. 0.99
00:11:29.780 I want you watching an iPad and a phone and the television at the same time, because that
00:11:33.980 lets me triple the size of the attention economy.
00:11:36.480 But that extractive race for attention creates this global climate change of culture.
00:11:41.180 And much like climate change, it happens slowly.
00:11:43.280 It happens gradually.
00:11:44.280 It happens chronically.
00:11:45.740 It's not this sudden immediate threat.
00:11:47.440 It's this slow erosion of the social fabric.
00:11:50.380 And that collectively we called in that presentation human downgrading, but you can call it whatever you
00:11:54.060 want.
00:11:54.400 The point is that, you know, if you think back to the climate change movement, before there
00:11:59.160 was climate change as a cohesive understanding of emissions and linking to climate change,
00:12:04.560 we had some people working on polar bears, some people working on the coral reefs.
00:12:08.920 We had some people working on species loss in the Amazon.
00:12:11.140 And it wasn't until we had an encompassing view of how all these problems get worse that
00:12:15.720 we start to get changed.
00:12:17.000 And so we're really hoping that this film can act as a kind of catalyst for a global response
00:12:21.840 to this really destructive thing that's happened to society.
00:12:26.340 Okay, so let me play devil's advocate for a moment using some of the elements you've
00:12:30.900 already put into play, because you and I are going to impressively agree throughout this
00:12:36.200 conversation on the nature of the problem.
00:12:37.820 But I'm channeling a skeptic here, and it's actually not that hard for me to empathize with
00:12:44.800 a skeptic, because as you point out, it really takes a fair amount of work to pry the scales
00:12:51.520 from people's eyes on this point.
00:12:53.580 And the nature of the problem, though it really is everywhere to be seen, it's surprisingly
00:12:59.260 elusive, right?
00:13:00.620 So if you reference something like, you know, a spike in teen depression and self-harm and
00:13:07.840 suicide, you know, there's no one who's going to pretend not to care about that.
00:13:13.080 And then it really is just the question of, you know, what's the causality here?
00:13:16.460 And is it really a matter of exposure to social media that is driving it?
00:13:20.660 And I think, I don't think people are especially skeptical of that.
00:13:23.420 And that's a discrete problem that I think most people would easily understand and be concerned
00:13:29.820 about.
00:13:30.180 But the more general problem for all of us is harder to keep in view.
00:13:36.680 And so when you talk about things, again, these are things you've already conceded in a
00:13:41.600 way.
00:13:41.860 So attention has been a finite resource always, and everyone has always been competing for
00:13:48.960 it.
00:13:49.140 So if you're going to publish a book, you are part of this race for people's attention.
00:13:53.760 If you were going to release something on the radio or television, it was always a matter
00:13:58.960 of trying to grab people's attention.
00:14:00.560 And as you say, we're trying to do it right now with this podcast.
00:14:02.800 So it's when considered through that lens, it's hard to see what is fundamentally new
00:14:11.060 here, right?
00:14:11.620 So yes, this is zero sum.
00:14:14.220 And then the question is, is it good content or not?
00:14:17.340 I think people want to say, right?
00:14:19.640 It's just, this is just a matter of interfacing in some way with human desire and human curiosity.
00:14:26.480 And you're either doing that successfully or not.
00:14:29.660 And what's so bad about really succeeding, you know, just fundamentally succeeding in a
00:14:34.920 way that, yeah, I mean, you can call it addiction, but really it's just what people find captivating.
00:14:40.200 It's what people want to do.
00:14:41.440 They want, they want to grant their attention to the next video that is absolutely enthralling.
00:14:47.020 But how is that different from, you know, leafing through the pages of, you know, a hard copy
00:14:52.160 of Vanity Fair in the year 1987 and feeling that you really want to read the next article
00:14:59.260 rather than work or do whatever else you thought you were going to do with your afternoon.
00:15:03.500 So there's that.
00:15:05.180 And then there's this sense that the fact that advertising is involved and really, really
00:15:13.440 the foundation of everything we're going to talk about.
00:15:15.680 But what's so bad about that?
00:15:17.240 I mean, so really it's a story of ads just getting better.
00:15:22.180 You know, I don't have to see ads for Tampax anymore, right?
00:15:25.800 I go online and I see ads for things that I probably want or nearly want because I abandoned
00:15:32.800 them in my Zappos shopping cart, right?
00:15:35.120 So what's wrong with that?
00:15:36.540 And I think most people are stuck in that place.
00:15:40.640 Like they just, we have to do a lot of work to bring them into the place of the conversation
00:15:44.700 where the emergency becomes salient.
00:15:48.520 And so let's start there.
00:15:51.020 Gosh, there's so much good stuff to unpack here.
00:15:52.840 So on the attention economy, obviously we've always had it.
00:15:56.180 We've had television competing for attention, radio, and we've had evolutions of the attention
00:15:59.940 economy before.
00:16:00.960 Competition between books, competition between newspapers, competition between television
00:16:05.020 to more engaging television to more channels of television.
00:16:07.480 So in many ways, this isn't new, but I think what we really need to look at is what was
00:16:12.400 mediating, where that attention went to.
00:16:14.820 Mediating is a big word.
00:16:16.340 Smartphones, we check out, we check our smartphones, you know, a hundred times or something like
00:16:20.440 that per day.
00:16:21.360 They are intimately woven into the fabric of our daily lives and ever more so because of
00:16:26.360 we pre-establish addiction or just this addictive checking that we have that any moment of anxiety,
00:16:30.740 we turn to our phone to look at it.
00:16:32.260 So it's intimately woven into where the attention starting place will come from.
00:16:37.180 It's also taken over our fundamental infrastructure for our basic verbs.
00:16:42.560 Like if I want to talk to you or talk to someone else, my phone has become the primary vehicle
00:16:46.920 for just about for many, many verbs in my life, whether it's ordering food or speaking
00:16:51.600 to someone or, you know, figuring out what I where to go on a map.
00:16:55.400 We are increasingly reliant on the central node of our smartphone to be a router for where
00:17:01.020 all of our attention goes.
00:17:02.260 So that's the first part of this intimately woven nature and the fact that it's our social,
00:17:07.000 it's part of the social infrastructure by which we rely on.
00:17:09.500 We can't avoid it.
00:17:10.540 And part of what makes technology today inhumane is that we're reliant on infrastructure that's
00:17:14.820 not safe or contaminated for many reasons that we'll get into later.
00:17:18.680 A second reason that's different is the degree of asymmetry between, let's say, that newspaper
00:17:23.700 editor or journalist who is writing that enticing article to get you to turn to the next page
00:17:28.060 versus the level of asymmetry of when you watch a YouTube video and you think, yeah, this
00:17:32.240 time I'm just going to watch one video and then I got to go back to work.
00:17:35.040 And you wake up from a trance, you know, two hours later and you say, man, what happened
00:17:39.360 to me?
00:17:39.620 I should have had more self-control.
00:17:41.680 What that misses is there's literally the Google, you know, Google's billions of dollars
00:17:45.960 of supercomputing infrastructure on the other side of that slab of glass in your hand pointed
00:17:50.820 at your brain doing predictive analytics on what would be the perfect next video to keep
00:17:56.240 you here.
00:17:56.540 And the same is true on Facebook.
00:17:57.880 You think, OK, I've sort of been scrolling through this thing for a while, but I'm just
00:18:00.660 going to swipe up one more time and then I'm done.
00:18:03.820 Each time you swipe up with your finger, you know, you're activating a Twitter or a Facebook
00:18:08.420 or a TikTok supercomputer that's doing predictive analytics, which has billions of data points
00:18:13.480 on exactly the thing that'll keep you here.
00:18:15.300 And I think it's important to expand this metaphor in a way that you've talked about
00:18:19.260 on, I think, in your show before about just the power, increasing power and computational
00:18:23.180 power of AI.
00:18:24.800 When you think about a supercomputer pointed at your brain trying to figure out what's the
00:18:28.780 perfect next thing to show you, that's on one side of the screen.
00:18:31.640 On the other side of the screen is my prefrontal cortex, which has evolved millions of years
00:18:34.800 ago and doing the best job it can to do goal articulation, goal retention and memory and
00:18:39.960 sort of staying on task, self-discipline, et cetera.
00:18:42.720 So who's going to win in that battle?
00:18:44.540 Well, a good metaphor for this is let's say you or I were to play Gary Kasparov at chess.
00:18:50.040 Like, why would you or I lose?
00:18:52.220 It's because, you know, there I am on the chessboard and I'm thinking, OK, if I do this,
00:18:55.960 he'll do this.
00:18:56.500 But if I do this, he'll do this.
00:18:57.880 And I'm playing out a few new moves ahead on the chessboard.
00:19:00.700 But when Gary looks at that same chessboard, he's playing out a million more.
00:19:04.800 moves ahead than I can.
00:19:06.140 Right.
00:19:06.600 And that's why Gary is going to win and beat you and I every single time.
00:19:09.840 But when Gary, the human, is playing chess against the best supercomputer in the world,
00:19:14.580 no matter how many million moves ahead that Gary can see, the supercomputer can see billions
00:19:19.620 of moves ahead.
00:19:20.960 And when he beats Gary, who is the best human chess player of all time, he's beaten like
00:19:25.520 the human brain at chess because that was kind of the best one that we had.
00:19:28.640 And so when you look at the degree of asymmetry that we now have, when you're sitting there
00:19:33.240 innocuously saying, OK, I'm just going to watch one video and then I'm out, we have
00:19:37.620 to recognize that we have an exponential degree of asymmetry and they know us and our weaknesses
00:19:42.700 better than we know ourselves.
00:19:44.100 That part of the conversation sets the stage for us well, but we recommend a full listen
00:19:52.480 to that episode as Sam continued to skillfully play devil's advocate throughout and allowed
00:19:58.020 Tristan to flesh out the nuanced and complex considerations.
00:20:01.240 But Tristan remains steadfast in his effort to sound the alarm about the power of algorithms
00:20:07.260 to target our weaknesses.
00:20:09.380 And so that's where we're going to stay in this trek through social media.
00:20:12.760 You heard Sam, while channeling a skeptical view, point to the economic model that serves
00:20:18.500 as the oxygen that keeps the social media monsters breathing.
00:20:23.000 Advertising.
00:20:24.520 Here is an open question for the health of democracy and individual psychology.
00:20:28.740 Is there a point when advertising can become too effective?
00:20:34.020 And has social media pushed us over that threshold?
00:20:38.240 Advertising is certainly nothing new, of course, and the profit motive has always encouraged persuasion
00:20:43.560 and attention-grabbing wherever possible.
00:20:46.680 But turn back the clock a few hundred years and imagine a handcrafted, colorfully painted wooden
00:20:52.040 sign hanging above a rival blacksmith shop in a town square.
00:20:56.060 And compare its influence to a perfectly timed, personalized, targeted advertisement that was crafted
00:21:05.140 and custom-molded to your taste in music, attraction, color preference, current mood, political
00:21:12.260 persuasion, and just about everything else.
00:21:14.820 The latter does seem to suggest a deep shift in the power to persuade effectively.
00:21:21.060 If there is something like an objective measure of the effectiveness of persuasion
00:21:25.280 that immorally encroaches on a notion of personal autonomy,
00:21:29.220 it's fair to wonder if we've blown right past it.
00:21:32.740 There's an old adage in marketing that goes like this.
00:21:35.700 I know I'm wasting half of my marketing budget.
00:21:39.240 I just don't know which half.
00:21:41.840 That built-in uncertainty might be eroding in the face of data-collecting machines which
00:21:46.240 promise more and more of a sure thing to advertisers.
00:21:49.740 To explore this area a bit more, we're going to hear from Jaron Lanier.
00:21:54.700 Lanier is a computer scientist and Silicon Valley pioneer who launched virtual reality companies
00:22:00.220 in the mid-80s.
00:22:02.020 He was part of an early wave of bright-eyed, idealistic technologists.
00:22:07.420 And he's among those who have since begun to question what they may have been missing.
00:22:11.860 When he spoke with Sam, he had just written a book which was not shy about its suggestion.
00:22:17.480 It was called
00:22:18.160 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.
00:22:22.900 For this compilation, we're going to be tapping this interview for Lanier's thoughts
00:22:27.020 on the economic models that have run amok on the internet.
00:22:30.220 And listen in on some of his nascent suggestions on how different models might improve the
00:22:34.660 situation.
00:22:36.280 We'll start with Sam and Lanier revisiting the early days of Silicon Valley and the seemingly
00:22:41.520 uncontroversial notion that information should be free.
00:22:45.380 This is from episode 136, Digital Humanism.
00:22:51.140 Many of the worst decisions we've made here, and this is something you point out in your books,
00:22:55.440 in creating this technology, are not on their face bad decisions.
00:23:00.840 I mean, they're certainly not sinister decisions.
00:23:03.180 And so, and one of the first decisions we've made is around this notion that information
00:23:09.020 should be free.
00:23:10.820 And that just seems like a very generous and idealistic way to start.
00:23:18.140 It just seems quite noble.
00:23:19.240 So, perhaps we can start here with the digital economy.
00:23:24.600 What could possibly be wrong with information being free?
00:23:29.140 Right.
00:23:30.100 Well, this idea that information should be free was held in the most profound and intense
00:23:39.360 way.
00:23:39.780 It was something that was believed so intensely during a period starting in the 80s.
00:23:44.380 In some ways, it still holds for a lot of people, and to defy that was very, very difficult.
00:23:51.840 It was painful for my friends who couldn't believe that I was defying it.
00:23:55.800 It was painful for me.
00:23:56.960 I did lose friends over it.
00:23:59.320 And on its face, it sounds very generous and fair and proper and freeing, but there are
00:24:07.720 problems with it that are so deep as to, I think, threaten the survival of our species.
00:24:12.980 It's actually a very, very, very serious mistake.
00:24:16.620 So, the mistakes happen on a couple of levels here.
00:24:20.940 I would say the first one has to do with this idea that information is totally weightless
00:24:28.940 and intrinsically something that's free in an infinite supply.
00:24:32.760 And that's not true, because information only exists to the degree that people can perceive
00:24:38.780 it and process it and understand it.
00:24:40.660 And it ultimately only has a meaning when it grounds out as human experience.
00:24:46.300 The slogan I used to have back in the 80s when we were first debating these things is
00:24:50.520 that information is alienated experience, meaning information is similar to stored energy that
00:24:56.960 can be released.
00:24:57.800 You put energy into a battery, then you can release it.
00:25:00.260 Or you lift up a weight, and then you let go of the weight, and it goes back down, and
00:25:03.520 you've released the energy that was stored.
00:25:05.200 And in the same way, information ultimately only has meaning as experience at some point
00:25:11.520 in the future.
00:25:12.800 And the problem with experience, or maybe the benefit of experience, is that it's only a
00:25:18.720 finite potential.
00:25:20.000 You can't experience everything.
00:25:22.000 And so, therefore, if you make the mistake of assuming that information is free, you'll have
00:25:27.000 more information than you can experience.
00:25:29.620 And what you do is you make yourself vulnerable to what we could call a denial-of-service attack
00:25:35.420 in other contexts.
00:25:36.400 So, a denial-of-service attack means that malicious people send so many requests to a website that
00:25:43.380 it's effectively knocked off the web.
00:25:46.340 You can't reach it anymore.
00:25:47.280 And every website that you use reliably actually has to go through this elaborate structure
00:25:52.380 of other resources created by companies like Akamai that defend it from denial-of-service
00:25:58.540 attacks, which are just infinitely easy to do.
00:26:01.240 But in the same way, when you have services like Twitter or Facebook, where anybody can
00:26:06.340 post anything without any cost to themselves, and there's no postage on email, and everything
00:26:12.040 can just be totally filled up with spam and malicious bots and crap, to the point where
00:26:17.820 reality and everything good about the world gets squeezed out, and you end up amplifying
00:26:23.220 the worst impulses of people.
00:26:25.060 There's no such thing as a free lunch.
00:26:27.300 There's no such thing as free information.
00:26:29.080 There's no such thing as infinite attention.
00:26:31.560 There has to be some way that seriousness comes into play if you want to have any sense
00:26:38.180 of reality or quality or truth or decency, and unfortunately, we haven't created a world
00:26:45.580 in which that's so.
00:26:46.860 But then there's a flip side to it, which is equally important, which is we've created
00:26:52.020 this world in which we're talking about technology often as something that's, if not opposed to
00:26:59.520 humanity, opposed to most of humanity.
00:27:02.480 So there's a lot of talk, and a lot of this comes from really good technologists.
00:27:06.960 So it's not from, like, malicious outsiders who are trying to screw us up.
00:27:10.540 It's our own fault, where we'll say, well, a lot of the jobs will go away because of
00:27:14.560 artificial intelligence and our robots, and that might either be some extreme case where
00:27:19.360 super-intelligent AI takes over the world and disposes of humanity, or it might just be
00:27:24.500 that only the most elite, smart, techie people are still needed, and everybody else becomes
00:27:29.820 this burden on the state, and they have to go on some kind of basic income.
00:27:32.960 And it's just a depressing—it's like everybody's going to become this useless burden.
00:27:39.460 And so even if that means, oh, we'll all get basic income, we won't have to work for
00:27:42.820 a living, there's also something fundamentally undignified, like you won't be needed.
00:27:47.020 And any situation like that is just bound to be a political disaster or an economic disaster
00:27:52.380 on many levels we can go into if it isn't obvious.
00:27:54.720 But the thing to see is that this economic hole that we seem to be driving ourselves into
00:28:01.760 is one and the same as the information wants to be free.
00:28:04.820 Because the thing is, ultimately, all these AIs and robots and all this stuff, they run
00:28:09.720 on information that, at the end of the day, has to come from people.
00:28:12.940 And each instance is a little different.
00:28:14.960 But for a lot of them, there's input from a lot of people.
00:28:17.700 And I can give you some examples.
00:28:18.800 So if we say that information is free, then we're saying in the information age, everybody's
00:28:25.120 worthless because what they can contribute is information.
00:28:29.080 The example I like to use as just an entry point to this idea is the people who translate
00:28:33.760 between languages.
00:28:34.880 So they've seen their careers be decimated, they're a tenth of what they were, in the same
00:28:40.920 way that recording musicians and investigative journalists and many other classes of people
00:28:48.560 who have an information product.
00:28:50.620 They've all been kind of reduced under this weird regime we've created.
00:28:54.480 But the thing is, in order to run the so-called AI translators that places like Bing and Google
00:29:01.800 offer, we have to scrape tens of millions of examples from real-life people translating
00:29:07.380 things every single day in order to keep up with slang and public events.
00:29:11.740 Language is alive.
00:29:12.680 The world is alive.
00:29:13.580 You can't just stuff a language translator once.
00:29:16.880 You have to keep on refilling it.
00:29:18.560 And so we're totally reliant on the very people that we're putting out of work.
00:29:22.220 So it's fundamentally like a form of theft through dishonesty.
00:29:26.620 Okay, so we've hit the ground running here.
00:29:28.900 I want to back up for a second and try to perform an exorcism on some bad intuitions here because
00:29:36.940 I think people come into this, we've trained ourselves to expect much of our digital content
00:29:42.820 to be free and free forever.
00:29:45.140 And it now seems just the normal state of the world.
00:29:49.580 And of course, podcasts and blogs and journalism and ultimately music should be free.
00:29:55.940 Or if it's not free, it should be subsidized by ads.
00:30:00.100 And I think there's this sense that TV and radio were free.
00:30:04.300 So there's this precedent.
00:30:06.460 And advertising has its excesses.
00:30:09.040 But I think people feel, you know, what's wrong with ads?
00:30:11.940 Some ads are kind of cool looking and amusing and stylish.
00:30:16.120 So, and we've lived with them for forever.
00:30:18.600 And then there's these other elements like, you know, having a personalized news feed.
00:30:23.360 What's wrong with that?
00:30:24.420 Why can't Facebook just give me what I want?
00:30:27.880 So let's just bring this, the concept of, or the role of ads back in here.
00:30:32.280 So most people have decided that in the face of this, the way to monetize work and inspire
00:30:40.880 good work is to build an ad economy.
00:30:45.720 And this answers the need to have information be free to all of the young people who want
00:30:52.240 to get it that way.
00:30:53.280 And, you know, now we who used to be young still want to get it that way.
00:30:57.600 And this is something that, you know, many of us have, are fighting against who've been
00:31:01.460 paying attention to the consequence of, of relying on ads.
00:31:05.560 And, you know, I've decided that I, that I can't credibly read ads on this podcast.
00:31:09.500 I know that you're, you're more sanguine about the state of podcasting than most forms of
00:31:14.080 media at the moment.
00:31:15.340 And I should say is that for, you know, many podcasters, because I've taken a position against
00:31:20.000 ads on my own podcast, many people come to me wanting to do the same.
00:31:24.480 And the truth is, I don't actually even know what to tell other podcasters at this point,
00:31:30.000 because I think I'm an outlier in this space where it works for me.
00:31:33.920 I found an audience who, and some percentage of the audience will support this work.
00:31:39.000 But it seems to me by no means straightforward to say that, that any podcaster who wants to
00:31:44.900 will, will find an audience to support their work.
00:31:47.500 And I think in the, given the current expectations, I think anyone who does decide to, to forego ads,
00:31:54.260 will be paying a, an economic price for doing that with, with whatever audience at whatever
00:31:59.940 scale, given, given the expectation that podcasts should be free.
00:32:03.680 So it's kind of hard to, to advise people, even when I'm successfully implementing an ad-free
00:32:11.700 model here.
00:32:13.060 Well, I need to correct you about something.
00:32:15.960 Um, my objection is not to advertising, but to continuous behavior modification by algorithm,
00:32:23.160 which is really a very different thing.
00:32:25.980 So what, what overlaps, overlaps in one case in that, well, I, so I'm, I'm worried as a
00:32:31.940 podcaster about the, the behavior modification or, or the perceived behavior modification that
00:32:38.020 can happen to me as a, as a, just a broker of information.
00:32:41.900 I don't, you know, it's like a credibility concern.
00:32:44.400 I just can't, you know, given what I'm trying, trying to do here, I don't feel that I can
00:32:50.260 personally shill for any products, but I think other podcasters can, I think is completely
00:32:55.480 convergent with the brand of other podcasters to say, oh, listen, here's the, here's the
00:33:00.240 greatest, you know, t-shirt I've ever found.
00:33:02.280 You know, you're, you know, you're going to want this t-shirt and that, that works for
00:33:05.100 people.
00:33:05.360 I know I've heard some really, I, uh, listening to some of the podcasters have to read their
00:33:10.940 ads when it's clearly bizarre.
00:33:12.960 It's actually kind of entertaining, but the thing is, as long as every listener hears the
00:33:18.000 same ad and everybody can understand what's going on, that's okay.
00:33:22.160 I mean, the reason podcasting is still, in my view, an unmolested, authentic medium is that
00:33:30.080 there aren't algorithms calculating, um, what somebody hears on a podcast.
00:33:35.860 It's still, it's, it's crafted by you.
00:33:38.460 And if it includes ads, people can tell it includes ads.
00:33:41.800 It isn't, there isn't some meta podcast that's taking snippets and creating a feed for people.
00:33:47.000 There isn't some algorithm that's in, at least so far, that is like, uh, changing what you
00:33:53.940 say with, uh, you know, uh, audio signal processing technology to suit the needs of somebody who's
00:34:00.680 paying from the side, some advertiser.
00:34:02.940 Uh, there's not a calculation of a feed designed by behaviorist theorists to change people.
00:34:10.020 And as long as it's just a crafted thing, even if it, if it includes commercial communication,
00:34:16.620 I don't think it destroys society.
00:34:18.180 I think, um, it does start to destroy society when everything becomes really manipulative and
00:34:24.780 creepy in a way that people can't possibly follow or understand, then it starts to undermine
00:34:29.460 human dignity and self-determination.
00:34:31.720 And that's exactly what's going on with social media companies and the way searches run and,
00:34:37.240 uh, the way, uh, YouTube videos are selected for you and fed to you and many other examples.
00:34:43.460 And, and, and that's, that's where we really have the most serious problem.
00:34:48.500 So what is the solution now?
00:34:50.820 What, if you could reboot the internet, how would you do it?
00:34:54.660 Uh, I would do a few things.
00:34:56.080 The first thing I would do is, um, encourage everybody involved to gradually bring money
00:35:03.160 back into the world of information instead of expunging it.
00:35:06.300 And, uh, I think people should be able to earn a living when what they add to the network
00:35:11.700 is valuable.
00:35:13.400 I mean, right now we're creating the most valuable companies in history based on the
00:35:17.140 information that people add to them.
00:35:18.760 And meanwhile, we're creating more and more economic, uh, uh, separation, more and more inequality.
00:35:23.880 And obviously that can't go on forever.
00:35:25.800 And the only way to correct it is to start paying the people who are adding the information.
00:35:29.920 That's the value and grow the pie.
00:35:32.240 It doesn't mean that I think the big tech companies should be shut down or that they're
00:35:35.660 evil.
00:35:36.020 I actually kind of like a lot of them.
00:35:38.000 Uh, it just means, um, that we have to get back to a world where when people add value,
00:35:43.000 they get paid for it.
00:35:43.920 And it's honest.
00:35:44.820 And of course, uh, that the flip side of that is just as Netflix proved, and for that matter,
00:35:49.920 Apple with the app store and many other examples, we have to encourage business
00:35:53.740 models where people pay for what they want.
00:35:55.860 So, you know, Google should, Google should say, Hey, search won't be free after 10 years.
00:35:59.940 We're going to gradually start removing the free option.
00:36:02.680 And what you'll get in exchange for that is no more commercial bias and crap on our search
00:36:07.760 results.
00:36:08.320 Uh, this is just going to be serving you.
00:36:09.840 You're going to pay for it.
00:36:11.080 Facebook, same thing.
00:36:12.200 We're going to, we're going to commit to not having any ads in 10 years and yeah, you'll
00:36:17.260 start paying for it, but it'll be a great deal.
00:36:19.020 It'll be affordable.
00:36:19.580 You'll get, you'll get peak Facebook and just like you got peak TV from places like,
00:36:24.640 uh, you know, HBO and Netflix.
00:36:26.700 We're going to give you peak social media where you can get better information and less
00:36:31.520 crap.
00:36:32.180 But, um, the, the, the other part of that is a little more complicated, uh, which is if 0.99
00:36:37.760 you keep your eye out for a piece I have coming out with a colleague in the Harvard Business
00:36:41.700 Review, sorry to, I know it's a snobby thing, but anyway, it's a place to start.
00:36:46.220 We're starting to, to scope out, uh, how to do this in much more detail than before.
00:36:51.200 And a lot of it has to do with creating in-between institutions.
00:36:56.180 Um, right now, if there's nothing but a bunch of individuals in one giant tech platform like
00:37:01.380 a Facebook or a Google, there's this bizarre situation where we're petitioning the central
00:37:05.880 authority that we have no other power over that we didn't vote for to, to police our own
00:37:10.000 speech and to police our own behavior.
00:37:11.520 And it's just not tenable.
00:37:13.620 We're demanding authoritarianism.
00:37:15.720 Um, and the way around that is to create middle-sized organizations that are analogous
00:37:20.780 to things like scientific journals or universities or trade unions or many other examples where
00:37:26.280 you can volunteer, you can voluntarily join these things and they collectively bargain
00:37:31.000 for you so you can get paid decently instead of having a giant race to the bottom.
00:37:34.660 And they can become brands in themselves that enforce quality, um, and become trustworthy.
00:37:41.860 And so we have to create this, this, um, the sense of intermediate structures.
00:37:45.540 And, uh, remember in the past before the internet, the place where, um, excellence and compassion
00:37:52.860 and trustworthiness came from was not the central government declaring it, but rather things like
00:37:58.060 universities and scientific journals and high quality, um, news outlets developing a reputation
00:38:04.240 and being selective.
00:38:05.220 And, but that was all voluntary, uh, voluntary.
00:38:09.440 So it wasn't authoritarian.
00:38:10.320 And so if you have in-between sized organizations, you can have all these effects that would be
00:38:15.960 authoritarian if they were global and directed from the center.
00:38:19.140 And all of those institutions are exactly the ones that were weakened and destroyed when Facebook
00:38:23.900 said, we're going to move fast and break things.
00:38:25.860 Stuff that was broken were all of those in-between organizations.
00:38:29.400 And so we have to rebuild them in a new way in order to have this more humane and sustainable
00:38:33.880 internet.
00:38:36.740 It's worth reminding ourselves after those two clips that social media is not entirely destructive.
00:38:43.400 It has potential to do plenty of good.
00:38:46.020 And it has realized some of that potential.
00:38:49.100 There are personal stories of friendships, reconnections, knowledge growth, business opportunities,
00:38:55.160 and meaningful political change, which can credit themselves to the advent of social media.
00:39:00.760 And it can offer valuable real-time information.
00:39:04.460 So we'll try our best to emphasize a hope to not throw out the perennial baby with the
00:39:09.000 bathwater in the criticism.
00:39:11.700 On that note, we'll listen in now to Sam's conversation with Jack Dorsey.
00:39:17.140 Dorsey co-founded Twitter and is cognizant of the monster which he's created and the struggle
00:39:22.180 to harness it for good.
00:39:25.460 Since this conversation with Sam, Dorsey stepped down from his role as CEO of Twitter, though
00:39:30.760 he's still the CEO of Square, which is a financial tool he also founded.
00:39:35.400 We'll resist the temptation to read into the move away from Twitter as admitting defeat in
00:39:40.000 his efforts to tame the beast.
00:39:42.460 In this portion of their conversation, Sam and Dorsey discuss how Twitter has entrenched
00:39:47.420 itself into the political and journalistic environment, for better or worse.
00:39:52.820 Dorsey mentions the echo chamber or filter bubble phenomenon, which describes only seeing
00:39:58.000 and hearing news and opinion which coheres with your particular perspective.
00:40:03.420 This phenomenon tends to warp one's worldview and exacerbate partisanship.
00:40:08.440 After we hear from Dorsey, we'll offer an alternative analogy, which might be even more potent
00:40:13.560 and poisonous to our psychology and democracy.
00:40:16.560 We're going to allow this clip to get into some of the specific policy knots that get
00:40:20.940 tied when any experiment like social media gets underway.
00:40:25.000 Here is Sam with Jack Dorsey from episode 148.
00:40:30.840 You've got these two massive companies which, at least from the public-facing view, seem diametrically
00:40:38.920 opposed in the level of controversy they bring to the world and to your life, presumably.
00:40:44.760 Square seems like a very straightforward, successful, noble pursuit about which I can't imagine there's
00:40:51.900 a lot of controversy.
00:40:52.800 I'm sure there's some that I haven't noticed, but it must be nothing like what you're dealing
00:40:58.120 with with Twitter.
00:40:59.180 How are you triaging the needs of a big company that is just functioning like a normal big
00:41:07.200 company and Twitter, which is something which on any given day can be just front-page news
00:41:14.820 everywhere given the sense of either how it's helping the world.
00:41:20.100 The thing that's amazing about Twitter is that it's enabling revolutions that we might want
00:41:26.320 to support, right, or the empowerment of dissidents, and there's just this one, you know, Saudi teenager
00:41:32.760 who was, you know, tweeting from a hotel room in the Bangkok airport that she was worried
00:41:38.680 that her parents would kill her, and I don't think it's too much to say that Twitter may
00:41:44.680 have saved her life in that case.
00:41:46.060 I'm sure there are many other cases like this where she was granted asylum in Canada, and
00:41:50.860 so these stories become front-page news, and then the antithetical story becomes front-page
00:41:55.540 news, so we know that, you know, ISIS recruits terrorists on Twitter, or their fears that
00:42:00.440 misinformation spread there undermines democracy.
00:42:04.180 And how do you deal with being a normal CEO and being a CEO in this other channel, which
00:42:10.720 is anything but normal?
00:42:13.000 Well, both companies in both spaces that they create in have their own share of controversy,
00:42:20.980 but I find that in the financial realm, it's a lot more private, whereas with communication,
00:42:27.640 it has to be open.
00:42:29.080 And I would prefer them both to be out in the open.
00:42:33.740 I would prefer to work more in public.
00:42:37.000 I'm fascinated by this idea of being able to work in public, make decisions in public, make
00:42:43.100 mistakes in public.
00:42:44.000 And I get there because of my childhood.
00:42:47.700 I was a huge fan of punk rock back in the day, and then that transitioned to hip-hop,
00:42:52.940 and that led me to a lot of open source, where people would just get up on stage and do their
00:42:59.140 thing, and they were terrible.
00:43:00.420 And you saw them a month later, and they were a little bit better, and then a month later,
00:43:04.520 they were a little bit better.
00:43:05.400 And we see the same thing with open source, which led me to technology, ultimately.
00:43:10.600 So I approach it with that understanding of that we're not here just to make one single
00:43:19.380 statement that stands the test of time, that our medium at Twitter is conversation, and
00:43:25.060 conversation evolves.
00:43:26.560 And ideally, it evolves in a way that we all learn from it.
00:43:31.760 There's not a lot of people in the world today that would walk away from Twitter saying,
00:43:35.800 oh, I learned something.
00:43:37.060 But that would be my goal.
00:43:37.980 And we need to figure out what element of the service and what element of the product
00:43:47.220 we need to bolster or increase or change in order to do that.
00:43:52.000 So I guess in my role of CEO at Twitter, it's how do I lead this company in the open, realizing
00:44:02.520 that we're going to take a lot of bruises along the way.
00:44:05.280 But in the long term, what we get out of that, ideally, is earning some trust.
00:44:12.840 And we're not there yet, but that's the intention.
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