All right, so let's do a Cal Reacts to the News segment. As promised, I want to talk about this article from The Atlantic online. It's titled, "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Has Been Uniquely Stupid." In the magazine, it was called "After Babel," and is an epic article by, I'm gonna say friend of the show.

What I mean is someone that people who've listened to this show enjoy, John Haidt. So I've talked to John Haidt once or twice. I don't know him well, but I really respect his work. Because he has psychology training, he can work with literatures in an academic way, but also has a real mind towards cultural criticism and public facing work, which I think is great.

So I'm a big John Haidt fan. So I was excited to see this article. I'm gonna read just a few highlights. Some highlighted sentences from this article, then I'm gonna give you some thoughts on it. All right, so one thing he says here is, "Something went terribly wrong very suddenly with America in the 2010s." As he clarifies, "In the first decade of the new century," so the 2000 to the late 2000, like 2009, 2010, "Social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy." Haidt argues, "The high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy movement." He goes on, however, to say, okay, and he clarifies also, "In their early incarnations, platforms such as MySpace and Facebook were relatively harmless.

They allowed users to create pages on which to post photos, family updates, and link to mostly static pages of their friends and favorite bands. In this way, early social media can be seen as just another step in the long progression of technological improvements from the postal service through the telephone to email and texting, all of which helped people achieve the eternal goal of maintaining their social ties." All right?

So John Haidt is setting things up where there's gonna be this fall, the 2010s. And in the first decade of the 2000s, basically we are in a more eidonic, eidetic time where social media was great. It was helping people connect to their friends and bands and get new information.

And it was helping to overthrow dictators and everyone's really happy. And what he argues is there was a major change. So what was this major change that happened to social media that set up the fall that he talks about in this piece? Well, he goes on to give his theory.

He says, okay, look, in 2009 and before, if you're on Facebook, you had a simple timeline, a never-ending stream of content generated by friends and connections with the newest post at the top and the oldest at the bottom. That began to change in 2009 when Facebook offered users a way to publicly like posts with the click of a button.

That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful, the retweet button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own share button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. Like and share buttons quickly became standard on most social media platforms.

Shortly after its like button began to produce data about what best engaged its users, Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a like or some other interaction, eventually including the share as well. By 2013, social media had become a new game with dynamics unlike those in 2008.

If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would go viral and make you internet famous for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics. Users were guided not just by their true preferences, but by their past experiences of reward and punishment and the prediction of how others would react to each new action.

So that is the story that Hyte tells for what is essentially the fall of social media, the fall from grace of social media. So this is a story, it's a tale of techno determinism. I talk about this in digital minimalism. I've talked about this in an article I wrote for the communications of the ACM.

It's a point I've been making a lot recently, which is we have to be incredibly aware of unintentional techno social dynamics where a technology introduced for one period can have massive influences that we weren't expecting. And we should be monitoring those and aware of those and reacting to those.

And we often don't. And as Hyte says, this is what happened with the like and retweet button. It completely changed the character of social media. Where social media used to be about connecting to people, posting information, connecting, it became instead about viral dynamics. What's gonna be a hit? What is going to avoid me being attacked?

You don't have that without retweet. You don't have that without likes. But once it became this algorithmic stream with viral dynamics, it completely changed the character. It wasn't the intention. As I talk about in my book, "Digital Minimalism", the intention of the like button originally was that engineers thought it was not elegant.

That someone would post a photo on Facebook and so many comments would say more or less the same thing. Awesome, cool, great, good. Like, well, let's just put a like button in so that if all you're gonna say is like, that's great, just click that button and we'll count up how many people said that so that you don't have to waste time scrolling through comments that are all just simple positive affirmations.

That was the point of the like button. But almost immediately, it completely changed the dynamics of Facebook because A, it made it more addictive because you began to care about how many likes your things got. And B, it gave them data that they could use to create algorithmically generated streams, which broke the whole model of I know you.

And Facebook is great because I can see what you're up to. And made into this model of, oh my God, what am I seeing in my newsfeed? This is interesting, this is outrageous, this is emotionally engaged, and it completely changed the dynamic. So is that a bad thing? Well, Haidt says it's undermining democracy.

It is like one of the worst things to happen is the social media platforms going towards this optimized streams that create, equipped with or augmented with viral dynamics. He gives three things he said went wrong once we switched to this. Number one, it gave more power to tools and provocateurs while silencing good citizens.

Number two, this approach gave more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority. Because again, when you have viral dynamics in terms of both praise and attack, you migrate to the extremes. A, you're not gonna get shared for saying things moderate, and two, the extremes are gonna be motivated to pile on or try to attack people that seem like they're drifting from it.

He cites the pro-democracy group More in Common, a very important survey. Back in 2017, they surveyed 8,000 Americans and they split the Americans up into seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. And they found that devoted conservatives comprised 6% of the US population, and the group furthest to the left, what they called progressive activists, comprised just 8% of the population.

And the progressive activists in particular were the most prolific group on social media. 70% had shared political content over the previous years, and the devoted conservatives were also very active on social media. At least 56% had shared political content. And the irony, he points out, is that those two groups tend to be both richer than the average American and wider than the average American.

So that we have, quote, two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society that are completely driving sort of extreme conversation on social media. Finally, he says, "Social media in this new form deputize everyone to administer justice with no due process. Platforms like Twitter devolve into the Wild West with no accountability for vigilantes.

A successful attack attracts a barrage of likes and follow-on strikes. Enhanced virality platforms thereby facilitate massive collective punishment for small or imagined offenses with real-world consequences, including innocent people losing their jobs and being shamed into suicide. When our public square is governed by mob dynamics, unrestrained by due process, we don't get justice and inclusion.

We get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth." So we get that happening as well. That is, again, another point I will just say, I hear this a lot in conversations about social media, content, content moderations. This came up, I think, in the context of last week's discussion of Elon Musk and Twitter, where people say, "No, I think it's good.

Look, it's good that there's blowback. If you're worried about saying something, that means you should be worried about saying it." And you often hear the phrase, "Free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. You can say what you want, but you have to be ready for the consequences." And I think what Haidt is pointing out here is that on its own is a vacuous statement.

You look at any example in history where there is a clearly, let's say, authoritarian regime dispensing arbitrary dictatorial justice. So let's look at Stalin throwing people into the Gulag. If you were to go there and see what was going on, he was not just saying, "I have arbitrary power, and I'm putting you in the Gulag because I don't like you, and what are you going to do about it?" No, there'd be a trial.

And he would say, look, he would say the similar sort of thing. What you say, "Things have consequences. You were treasonous to the country. This treason's going to unsettle the communist utopia. Like, you know, your actions have consequences, and you're doing something dangerous. You need to go to the Gulag." I mean, that's true of any time, anywhere.

So what you have to do, of course, is with some humanity and common sense, just look at the particular context and say, is this largely actually just, or is it disproportionate? So if you're in Stalin's Russia, you would say this is very disproportionate. He's sending people to the Gulag clearly because he just doesn't like them, or they're not on his team, or he's trying to make sure that he can preserve power.

And obviously things aren't that bad now, but I think a lot of neutral observers looking at the swiftness and virality of pylons, both on the left and right, would say this can't possibly be proportional and just. It just doesn't seem that way. Our common sense is saying that's not true.

So I don't buy the argument of, hey, you can say what you want, consequences, but you can't be free from consequences. That applies in every context. What matters is, are the consequences we've seen, as Haidt would say, proportional, merciful, and truthful? And often they're not, and it's because, as Haidt points out, the viral dynamics of these platforms have pushed out most of the middle, pushed out most normal people.

We have these two extremes on either side, completely disproportionate of the population that not only control the conversation, but are doing so in an incredibly aggressive way because they're trying to play the dynamics of great viral reward while avoiding or participating in great viral punishment. And so it really is a wild west of a small number of disproportionate vigilantes running around.

And he thinks that's very destabilizing, and I think he's probably true. All right, so what do we do about it? Well, I don't have a definitive answer, but there's a couple points I wanna make. First of all, I think I am somewhat alone in my argument that I do not think Twitter is as fundamental as everyone else does.

Haidt makes this point, Elon Musk has recently made this point. They're all saying this is the town square, it's critical to democracy, that's why we really have to care about it. I don't think it's critical to democracy, I don't think it's the town square. I think if Haidt is right, that what Twitter is is 11% of the population segregated at the extremes playing this weird viral vigilante game of viral reward and viral punishment, maybe being observed by a larger group of people who find the emotions of this kind of entertaining.

This is not the public town square. This is the Colosseum. This is the gladiator to the fights to the death that people in Rome will wander over to watch 'cause it's bloody and interesting and is better than doing something else, it's kind of exciting, but it's not at the core of democracy, and how do we know that?

'Cause what would happen if, for whatever reason, let's say Elon succeeds and his latest thing is he wants to buy Twitter, he made an offer, let's say he just shuts it down. Nothing bad would happen. 85% of the country or 90% of the country wouldn't even notice 'cause most people don't use Twitter.

You don't need Twitter to report the news, you don't need Twitter to be a politician, you don't need Twitter to be entertaining, nothing bad would happen. People would barely notice. It would have less of an impact than supply chain disruption for toilet paper. So how could that be critical to the town square?

It's a Colosseum, it's not the Roman Senate. That is my argument. So once we recognize that, then I would argue we need to downgrade the importance of Twitter. It's weird, it's this weird 240 characters or whatever it is now with these weird viral dynamics and these little boxes with these threads and it's this weird bloody gladiator game and we say I'm leaving the Colosseum.

And here's what I think we need instead. A, we replace the distraction that Twitter gives, whoever it gives distraction to with better distraction. There's better things to do if you're bored. Yeah, it's exciting, but listen to a podcast, read a book, have a better hobby. There's all sorts of things you can do that are interesting and entertaining, more so than these weird short character threads of extreme people fighting each other.

Two, I think social media itself needs to fragment much more and get back more towards that 2000 to 2009 period where it is about connecting to people that you find interesting and know, expressing yourself. Social media should be more niche. It should be more about like people felt MySpace was in the early days or Facebook was in the early days.

Here is a group of amateur bicyclists and we connect with each other and we share photos of our rides and encourage each other. And we have our own norms and our own way of talking. And it's great. And I'm glad it exists because there's not enough amateur cyclists who live near me to actually like meet that many people.

And that's what social media should be. It should not try to be a virtual town square. There should not be a service that everyone feels like they have to use. That doesn't work. Finally, C, we need better ways for those who actually do have important, useful or thought provoking information to share to use the internet to share that.

There is no reason why the best and brightest, the most interesting, the smartest, the most engaging thinkers and writers out there should be constrained to a small number of characters, retweets and linking and adding and all of these weird arbitrary rules that serve to do nothing but virality. And virality is not useful for giving you the ability to share and express yourself and to hear what other people are saying.

It's really not that useful for it. The internet existed before the retweet. Social media and internet existed before the like button. So I think we need perhaps an earlier web 2.0 type approach, podcasts, blogs, individual websites where you can express yourself at length and in detail. And yes, it's harder to find attention when you're kind of on your own, but that I think is a feature.

That means you're gonna gather a more focused crowd. The best will rise to the top. You know, yeah, most podcasts don't get listened to, but ones that are interesting get big audiences. It's harder, but it's longer form, it's more nuanced, and it doesn't have viral dynamics. It doesn't create these weird pushes to the extremes.

I wrote an article about this for Wired Magazine early in the pandemic, where I said, the best thing we could do from a public health perspective for during the pandemic would probably shut down Twitter. It's just gonna make people crazy. It's gonna push people in weird directions. It's not gonna help our psychological or physical health during a pandemic.

And my argument in that Wired piece was we should go back to blogs for medical experts, and they should be hosted on institutional websites so we trust it. Oh, this doctor works for this medical network. The blog is posted on that network. Like we're already validating, like this is where this person comes from.

Here's why I should trust them. And he's not doing tweet threads of screenshotted charts. He can write a real article. And yeah, if you wanted to use social media to say, I published a new article, you can find it here, fine. But that was the appropriate form 'cause it allows us to do curation of who we should be listening to, to get more information, to have context, to have nuance.

Twitter was a terrible medium for that type of discussion. So I think we need to go back or forward, we could even say, to a way of communicating, expressing ourself that doesn't constrain us to these weird, narrow platforms that are built around virality and active user minutes, not around the most effective ways to convey information.

All right, so that's my thoughts on this general point. I think John Haidt is right and perceptive. I think he clarified better. I've made this argument, he clarifies it a little bit better that as you shifted from, the way I usually put it is as you shifted from the wall to the newsfeed, as you shifted from looking at friends' posts to liking and retweeting, you got these weird viral dynamics that transformed the social media landscape into this weird group of extremes and vigilantes that's had a huge negative effect.

And again, most people don't use Twitter, but reporters use it, politicians use it, corporate executives look at it, and it has, so therefore, a huge outsized effect. And to me, again, it's not the town square, it's not the Roman Senate, it's the Colosseum. And we're letting the bloody combat in the Colosseum, as entertaining as it is to look at in the moment, we're letting that actually dictate the way the rest of us live their lives, how news is covered, how politicians act as legislatures, how companies set policy or change their directives or initiatives, or even decide who to hire or fire.

And this is crazy, the Colosseum should not have a major role. There is nothing fundamental about this technology. We can do better with the internet, and I hope we actually do. So that's my thought on John Haidt's article on Twitter. So good job, John Haidt. And that would be what I add to it.

I mean, the one exception where we do need Twitter, I think is Baseball Trade Rumors, 'cause I need that information fast. But hey, look, that's an example though. Yeah, Twitter is good for getting Baseball Trade Rumor information fast, but there's a website, mlbtraderumors.com, that works just as well, and it's focused on just that.

And I'll tell you something, and then I'll let this go, but I'll tell you something. That is where I went to see what was going on in the highly compressed free agency that happened in March after the collective bargaining agreement was made, finalized for MLB, because specifically I did not wanna go to Twitter to see what the baseball reporters were saying, because Twitter was gonna push in my face terrible, terrifying news about Ukraine and nuclear war and about COVID.

And I was like, I don't wanna go to the Colosseum to find out about my team. And so I went to a special purpose website, got the news I wanted without the stress. So case in point, that's the future we need. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)