Tech Won't Save Us - War in the Content Economy w/ Ryan Broderick & Hussein Kesvani

Episode Date: March 3, 2022

Paris Marx is joined by Ryan Broderick and Hussein Kesvani to discuss how war gets filtered through social media and the content economy, and what that means for how we make sense of it.Ryan Broderick writes the Garbage Day newsletter and hosts Content Mines. Hussein Kesvani is a writer and the co-host of Trashfuture and Ten Thousand Posts. Follow Ryan on Twitter at @broderick and Hussein at @HKesvani.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Ryan has written two issues of Garbage Day trying to make sense of what’s happening in the war.Hussein wrote a very good tweet.Sam Biddle wrote about how Facebook is allowing users to praise the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.Taylor Lorenz wrote about Instagram meme pages capitalizing on the conflict.Journalists have been saying some pretty racist things about why the war in Ukraine is different than those in the Middle East.Chris Stokel-Walker wrote about how TikTok is designed for war.Jonah Peretti wrote an article called “Capitalism and Schizophrenia.”NBC’s Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel wondered aloud on Twitter whether NATO should start World War III.Hillary Clinton neglected the consequences of the US arming Afghan “insurgents” against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.The media isn’t applying the right level of scrutiny to Ukrainian war stories, like Snake Island.Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could have consequences for semiconductors.Support the show

For like average news people, it's a really, really difficult thing to understand what is going on on a very basic level. And I don't know whether that's like a platform problem or whether that's news operations that operate within a platform logic. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks. And after Russian tanks and military vehicles rolled into Ukraine last week, and all of a sudden it seemed like we were consumed with following what was happening in this part of the world through social media, through traditional media, and there was so much conflicting information in such a short period of time in the fog of war, as many people call it, I wanted to have a conversation about what was going on there and what social media and the way that the internet is affecting traditional media is

affecting our ability to understand what is going on in this conflict and other, you know, important major events beyond this war as well. So this week, I have two guests who are experts on social media and the content economy. The first is Ryan Broderick, the writer of the Garbage Day newsletter and host of Content Minds. And second is Hussein Kasvani, the writer who's written for a ton of different publications and the co-host of Trash Future and 10,000 Posts. In this conversation, we get into what it has been like for this past week. You know, at the time we spoke, it was just about five days into this war and what that was like on social media, what it was like to see all of this content being produced and how it was like

regular people were wading into this information war being conducted by the two powers on opposite sides of this conflict, but also, you know, people and states and institutions who were supporting either side as well. You know, Russia pumping out pro Russian information, but particularly in the English language, the Ukrainian side of things, the Ukrainian government and organizations that supported Ukraine pushing out pro-Ukrainian information as well. And again, even though we have that conception that things that come from Russia are inherently, you know, misinformation and incorrect and things that come from Ukraine are correct and true, you know, that's not exactly the case,

right? There are falsehoods and exaggerations on both sides as they are trying to win over public opinion and get us to empathize with and support their side of this conflict, their narrative for why it makes sense for them to be doing what they're doing. And naturally, I think it's fair to say and obvious to say that it's absolutely terrible what is happening in Ukraine and what the Ukrainian people are being subjected to as the Russian military moves into their country, engages in conflict with their fighters, drops bombs on their city in trying to pursue their military objectives, whatever those end up being. And, you know, I think that there's been a lot of speculation about what those are, but I'm not sure anyone really knows for sure what Vladimir Putin and his,

you know, small circle really want to get out of this conflict. So I'm not going to try to assume or make assumptions on this podcast. Before we get into the conversation, though, one thing I do want to note, which I think is important, and that we don't discuss in this because we're talking mainly about what's going on on social media. But as we see this conflict roll out in Russia and Ukraine, and as we see a ton of sanctions being placed on Russia, that also has other implications for the tech industry and the tech economy. And one of the most crucial of those is obviously we know that Russia is a major producer of oil and gas. There's been a lot of discussion about that in the past week, and certainly, you know, for

many years, and the dependence of Europe in particular on Russian oil and gas. But what people might not also recognize is that Russia and Ukraine are major producers of some of the resources and gases that are necessary to make semiconductors. And in this moment, I'm sure many people recognize that we have been dealing with globally a disruption to the supply chains of semiconductors for a long time that has resulted in shortages and price increases for certain products like vehicles and graphics cards and things like that. And so this war that is happening between Russia and Ukraine could further disrupt those supply chains

depending on how long this goes on and how supply is disrupted for those key materials. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. And you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple or Spotify.

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if you feel like you learn from them, you can join patrons like Don from San Francisco, Elizabeth Cooper, and Tante from Berlin by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Ryan, welcome to tech won't save us. Thank you for having me excited to be here. I'm really excited to chat with you and Hussein welcome as well. Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm to be here. I'm really excited to chat with you. And Hussein, welcome as well. Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be on this pod. Thank you. You know, obviously a big fan of your podcast as well and Ryan, your newsletter. You know, everyone should check them out. But we have been dealing with this terrible situation

in Ukraine with the Russian invasion for the past week. And I think, you know, it's fair to say that things have just been crazy. And even trying to get some degree of like understanding of what's going on through the media channels that we have can be difficult. And that's why I kind of wanted to have this conversation with the both of you about what has been going on, what you've been observing through the social media, the traditional media lens of how we consume information, how we get information. And, you know, just, I think, trying to process the devastating images of what we've been seeing in Ukraine for the past week,

you know, the responses to it, and the form that those things have taken on social and traditional media has been really difficult, I think, for a lot of people. And so I think before we get into specifics about what you have been observing or specific questions that I have, I guess I just wanted to get general thoughts about what you've been observing the past week. And if there's anything in particular that has stood out to you that you think is really notable. So I would say that the thing that has stood out to me the most is how quickly the war has been turned into like a meme and how uncomfortable it's been to watch sort of people treat it like the Suez Canal or something. And then for that to happen at the same time that obviously social media has played like a massive role in winning the hearts and minds of particularly like politicians in Europe to to the cause you know to defend ukraine it's just like a really weird example of like the bizarre two-way street of social media like opening the conflict up like this uh it both trivializes it in a weird way

but then also like is revolutionary it's a really weird headspace to be in all day long looking at it on twitter yeah this is a difficult one for me, because in a lot in some ways, like, I'm kind of reliving certain things. So I kind of worked for a wire service, like a wire news service in 2014, when the first like Ukraine crisis happened, you know, so you're introduced to this type of like social media environment where you're kind of dealing with like a deluge of tweets, articles, lots of misinformation, lots of disinformation. And I think there's like a definite distinction between the two commentary sort of like mixed into it and all kind of happening across like less than three platforms. Right. And at the time, like I was

working in a news job. So like it was my job to spend all this time on these platforms, like looking through everything and trying to like make sense of stuff. And it was horrible. It was like a really horrible experience. Like it was also the year i started doing therapy uh which i don't think i think the two things are sort of definitely like into like intertwined um it's like a lot and like you know it kind of really affects you physically emotionally and so on and i think the thing that's really been weird is watching everyone i know and everyone online just like doing that same job entirely voluntarily yeah it's so weird so and i kind of look at it on one hand being like no don't fall into this trap because like you're not going

to be able to get out but i completely understand like why this has happened and like again we you know this is year two of like coronavirus uh related stuff where we've sort of not only been kind of confined in our like general worlds have sort of narrowed and like we've kind of become a lot more atomized but crucially like we've become so used to kind of absorbing not just this scale of information although i would actually say it's even worse now because you have a lot more of it like circulating across again like a handful of platforms but like we now are like having to sort of like interpret more information than anyone i think is really useful but crucially in this environment or this type of social media like and i'm sure

we'll talk about this as so type of social media apparatus which is even more driven by like surveillance culture as well um and like i don't know you look at it from like an opposite like i imagine if i was just someone well actually i didn't even imagine someone I could just think of my dad and like, is, you know, someone who's not very online being like, why, why, why do you spend all your time online? Like, you know, why don't you watch the news like a normal person before you go to bed? And it's like, yeah, that's a good point. But I feel like there's an interesting question as to like, why people aren't doing that, you know, and it's not just about like, you know, being the main character. Again, we can talk and we can talk about that a bit more. Yeah, it's fascinating. Like for me, the first few days of this, I was not only like, ravenously consuming everything that was on social media. But at the same time, I was like, binging like Al Jazeera and CNN and NBC to like, see what the narrative was on the different like news stations as well, and how they were reporting it and interpreting it. So then how so many other people were seeing it and trying to understand

what was going on. And I think it's really interesting you say, we've all been dealing with COVID for the past two years and how totalizing that has been and how that has changed so many, the way that we live, the way that we engage with information. And then all of a sudden, it's like, I don't know if you feel this way, but it's like it disappeared. And all of a sudden, it's just like everything is the war. And you don't hear so much about COVID anymore, or at least I haven't been seeing it. Well, it's a new season of reality. It's a new season of the world cinematic universe that we now live in. Yeah, it's like the House series where he went to the mental hospital right and it's like oh okay we're just here now

covid was like the overarching season plot and then we you know we had like minor subplots like the trucker convoy and critical race theory but now like we've got a new big bad um because like we consume reality through like a bunch of corporate platforms that make things into weird narratives we have to follow. The thing I was going to say, though, is I don't think we're entirely removed from it. I think that when COVID news was COVID news, maybe in early 2020, I don't know about other people, but I remember when the pandemic first happened. And I was trying to understand what was going on. I spent a lot of time on the the virology subreddit right and i was like you know it was also that time when joe rogan actually did like quite a good interview with with like a

very rare one like a very good saying who's saying we are barely seven minutes into this podcast and you're already and you're already plugging joe rogan i just want that's right look i just want i want to be on a show i want to talk about like let's talk about gundam seed uh that's that's what i want to do anyway look no i think we're gonna have to stop you there and exile you from the show and it's just gonna be me and ryan for now no do you know what i mean i think it was like that time when people were trying to okay like what is like you know what is this virus and like what is a pandemic and what's the difference between a pandemic and like an epidemic like all these types of questions that were sort of linked to covid and then over time

like uh you know that kind of like conversation about public health like you know dissolves because it merges into other things until we sort of get to like the end of 2021 where you know covid is still happening but we're not really talking about covid or we're not really talking about omicron anymore um you know it's now sort of like become just this big nebulous like term that's kind of encompasses everything and nothing at the same time and i think that like the ukraine stuff like again like and this happened really fast it becomes during that kind of period where we weren't sure whether like putin was going to go in you know you see these kind of conversations about you know russian geopolitical strategy and like

like the history of kind of like crimea in relation to like you know the former like soviet republics and everything and like it's remarkable now how it's like lots of conversations i see across both like my main feed but also the list like i have but not really about that anymore it's much more about like this kind of broader existential dread and like i think the kind of connective tissue between all this stuff is just like the past few years like trying to understand what this feeling of existential dread actually is and that kind of is located in so much it's located in like global politics it's also located in like the degradation of the global economy you know it's located in like pop culture and like the dearth of like art and creativity in terms of in terms of its ability to like express like our current condition um so i think there is like an underlying question but

it kind of it's it's really difficult to define not only because of how much information is like sort of thrown our way and like you know that's difficult to interpret but just the fact that like i think this moment is very difficult to interpret yeah i think that makes a lot of sense and i think one of the topics i want to come back to will kind of relate to that. But Ryan, I wanted to get to something that was in a recent issue of Garbage Day that you wrote, where you discussed how, you know, war is not new in the way that many, you know, commentators have been saying when they've been saying like, oh, you know, this war is happening in civilized Europe, like we haven't seen anything like this before. But as you note, our TV and social media for as long as it's been around has been filled with war for decades, right? But it feels

like something is different in this moment, right? As we're consuming this war for the past week and everything that has been going on with it. Why is that? And what stands out about it to you? So yeah, in that garbage day issue, I sort of compared the propaganda war between ISIS and America. And like, ISIS, for better or worse, like created like a new form of info war that we'd never really seen before, where they were basically breaking through the walled gardens of Western social media platforms, and posting like beheading videos or footage of them like parading around with AK-47s or whatever it was. And they would use that as a way to intimidate people, but also to recruit a decentralized terror network, which they were able to bring a lot of SoundCloud rappers from the UK to Syria, which is very impressive. And that, for better or worse, was up against this monolithic American pop culture machine that was nonstop American sniper know, American sniper style, everything about the war, we're America, we're the best. And ISIS couldn't obviously compete

with something like that. But what's happening right now, and I think that's what is tripping up a lot of pundits, is that for right now, and we're recording this on Tuesday, March 1st, Ukraine has internet connectivity. And Ukraine's internet presence is in some ways actually bigger than Russia's, but at least right now their connectivity is about equal. Yeah. In the English language, right? For sure. And there's a lot of conversation about why isn't Russia's info war better? And it's like, well, Russia is doing an info war, but they're focused internally. They're focused on trying to quell division inside Russia.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is using social media to essentially, I think The Verge described as a force multiplier, theverge.com. And it's a great concept where it's like, Ukraine is small. It is a civilian army. It's full of underground people's army cyber warfare stuff, but they're able to multiply that feeling across the entirety of the internet. And so we are seeing two fairly equal, connected nations battling each other. And it's totally bizarre. And I think it's actually causing mental distress for people who watch it, because they're saying like, well, wait, how is this any different than what I've seen in Palestine then? Wait, or how is this any different than what I've seen in Hong Kong or China? Or how is this different than the Vietnam War? Once now we're seeing two equally connected nations,

the absurdity and the horror of war, I think, is almost incomprehensible. Because now you're like, wait, I can see inside these countries as they're fighting. I can watch a Ukrainian steal a tank with a tractor on Twitter. And that is mind blowing to me. And it makes me think, what would the Vietnam War have looked like if the Viet Cong had Twitter or TikTok and they were able to post? I mean, these are absurd things to say, but at the same time, think about it. Think about how different history would be if two opposing forces were able to use this technology this way. And so to go back to like what I had said at the very top of the show, which is like, it's uncomfortable because I don't want to watch

war content on TikTok. Like I don't want to see like soldiers doing dances around, you know, military equipment and stuff. But part of me thinks it's also revolutionary and incredible. It's very strange. Yeah. Just two points on that before I let you respond, Hussein. And that's, you know, on one hand, you can understand why Ukraine is so focused on the English language info war, right? Because Russia is focused internally or also on the people in Ukraine trying to get them on its side. Whereas Ukraine, as you say, is small, it needs to win over the West and Western public opinion and politicians to support it in this war, or it faces much less of a chance against Russia, right? And on the other part, where you're saying how social media in this moment feels like, you know, what it is offering to this war, how we see this war, how we understand it offers a new way of perceiving that, you know, it reminds me to the past, right? The importance of film in previous wars, and how that was used as a propaganda tool to

create a narrative of war, the way that radio was used in war in World War II, the way that television was used in the Vietnam War and how that was used in a way to communicate what was actually going on there and gave people a different insight into war and helped to fuel the opposition to the Vietnam War, right? And so you can definitely see how it's in that kind of larger historical trajectory of communication and media technologies being used to, I don't know, show what war looks like. And I'll say one more thing before Hussein jumps in, because I want his thoughts on this, which is that, so as of today, there are over half a million Ukrainian refugees at the border of Ukraine and Poland. And that connectivity, I think, is about to have the exact same effect on that refugee crisis and throwing that into a bizarre perspective.

When you have Europe in the Mediterranean arresting captains of boats who don't let refugees in, meanwhile, we're going to have the most connected online refugee crisis of all time so far happening at the exact same time. And I think the same kind of cognitive dissonance we're seeing with people saying like, wait, occupation can be bad is going to be happening with the refugee crisis as well. So, okay. I don't, I don't want to like dismiss it because I don't think it's like, number one, I think Ryan's a lot like has a lot more of experience like seeing this stuff than i do um and also just like because it's the internet as well like you know you can't really just dismiss anything because most of the time uh you can be wrong however however however

my my kind of cynical position on this is that like okay there are some parallels right so um i did like a tweet that got more attention than it should have done. And there were a lot of people kind of like quote, tweeting me being like, you know, this is just like a boomer take, like wars have always been memed. And like, you know, television, radio, movies, pop culture, like all been informed by war, like, you know, there is no difference here. And I think that like, I see where they come from. But I think it's incorrect, because like the difference here, like and to put it in like the most reductive terms the difference here is like content right i don't think it's the same as like radio shows i don't think it's the same as like movies that are kind of intertwined and like integrated within

like a propaganda machine i don't think they're like tv shows i don't even think they're really like marvel movies to be honest right i think marvelization and marvel like marvel is like a production house like two different things not least because of elastid does have like ties with the like us military and industrial complex right i think that content and crucially user-generated content that these platforms like need and require in order to survive um is really like the crucial difference here and yeah on the one hand there could be like revolutionary potential right because you have like this huge amount of like really connected and crucially like quite social media savvy people and i don't like using that term so what i mean by savvy is like people who can like interact with the west in a way that it recognizes they're on

linkedin you're saying they're on they're doing they're all networking on linkedin yeah yeah they know how to do like a good linkedin post yeah they recognize the spider-man meme like you know all that stuff right they know how to like interact with westerners in a way that like i don't think other refugees living like in the middle east or like living in parts of africa like we're necessarily able to do so maybe there might be like a smoother communicative exchange with that the problem with like in my opinion but level of scale and like just the fact that there is too much it kind of again it goes back to like abundance right and when you have like an information abundance um like channeled through platforms where you already have too much content and it's already really difficult to like interpret stuff what ends up happening i think for like a lot

of people they become exhausted or they become like confused or they don't really know like how to interpret it and like that type of stuff and crucially like if you're going to talk about russian information wars and what they're very good at like the thing that's like the russians have always been very very adept at in terms of understanding the internet from like a very cynical perspective is just like the effectiveness of just filling the hole up with shit like they sort of know that abundance is part of like a disinformation strategy it's like a disinformation weapon right And it's a way of like basically getting people to become apathetic because crucially, like rather than sort of being focused on like what is currently happening or like the kind of

crisis that's taking place, if you sort of play out, play out for longer scale and like people in the West realize, oh, this doesn't really pose an existential threat to me in any sort of direct way. They kind of lose attention. And that could ultimately be a problem for Ukrainians for whom like the information war is very much like the war that they're winning right now. Like, again, it goes back to like content ephemerality and just the idea of it, like information wars can be very, very effective in a very limited way, but played out on a longer scale, not so much. And I think, again, and I will try to make this very quick. Like I think refugees is a really good example of this. I think like war content, you know, it's like loud, it's quick and it's like, you know, it's very shocking. And when you watch it, it's like, you know, you feel very moved

by it. Uh, you know, you can feel like very physically disorientated by it. I think with like some refugee stuff you can, but like, I don't know, like looking at the fall out of the refugee crisis in 2015 and how that kind of went from like this being this like mass movement or this mass kind of like call to bring in refugees after the death of Aylan Kurdi, you know, only for like a few months later to kind of look at these, you know, for respectable tabloids and broadsheets to look at like crowds of people at borders and being like, you know, these are invaders or these are people who like will like corrupt our communities and like we need to keep them in camps. Like it was remarkably quick how that transition happened. And I don't

necessarily think that will be avoided for Ukrainians just because they happen to be like whiter Europeans, if that makes sense. Yeah, I think you're right. I'm terrified of what happens when the world loses attention. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are fueled by that. So like, eventually, this will be like a thing we all remember. And that is a terrifying idea to me. Yeah, or it'd be one of those things where you look back on it, and you're like, Oh, remember, like those few weeks when we really cared about like the Ukrainians and everything. So like, and I don't know, like, maybe maybe like the Ukrainian government or people in Ukraine, like know about this, right? You know, they were in everything. And I don't know, maybe the Ukrainian government or people in Ukraine know about this, right? They were in Europe and they were affected by the refugee crisis in the same way that other Eastern European countries were.

Maybe they're aware of that ephemerality and have a strategy for that. My kind of thinking is just when it comes to platforms, when it comes to platforms that depend on such high volumes of user-generated content, in order of maintain that attention and to maintain that urgency is a really really big task i mean like a really contemporary example of that is black lives matter right where like you know that movement is still going on and like i very rarely kind of see that happening on like my main feeds and like even feeds where you know i follow people who were very very active in that right so I just wouldn't discount that. And I kind of think that like for all the effectiveness and information warriors right

now, like it historically kind of tends to be very short lived. And I imagine that like the Russians certainly know that. I think that's really fascinating, right? To think about how long this is actually going to last. How long can you maintain people's attention and keep them caring about this topic? Because, you know, we've seen it many, many times before how the attention drops off, as you're saying, Ryan and Hussein. I'm also interested in what we have been seeing in the short term, though, right? And as you're saying, Hussein,

kind of the incentives of the content economy on that. Because since the war has broken out, you know, there have been stories about misinformation spreading on TikTok, the same happening on Instagram war meme pages. We can see the information war happening on Twitter very clearly with pro-Russian stuff and pro-Ukrainian stuff being spread. Sam Biddle had a story about how Facebook rolled back a 2019 ban on the neo-Nazi Azov battalion, which is part of the Ukrainian military, now allowing people to praise that group, whereas they weren't allowed to before. And we have a lot of problems with Facebook and right-wing stuff. But what are we seeing in these instances? And what incentives does the content

economy create that affects our ability to, I guess, understand this, but also creates incentives to spread particular kinds of information? My first reaction to that is just that we feel like we need to spread it. Social media functions unlike TV or radio because you only see things because other people have posted it or shared it. And that is a completely disorienting thing with regards to war content. And the fact that all of these social media platforms are participatory, I think is creating this bizarre world where everyone feels like they have to have the Ukraine take. And it's become like a punchline where it's like all the COVID guys on Medium are pivoting to be like war guys right and it's true it's it's the same with like fandoms

it's the same with q anon it's like if you're on the internet you feel like you have to engage with the the trending topic du jour and right now that is a literal land war in europe and that is absolutely bizarre and it's and it's this and it's why you're seeing people be like, Zelensky is making me horny. And why you're seeing Avengers Endgame memes. Oh, I saw one today that was a very chipper, how to prepare for the nuclear apocalypse prepper's guide. It was like, cute, fun things you can do to prepare for nuclear war. And it's like, oh, we all just have to have a content strategy that now has to fit around World War III. It's goofy. It's ridiculous. Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

I feel like having a strategy for getting your podcast out on schedule during a nuclear fallout is really important. Hussain, I'll be very honest with you. Of all media forms, podcasting will be the least affected by nuclear war. That's right. We're protected. That's right yeah we're protected yeah that's right because yeah i mean like i already do it from my basement anyway so it's pretty chill um no i think you're right like and that paris that's like a big question so i'm sorry if like

i don't kind of touch on everything that's okay but yeah you're right like again it goes back to like one element of this i've been thinking about is like the way in these platforms have commodified all the information and centralized it on their platforms. It means that everyone who's consuming information and the way that lots of people consume information through the internet is very similar to how you would do it if you were working in a newsroom or if you were a social media manager or something. It feels like the default way of like understanding information. And again, like, I don't know how common that way is or whether that's just kind of something that a particular kind of person who is like sort of news information adjacent does. So I've been very, I've been kind of wary of like projecting that as like a mainstream experience. But then I also think about like the news economy more broadly. And you know i remember i remember like when the guardian live blog kind of came out and that

was like this kind of new and innovative thing of you know rather than having news being updated like you know a couple of times during a day on a website like the live blog and like the team that was on the live blog would be working around the clock to like update everyone with like information um the first time i remember using it was during the 2012 u.s presidential election where you know the live blog was kind of like used as a way of calling out states so you could watch the election play out in real time right and it felt like this really really amazing thing and then it was used during the so-called arab spring and like you know syrian revolution and stuff and now what's really interesting is that like everything's a guardian

life right and but it's not even just like the live blog in is that like everything's a guardian life right and but it's not even just like the live blog in terms of like here's the news and like here's what our news team has reported it's like here's a mixture of all this stuff that ranges from news and commentary and things that are kind of a mixture of both and things that have some truth and don't have some truth in it and by the way like you're gonna have to figure this all out yourself and like i think this is also one reason why you see lots of people acting as if they're like working in newsrooms, like ordinary people being like, check your sources. Oh my God. I think that is such a ridiculous, how have we gotten this insane where it's like, oh, hey, average person, it's your responsibility to not share. Right. It's wrong. It's like, why why why is it you're like it's ridiculous right and again this is a platform problem right where it's like these platforms can't work in a traditional

like they can't really institute like moderators in a way that you would kind of associate them with platforms and stuff right um so like on the one hand they've got these they've got these moderators that are really there to like try like take out like the worst possible content and like i don't know what their success rates are but like the fact that a lot of kind of like quite gruesome stuff like bleeds through quite often would imply that like, it's a much more difficult job to actually do that than it actually is. But then when you have like things that don't necessarily cross that boundary, but are still like bits of misinformation or things that are quite gruesome or things that are just like inappropriate, like that stuff, because it kind of exists in that nebulous form of like content it's technically like allowed there's no kind of like real kind of

rules or regulations against it and i think that like the way we interpret that in terms of how we access and just like understand information relative to like ourselves and our existence like it just makes it a lot more tricky like even trying to describe it is quite a difficult thing to do. Um, and in terms of like platforms and content and like platform incentives and stuff, well, I think on a very basic level, again, because these platforms rely on so much user generated content, you know, the incentive is very much, yeah. If you have this like shitty opinion that doesn't make sense, absolutely post it because like you'll get loads of engagement and like, you know, Twitter is a really good example of like, you know, encouraging the worst possible takes and like the worst take you post, like the more engagement you'll get loads of engagement and like you know twitter is a really good example of like you know encouraging the worst possible takes and like the worst take you post like the more engagement you'll get because you know worst case scenario you'll get like a load of people

dunking on you and you get loads of attention for that and crucially like bear in mind there are some people that really like getting that attention right um you do right that that's why you know the way you tweet is that yeah fuck yeah i mean look no i don't i don't like it i don't like it or um uh but there was a time where i think we all know the kind of people you're you're talking about or i would hope so yeah like there are people who really like that kind of attention or like find it really fascinating to sort of get that attention and again it's like one of those things where you will get more attention if you post your sort of like compassion takes there are like war journalists or like kind of like people in ukraine right now who are kind of doing so-called war journalism who are like

posting anecdotes and like highly personalized like posting selfies from war zones right i'm not going to like name names but like you know i kind of look at it i'm just like oh is this like really what you should be doing but again the platforms like reward that and like now because of you know um stuff like you know paypal patreon and so on um you can do that a really really personalized level right there are kind of reporters in ukraine right now who's like funding for like whatever they're doing is being paid by patrons who like aren't really kind of paying to like you know hear what the report is in kiev or whatever because there's so many reports in kiev they're just like paying for that person to be there to kind of post stuff. And I think that's like a really scary and unhealthy thing. And one that like, we haven't sort of seen like the full implications of, uh, but this is like, crucially,

when we talk about why is this war different from other ones? It's like, well, I think this is the first time, like, you're going to see that type of personality about like influencers slash like journalists, whatever you want to call them like as a kind of like mainstream figure in the information economy so i think we're thinking of the same person so on one hand like part of me thinks that's interesting because this war is happening at a time where like major media brands have eroded to a degree that they've never been like this. Most American digital outlets, unless they are one of two major newspapers, they can't send someone there. And they can't really even respond to it properly. So obviously, I think that you're

going to see people going there. We talked about this earlier in the podcast. We don't even really know what type of timeframe we're talking about. And so when Hussein and I worked together, I used to be sent to immediately report on European terror attacks. I did a lot of them. I was in Paris the day after the Bataclan. I was in Calais the day they burned the jungle refugee camp. I spent a lot of time doing breaking news on the ground in Europe. And I've written about this before, but I will never forget being in Nice the day after the truck attack and watching the international news crews leave because there had been a conflict in Turkey. And it was like watching the carnival pack up and move to the next town.

And it was just like, I don't know how like this ecosystem we're talking about with the influencers and the people parachuting in and the Richard Ingle, like getting a super huge boner for World War III and all the rest of this bullshit. How does that function in something like a world war, which America didn't even enter World War II for two years. We're on day five of this right now recording this. So like we can't even conceptualize the length of time for a world war. And who knows, maybe because of social media, the time is going to be compressed in real life. But technically, this war hasn't even started yet. And so how our media system works with that, I have no idea.

Yeah, it's been interesting as well to kind of see the takes that this is something that should have been over and done super quickly, and Russia was just going to storm in and take it or else it's not going to work and they're failing, right? Whereas a war is something that is often quite dragged out when you look at even what the United States did in Iraq, that was not something that happened overnight. And I think our expectation for it to go really quickly might be influenced by other kind of ideas that we have about speed and time well yeah and it's also just like that point of like well if you want to talk about like this this wasn't just a war that just happened like technically it's sort of been going

on since 2014 and again like i remember when like the invasions of like donbass and korea and stuff happened like you had a very kind of similar response although like on a smaller scale where it was just like you know russia is invading like a independent country and a country in europe and like is europe going to do anything and you know there was like the same kind of braiding of people who were like you know stop the war kinds of like you know you're appeasing putin and stuff like that um and for about like a month this was like this huge thing and it kind of led to like people working for russian news organizations res this was like this huge thing. And it kind of led to like people working for Russian news organizations resigning. And like, I remember like it definitely felt like this kind of like tipping point.

And then a month afterwards, people just forgot about it. And then you kind of see these documentaries on like Vice News and stuff, whereas like, you know, they'd send a reporter into Donbass and like, you know, you would just see that, oh, like this war is like has destroyed this entire town. And it's like, you know, rendered so many people like in kind of permanent poverty and like, you know, be kind of sees a resentment and nobody really kind of cares about it anymore. So it's kind of that thing about, well, okay, if you're going to talk about this sort of being a world war, like, you know, that began like a

long time ago. And I think you just have these sort of like moments that kind of, I don't want to say like wake people up, but it's more just just like they kind of remind people that oh these kind of like continual forces of history are still existent so pay attention for it for a bit but then you'll have like a new thing happen afterwards and you know in the same way that like reporting crews like sort of move to other countries like we turn our attention to other things um and crucially we're in this moment where there is an abundance of things to uh turn our attention to i also think that like the algorithm craves conclusions it's like the same reason why like every response on a reddit relationship post is like get a divorce it's like it's the same like feeling behind like cancel culture quote unquote

or like any sort of like online movement has to have some kind of ending because like when it turns out that like when we crowdsource narratives like this we just assume like okay we're all done like i've shared all the content covid's over like uh okay okay like move on and for whatever reason maybe it's a psychological thing maybe it's something else but but we just can't really keep our attention long enough to follow something like this. It's too big of an object. It's too complicated, I think. I'm wondering as well, in thinking about this content economy and how we're all consuming this information at this moment, we were talking about an info war that is

basically going on between these two powers who want to win public opinion, win support by utilizing what's going on online. And I think we can see in recent years, obviously, how social media has been used to propel, you know, misinformation, conspiracy theories, things like that. What are we seeing in this moment as there is just like, as you're saying, this kind of deluge of content of information coming for people, not all of it is accurate. I guess, what does that mean for how people engage with what's going on? So my hot take is that misinformation just doesn't matter anymore. I sort of think that we're over it. And I have to believe that human beings are smart enough to see a TikTok video of a guy parachuting and vlogging and be like, that's probably not real. Like I have to believe that just because like if that's not the case, like I'm really scared.

Like particularly TikTok because I think everyone's really nervous about like the misinformation on TikTok. But when I think about all of the like insane bullshit that I heard when I was 16 years old about the world around me that I just like never remembered. I wonder if like it's a similar effect where like teenagers are just logging on. They're like, that's weird. And then they just move on. And then with, with old people, like neither of you are American. So this won't make any sense, but like any American listening, who's been to a Thanksgiving ever will tell you that a lot of the old people in your life will just say crazy shit at you. Like it doesn't mean anything. And then just not think about it again. And I sort of think that like the majority of the stuff that people see on the internet kind of falls in that bucket. But then like the 10% that like fall for this stuff, spend days camping out in like Dallas,

Texas, waiting for like QAnon to bring back JFK Jr. So it's like a really vocal minority fall for it, but the rest of us just sort of move on with our lives. maybe that's just me being too optimistic i've been kind of thinking about this a little bit because like i'm kind of yeah i think that like the kind of misinformation crisis has been overstated in the sense that like i think people kind of forget how the like very long history of like misinformation and how like misinformation has shaped a lot of like internet culture right like so the idea of like trying to sort of combat misinformation online to try to like sanitize the internet for like lack of a better word is kind of a project that seems to kind of be counterintuitive to how lots of kind of online culture emerges

anyway it's not to say that like misinformation beats aren't important or like especially in times like this for like debunking like obvious bullshit that is like actively dangerous isn't something that should be done but it's more like the idea of like waging a war on disinformation just sort of feels like the wrong terms of reference and i kind of also kind of think like like memory is like a really important thing too like you know i've never been to a a Thanksgiving dinner where like something like that has happened, but I do come from like a kind of like ethnic minority community that has a history of displacement, right.

And a history of movement and also like has a mother tongue that doesn't really have like a written form. So lots of kind of like familial histories and mythologies and stuff are things that are like probably not entirely or like even close to being true but they are kind of like important to people in like ways that allow them to sort of understand themselves in reference to the worlds that they're in especially ones that have kind of been informed by like you know histories of kind of like abuse and trauma and so on um which is to say that i think that like we need to have like a better conversation about why people are kind of compelled not necessarily towards misinformation

but like misinfo narratives and like what people are actually in danger of that you know so like yeah separating like the tiktok teams you kind of see like weird shit a scene that is from like ukraine or whatever but we'll probably likely forget about it within like a month's time because again like you know so much content on tiktok is very easy to sort of like forget stuff that like you've seen in the same way that it's very easy to forget tweets right i've never forgotten a tweet i think about them all yeah yeah well you know unless you're ryan broderick in which case you remember all of them but then there's like a minority of people for whom like misinformation narratives and especially like how those kind of like bits of misinformation feed into like these kind of

you know narratives of like resentment or pain or like you know these kind of really deep emotions um how they kind of like fit into that then we can kind of talk about interventions and strategies and so on so basically like to put it kind of more simply i think that the way that misinformation beats have kind of been conceptualized has been like a bit too like technical in terms of like they kind of diagnosis as a technical problem rather than like a social one, which crucially like with so much of like, you know, social media management and stuff like it's that classic thing of like viewing something as like a technical problem that requires a kind of algorithmic solution then seeing like online culture is kind of not only being embedded into broader human culture but one that is like very much linked to like people's lived like material experiences i mean two good examples just from like today uh like mbc news did like an incredible story ben collins did this incredible story about russia using deep fake photos of not real people to build sock puppet accounts. Perfect example of a thing that should not be happening and should be written about and should

be moderated out and should have never happened in the first place. But at the same time, today, I'm on Twitter and a missile hits what people report to be the TV tower in Kiev. My entire timeline fills up with reports that they have taken out the TV tower. I saw takes being like, this is what Putin does every time. He did it in Crimea. He did it every, he takes out the communication center. 10 minutes later, no, it didn't actually hit the tower. It actually hit somewhere nearby. Okay. But because of the angle of the cell phone footage from the apartment and it's like, yeah, all all right. That's just sort of the nature of how this works. And I wouldn't want to lose the stuff that allows us to understand things better because

of that chaos. And I mean, what? Last week, was it? Instagram was putting a fact-checking widget on something about how billionaires don't cause inflation. And it's like, oh, really? So this is the solution? Is that these platforms, which can't even moderate themselves should also be the arbiters or objective truth. It doesn't make any sense. I think I want to pick up on that, right? Because I think this is something that I have observed as well, as all this has been going on the past week. I think it's interesting that, you know, before this all happened, there were these discussions about geopolitics and history and things like that. And then as this war broke out, that kind of flattened, right? As there was the very pro-Ukrainian takes and then the pro-Russian takes, and there wasn't a whole lot of nuance of what was going on. And I think that kind of left a space for things that were pro-either side that weren't completely true to really take hold of the public, to really seize on them. The Snake Island story in particular comes to mind where supposedly there were 13

Ukrainian soldiers. The Russians said, surrender. They said, fuck off. The Russians bombed them, and they all died. That turned out not to be true. The Russians just took them hostage, 80-odd people. It actually was. And so I wonder what this kind of does to our ability to understand the conflict, to have a nuanced understanding of what's going on in the conflict and whether there's a difference between what goes on on social media where, you know, I think this stuff is just going to happen and the responsibility of like the traditional media, I guess, like reporters to actually be able to cut through what's going on on social media and not elevate the kind of stuff that that isn't true,

that is propaganda. And I don't mean propaganda in a negative sense, just propaganda is in like something that is going to try to win people over to one or another side, right? Because I feel like one of the things I took away from what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan was the lack of understanding that people had for the history and how that played into those events, right? And you even saw Hillary Clinton, I think it was yesterday, giving an interview where she said, like when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and the United States supplied arms to the insurgents in Afghanistan, we should be doing something similar in Ukraine, completely leaving out how the people who they gave arms to in

Afghanistan were later the very people who did 9-11 and who they launched a war on terror against for 20 years. And there are a whole load of consequences from that. And there's a whole load of history leading up to it from arming Iraq and Iran in the Iran-Iraq war and overthrowing Mossadegh and the colonial powers carving up the Middle East. There's all this history here that allows you to create a narrative that the Middle East is this place of barbarians where everyone's feuding and at war because you're not allowed to have the historical perspective that shows you how much Western intervention kind of created that state of affairs, right? And so it's like, if you don't have that in the case of what's going on in Russia and Ukraine, how can you get a fuller understanding

of what's going on there? And is the role of the media then to try to provide that context so people understand? And not to say that that's like drawing an equivalence between Russia and Ukraine. You can still support Ukraine and what's going on there, but it's to try to give people an understanding of what's going on at the moment instead of just repeating and elevating things that are happening on social media and being shared that way. Well, first, I agree with you. The US should arm the Azov Battalion. We should give them as many weapons as they want. I think that they are exactly who should we be rooting for. Yeah. You know, the Snake Island thing is actually a fantastic example of this because when I first saw it, I sent it to my mom because she's like a news junkie. She lived in Europe for a long time. She's retired also. So she's like watching a lot of this. And I sent her the clip. And I was like, and at the time it had just been reported that they said fuck off and that was it and i was like this is this is great like check this out and then like a half hour later she texts me back she's like i think they all died

and i was like oh man and in that moment it was like a perfect encapsulation of like what's wrong inherently with viral media to chronicle a war like boredpanda.com should not be doing like the best uplifting moments of the invasion of Ukraine, right? I think we can all agree. That should be done by the magicians instead on Facebook. But then the fact that it then comes out a day later that they are alive, and that was reported by traditional media, I was like, ooh, that's even a better example of why this doesn't make any sense. The problem is that there's no way that traditional media can keep up with social media. It's done. In the same way that we can't really fix the fact

checking issues probably at this scale, at this scale also, Jim CNN is not going to be able to keep up with Patriot Mom and Christ Warrior and Hussein and I. The four of us in that group chat are going to outrun Jim CNN every time. And so I think the role, to sort of get to your question, I think the role for media here is closer to a ref, or at the very least, I think most news organizations, and honestly, I'll be very honest, I am not someone that should be telling news organizations what to do. But if I had one, I would basically be saying, what can we put our institutional power behind that an average person on Twitter can't? If people are reporting these things, if they're sharing these things, do we have the money

and resources to clear this stuff up and get a verifiable thing? Obviously, that like the platonic ideal and not really what happens and also doesn't take into account the economics of running a news organization all the rest of it but that's a really hard question so i'm gonna throw it to hussein and ask him what he thinks because i don't have a good answer yeah if i was if we were running a newsroom it would be like the newsroom from the newsroom right i i want to stand up and i want to tell people where i was the day osama bin laden died i want to stop the whole plane and say we got him i think there was an episode which kind of dealt with this whole idea of like

oh the internet is saying this and like it was a very classic like sorkin thing of like no we're the news god damn it and we're wait until like, it was Dev Patel's character and it was the BP oil spill. And it was the first episode found out about the oil spill, I think on Twitter first. And then Will McAvoy was like, we're the news. We don't just repeat what we see on the internet. And then obviously the BP oil. Yeah. So we should say that like Aaron Sorkin is like Aaron Sorkin was right the whole time. And we, we owe him like big apologies. No, apologies no i mean okay like actually like that it's kind of facetious but there is actually some like bizarrely there is some truth in this right which is that like in the world of our tv show they basically just kind of said look we're

rejecting the logic we're rejecting the logic of like internet news gathering and we're going to do it traditionally and we're going to do it properly and we're going to do it in a way that like you know we recognize and if like it's a bit slower then that's okay and it was like a little bit slower but it was broadly fine um i think like the problem now is that for like so many news organizations including like legacy news organizations they have no choice but to sort of like adapt to the logic of the internet right and i think like on one basic level like that's very evident in like the expansion of like misinformation beats and like you know suddenly now like internet culture reporting being taken seriously even though like there are lots of like gendered problems in relation to that but like nevertheless like most newsrooms now have like an internet

person whereas you know back in you know the kind of early to mid 2010s that was kind of like an outlier job that you'd either give to like a low paid intern or like you know a woman who is also low paid and most likely an intern so i think there's like there's this like recognition that these organizations like have no choice but to interact with like the logic of like you know online information distribution that's sort of made worse by platforms kind of consuming all kind of forms of news which means that even as platforms kind of like say how much they hate like Facebook, Meta, Twitter, um, like all these platforms, they still have to kind of like play ball with them. Um, and tech companies really just don't give a shit about like how news is distributed, made like, you know, process, et cetera, which

then just kind of means that we're going to like experience these problems over and over again. And I think particularly, I think Chris Sokol-Walker just put out a piece recently, like today actually, which kind of touched on this, which is how like platforms are kind of built for situations like war where again you have like tons and tons of user-generated content that has been reproduced and regenerated and remixed and so on and where like TikTok doesn't like and other platforms don't have a way of like meaningfully differentiating that or creating like assemblages in which like people can sort of like understand what's happening on the ground one other thing that I really want to say and I'm not sure whether it's like related to this particular aspect of the conversation, but I think it does touch on something that we have been skirting around over this podcast,

is also just what people expect from the news now, which seems like a very basic question, but it's one that is probably worth asking. Because I think the assumption is that people read the news because they want to understand what's happening in the world, and they want to be informed, and they want to be informed citizens and like more information is kind of a good thing and it's empowering but like what happens when you not only have too much information but the more you consume the less aware you are of like your place in the world or like how you relate to it right um and then that's where you end up having these insane takes or like you know viral videos of like blonde american women reciting poems about putin and

dear president putin if i was your mother like all stuff like you know or can history just like not stop for one day and like you know these very cringe posts where i feel like people have sort of like they've kind of like done you know oh this is cringe this isn't about you you're not the main character but i kind of see where it comes from in the sense of like in trying to interpret information in an environment that makes it extremely difficult to not only know what's going on but also works in a way that is designed to disorientate like your kind of position like there are so many like you know of digital news outlets and traditional outlets that are producing like ukraine news which go along the lines of this is really important and you should pay attention to it and like this war has implications for

everyone and it can kind of like it'll not only make you worse off economically but now there's like threat of a nuclear war but also like you know you live in like the west and like you have no threat of war happening to you so like don't freak out about it like do you know what i mean it is kind of i think for like average news people who like aren't kind of adjacent to this environment or don't spend a lot of their time thinking about this like it's a really really difficult thing to actually just understand what is going on on a very basic level and i don't know whether that's like a platform problem or whether that's like news news operations that believe that like in order to kind of you know survive and be successful they kind of need to like operate within a platform logic that is constantly demanding

not only attention but very specific kinds of attention that are really there to like recirculate that content i do think that like twitter has a weird effect on this because like what's really weird about twitter is that it's essentially a message board for current events. Reddit is broken up into smaller boards of particular topics and you can make your own topic and then you talk about that topic. And obviously, current events might inform how you're using the Pokemon Go subreddit, to use an example of my own life. But it is largely going to be about whatever that topic is the thing with twitter though is that like it has a lot of people who are just there to consume current events and so it creates like this bizarre culture of like super posters who are in a constant state of agony because their shared interest is just whatever horrible

shit that's happening in the world interspersed with like award shows so like of course they're just like miserable and that's when you get the people like you know from their brownstone and park slope being like everyone just needs to calm down or like hey doritos can you read the room and it's like no doritos doesn't need to read the room doritos is just here to advertise doritos unless doritos is like doing some sort of weird ukraine themed advertisement but like for the most part like the people who feel that way on twitter and are posting these takes and are like in a constant state of agony over the news part of me is just like please go outside just like do anything other than be here because like clearly you can't handle it and nor should you it's an unnatural way to live i think to be on twitter this much at the same time i kind of, I understand where that impulse comes from, but I also think it's very hard for people like, you know, the whole like touch grass, go outside thing.

I think it's really hard to like go outside and touch grass and also like not be affected. You know, I live in England, man. Like all the grass is like fucking toxic. You guys have so much more grass than we do. It's like, it's insane how much more grass you grass than we do it's like it's insane how much more grass you have than we do yeah that's right and it's kind of like grass and public restrooms you have to pay for the public restrooms in the uk though yeah you do yeah that's that's why there's so much like discourse about it um but i think like again it's really hard to sort of go like

i spent for example like last weekend like you know'm, I tried to like spend less time online on weekends than like on weekdays, uh, partly because like my girlfriend keeps telling me to. Um, and when we were going out, we went to go like see some friends in the countryside and everything. And like, all we really did was just talk about Ukraine. Right. Because like what happened was they had gone to church and the church service was about Ukraine and like the war.

So it was kind of like, even in those those types of settings it's very hard to like really fully switch off because again like you know there's no meaningful switch off and like the way that information is conceived of and presented and distributed and crucially like just the amount of it that's like circulating through the system um means that like even when you sort of disconnect I think this like definitely applies to stuff like ongoing culture wars and everything like eventually it does seep into like ordinary discourse and what happens when like you're confronted with someone who is basically repeating things that you've read on twitter and you're kind of like I don't want to interact with someone as if I am on twitter but like now I kind of have to but in real life and this is really weird and really disorientating. I don't know whether this person knows that they're saying stuff

that came from like Twitter or like, you understand like how the sausage is made for like, lack of a better term, but it also just makes it very difficult to like interact in the real world. I guess like what I'm trying to say is that like, I feel like there are very real, material consequences of this type of information economy. And I feel like it's something that we kind of lack a language for, which makes it very difficult to talk about in real life. And even on podcasts like this, where I'm with two very online people, it's very difficult to articulate that. But it's really, really important because it's affecting politics and it's affecting economics and it's affecting how we live our lives and how we speak to each other, how we relate to each other like that lack of separation

but as i said in like that tweet that is kind of i'd like still kind of getting numbers right now okay you don't have to brag about the numbers you're doing on twitter but okay don't worry everyone i'll put it in the show notes so you can go see link to hussein's great tweet yeah yeah that's right that's right that's right like but what I mean is that like, it's kind of really changing the way that like we relate to each other. And I think it's like very different to other forms of mass communication because like of the way that it's happening both faster and also the way that it kind of encompasses into like other trending topics.

So this is the idea that like, you're not really talking about one thing. You're actually talking about like this whole genealogy of like stuff that exists online and offline but like kind of switch interchangeably yeah it's really difficult to like talk about it and i think that like a lot of the stuff that we're seeing with this war right now and like especially because it is like an extremely online war um also just reflects our need to sort of like have a new language or like to update how we talk about the way in which we process, consume, distribute, share information. Yeah, I think it's such an essential point.

And, you know, I hope that as we end this conversation, people's minds are spinning, just trying to think about the implications of that. But, you know, this hour has flown. It's been so great to speak to both of you about what has been going on. I wanted to end by asking if both of you have any final comments or thoughts, anything we didn't get to in the conversation or anything that you think is relevant that we weren't able to discuss. The reason Hussein's tweet is doing so well is because I linked to it in Garbage Day. I want

that. That's the Garbage Day effect. So you're welcome. but it was a great um i think my my final thought on this is just that like we are so early in something that is both so old and so new at the same time that i i want to be like as like definitive and like professional about this as possible but i'm just like things are going to be really weird because war is essentially like what i would say the second oldest thing that human beings do with each other and like the internet is the newest thing that we've ever created and they're now happening like within each other and like as weird as the gamestop pump and the crypto boom were for finance like We're now seeing this exact effect with war. And we're at the beginning. We're day five. My head is spinning trying to keep it all straight. And what's

crazy is there's so many micro moments happening within this macro moment that, yeah, I don't know how people are meant to process this. And maybe they just don't. I don't know where we go from here. I really only have like one thing when i like i didn't mention it because number one like it used to be like ryan and i's boss but actually like jonah press he was like right um i don't know whether either of you are like familiar with the essay that he wrote in like the 90s the commodification thing yeah the one where he kind of like it's like about like deluse and qatari and like the reproduction of identity and how like the internet like like acceleration

and you know again like a lot there's like this very interesting kind of insight into like acceleration theory of the 90s um one of the arguments that he makes in that essay is that like what the internet sort of allows is like constant reproduction of identities and while this is like very confusing for politics because it means that like it makes it very difficult to kind of pursue any type of like collective action or um like inform any type of like holistic political identity in which to kind of like enact any kind of activism what what it's great for is for like companies to kind of reproduce identities and in so doing like create products right um create create products and services and by the time like that cycle finishes like another cycle emerges and so on and as the internet and as platforms become faster that

process becomes a lot faster as well and i think it's like it's just something to bear in mind when we sort of see phenomena like this because ultimately like i think one of the things in that essay that is actually very poignant is the idea that like that process also makes it very difficult for people to really understand not only what's going on but like their kind of own material stakes in any type of you know social phenomena so ultimately like what this is is it's very good for platforms who are able to kind of like reproduce and regenerate content and um in so doing like allow their users to kind of feel like participants in whatever phenomena is taking

place and immediately they can switch to new phenomena. But it's very difficult on platforms to understand meaningfully the moments that we're in or what particular political moments require. And that doesn't just apply for war. It applies to things like activist movements. BLM is a really good example of this. It applies to climate change movements and stuff like that um yeah so i would ultimately say to like listeners who haven't read it like who haven't kind of read this essay like go read capitalism

and schizophrenia by buzzfeed founder jonah peretti yeah oh and watch and watch the newsroom you should watch the newsroom yeah that's right yeah do yeah do both. Read the essay, then watch the news. And you'll have like perfect online brain like me. Perfect content recommendations. As we end this episode, I'll put the link in the show notes to the essay. Again, I thank you both for taking the time. And I know that all three of us are thinking about the people in Ukraine right now and what they're dealing with and how terrible and tragic that is. So I thank you both so much for taking the time. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much. Ryan Broderick is the writer of the Garbage Day newsletter and host of Content Minds. And Hussein Kesvani is a writer and co-host of Trash Future and 10,000 Posts.

You can follow Ryan on Twitter at at Broderick. You can follow Hussein at at H Kesvani. You can follow me at at Paris Marks. And you can follow Hussein at at H. Kesvani. You can follow me at at Paris Marks and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network.

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Thanks for listening.