Making Sense of Social Media and the Information Landscape ｜ Episode 8 of The Essential Sam Harris
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Summary
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
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This is Making Sense of Social Media and the Information Landscape.
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The goal of this series is to organize, compile, and juxtapose conversations hosted by Sam
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This is an ongoing effort to construct a coherent overview of Sam's perspectives and arguments,
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the various explorations and approaches to the topic, the relevant agreements and disagreements,
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and the pushbacks and evolving thoughts which his guests have advanced.
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The purpose of these compilations is not to provide a complete picture of any issue, but
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to entice you to go deeper into these subjects.
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Along the way, we'll point you to the full episodes with each featured guest.
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And at the conclusion, we'll offer some reading, listening, and watching suggestions, which range
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One note to keep in mind for this series, Sam has long argued for a unity of knowledge where
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the barriers between fields of study are viewed as largely unhelpful artifacts of unnecessarily
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The pursuit of wisdom and reason in one area of study naturally bleeds into, and greatly
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You'll hear plenty of crossover into other topics as these dives into the archives unfold.
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And your thinking about a particular topic may shift as you realize its contingent relationships
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In this topic, you'll hear the natural overlap with theories of moral and political philosophy,
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belief and unbelief, free will, and artificial intelligence.
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Let's make sense of social media and the information landscape.
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One very important update before we jump into this compilation.
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Since the initial writing and recording of this episode, Sam quit Twitter entirely.
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He recorded a solo episode entitled, Why I Left Twitter, which explains his reasoning and
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We, of course, recommend listening to that, in addition to the included conversations here.
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The knowledge that Sam eventually walked away from social media platforms places an interesting
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lens over his conversations on the subject from the previous decade.
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Though, as you'll hear, this compilation extends the considered issues of social media well
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beyond personal engagement and into the many ways in which the surveillance economy generally
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has warped our politics, social relations, and moral psychologies.
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Social media is one of those topics that everyone seems to have strong opinions about.
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That fact in itself, the idea that our feelings on just about everything seem to have gotten
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stronger, inflamed by the advent of social media, is something we'll fold into the discussion
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Like just about all of us, Sam has gone through, and continues to go through, a strained relationship
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Apparently, even the most practiced meditators can be hijacked by algorithms that target our
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propensity for outrage, adulation, annoyance, and disgust.
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But of course, social media also has positive potential, and its own success stories.
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There are unignorable societal benefits that must be evaluated and considered.
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This compilation contains plenty of critique and perspective regarding the darker sides of
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social media, and the economic model which has provided its scaffolding.
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But the criticism should not completely crowd out or invalidate the defenders and believers
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We're also going to be situating the social media question in a broader context of the
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business model which enables it, something that's been called surveillance capitalism by
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its critics, and personalized advertising by its more supportive advocates.
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We'll also be zooming in on some of the specific technologies upon which all of this is built.
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In the introduction to an episode with Jaron Lanier, which is included in this compilation,
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Sam identified three main lines of inquiry for this topic.
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The first is economics, and the question of incentives in the face of automation and artificial intelligence.
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The second is politics, and the question of how we can cooperate and cohere on ideas in a space
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And the third is psychology, and how our attention and well-being are being assaulted by the power
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We'll be wandering through that same roadmap through these clips.
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There won't be a ton of deep philosophical lessons and thought experiments to walk you through
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Much of what we'll be tackling is plain for most people to see and experience for themselves.
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We're going to hear Sam's conversations with defectors from the ranks of the architects
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of information ecosystems in Silicon Valley, like Tristan Harris and Jaron Lanier.
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We're going to hear some of Sam's conversation and pseudo-interrogation of Jack Dorsey himself,
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the co-founder of Twitter, who was also its CEO at the time of their conversation.
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And we're going to hear from authors like Jonathan Haidt and Cass Sunstein, who have studied
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and continue to investigate the impacts of social media on individuals and the health
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We're also going to broaden our lens and listen in on a conversation with Zeynep Tufekci, an
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author who focuses on global movements and geopolitics, and consider how social media fuels,
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diverts, or otherwise confuses political efforts.
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And finally, we're going to tiptoe into the emerging deepfake technology, which threatens
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to pour even more fuel on the fire of the collapsing integrity of global information.
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So let's start with Sam talking to Tristan Harris.
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Tristan has been called the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience.
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Tristan had just appeared in a documentary entitled The Social Dilemma when he spoke to
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So much of their conversation references the film, which is certainly recommended viewing
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Tristan has been laser-focused on the problems of social media after spending years working
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as a designer for Google and seeing firsthand the potent attention-harnessing techniques that
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If you listen to our compilation about artificial intelligence, you'll be familiar with a concern
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about our strengths and competencies being squashed by technology.
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Here, you'll hear Tristan flip that concern around with a sharp observation.
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This is from the more recent conversation from episode 218, Welcome to the Cult Factory.
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If you could boil it down to the elevator pitch answer, what is the problem that we're going
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Well, it's funny because the film actually opens with that prompt, the blank stares of
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many technology insiders, including myself, because I think it's so hard to define exactly
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There's clearly a problem of incentives, but beneath that, there's a problem of what those
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incentives are doing and where the exact harms show up.
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And the way that we frame it in the film and in a big presentation we gave at the SF Jazz
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Center back in April 2019 to a bunch of the top technologists and people in the industry
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was to say that while we've all been looking out for the moment when AI would overwhelm human
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strengths and when we would get the singularity, when would AI take our jobs?
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We missed this much, much earlier point when technology didn't overwhelm human strengths,
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And you can actually frame the cacophony of grievances and scandals and problems that we've
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seen in the tech industry from distraction to addiction to polarization to bullying to harassment
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to the breakdown of truth, all in terms of progressively hacking more and more of human
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So if we take it from the top, you know, our brain's short-term memory system have seven
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When technology starts to overwhelm our short-term and working memory, we feel that as a problem
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I came here to go to Facebook to look something up, but now I got sucked down into something
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That's a problem of overwhelming the human limit and weakness of just our working memory.
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When it overwhelms our dopamine systems and our reward systems, that we feel that is a
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When it taps into and exploits our reliance on stopping cues that at some point I will stop
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talking and that's a cue for you to keep going.
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When technology doesn't stop talking and it just gives you the independent bottomless
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bowl, we feel that as a problem called addiction or addictive use.
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When technology exploits our social approval and giving us more and more social approval,
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we feel that as a problem called teen depression because suddenly children are dosed with social
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approval every few minutes and are hungry for more likes and comparing themselves in terms
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And when technology hacks the limits of our heuristics for determining what is true, for example,
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that that Twitter profile who just commented on your tweet five seconds ago, that photo
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We only have a few cues that we can use to discern what is real and bots and deepfakes and
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I'm sure we'll get into GPT-3 actually overwhelm that human weakness.
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So I think that the main thing that we really want people to get is through a series of misaligned
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incentives, which we'll further get into, technology has overwhelmed and undermined human
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weaknesses and many of the problems that we're seeing as separate are actually the same.
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And just one more thing on this analogy, it's kind of like, you know, collectively this digital
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fallout of addiction, teen depression, suicides, polarization, breakdown of truth.
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We think of this as a collective digital fallout or a kind of climate change of culture that
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much like the, you know, oil extractive economy that we have been living in an extractive race
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for attention, there's only so much when it starts running out.
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We have to start fracking your attention by splitting your attention into multiple streams.
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I want you watching an iPad and a phone and the television at the same time, because that
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lets me triple the size of the attention economy.
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But that extractive race for attention creates this global climate change of culture.
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And much like climate change, it happens slowly.
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And that collectively we called in that presentation human downgrading, but you can call it whatever you
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The point is that, you know, if you think back to the climate change movement, before there
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was climate change as a cohesive understanding of emissions and linking to climate change,
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we had some people working on polar bears, some people working on the coral reefs.
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We had some people working on species loss in the Amazon.
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And it wasn't until we had an encompassing view of how all these problems get worse that
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And so we're really hoping that this film can act as a kind of catalyst for a global response
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to this really destructive thing that's happened to society.
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Okay, so let me play devil's advocate for a moment using some of the elements you've
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already put into play, because you and I are going to impressively agree throughout this
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But I'm channeling a skeptic here, and it's actually not that hard for me to empathize with
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a skeptic, because as you point out, it really takes a fair amount of work to pry the scales
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And the nature of the problem, though it really is everywhere to be seen, it's surprisingly
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So if you reference something like, you know, a spike in teen depression and self-harm and
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suicide, you know, there's no one who's going to pretend not to care about that.
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And then it really is just the question of, you know, what's the causality here?
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And is it really a matter of exposure to social media that is driving it?
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And I think, I don't think people are especially skeptical of that.
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And that's a discrete problem that I think most people would easily understand and be concerned
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But the more general problem for all of us is harder to keep in view.
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And so when you talk about things, again, these are things you've already conceded in a
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So attention has been a finite resource always, and everyone has always been competing for
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So if you're going to publish a book, you are part of this race for people's attention.
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If you were going to release something on the radio or television, it was always a matter
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And as you say, we're trying to do it right now with this podcast.
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So it's when considered through that lens, it's hard to see what is fundamentally new
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And then the question is, is it good content or not?
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It's just, this is just a matter of interfacing in some way with human desire and human curiosity.
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And you're either doing that successfully or not.
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And what's so bad about really succeeding, you know, just fundamentally succeeding in a
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way that, yeah, I mean, you can call it addiction, but really it's just what people find captivating.
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They want, they want to grant their attention to the next video that is absolutely enthralling.
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But how is that different from, you know, leafing through the pages of, you know, a hard copy
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of Vanity Fair in the year 1987 and feeling that you really want to read the next article
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rather than work or do whatever else you thought you were going to do with your afternoon.
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And then there's this sense that the fact that advertising is involved and really, really
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the foundation of everything we're going to talk about.
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I mean, so really it's a story of ads just getting better.
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You know, I don't have to see ads for Tampax anymore, right?
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I go online and I see ads for things that I probably want or nearly want because I abandoned
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And I think most people are stuck in that place.
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Like they just, we have to do a lot of work to bring them into the place of the conversation
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Gosh, there's so much good stuff to unpack here.
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So on the attention economy, obviously we've always had it.
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We've had television competing for attention, radio, and we've had evolutions of the attention
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Competition between books, competition between newspapers, competition between television
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to more engaging television to more channels of television.
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So in many ways, this isn't new, but I think what we really need to look at is what was
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Smartphones, we check out, we check our smartphones, you know, a hundred times or something like
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They are intimately woven into the fabric of our daily lives and ever more so because of
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we pre-establish addiction or just this addictive checking that we have that any moment of anxiety,
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So it's intimately woven into where the attention starting place will come from.
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It's also taken over our fundamental infrastructure for our basic verbs.
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Like if I want to talk to you or talk to someone else, my phone has become the primary vehicle
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for just about for many, many verbs in my life, whether it's ordering food or speaking
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to someone or, you know, figuring out what I where to go on a map.
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We are increasingly reliant on the central node of our smartphone to be a router for where
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So that's the first part of this intimately woven nature and the fact that it's our social,
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it's part of the social infrastructure by which we rely on.
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And part of what makes technology today inhumane is that we're reliant on infrastructure that's
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not safe or contaminated for many reasons that we'll get into later.
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A second reason that's different is the degree of asymmetry between, let's say, that newspaper
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editor or journalist who is writing that enticing article to get you to turn to the next page
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versus the level of asymmetry of when you watch a YouTube video and you think, yeah, this
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time I'm just going to watch one video and then I got to go back to work.
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And you wake up from a trance, you know, two hours later and you say, man, what happened
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What that misses is there's literally the Google, you know, Google's billions of dollars
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of supercomputing infrastructure on the other side of that slab of glass in your hand pointed
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at your brain doing predictive analytics on what would be the perfect next video to keep
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You think, OK, I've sort of been scrolling through this thing for a while, but I'm just
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going to swipe up one more time and then I'm done.
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Each time you swipe up with your finger, you know, you're activating a Twitter or a Facebook
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or a TikTok supercomputer that's doing predictive analytics, which has billions of data points
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And I think it's important to expand this metaphor in a way that you've talked about
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on, I think, in your show before about just the power, increasing power and computational
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When you think about a supercomputer pointed at your brain trying to figure out what's the
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perfect next thing to show you, that's on one side of the screen.
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On the other side of the screen is my prefrontal cortex, which has evolved millions of years
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ago and doing the best job it can to do goal articulation, goal retention and memory and
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sort of staying on task, self-discipline, et cetera.
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Well, a good metaphor for this is let's say you or I were to play Gary Kasparov at chess.
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It's because, you know, there I am on the chessboard and I'm thinking, OK, if I do this,
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And I'm playing out a few new moves ahead on the chessboard.
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But when Gary looks at that same chessboard, he's playing out a million more.
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And that's why Gary is going to win and beat you and I every single time.
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But when Gary, the human, is playing chess against the best supercomputer in the world,
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no matter how many million moves ahead that Gary can see, the supercomputer can see billions
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And when he beats Gary, who is the best human chess player of all time, he's beaten like
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the human brain at chess because that was kind of the best one that we had.
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And so when you look at the degree of asymmetry that we now have, when you're sitting there
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innocuously saying, OK, I'm just going to watch one video and then I'm out, we have
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to recognize that we have an exponential degree of asymmetry and they know us and our weaknesses
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That part of the conversation sets the stage for us well, but we recommend a full listen
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to that episode as Sam continued to skillfully play devil's advocate throughout and allowed
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Tristan to flesh out the nuanced and complex considerations.
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But Tristan remains steadfast in his effort to sound the alarm about the power of algorithms
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And so that's where we're going to stay in this trek through social media.
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You heard Sam, while channeling a skeptical view, point to the economic model that serves
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as the oxygen that keeps the social media monsters breathing.
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Here is an open question for the health of democracy and individual psychology.
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Is there a point when advertising can become too effective?
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And has social media pushed us over that threshold?
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Advertising is certainly nothing new, of course, and the profit motive has always encouraged persuasion
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But turn back the clock a few hundred years and imagine a handcrafted, colorfully painted wooden
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sign hanging above a rival blacksmith shop in a town square.
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And compare its influence to a perfectly timed, personalized, targeted advertisement that was crafted
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and custom-molded to your taste in music, attraction, color preference, current mood, political
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The latter does seem to suggest a deep shift in the power to persuade effectively.
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If there is something like an objective measure of the effectiveness of persuasion
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that immorally encroaches on a notion of personal autonomy,
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it's fair to wonder if we've blown right past it.
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There's an old adage in marketing that goes like this.
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I know I'm wasting half of my marketing budget.
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That built-in uncertainty might be eroding in the face of data-collecting machines which
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promise more and more of a sure thing to advertisers.
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To explore this area a bit more, we're going to hear from Jaron Lanier.
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Lanier is a computer scientist and Silicon Valley pioneer who launched virtual reality companies
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He was part of an early wave of bright-eyed, idealistic technologists.
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And he's among those who have since begun to question what they may have been missing.
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When he spoke with Sam, he had just written a book which was not shy about its suggestion.
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10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.
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For this compilation, we're going to be tapping this interview for Lanier's thoughts
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on the economic models that have run amok on the internet.
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And listen in on some of his nascent suggestions on how different models might improve the
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We'll start with Sam and Lanier revisiting the early days of Silicon Valley and the seemingly
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uncontroversial notion that information should be free.
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Many of the worst decisions we've made here, and this is something you point out in your books,
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in creating this technology, are not on their face bad decisions.
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I mean, they're certainly not sinister decisions.
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And so, and one of the first decisions we've made is around this notion that information
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And that just seems like a very generous and idealistic way to start.
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So, perhaps we can start here with the digital economy.
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What could possibly be wrong with information being free?
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Well, this idea that information should be free was held in the most profound and intense
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It was something that was believed so intensely during a period starting in the 80s.
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In some ways, it still holds for a lot of people, and to defy that was very, very difficult.
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It was painful for my friends who couldn't believe that I was defying it.
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And on its face, it sounds very generous and fair and proper and freeing, but there are
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problems with it that are so deep as to, I think, threaten the survival of our species.
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It's actually a very, very, very serious mistake.
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So, the mistakes happen on a couple of levels here.
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I would say the first one has to do with this idea that information is totally weightless
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and intrinsically something that's free in an infinite supply.
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And that's not true, because information only exists to the degree that people can perceive
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And it ultimately only has a meaning when it grounds out as human experience.
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The slogan I used to have back in the 80s when we were first debating these things is
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that information is alienated experience, meaning information is similar to stored energy that
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You put energy into a battery, then you can release it.
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Or you lift up a weight, and then you let go of the weight, and it goes back down, and
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And in the same way, information ultimately only has meaning as experience at some point
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And the problem with experience, or maybe the benefit of experience, is that it's only a
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And so, therefore, if you make the mistake of assuming that information is free, you'll have
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And what you do is you make yourself vulnerable to what we could call a denial-of-service attack
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So, a denial-of-service attack means that malicious people send so many requests to a website that
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
00:26:01.240
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
00:26:31.560
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
00:26:46.860
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
00:27:02.480
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.
00:28:14.960
But for a lot of them, there's input from a lot of people.
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
00:28:34.880
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
00:28:50.620
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.
00:29:13.580
You can't just stuff a language translator once.
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.
00:29:28.900
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
00:29:45.140
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.
00:30:09.040
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.
00:30:18.600
And then there's these other elements like, you know, having a personalized news feed.
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
00:30:45.720
And this answers the need to have information be free to all of the young people who want
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
00:31:15.340
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
00:32:15.960
Um, my objection is not to advertising, but to continuous behavior modification by algorithm,
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
00:33:02.280
You know, you're, you know, you're going to want this t-shirt and that, that works for
00:33:05.360
I know I've heard some really, I, uh, listening to some of the podcasters have to read their
00:33:12.960
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.
00:33:38.460
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
00:34:02.940
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,
00:34:18.180
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
00:34:31.720
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.
00:34:50.820
What, if you could reboot the internet, how would you do it?
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
00:35:13.400
I mean, right now we're creating the most valuable companies in history based on the
00:35:18.760
And meanwhile, we're creating more and more economic, uh, uh, separation, more and more inequality.
00:35:25.800
And the only way to correct it is to start paying the people who are adding the information.
00:35:32.240
It doesn't mean that I think the big tech companies should be shut down or that they're
00:35:38.000
Uh, it just means, um, that we have to get back to a world where when people add value,
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
00:35:55.860
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
00:36:12.200
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.
00:36:19.580
You'll get, you'll get peak Facebook and just like you got peak TV from places like,
00:36:26.700
We're going to give you peak social media where you can get better information and less
00:36:32.180
But, um, the, the, the other part of that is a little more complicated, uh, which is if
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
00:37:15.720
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
00:38:05.220
And, but that was all voluntary, uh, voluntary.
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
00:38:36.740
It's worth reminding ourselves after those two clips that social media is not entirely destructive.
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
00:39:11.700
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
00:39:25.460
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
00:39:42.460
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
00:40:16.560
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.
00:40:30.840
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
00:40:52.800
I'm sure there's some that I haven't noticed, but it must be nothing like what you're dealing
00:40:59.180
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
00:41:46.060
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
00:42:13.000
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,
00:42:29.080
And I would prefer them both to be out in the open.
00:42:37.000
I'm fascinated by this idea of being able to work in public, make decisions in public, make
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
00:43:00.420
And you saw them a month later, and they were a little bit better, and then a month later,
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
00:43:26.560
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,
00:43:37.980
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.
00:44:17.720
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