Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson - Why the Internet Is Getting Worse and Why That Might Be Good for Society

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

Ben’s article on “Regretful Accelerationism,” the differences between today’s Internet and that of 10 years ago, AI articles at Sports Illustrated as digital media continues its decline, and why the increasingly bleak outlook for social media might be healthy for society itself.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp. And on the other line, Ben Thompson, Ben, how you doing? I'm doing well. I think the question is, how are you? I couldn't be promoing Sharp Tech in the update yesterday. I'd be like, oh, there's going to be another one this week, you know, but I was still writing. So I think everyone knew who the guilty culprit was.

Is everything okay in the Sharp household? So the question is, Ben, am I, in fact, the guilty? Colpritt. So we're going to skip to the end of the rundown here at the very bottom. This is Isaac. He says, Andrew, I can't believe Ben let you tempt the baby gods the way he just did. You never, ever, ever talk about how perfect your baby is or how well they're sleeping. It's all stages. Every few weeks or months is a brand new stage. And as soon as you open your mouth, a foot is around the corner. It's just not worth it. vague comments about things going well and how blessed you are right now is always okay.

But anything beyond that, please be careful. So, Ben, yes, about a week ago, we talked about how perfect my baby was, the best baby there's ever been little baby Charles. And in the wake of that conversation, I read Isaac's email. And then Charles proceeded to go through a bit of a crying stage. There's a little bit more fussiness than there had been. Sounds like teeth. And then, yeah, there may be some teeth around the corner here.

And then also our entire house got sick with a stomach bug that I think he is responsible. I don't want to put it on Charles. But either way, I think there was bad karma in the air in the wake of our Sharp Tech episode. And then we all went down with a bit of a stomach virus to start the week here. But now I'm feeling good. I'm not sure what Isaac is insinuating because he kind of blamed you, you know, for allowing you to weigh in. Right. Maybe he should have just said, you know, accused me of having a devious plot to upset, you know, I was just so jealous of Charles. To sabotage the

happy family. That's right. That's right. So yeah, I'm glad you're feeling better. And I hope Charles is feeling better as well. Well, and speaking of dad behavior, uh, we have talked in the past about the nerdy ads that are targeted at you on social media. And I understand that we've hit a new milestone this week. So do you want to fill the people in on what the latest ad was that converted you to a buyer? Oh, it's a new like sort of drain filter thing for your sink. It looks fantastic. I'm very excited. Just unbelievably washed behavior from Bent Thompson there. And on that note, let's get into the actual show. And before we jump into what we're discussing today, one thing I want to note is that we got a bunch of really thought.

reactions to the impromptu Elon conversation last week or prompted by Elon, actually. And I think we'll probably double back to run through those emails at some point in the next few weeks. But for now, I'll just say thank you to everybody who wrote in because I was surprised that how smart and civil all the discussion was. It's rare to encounter thoughtful civil discussion about Elon Musk. And as far as the opposite of civil and thoughtful, let's talk about the internet writ large and where we're all headed. So you wrote this week on Sertechri, an article that was headlined regretful accelerationism. And for anyone who's not familiar, that headline is a play on effective accelerationism, which is a belief that is, quote, rooted in the second law of thermodynamics,

that the universe itself is an optimization process creating life which constantly expands. The engine of this expansion is techno capital. This engine cannot be stopped. The ratchet of progress only ever turns in one direction. Going back is not an option. Rather than fear, we have faith in the adaptation process and wish to accelerate to this asymptomatic limit. asymptotic, that's right. That's like a asymptotic.

Approaching a line, but you never actually hit it. The techno capital singularity is what we're all approaching here. A lot of the accelerationism rhetoric is begging for the, sir, this is a Wendy's response. But I just wanted to spell out the contours of what we're talking about here, when we use the word accelerationism. And in your piece this week, you present a vision. of technological acceleration that's a bit more nuanced. I think there are three chapters of the conversation that are worth highlighting here. And I'll start with this. Chapter one, why recent innovations will make the internet less useful in the long run. And so for this topic, I want to

start with what social media and the internet looked like around 2013 and try to contrast that with what we have today and where we might be going over the next couple of years. So can you walk people through what's changed and the mechanics of how and why it's changing? Well, I just think it's changed because it just got so much bigger. And I mean, there is an aspect to a lot of this take and a lot of this discussion that is frankly pretty sort of elitist and, you know, quote unquote, sort of privileged in nature like talking about the good old days and the way things were. And I think that is a mistake that is made frequently when you're when you're talking about the past, when you're being sort of nostalgic. You know, I mean, actually when I was writing this article, there was, you know, was having a discussion with some friends about, about music. And I happened to play an album from 2006 while I was writing.

And it was funny. I'm like, man, 2006 might have been the peak. We had iPods, but not iPhones. Like, we had like, we had just enough technology. We could go out. You could enjoy great music. you weren't like totally bored out of your mind sitting on the bus. I was riding the bus back then.

But at the same time, you weren't like consumed with all these stimulus and stuff. You could still sort of enjoy life. It was a real golden era because you also had like faster internet connections. You were able to. Right. You had broadband. And you had the internet. You had all the information in the world.

Google was great. Google was unbelievable. But you didn't really have social media. Right. It wasn't horrible yet. And, you know, even you fast forward in 2013, that's kind of the golden era of social media. And certainly, and this is why I'm like the world's biggest hypocrite in many respects writing about this. And anyone that wants to criticize me on these grounds is utterly and completely justified.

Like, no one has benefited from social media more than me. Like, like, secretary is completely grown up on social media, Twitter in particular. And so that's sort of just in broad strokes sort of where I'm coming from. And I think it really is just a scale issue. There's a lot of things that are great when they're small that kind of become crappy when they're large. And a lot of stuff is like this. I mean, to take an offline example, or not an offline example, it's definitely online, but it entails physical goods. Take like Amazon, right?

I think one of the effective critiques of Amazon and this sort of marketplace approach, one of the benefits of Amazon, the, one of the benefits of Amazon, the retail, when they just sold all their own stuff is by definition someone is vetting all that stuff because they are paying Amazon's money for the good. That good is then going into an Amazon warehouse and then they're selling it and there's a certain bit where they are de facto standing behind it because they had buyers involved in the process. When you fast forward to a marketplace model where people can just walk up and put stuff on Amazon and also can sort of get the imprimatur of the Amazon brand because it's

stored in an Amazon warehouse, it has the prime on it, that's when you get into issues of, like, I warns you, don't buy electrical sort of plugs on Amazon, right? Like, like, you, you don't want to accidentally burn your house down because you have some sort of no-name sort of thing or some rip-off. Like, there's certain expensive things. I tell people, no, don't go buy that on Amazon. Go to, you know, B.H. Photo Video, or go, go to, you know, the manufacturer directly or whatever it might be just because you don't want to get a done. You don't want to get a, a, what, what is it?

No, ripoff sounds right. No, it's like, basically every category on Amazon is a full of ripoffs now. Right. And so the problem is this is sort of, yeah, this is, no, it's not, but they, they steal the brand. There's a specific word for it. I can't think of what it is.

But, but email at sharp tech. com. I'll come up with it like, what word is thinking of. Yeah. No, knock off. That's the word I'm looking for. Knock off. Yeah, okay.

That feels right. Anyhow, the issue is scale. There's a real tradeoff. On one hand, Amazon has everything, right? You can go there and you can find whatever it is you're looking for. And you get stuff that's super cheap, that seems impossibly cheap. And half the time it's crap. Like my drain thing is probably going to be crap, but sometimes it's good.

And the cost is low enough that it's worth the try because it looks pretty compelling. And if it doesn't, well, whatever, you know, it didn't work out. There's lots of consumer benefits to that. But it does come with costs where it's sort of hard to police. And this has been a theme again and again. This goes back to the Elon Musk discussion about like they're being really objectionable content on Twitter or Facebook's in in hot water again for, you know, showing really objectionable stuff involving kids.

When you reduce friction, when you take away any sort of gatekeeper, you do get benefits of scale of having. everything of every niche sort of being served. But that scale inherently comes with all these sorts of downsides. And it's important to acknowledge both. I think there's people that see the upside and they just ignore or sweep away the downside. And there's people that obsess about the downside and ignore sort of the upside. And the right answer, as with everything, is probably somewhere in the middle.

Right. And certainly that tracks with my experience. It's like if we're just treating Twitter as a standalone example here, Twitter from 2009 to 2012, 2013, I mean, it's frequently people are nostalgicizing. Nostalgizing. That's not a word either. It's a word now. It is now. Romanticizing the heyday of Twitter. And what really made Twitter great in the beginning is that there weren't as many people on Twitter.

And so you had a creative community that was like feeding off of its own energy. And then as soon as like the entire world or what felt like the entire world showed up and was voicing their own opinion, like it kind of became unbearable. And similar things happened with Facebook as well. And so increasing the scale and inviting more and more people into the tent tends to poison the well as far as social media is concerned. The other two drivers that I think are worth mentioning and that you highly, in the piece is that the marginal cost of creating content has basically disappeared and doesn't

really exist on social media where it's all user generated content and AI is going to be entering that space and is going to make it really, really easy to generate tons of content for free. And then also, you're no longer seeing content from people you follow. You're not limited by your social graph on social media, which we've talked about in the past, but I think is important as we forecast what the internet is going to look and feel like moving forward as AI proliferates and then as we all become accustomed to consuming content that we didn't explicitly sign up for, but we're just opening the app and being served what the algorithm thinks that we're going to be interested in. And as all the content becomes more and

more divorced from actual humans, we could head to some pretty strange places. So So it's in some ways it feels like we're already there. But that was an aspect of your piece that I hadn't fully synthesized until having you put it all together like that. That bit about already being there, though, is an important one. I mean, just first off, the ironic thing, and I sort of maintain this throughout all the hysteria of the late 2010s, is that in my experience, and I think that my experience is probably accurate for the reasons I'll get into, by far. the most pleasant social network is Facebook. Because, and that's because it's limited to your friends, or, you know, friends broadly defined in the Facebook sort of definition that people you follow, you have to explicitly

choose to make your post public. But also it's worth noting everyone considers, and I think fairly so, the Facebook social network to be fairly dead, or at least not attracted to sort of younger people as far as that goes. So it does speak to the sort of tension here where people actually want the, you know, the broader hysteria. They want the algorithm. They want the stuff that actually surfaces in their feet that they didn't know was interested in them, but then they get stuck in the right old. They want drains. Who just bought a drain filter. Yeah. Yes. There's nothing better. No, and also I think another challenge with Facebook is you don't want to broadcast to everyone you know

in your life. Not only friends, but people you went to elementary school with, high school, with college with, like, if I have a thought that I think is interesting enough that some people in my life might want to consume it, my guess is that the people I went to grade school with are not going to want to hear it and also are going to be annoying if they engage with it. So it's just like not an appealing experience. Well, yeah, look, I just, I don't want to get into it. I think that's most people's approach to Facebook is like, actually, there are a lot of people that I'm technically friends with on there that I'm not really friends with and I'm not clamoring to interact with.

Yeah, I mean, this is going to, I mean, this is, this was the approach to life before, right? You were. Yeah. Constrained and limited in what you did based on those around you and the desire and realization that you need to preserve relationships for the long run. It's a, it's an iterated game. You know, there's a, you know, this is sort of like, like game theory, this idea that the classic game theory example is the prisoner's dilemma, right?

Which is, you know, we both have the choice to confess or to stay silent. If, you know, and the optimal choice is, it depends. The optimal choice depends on if you're playing the game one time or multiple times. If you're playing it one time, you should always screw the other person. That is going to be sort of your optimal outcome because the risk of them screwing you is very, very high. Like you're in prison for much longer. on the other hand, the best possible strategy, and this is really interesting,

they had this huge competition to sort of figure out what's the best possible strategy. People came up with these super convoluted sort of approaches and strategies to win sort of an iterated game where you play the prisoner's dilemma again and again and again. The goal was to over time minimize your total time to send jail. So sorry, just to back up, if neither of you confess, you both get off.

If one confesses the other doesn't, the one that doesn't get super screwed. if you both accuse the other, then you kind of get a medium length time. So that's sort of the broad structure of that. It turned out the program that won this competition was the simplest program imaginable, which was do what the other person did the previous time.

So basically, if you screwed me, then the next time we go, I will screw you. If you are nice to me, the next time I go, I'll be nice to you. It's called tip for tat. All you do is just mimic the other person. And it turned out that was by far the dominant strategy. That was that one like every single time.

If you're playing the same game again and again, you sort of change your approach than you do if you're only playing it one time. And I think the thing when you're interacting with people you know in real life, it is an iterated game. You saw them before, you're seeing them now, you're going to see them again.

And this applies to the real world, it applies to Facebook with the people that you actually know in your network. And so you act differently. You don't necessarily throw out opinions that... Yeah, you self-sense. censor, of course. Right. And self-censoring sounds bad, but like all such things, it's called maintaining healthy relationships and not being a complete shithead half the time.

I mean, it depends on the context. Twitter, like, on public social media, it's much more of a one-shot game, right? You're like, you go out there and you dunk and you develop a persona that's different than your sort of, you know, your real-life persona. Now, again, I, I'm somewhat projecting because for me, my Twitter persona, by definition, has to be sort of my real life persona, my professional persona. And so my reaction has been to not play the game because I'm wary of, you know, the challenge of what happens when you have all the incentives for this network, particularly for, you know, smaller throwaway accounts or whatever it would be that are often the most vicious, they're playing a one-shot game. And if you're there playing a multi-shot game, you're at a fundamental disadvantage. And that's just sort of a challenge. So again, maybe I'm here complaining about it because I'm not well suited to this new fauna.

I'm just an old fogey trying to maintain a reputation online and these darn kids are being mean to me. Yeah, but I don't honestly, I don't think that you're putting value judgments on any of it anyways. I think that you're just an analyst observing where this is going, where we are now, but also how AI figures to exacerbate a lot. lot of the dynamics that we've seen emerge over the last several years. But I think this was a big point is independent of AI. This is just a reality of social media. And this is like this idea of constraints, you know, are actually good for humanity or good for humans to have sort of boundaries in which you operate.

This, as I sort of mentioned, is the first constraint that went away and went away long before AI. It was the constraint of acting like a normal human being, right? Like there's that very famous Twitter exchange where someone who's like insulting like a UFC analyst or something. And the guy comes back, you know, on Twitter. He's like, oh, there's the worst announcer ever, blah, blah, blah. And the analyst comes back to him and says, you know, why are you talking like that? Would you say that to my face?

And he replies, of course not. You'd kick my ass. And that like perfectly encapsulates sort of the experience. That's a snapshot of the last 15 years. No question. That is articulating the removal. of a constraint, that constraint being actual consequences for what you say. There aren't any.

Like the worst that can happen is that you get banned or kicked off from Twitter. You have to go sign up for it for a new account. And again, I appreciate you noting this isn't a value judgment. I would from my value perspective say that there probably are more downsides and upsides. I don't know. It just is what it is, though. That's just sort of the reality of the way things are. Right. Well, and then at the same time, this sea of content, like the sea is rising and rising with each passing year.

So now I am served. Like I think I follow, like somehow I follow more than a thousand people on Twitter. But I observed tweets from all over the world at all hours of the day from mostly people at this point, mostly people that I don't follow. And that's the way all social media has come. to operate and moving forward as AI starts generating video and starts generating text, like who knows what sort of content I'm going to be served in that context. And that's where what already feels like this cacophonous, like crazy atmosphere could be rendered completely unrecognizable in like five years or 10 years. And who knows exactly how we'll respond to that.

that reality, but it almost feels inevitable that that's the direction this all goes. Right. Well, I think the response, you know, and again, this is like when I was, you know, I've been like online. I put like home on the internet in my Twitter bio like in 2006, like just my virtue of living abroad and just sort of the reality like my friends have been online. My, my experience has been in life. My professional life is online.

And so there was always. a hesitation that I had about making any pronouncements about life online, the future online, in part because I felt my experience was such an outlier that it wasn't totally clear, to what extent is my experience an outlier because of my living abroad and just generally being sort of a nerd and all those sorts of things versus, no, I actually am like super far ahead of the curve and people are going to get here sort of in the long run. That very much applies to here, where am I ahead of the curve in that one of the realizations I had with writing strategically, and fortunately I had this pretty early, like back when Twitter was still good, frankly, 2014, 2015,

is that it suddenly occurred to me that people who responded to me to Twitter about my articles, it was always the same people, right? It was just like, it was a web and it set, and I'd see their names or again and again. And meanwhile, my subscription numbers for trajectory were going up and up and up. So by definition, there was a mismatch in that there was my audience on shrategory was much larger. And perhaps it obviously included this subset, but they were only a subset. And they actually weren't really growing. It's not like I was getting like new reply guys or something like that.

And so what I realized is I appreciated those folks for sure, but I needed to take care to not over index on them, on their takes and their responses. It's a challenge for every single creator on the internet, frankly. frankly, is you need to be able to be at a remove from all that. One of the lessons they learned super early is you really ought not take Twitter too serious. And this is, again, back when Twitter was good, you know, like I just had to, I had to trust that my takes and my instincts were what were building the business. And if people disagreed with that vocifically on Twitter, but it was the same person every single time, that person could not, by definition, be standing in for everyone in my audience,

which was going, you know, which was expanding. And so I've, That was long before I abandoned Twitter or stopped sort of tweeting on there. And of course, I'm all lying when I say I don't tweet. I don't tweet from Ben Thompson. I tweet like a freaking maniac from no tech Ben. But currently harassing the ringer over. Yeah, full disclosure. I mean, I need to be.

We want to have some honesty in this conversation. 15 tweets in on the honest ranking. Yep. Okay. But the, I mean, speaking of garbage online. But yes. Yeah. Hopefully that was AI generated.

I don't want to impute any humans over there. Um, okay. Yeah, but the point, the point being is, uh, I learned super early and in conversations with other creators, other people that, that have built real sustainable businesses on the internet, especially around content creation. This is a pretty universal theme is everyone at some point reaches a point where they realize you, like, you just got to ignore it. Like you, you, you can't take it too seriously.

And you can't take it too seriously in either direction. Like people that are blowing smoke up your end or. people that just want to, you know, kill you. Like, you just, it is what it is. And it is, it's more like the comment section, right? And, and, and the comment section can be useful. There's often good stuff in there, but you can't let it control you and you can't let it control you emotionally, like in the way you feel and the way you're up or down or all those sorts of things. And so this is the question and the hope. Is this a case where me being super online, super early, I think was sort of a leading indicator of where things were going or me surfing

the internet on my phone in 2020 and running up or 2010 or 2010 I should say or no, 2000. Geez. Running up huge bills was where people were going in the long run. I hope that's the case here. Like can we get to a spot where you realize that social media is not the real world? It feels like the real world. Today, it impacts the real world in a meaningful. way. We talked about this in the context of Musk and Twitter and maybe he just wants to have

that sort of influence. My hope in response to Musk is not that he wins. My hope is that we all collectively decide being led around by our noses by this group thing that and just maelstorm and just fighting and dunking and seeing what rises to the top for the day, that's not a good way to, that's not a good way to organize society or to run things. is it maelstorm or maelstrom? Can we get the clarification on that point? I think it's Melstorm, which means it's almost certainly Melstrom, and I'm saying it wrong. So I would always bet against me.

I like that it's downstream of Hailstorm. Yeah, whatever. But yeah, no, I mean, look, to your point, every creator I know, you're not unique. Like, I'm in the same boat. And most of the people I started out working alongside online, almost anybody who, who emerged in that early Twitter golden era now doesn't tweet and has pulled back from social media, at least in that way. I mean, people get on Instagram and for whatever reason, that's a more positive environment. But in general, a lot of people have arrived at that same conclusion.

And it is an open question as to whether the rest of society will arrive at that same place in the next five to 10 years or so. But I think when you project forward, the way I'm understanding the current landscape on the internet is that social media takes on an outsized significance when we start looking ahead in large part because social media is the only form of large-scale digital media that has been able to make money on a sustainable basis. And it's now how most people experience the internet, whereas 10 and 15 years ago, people would just go to actual websites and experience it that way. Does that track with your understanding?

Am I summarizing that accurately? I don't know. I think it's not just the making money thing. I think number one, it's super easy to post and people like to post, right? Like everyone's a poster at heart, I think is one thing. And social media is just a million times easier than setting up a blog and posting on a blog or whatever it might be.

That's just the fact of the matter. Number one. Number two, it is easier to consume. Right. You go there and you get a feed and you get a whole wide range of things. You're not having to surf around and click here, click that and go through your bookmarks bar, your RSS reader, whatever it might be. You're just getting fed sort of a drip of content. And then you have the algorithms that make it sort of compelling to you. And then you add on to that the possibility of interaction. Like people do still crave connection. Like there's, you know, even the troll online. It's like your kid that wants attention. So they do something, they do something bad. Right. And it's like, well, you're getting attention now. You're getting a good and hard, but hey, you know, that's what you wanted. How different is that from trolling, right? Like, like, to some extent. The trolling wouldn't be fun if you were trolling in a vacuum.

It's only fun if you elicit a reaction. You get sort of that. And so social media has that in spades. So I do think it's not just a money-making thing. I think there's a lot of important factors with social media is, quote-unquote, better. Now, by better, I mean a better business, a better product. in terms of what people want, not necessarily saying it's sort of better for society. I think there's very real questions there.

And by the way, you know, just to be clear, I would be so lonely and miserable without social media broadly defined. Now, I've moved a lot of my, you know, you go back a decade ago, I had tons of interactions and made lots of friends on Twitter. Now, today, I talk to a lot of the same people just in encrypted private messages, right? And in group chats. And so to the extent messaging is social media, I think it's incredible. I think it, and I think it's massively mixed like so much better.

There's a distinction between public and private social media in this conversation for sure. Right. But I think the distinction, I think the distinction is what by definition, a group chat is reimposing a constraint that we took away for a while. That constraint is, are you in the chat or not? That constraint is encryption, sort of can that sort of be shared? And part of that goes part and parcel with trust. Do you trust the people that you're with?

If you trust someone to be in a group chat where they can take a screenshot and dunk on you, that is actually a healthy dynamic. Like there is some sort of, you know, implication of that that deepens the relationship and the connection that you're never going to get in your community and sort of publicly on Twitter. And to the extent we're moving that direction, it does feel like we are, that's a good thing. And I just think it's interesting. I feel like I moved here personally, lots of other creators. I think we're very early on this because they were just the targets of dunks and attacks sort of much earlier.

But more and more people who's not in a group chat these days? You know, the funniest memes are often about the group chat, right? Like what's sort of what's going on there? And I think that's a healthy dynamic. And it just feels like society generally is a trailing indicator here. The fact that we're still led around by what's the hysteria on social media. It's illogical, yeah. Yeah, it's a fever that breaks.

It's sort of, I mean, again, I sound very old man on the porch here. But it's not healthy. It's not a way to do things. And again, even if the fever runs in a good direction and a positive outcome, when you deal in a world of tradeoffs in a world where there's so many hard decisions to be made, there are no hard decisions on social media. Everything is black and white. Yes.

Well, speaking of health, the reason I ask about digital media and websites writ large is because there are two items that we need to hit before we return to the future of the internet and social media at the center of that conversation. So first, I'll read this from Futurism. And according to your rundown, this is chapter two, the state of digital media. That's right. Anybody who is really excited to hear what chapter two and chapter three was, chapter two, the state of digital media.

Futurism writes, there was nothing in Drew Ortiz's author biography at Sports Illustrated to suggest that he was anything other than human. Quote, Drew has spent much of his life outdoors and is excited to guide you through his never-ending list of the best products to keep you from falling to the perils of nature, it read. Nowadays, there is rarely a weekend that goes by where Drew isn't out camping, hiking,

or just back on his parents' farm, it continued. The only problem? Outside of Sports Illustrated, Drew Ortiz doesn't seem to exist. He has no social media presence and no publishing history. And even more strangely, his profile photo on Sports Illustrated is for sale on a website that sells AI generated headshots where he's described as, quote, neutral white young adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes. And the article that was highlighted by Futurism and was allegedly written by this Drew Ortiz figure was headlined, play like a pro, with the best full-sized volleyball and was like sponsored content for volleyball.

And the reason I ask about making money is because this story went viral a week ago or whatever at first surfaced. It was this big deal. But to me, like the vast majority of people reacting to the story were depressed by the apparent lapse in journalistic ethics. But what's far more depressing to me as a former member of the Sports Illustrated

staff and someone who grew up reading Sports Illustrated. Yeah, it's going to make a joke about a profile about a neutral white young adult male with curly red hair. Exactly. I was squarely in the AI demographic there. But I just find it incredibly depressing that Sports Illustrated is now reliant on nonsense sponsored content like that to help pay the bills. Like it's not economically viable for them to pay a staff and only produce good sports

coverage and support their business with ads and subscriptions like they once did. And so it's not like it would be less depressing to me if the play like a pro with the best full-size volleyball story was written by a human instead of an AI bot. In fact, I'm kind of glad that no human had to write that story. But it does, it highlights and underscores the broader problems with the industry, publishing just in general and Sports Illustrated specifically. Do you know what I mean there? No, for sure. I mean, you think about how you make ads, you make money from advertising online. Take like a social network, like Facebook, for example, right? So Facebook could increase inventory, basically have more ads. How do you increase inventory? Well, one, you could get more

users, thus you can show more ads. But once your user growth is stabilized, well, you could cram more ads into their feed. The problem then is at some point it just becomes all ads and people sort of churn out and then you're actually declining, you're reducing your inventory. Number two is you can sort of target more effectively. You can better understand your customer. You can have an ad that appeals to them. You can show drains to me and t-shirts to you and sort of make more money in that way. And then number three, you can sort of have better measurement, like how well does the ad work?

How well does it sort of, you know, you convert and thus you can deliver more assurance that this is sort of to work well. And people will pay more sort of for that, pay for performance. And Facebook is obviously pushed on all these sorts of things. The issue for any publisher is they only have one lever to pull, which is inventory, is sort of showing more ads because they don't, they never had any means to sort of get the ability to target effectively. Right. And they didn't have the wherewithal to sort of do sort of effective measurement. And the companies that did, a company like Google say, or, you know, they would come in and say, oh, look, we'll take care of that. We know who users are.

We can go through measure it. And so you just put the ads on your site. And from Google's perspective, that's great because they're increasing the number of places where their ads can be shown. And Google is fine because it doesn't cost any money to place these ads. Google is fine with the price per ad decreasing over time. This is sort of a counter, you know, I've talked to a lot before, a very counterintuitive aspect of Google at their IPO that people didn't get in a reason why they really missed out. It's like, wow, the price per ad keeps decreasing. It's always decreased their entire history.

This is a company going to the bottom. It's like, no, this is a company going to the top. If there's no marginal cost to place an ad, the more ads you can place, the better. And so for Google being able to put ads over there, it was great. Or then obviously there's lots of all these ad networks come along and do sort of the same sort of thing. And they just want more and more volume. So from a publisher perspective, you don't have any levers to pull other than sort of increasing inventory because everyone on the web is doing the same thing.

And so you don't have an attachment to the customer. and so all you can do is sort of increase the number of ads that you show, but the more ads that you show, everyone else is also doing the same thing, so the price per ad is plummeting. So you're really swimming against the tide here. You're swimming against a torrent. You're swimming against a tsunami of like just an infinite amount of inventory, an infinite amount of ad places.

And so you're just trying to throw up content as fast as you can, hope it gets ranked in Google, and you can scratch an ever-decreasing amount of, pennies from some of those ads. And so you think about that, what's the limitation? What is the constraint in pursuing that policy? It's how many articles can one human turn out in a day? And there are these, having these content factories that are not so dissimilar from

these sort of articles of people writing 40 articles a day. That is just absolute garbage. Yeah. And all it is just meant to get a couple clicks from a search and show a few ads and make a few bucks. but that obviously has decreasing returns and it has a hard floor, which is at some point, it's going to get so, you're going to earn so little revenue that it's not worth the cost of the human. And so, well, now we have this miracle of AI. And even if AI costs money to run these, you know, to produce this sort of content,

it's drastically cheaper than sort of any human. And so the fact that this happens is not surprising. It was absolutely inevitable. It's going to happen more. As I pointed out in the article, like they list all these places that's already happened. Those are the places that were caught. And it's much easier to catch places now,

catch publications now, when it's still not super good at it. As AI gets better, it's going to happen everywhere. And we're going to be awash, you know, it was bad enough in a world of companies incentivized to just pump out content

because it was the only lever they had to pull, to sort of increase advertising. At least there was a human somewhere behind the scenes that was ultimately accountable for it. In the long run, it's not clear. There's no reason why it won't just be AI. We're not going to be absolutely flooded with AI content all over the internet.

And it's interesting because it's both a opportunity and a risk for Google. The risk is obvious. Google ultimately gets its content from the web. And if the web is absolute garbage, then Google is garbage. That's the real issue with Google over the last, five to 10 years, there's just so much more garbage on the web that the Google results get

worse and worse. And this is, you know, people will criticize Google that, wow, they, they're bad at their jobs. I think there's a real aspect of, like, they know how important is that good search results. It's, that's how hard of a problem it is. That's how much garbage there is out there. Right. On the other hand, if there's any company that can figure this out and can handle it, it will be Google, right? Like, like, go to Bing, go to like any other sort of search engine. And it's way worse because it's such a hard problem. And so maybe this differentiates them even more. That's sort of the optimistic take.

But there's, you know, in the long run, how much value is the web going to be? Like, is the free content in particular? Like, even if Google improves its processes on the back end, we also got this question from Patrick from Chicago. And he says, after the recent sudden closure of the website, Jezebel, I wanted to ask, your opinions on the inshittification of the internet. As a pop culture fan, I used to frequent a lot of the geo-media websites, which is Gawker-something websites. But my favorite of the bunch was the A-V-Club.

Maybe it's not Gawker. A-V-Club wasn't Gawker. In any event, he says, I was a die-hard, refreshing multiple times a day reader, but now I no longer read the site. The drop in a quality experience seemed to happen slowly and then quickly. More ads and more aggressive video ads started clogging up the mobile experience to the point where it would often crash. And incrementally, quality talent left until suddenly they shuttered the Chicago office and laid off the remaining local staff. So this seemed to follow the trend of the inshittification of the internet.

Squeeze more dollars out of site traffic by flooding the site with ads, reduce overhead by laying off more tenured, likely more expensive writing talent. but in the end, they lose a loyal reader. With fellow geo-media site Jezebel closing recently, I wondered, is this the inevitable end of every good website? Is this capitalism working correctly? Is this just a byproduct of it being really difficult to monetize writing on the internet? And for anyone unfamiliar,

the term in shittification describes, quote, the phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content in order to increase profits. I hate the term in shittification because it describes something that's real and it does provide a useful framework to analyze how and why the internet changes in frustrating ways. But it also sounds like Reddit terminology that is just like impossible to take seriously. And so I wish we could come up with a better word for the phenomenon.

I have two objections to it as well. Okay. Objection number one is I feel like I wrote about this a long time ago and why does this or maybe it's professional. It's all branding. That's right. It's really caught on. It's only written like two years ago.

I wrote why web pages suck in 2015. Like some of us have been on this for sort of a long time. It's the same thing with like the Lina Khan's Amazon article, which I felt like was just articulating an irrigation theory, but she gets all. the press and the appointees. It's actually my real motivation of being against the FTC. We've gotten to the bottom of it here

in the therapy office. I love it. That's number one. Number two, my issue with it and sort of with Cory Dr. O's view of the internet in general is he ascribes a degree of intentionality to these platforms that I think is misplaced.

And like, you know, there's it's like there's really too much agency, like these entities are doing this on purpose. And I don't think that's the case. You know, I think this is like the, it's a similar mindset to take the Wiena Khan example of we allowed these companies to come to dominate the internet. Like it's like it's placing too much agency when this is a situation where the structural factors are by far the dominant factor. And I don't think there's anything that could have been done about this. And it's what we talk about right now. When you achieve such massive scale,

it's manageable, it's manageable, it's manageable, it's manageable until it's not, until it sort of tips over. And I think that's the case here generally, is you just get so many people, so much stuff online that, say, Twitter, for example, changes from a place of conversation to a place of war. And it's a performance, right? The way to enjoy Twitter today is you go there with the intention of laughing, of like laughing at people, laughing at the absurdity.

And like if you go there without that, then you're going to give into anger, right? And like, this is the way to the dark side, right? And do not go there with the intention to learn. Go there to laugh. You may learn something, but if you're looking to learn something, you're probably going to be led astray. That's a good rule for everyone out there. I do think you can still learn.

But it's a very specific type of warning where you can be a, like you see novel. But in all cases, where you learn from is like accounts that no one's heard of in like tiny little things or like little corners of the internet that are weirdly represented there. And that is why I, you know, I hope Twitter doesn't go anywhere because it still only exists sort of in that space. But the economics of zero marginal costs are undefeated. And the fact that you're competing with infinite number of competitors, you only have the one lever to pull means it is going to degrade and get worse and worse and worse.

The only way out is to recognize that and to take a degree of intentionality to change your business model around it. So in the long run, what are we going to trust online? Are we going to go back to printed newspapers? Of course not, right? We're not going backwards. I think that I've helped push us in one possible direction, which is put up a paywall. Like make money that way. Make $120 per subscriber instead of trying to make $1.2 per subscriber.

or whatever it is with sort of an ad-based model. There's all sort of incentives that fall from that. They need to go big. They need to have click-bait. They need to sort of like go viral. They need to, you know, rank high in Google. To what extent can any ad-supported site stay viable in the very long run? That's a very fair question.

It's not clear, you know, there's platforms and entities that have held out that I like that are ad-supported, like, you know, diverge, right? Like is kind of a go-to example in tech. And, you know, anyone's complaints about the verge are generally about, oh, they don't like a particular point of view or whatever they're taking to a problem or they're only negative or whatever might be. People are glad the verge exists, though. Yeah. Exactly. Like, like, and so, but my point is that actually speaks to the fact that they've resisted this. It hasn't gone sort of sort of full scale.

But you have to question in the long run, like how, if you look out 10 years, 15 years, how sustainable is that? how sort of meaningful can that be. And maybe there will be some small number of entities that do survive, but this is why making people pay. Like that is going to be the island in the sea of garbage that is the internet. And what is that? That is placing a constraint. Constraints are essential for business.

That's how you make money is you pay to overcome some sort of challenge, some sort of thing that's in your way. if you don't have that, the waves of this, I think are just impossible to sort of push back on. And, you know, we've seen it. We've seen it in my lifetime. We're living my lifetime. Literally the last five years. I mean, like, there just aren't good websites anymore. And I think you hit on it. The key insight is that a lot of the most frustrating transitions we've seen are not undertaken because the people in charge are especially evil or craven or irrational. This is just market forces at work where there are a handful of social media companies and Google who have figured out how to serve ads in a really compelling way and are making gobs and gobs of money as a result. And then a lot of the digital media was serving ads the same way newspapers used to serve ads. And it just doesn't really work well. And you hit a point of

diminishing returns and it becomes sort of a race to the bottom. And then you look around and it's like The Verge, the ringer, the New York Times, which is now a subscription business and not really an ad business. There aren't many websites that you can go to that are ad supported that are actually like a fulfilling experience. And so then you do enter this phase where, okay, so social media just sort of is a stand in for the internet for almost everybody. And there aren't really alternatives. And if social media is getting worse, I'm just walking through my thought process as I'm reading your article, if social media is going to become full, of deep fakes and nonsense that can't be verified, which we're sort of already there. It seems like

it's going to get worse. Then it starts to feel like the whole internet is just crappier now than it used to be. And then you go, like, you take a step further. And maybe that's a good thing, is how I read the end of your article. And maybe it could be healthy in the long run if we all develop a different relationship to our presence online and the way we consume information. Is this chapter three? This is chapter three. There you go. Chapter three.

Let's see. Where do I have it written down here, the name. Why the internet becoming increasingly incoherent may not be a bad thing. Do you care to expound? So there was a scandal at the school here. chapters. Yeah. Hey, you're the one that introduced the concept.

We're sticking with it. There was a scandal at the international school here a few years ago. It's called the Pokemon scandal. And it involved, you know, students obtaining nude photographs of other students and then trading them like Pokemon cards. And obviously horrific. It was terrible. you know, what else can I say?

What I was imagining when you said the Pokemon scandal? Yeah, I know, I know. Took that in a really dark direction. Yeah, it's not good. This was a few years ago. But fast forward to, there's an article I don't have in front of me, but, you know, about this new wave of deep fakes hitting high schools of basically creating nude photos of various students and then sort of passing them around and how scarring and sort of

sort of terrible it is. And on one hand, obviously terrible. Like, I'm not at all saying it's a good thing at all, right? This is very important. We have to deal in, like, relative terms, not sort of absolute terms. It's absolutely bad. On the other hand, I do think back to that Pokemon scandal and think about, what if we were already swimming in a world of deep fakes?

Like, there is actually an argument you could make that that would have been better for everyone involved because if you don't know what's real, everything, everything is fake, right? And it's a very unsatisfying argument to make precisely because it's all bad. It's all terrible. We should not be in a situation where this exists at all. Unfortunately, we are, right? And so the question is like, like, you know, this is sort of a question I have about this stuff generally. on one hand having AI written stuff and hallucinations and made up stories and fake news that is explicitly designed to deceive.

You know, all of that is really bad. And I would like to return to a world where that didn't happen where, yes, folks made mistakes, folks had biases. But by and large, constrained by the need to actually print out a newspaper or a magazine or a book or print a photograph, you have. had to actually be biased towards trying to get it right. Whereas you fast forward to this world today when doing all those activities costs nothing, then the actual bias is to be wrong because the effort to make sure it's right is not worth the cost. And so we have all these, the incentives of zero marginal cost production of content are really negative. And I suspect we'll reach a point where it's like anything online, how do you deal with fake news?

How do you do with misinformation? Probably the healthiest approach is to assume it's all wrong. And you're going, now, that's not great. I'm like arguing for a return to an age of like, like, you know, it's very sad. You go back to the core doctoral point. I think one of the issues why you want to ascribe agency to the insidification of the internet is because people our age, remember when it was so great. Remember when it was like this incredible explosion of content.

I could be a kid in rural Wisconsin. No one around me interested in technology. And I could like go online. I could read about all this sort of stuff. And it was, you know, and obviously it's been a tremendous outcome. And that world was better than the world before. But I think a lot of people our age, that is remains their vision of the internet. Is this, it started out all upside.

And there is real downsides. And, you know, it's not like that anymore. Right now, I think the healthiest approach in what I want to inculcate in my kids, for example, is you have to be default cynical. You have to be default skeptical. You can't just believe something. Yeah. That's right.

That's right. And now, again, maybe my, the Pokemon example is not a good example for, just because it's so morally repugnant and we're dealing with kids. It's uncomfortable to consider, yeah. Right. But there is some aspect. where, man, we are definitely in a worse spot than we were before. But there are like, is it, is it a sort of equilibrium that can be somewhat better than

where we, where we were at at some other point in time? Right. Is it better if nobody trusts anything that comes across their phone in, in that extreme hypothetical and everything, you just assume that everything is fake, so you're doing less damage to the victims in that. Which is a pretty miserable sort of point of view. I mean, no, it's all awful. It's like choosing the best of a bunch of horrible options.

And that is honestly, it feels like where we are right now when we forecast what's possible going forward. And I'm not easily shocked by what I see on social media. But there have been so many instances recently where I've come away just like baffled by what I see on Twitter or TikTok videos that are shared on Twitter. and there are just these periodic reminders that the current information ecosystem is even more screwed up than we fully appreciate. And I'll give you an example of what I mean. On Wednesday, Adam Silver, NBA commissioner, he was asked whether he feels like the NBA gets pulled into international relations questions. And I'll just play his full response here. Do you feel an obligation to be a part of like international relations?

I mean, you said one country that I think we're not necessarily like the tightest with right now. Yeah. Are you a part of that? Do you get pulled into those types of conversations? I get pulled in, though, not always in a positive way. What we're doing. I will say, you know, I was reading a lot of those long obituaries around Henry Kissinger's death, you know, at 100. And, you know, he was sort of an exemplar of one of a great global diplomat.

And I want to say, I understand. I mean, this is going to be far afield, maybe your question. I, of course, believe we have to have a strong military. I'm a big believer in it. At the same time, you know, call it soft power or call it diplomacy. I think through sport, through culture, through arts, it brings connectivity together with, you know, people of diverse cultures and backgrounds. Basketball is one of those sports. I mean, you know, again, you know, as an athlete, even, I think what connects you to people, you know, by virtue of your career in the NFL, talking about sports, but then using that as a platform just as we are now to talk about other things. So, you know, I'm not, you know, I'm a sports executive. I'm not a diplomat. But I think the things that we do around the world by participating

in these national games, Olympic games, by taking our games globally, by bringing international players to the United States, by showcasing the very best, by people seeing our values of this game around the world, these principles, I call it like the rule of law. It's interesting. The World Cup of soccer and football was in Qatar, you know, 200 countries participating. Everyone accepted, those were the rules. Whatever it was going on in those countries, whatever autocrat or dictator, whoever was running those countries, everyone accepted for on that pitch, on that soccer field. When the ref made the decision, they may disagree with it, but those are the rules. And then a winner is declared at the end of the tournament. And that's sort of sports teaches,

those values. And just lastly, you know, this is an issue in the United States, but really for the whole world, even though we're seeing more prosperity in many places, you continue to see issues around childhood obesity, diabetes, and in many cases, because kids aren't active. So that's a whole separate issue that you need fun, engaging platforms like sports, just to keep kids running and engaged and wanting to be outside and wanting to do things with physical coordination, you know, playing football, you name it. I mean, so, so that all becomes very important. And I think sports is very unique from that standpoint.

I mean, that seems, seems reasonable to me. Exactly. And it's a fairly forgettable answer. So I'm not introducing it for any groundbreaking insight into what sports can be. Maybe you should have prefaced the video by saying this is going to be a very boring answer. I really should have warned people. You're right. But the point is there's a Twitter account called All

announcing that's fairly influential in sports media circles. And this is how they characterize what Silver said there. They say, quote, Adam Silver is asked by Pat McAfee about the NBA's place in international relations and compares himself to Henry Kissinger, quote, one of the great global diplomats before telling ESPN's audience he is a, quote, big believer in a strong military. And because that's how his answer there was framed, people on Twitter spent eight hours discussing that clip as if Silver had just offered like a full-throated endorsement of the U.S. military and everything Kissinger had ever done. And the whole conversation just became so divorced from reality. And that's honestly a pretty low-stakes example. But stuff like that happens,

just every single day on Twitter and I'm sure on TikTok and every other social media platform. And we would be in a much better place if we could all just like take a step back from that version of the arguments we're having on a daily basis and the way it can kind of polarize all of us and distort the way we interact with one another. Yeah. And I mean, look, neither of us are Adam Silver fans, I think is safe to say as far as the stewardship of the NBA. And, you know, maybe a lot of those complaints because we're old men were definitely sound like old men talking about Twitter here. I mean, we may have to, I'm just like, I could, I could see like my hair turning gray as we are sort of having, having this discussion.

But I do think it is, it's a good sort of bookend to last week's episode, which is, you know, the answer is not to go backwards, obviously. It's to not care, right? And, you know, on one hand, this tweet is really irritating. It's such a dishonest framing. On the other hand, everyone that is getting riled up about it is people that were already agree with the sentiments sort of there. They want to be riled up.

That's why they're on Twitter is to get riled up. And maybe our job sort of going forward is to not care, you know, right? It's still like, look, that was a dumb tweet. It's super unfair. there's 2,000 likes or whatever, it's 2,000 likes. It's not 2 billion likes, right? And I think that, you know, maybe there's a bit where you and I need to be are. Is that the NBA's job also, you know, don't care about the conversation that's generated by like a comment made in passing.

And I think you're not necessarily giving it enough credit for being like really misleading and deliberately so. No, I am. No, it is. It's horrible. This, though, is why we need to regretfully, because we can't go back, accelerate. Like, we need to, we got to get past this stage. And I think we're going to, I think we're going to do it. This is maybe I could have put an optimistic sort of spin on this.

Like, we are by definition going to be living in a very different world in 10 years than we are today. Look how different things are today from previously. And AI is only going to accelerate that sort of in every respect. So let's, let's do it. I don't think right now is particularly pleasant. So many folks think that 2023 is 2013. They're like, no, it's so great.

Like, like the connections you can build online. Or it's just a step or a tweak or two away from being great again. Right, exactly. Issue. Yeah. Make Twitter great again. So this is not going to happen. Right.

So, you know, let's, what's the word I'm looking for? Be the change you want to see in the world. The change you want to see in the world. Now, you know what? We are ending in the last. hokeyest way possible on our old man podcast here. The question I have moving forward, and we're not going to answer it on this podcast, is what large-scale alternatives to that will there be? Because the digital media landscape is like bombed out and depleted these days.

And then social media, I don't think, is going to be a place where we all want to congregate and inhabit that world. So is it WhatsApp? Is it group chat? or is there going to be some other kind of unifying media experience that's not horrible? That would be my question. Yeah, no, that's gone. And this is actually a return to, I think, the normal history of humanity, you know, or even just sort of the printing press generally, right? You go back to like the Revolutionary War period and the rule or even like the Civil War period.

Like there's a big part of that, an understanding what was going on was the role of all these independent sort of newspapers or these plebiscites or the sort of things that you would print up and sort of people would react to. And a lot of them were known for being dishonest or sort of like putting stuff out there that wasn't quite right. And that is, you know, understanding the tenor of history does often entail understanding the media. What is the aberration is what we grew up in. Is the post-World War era? where you have this nationalization, this corporatization of America, and you have one newspaper per city, and there was three broadcast networks.

This idea that we have a unified media experience is the aberration in time, just as the Twitter experience of 2013 was, in fact, the aberration, the non-shadification of the internet was the aberration in time. Because we were born in that time, or because we came online in that time, we think that's normal. We think that's the, and I think pining fairly so. I'm going to defend our nostalgia in this case.

But this is why understanding underlying economic forces, underlying the structure of the internet, underlying this idea of zero marginal cost and its long term implications matters because you see where things are sort of inevitably going in the long run. And in the long run is just a bunch of crap. And you are going to have, you know, islands that will fight to attract, you know, I wrote about this never-ending niches. There's an aspect where the New York Times, as big as it is, as powerful it is, it's just a, it's a competitor for trajectory. We're both putting a product out there and charging a price for it. And we have to align our cost structures to make sense as far as how many customers we can attract or whatever it might be. And we have to be cognizant of, like, I don't write about, I don't write my bucks takes on strategy. even though I care passionately about that

because that's not what people are paying for. I have to be cognizant of what my consumers are interested in. Now, I don't want to overindex on that because at the end of the day, I am selling my hopefully differentiated opinion, not just telling people what they want to hear, but there will be lots of sites that tell people what they want to hear. Maybe I'm telling people they want to hear at the end of the day, right?

That's why they're my customers. That is for sure going to be the future. And that is going to have its pluses and minuses. We're not going to have a unified source of truth that everyone agrees on. That's just going to be a reality. What does that mean? Are we going to have a future of nation states that were once unified by language

because the economics of the printing press dictated that you wanted to have a geographic area that you could serve broadly? You print a book and it's in a particular Italian dialect, well, or German dialect or where you want to be. Like that is a unifying force that was unified force. In the internet, there are no more languages, especially when AI comes along and anything sort of translated sort of seamlessly, you're going to have these massive fractures in divisions based on particular viewpoints and schisms, right? We're moving from the Catholic Church to

not just Protestantism, but like this super extreme version where everyone, every is their own denomination, everyone is their own sort of schism. That is the, and how will that roll back up into our political organization? How will that roll back up into the organization of the world? All this stuff is in the future. And it's going to, to be messy. It's going to be very interesting, but it's definitely going to be messy. Okay, one final question before we close out. Vibe check on the way into the in-season tournament on Thursday afternoon. I mean, it's just not clear to me what team is ultimately going to stop the buck's

offense and why we just can't outscore everyone, even if the defense is terrible and we're doing dumb stuff. You know, no evidence yet. You know, offense is is great, getting better. No evidence. Not much defense either. Well, it doesn't matter. Let's put 170 on the whole world.

That is a good slogan for the bucks here moving forward. Do you think they would hang a banner if they win the in-season tournament, the inaugural? Of course they will. Okay. Good. I don't know that all teams would, but we shall see. I'm rooting for the bucks on your behalf and on Janus's behalf. And so Thursday, 5 p.m. Eastern bucks pacers.

What could be better than a little hyphen action? You can follow it all on. What would be better is knowing how much? Adam Silver paid you off to sort of promote the in season tournament and defend him on this show. Look, I don't know. There hasn't been a lot of defense of the in season tournament on my end the last few months. But Ben, it's great to see you. And everyone can look forward to more old man takes next week.

I don't think you're giving us enough credit. We've got our finger on the pulse here. We're not too old men whinging about how things are. But either way, I look forward to circling back next week and keeping it rolling. Is it, do you actually say winging? I just thought that was a weird spelling of whining. No, winching is definitely its own word. It's, I would say, a more desperate, annoying form of whining is how I've understood it.

Well, there you go. I'll talk to you later.