(upbeat music) All right, so I wanna talk about today, today's deep dive, Quit Social Media. And the reason why I'm using that title is because that was the title of the single video I've ever produced that has been the most watched. My TEDx talk, I believe it was from 2017, Jessica confirmed that, that was titled Quit Social Media.

And that went on 8 million something views since then. And I wanted to revisit it. It's been five years since I gave that talk, the most viral thing I've ever done online. I thought this would be a good time to visit my Quit Social Media TEDx talk. All right, so to start, I thought it might be interesting to give the backstory of how that talk came to be.

Then I wanna talk about what happened after it came out, and then finally reflect on how do I think today, five years later, about the points I was making then. Am I happy about things turned out? Am I upset how they turned out? Are they no longer relevant? That's my goal here.

So let me go back to the context. So I had published the book Deep Work very early in 2016, right? So after I had published that book, we were looking for different topics I could bring out into the public sphere to try to generate attention for the book. So like, for example, I did an article for the Harvard Business Review that was titled "Modest Proposal, Eliminate Email," which was the seed of the idea, of course, that I later elaborated in my book, "A World Without Email," because that was like one of the ideas, email is distracting.

And one of the other things that I talked about in Deep Work was social media. There was a chapter on social media being distracting, and we're putting too much emphasis on it when there's deeper skills that are probably more valuable. So we thought, okay, we should find a way to talk about this angle somewhere.

Now, at this point, going up to 2016, I'm a bit of an odd guy. I had spent my entire adult life up to this point doing professional speaking. I mean, I started professional speaking when I was like 22 or 23 years old. I would travel around the country talking at colleges, then eventually at large conferences and corporate events.

I had spoken in front of a thousand people at Lincoln Center and at the World Domination Summit, these type of places, as well as corporate gigs, the Canadian Olympic Committee, like all sorts of different places. I just gave a lot of talks. So I was familiar with talking. And when you're a talker who's been around for a while, I used to get lots of invitations for TEDx conferences.

There was a time back then, 2014, 2015, 2016, where TEDx conferences were popping up everywhere because TED was very popular. And I would get those invitations all the time, and I was like, "No, I'm not gonna go to a TEDx conference. "I have enough sort of big, high-paying gigs "or giant audience gigs to do." But when we were trying to promote deep work, and we're thinking about where can I go to introduce this idea of not using social media, I had this idea that you know who does video best when it comes to talks is these TEDx conferences.

And so one thing they do very well is they have very good cameras, and they have the distribution power of TED. Behind the video. So I said, "Okay, the next reasonable TEDx invitation I get, "I'm gonna say yes, I'm gonna use that as a venue "to give a fire-breathing talk about social media." And a TEDx conference that was being held in Virginia, so a 45-minute drive from me, came along and said, "Do you wanna speak?" And I said, "Yes, I don't really care what your theme is.

"I'm gonna come talk about quitting social media." So that's how it came to be. And so I wrote this talk, and it's a TED talk, so I memorized it, it's 15 minutes long, where I make the argument that more people should quit social media. It's not something that everyone has to use, and its damages are bigger than people might think.

And I came to this TEDx talk, it was a small room, it was like a classroom, there must have been, I don't know, at most 40 people there. And I gave my talk. The whole idea behind the talk was that I wanna bring attention to that topic. Almost immediately, it made the organizers uncomfortable.

This idea that you should quit social media, to say it with a straight face, without a ton of caveats, was very counter-cultural and eccentric. So the first thing they did was change the title of my talk before they posted it online. They changed the title to Working Deeply in a Distracted World.

I barely mentioned deep work in this talk. This is straight up, this is the problem with social media, you should stop using it, here's what it's like to not use social media, it's great, I was being purposefully provocative and clear about it, and they changed the title, because they were worried, this is eccentric.

Let's make it Working Deeply in a Distracted World. And I called them up, it's like, no, this is the whole reason I came here, is so that talk could be called Quit Social Media. A talk called Quit Social Media will be posted by TED. That's what I want. So they went back and they changed the talk back.

And it sat there for a little while, and then it picked up steam, and then views really began to pile up, and it ended up, it's not like it's the most popular TEDx talk of all time, but I think it's easily in the top 100 or top 50. All right, so that's what happened.

And the question is, why did that happen? And one of the contentions I wanna make is that if I had given that same talk two years earlier, no one would have cared. That the timing of that talk was just perfect, that sort of early in 2017 when I gave it, was just perfect for this topic.

And to understand that there's a little bit of history I think people don't always understand all of the details of. But what you have to understand is in the lead up to that point, so 2012 up through 2016, there was a lot of exuberance around social media. The general sense about social media from any sort of elite discourse was this is a revolutionary technology that is a progressive force of good for the world, it's instigated the Arab Spring, it is supporting expression of groups that otherwise could not be expressed, that this is a great technology.

That was the general sense. During that period is when I began to build up a skepticism, not about the internet, but about what I used to call social media universalism. The idea that we all needed to be using social media, I thought for most people, this is not that great.

Most people are not toppling governments, most people are not bringing interesting new voices into the marketplace of ideas, most people are looking at their phone three hours a day instead of doing things that are useful. These are purposefully addictive and the idea that we all have to be on where it's weird is a problem for society.

And I began to make that critique and people thought I was insane. So the TEDx organizers tried to change the name of my talk. A couple of years before, for example, I'd written an op-ed for the New York Times that argued that social media was not as important for young people's careers as they thought and it created a fear.

The New York Times actually had to commission a response op-ed the next week, addressing my op-ed and saying, this is wrong, don't listen to it. People got mad about it. I went on a major national radio show in Canada to talk about it and they ambushed me 10 minutes into the interview.

Here is a social media expert and an artist who uses social media to promote her work here to tell you that social media is important, right? Because it's so infuriated people that anyone say that. There was a professor in this area here in DC who was frantically trying to get me to come debate him.

Like he couldn't take that in a national publication someone had said social media is not important. So that's what things was like and I was seen as eccentric and that's where things were when that talk came out. All of that changed. All of that changed right around the time that that quit social media talk was released which is why that timing was so good.

And the reason it changed was politics. And it was the 2016 presidential election here in America. And that election had a very unfortunate outcome for social media companies because they managed to upset all sides of the political spectrum. Now I got the first inklings of this actually when I was promoting Deep Work in early 2016.

When I would go on conservative radio shows or conservative podcasts, everyone was asking me about censorship on social media. And this was not something that was in my normal orbit. It's not something I'd heard about or encountered. It was not something that was being covered in sort of standard techno journalism.

So I would get caught off guard by these questions. Like I don't know what you're talking about but already in the lead up to that election, the right was starting to get upset where they said when we look at like what gets taken down and what doesn't, it all comes from like a standard set of relatively far to the left political perspective.

And I don't think this is surprising. These companies are based in Northern California. This is more of a, the political left is way more dominant there. But so the right started to get upset or skeptical about social media. And then the election happened and Donald Trump won. And it took a little while, about a half a year or so but the left then began to get real upset about social media because of their role in helping Donald Trump win.

So now you had the left start to get upset about social media as well. Now that's kind of a complicated story. If you really look at that story closely about what happened on the left, I think it's often portrayed as they saw specific harms that like Facebook was doing and that's why they were upset.

There's Cambridge Analytica, there was Russian misinformation. But really if you watch closer, what really happened with the left and social media is that most of, I would say, the mainstream sort of political and cultural voices entered a resistance mode after Donald Trump was elected. Like our goal, the point of our paper and what we're doing is there's an existential threat to our country.

It's Donald Trump. And this is what we're trying to do is we're in resistance to that. And the social media companies, though politically they're to the left, didn't join that resistance mode. Zuckerberg, a couple of years later, came to Georgetown, gave a speech about free speech online. They were trying to, they weren't supporting Donald Trump but they were not ready to go full resistance mode.

They weren't like, "We're fully on board. He's off the platforms. We're going to do what we need to do to make sure that we are helping preserve this vision of democracy." They didn't do it. They tried to go down the center. It was like during the French Revolution where you were the shopkeeper.

And you're like, "Look, I'm no fan of the king, but I also am not going to go to the Bastille." And your days are numbered at that point. Like the revolutionaries are going to see you as with like a sort of bourgeois suspicion, right? And I think this was a big thing that happened.

So there was sort of a tribal traitorousness that was going on here where the left was like, "You guys aren't fully on our team." And so a lot of those mechanisms turned against it. So now the left was really mad at these social media companies and you had like the delete Facebook movement and Zuckerberg became the devil.

And now they had upset all sides, all sides of the political spectrum. And what that meant was for everyone else who maybe was not looking at these technologies purely through a political lens, this had had the effect of dislodging how these technologies were categorized in the cultural hive mind.

It had dislodged them from exuberant cool new technologies to something that there's probably issues with, like these political issues. And once it was in a category where we acknowledged there could be issues with it, people that were far away from political concerns saw other issues with it. And my kids are using this too much, I'm on this too much, I don't really like this.

It opened the floodgates to critique. So it took this particular political disruption to change our cultural categorization of social media. But once we changed it to something that was worthy of critique, we found a lot of critiques. And that was exactly the environment in which that video dropped. I think that's why it found an audience.

It was perfectly timed to a cultural awakening where people said, let's start looking closer at social media. And it doesn't mean I was convincing them, but they were ready to hear an argument from my side. They were ready to watch a video that was titled "Quit Social Media" because that suddenly became something that was at very least comprehensible in a way that it wouldn't have been in 2015, the way it wouldn't have been in 2016.

So I think that's the story behind that video. Now, reflecting on it today, how do I feel about the issues I talked about in that video? I would say I'm pretty optimistic. I'm pretty optimistic because again, the foundation for my critique was my wariness of social media universalism. This idea that everyone had to use the same small number of platforms, and these were giant platform monopolies that were engineering highly addictive experiences.

And I did not think it was good for the body politic. I don't think it was good for our culture that everyone had to be on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, and we were all on there because I think for most people, it probably causes more harm than good.

Not that these were evil tools, but for most people, it's the time it takes, the emotional labor it creates is not worth the minor distracting benefits. And the line I used to use back then is that I think social media, I don't think it should be banned. I think it should be like "Game of Thrones." Something that's pretty popular and has a pretty loyal following, but like most people don't care.

There's also a lot of people that say, "I'm not gonna want something with dragons." And I think we are actually starting to move towards that. I think in recent years, after this political disruption, recategorized social media writ large, we are seeing a fragmentation of the social media universe. Facebook fell from favor.

I mean, it was just relentlessly attacked from the left and the right. Twitter has never been super mainstream. It's incredibly influential, but most people aren't tweeting. Most people don't really care what's going on on Twitter. There was things like Snapchat that rose and are gone. We're in a moment now where TikTok has become really good, but we're not anymore in a moment where there's any one platform where it would be considered weird to not use.

I was labeled a heretic for saying, "I don't use Facebook." There is no such platform today, no matter how popular, that people would think it's weird at all if I say I don't use it. TikTok is very popular. No one would bat an eye if you say, "I don't use TikTok." But yeah, it's like "Game of Thrones." Like some people love it, and some people think dragons are kind of stupid.

We get it. It's not a big deal. If you say, "Oh, I don't use Twitter," people are like, "Yeah, I get it. "It's kind of toxic on there, anxiety-producing. "Like, good for you." And I think that is a good thing. So what's gonna come next in the world of social media?

I just think more fragmentation. I mean, we have seen social media moved away from being a tool to connect people into a tool of infinite scroll distraction, algorithmically optimized. TikTok, for example, is just owning that better than anyone else. Forget anything else other than just, "Let's touch your brainstem in 30-second burst." You're like, "Ooh, ah, ooh." Like it's getting straight to the chase.

Like it's not about connecting. It's not about creativity. It's not about finding interesting people. Let's just like touch your brainstem. So once it's in a world of distraction, there are many sources of distraction. There's various social media platforms. There's podcasts. There's all these streaming services that are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to produce really good stuff.

There's articles. There's newspapers. There's endless books. Like there's endless things they're trying to provide distraction and you can choose which ones are best for you. And maybe it's TikTok or maybe it's podcast or maybe it's books. And like, we're getting to a point where that's all fine. And that's what I wanted to see.

A world in which there was a diversity of different technological tools and innovations coming and going, some getting popular, some falling, trends come, trends don't go, but we'd never had this sense of universalism. You have to use this one. We all have to be on that one. That was the world I was hoping for in that talk.

And I think we're getting closer. We're closer to be there. We're closer to be there. So we are in a better place in 2022 than we were in 2017, early 2017, when I was giving that talk. At that point, I was making people nervous with the way I talked about social media.

Today, I think I'm probably seen as being too centrist on social media because I'm not part of the, both the right and the left is out for blood. You are our tribal enemy and we will destroy you. And I'm not pitchforking. I'm just saying like, hey, maybe don't use Facebook.

And I think that is a probably a good switch of affairs. So quit social media. I don't care if you do or you don't, but I'm just glad that if you do, very few people are going to care. That's my reflection on that talk. So there you go, Jesse.

Looking back at it. - The internet says that it was September 19th, 2016. - Oh, okay. - In the Tysons. - Oh, so '16, that makes sense. Summer of 2016, probably. - Yeah, September 19th, so right after. - All right, 2016, that makes more sense. So it was like, it took a little while for all this to sink in.

Like that op-ed I wrote for the Times that generated all that furor was the week after the presidential election. So like at that point, it was still like, what do you mean social media is awesome? It really took another year before Cambridge Analytica, I think, helped did this. There was like this general upswelling of, wait a second, the Russian misinformation.

Like all of that took a while to get going. So even when I gave that talk in 2016, it was still eccentric. By 2017, people were like, yeah, we don't like social media anymore. So it's funny how that shifted. I mean, even, do you remember Cambridge Analytica? - Yeah.

- Right, this is like an interesting example. Like the way that was pitched, like the way that was pitched to people was basically that there was like a Bond villain in a hollowed out volcano that was on like a secret laser phone to Donald Trump, perpetuating like this giant heist.

But the reality was, what they were doing at Cambridge Analytica was the business model of Facebook. It was what like everyone was doing, political or not. Like that's how Facebook actually worked. And like they had just started changing, like there's no real crime committed there other than they maybe had just started to change their terms of service like a few months before or something like that.

But like that was not some unusual use of Facebook. Like that's what Facebook, that's why it was so profitable. You could go in and scrape all this information and target people or whatever. And my contention is that like Facebook saw the danger of people recognizing like, this is what we do.

We, you play the, you do the personality test and we steal your whole contact network and use that to like target ads to everyone. Like we don't want people realizing that. So they leaned in heavy that like, oh, this was some sort of unusual or exceptional crime that occurred.

Like, oh, this Cambridge Analytica was some mastermind bond criminal, like broke into the data safe and was doing things. And because they, so they were trying to desperately, I believe, they did not want the story out there that was like Cambridge Analytica reveals the extent to this is what Facebook is.

It's stealing all this data. And so they were very successful, I think at the time and making it seem like it was an exceptional case. And the only real thing exceptional about it was like its scale was very large. So it was a large number of people, but that was a standard academic research study play of like personality tests to scrape data, to target people with ads.

I mean, it was like the whole business model around Facebook. So I really think they leaned in the trying to make it about like people doing something unusual or exceptionally bad. And I think, because again, I think that was something that Facebook felt like we can play on that ground to be okay.

We can say like Cambridge Analytica was an exceptional instance. We're working on privacy. So that can't happen again and distract people from the fact that like, that's what their business model was, but it didn't work because of the political anger. So even though they were like, yeah, we agree.

Cambridge Analytica is bad. And we're gonna like change our privacy laws, the sort of you were not enough on our side post Trump, I think still numbered them. Their days were still numbered. The media was gonna be done with them. So like they tried to create a villain that they could be like, yeah, we're on your side.

We gotta go after those people. We don't know what they were doing. We definitely did not encourage exactly that behavior for like hundreds of clients. They tried that and it didn't work because the damage had been done. So there you go. Zuckerberg's on the podcast tour. - Yeah, I listened to his Ferris and Lex.

- Lex, Ferris, yeah. Has he answered our invitations yet? - He wants to talk to you directly. He wants to play golf with you. - Yeah, can you imagine Mark Zuckerberg coming to the Deep Work HQ? Like, don't worry, Mark. That smell is the grease trap of the kitchen below us.

It's not me.