The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again?

Episode Date: June 24, 2025

In 2004 Facebook was created. Two years later in 2006 Twitter was founded AND the very first episode of the Agenda aired here on TVO. Fast forward to 2011 and social media was seen as helping sow the seeds of democracy in the Middle East during the Arab Spring. And many were optimistic that these growing connections would help harness the wisdom of the crowd. It would be like "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" when you asked the audience. And the audience was almost always right. So ... what happened? How has social media evolved? How has social media changed us? And has it been a net negative or net positive? Cory Doctorow, Vass Bednar, Jeff Jarvis, and Douglas Rushkoff join to discuss. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 2004, Facebook was created. Two years later, Twitter was founded, and the very first episode of The Agenda aired here on TVO. Fast forward to 2011, and social media were seen as helping sow the seeds of democracy in the Middle East during the Arab Spring. And many were optimistic that these growing connections would help harness the wisdom of the crowd. So what happened?

How have social media evolved? How have social media changed us? And has it been a net negative or positive? Let's take the long view on social media with, in Portland, Oregon, Corey Doctorow, journalist and author of Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench novel. On Manhattan Island in New York City, Douglas Rushkoff, professor of media theory and digital economics at the City University of New York, Queens College, and author of the upcoming book, Program or Be Programmed, Eleven Commands for the AI Future.

In Somerset County, New Jersey, Jeff Jarvis, author of The Web We Weave, Why We Must Reclaim the Internet from Moguls, Misanthropes, and Moral Panic. He's also a visiting professor at Stony Brook's School of Communication and Journalism. And with us here in the studio, Vass Bednar, managing director at the new Canadian Shield Institute, fellow at the Public Policy Forum, and senior fellow at CG,

the Center for International Governance Innovation, and I cannot think of four people I would rather have this conversation with than you four. So let's get to it. Great to see you all again here on TVO. We want to start by going back to the year 2011 and the Arab Spring. Zeynep Tufekci was on our program, the author, and here is what she had to say. Roll it, Sheldon, please.

Clearly social media have played a role in enabling the populations of these countries coordinate, communicate, and create a counterpublic sphere that was not directly censorable by the state. I mean, I don't think it's a coincidence that these dictatorships and authoritarian regimes have been able to withstand 30 years of stability to be undermined at this particular juncture in history. There hasn't been this ability to come together and to create a voice that could then do what we have seen in Tunisia and we are watching very intently in Egypt.

That was 14 years ago. Corey, start us off. How would you describe the optimism around social media at that time? Well, I think at its best, it was not optimism but hope. It was the idea that although things were bad, we could see a way that people could work together and do something that might make it better. And even if we couldn't see a way all the way through to the end, right, we didn't know how social media would could be

used, for example, to establish a stable democratic government in countries whose autocrats were falling as the result of social media mobilizations, we knew that if we could take one step, we might be able to bring into vision bring into clarity some other step that we couldn't see from from the elevation we were at at the moment. And that is we ascended in this stepwise fashion, we might be able to see our way all the way through after all life's not a novel, it doesn't have a

smooth plot from A to Z. Life is complicated, and you often can't plot your way all the way through. That's how did you see it? I saw it as a sort of compliment to traditional new sources and things we were consuming. So of that time period, I was in grad school for a lot of that, right?

2008 to 2010, I was sitting in the classroom stressing a lot of the time and really feeling like the way that my peers and I were experiencing the world, taking our first ride in an Uber, booking something on Airbnb, how we were finding each other, how we were communicating, the kind of chats and kind of other ways felt like something that was happening off the side, right, or behind a screen. And now it seems like it's the kind of feature in terms of how we are getting what we hope is information,

but is often quite sloppy and noisy. More on that in a second, on the sloppiness and noisiness. Douglas, your view on 14 years ago and what was in the air at the time. Well, it's interesting because the book you called upcoming I wrote in 2010 as programmer be programmed and in there I had a chapter called don't sell your friends. So by 2010 I was already pretty down on social media Which I saw as less social than the good old-fashioned, original text-only internet.

That even though we weren't using algorithms to program people into, you know, dismay or sensationalist states, the business model had already changed from letting people build their own web pages, which is what Facebook originally was, to monetizing people's social graphs against each other. And as I looked at the time at things like Tahrir Square, what I kept noting was people only went out into the square when the government shut off the social media. You know, they thought they were going to stop the revolution, but they

created it. So to me, it seemed that, oh, well, in some ways, social media could actually be an obstacle or a way of venting and not actually addressing the problem. Jeff, is there a particular moment that you would point to where you say or you thought, wow, things are really shifting away from this more positive, hopeful, potential view of social media to, let's say, mob rule? Well, before we get to dystopia, let me spend just a little moment in the happier times.

I think the real story here wasn't so much the rise of social media, it was the fall of mass media. And I devoted my professional career to being in mass media, which I now regret. And I think that the internet opened up to voices who were always there but not heard in monolithic mass media run by people who look like me and you, all white men. And so I think we have to recognize the importance of that. The problem was, as I think Douglas hints at, is that when our conversation online, through links, through blogs, through open platforms,

was co-opted by corporations, I, for one, didn't fully understand the peril that we then faced, that it could be taken over, in the case of Twitter, by a narcissistic nihilist named Elon Musk. And so if you're looking for a moment, I don't think it's that clear. I think that the Arab Spring was overly optimistic. Too much was attributed to Twitter rather than to brave Egyptians.

And we didn't yet realize that this was a good platform for tearing things down and protesting, but not yet for building complex institutions. In which case, follow-up, has the, has it all been in your view, social media, a net negative or a net positive? Oh, a net positive, without question. I think we have lessons to learn, but I've covered in my books the rise of print. In the early days of print, it spread not only new information, but also witchcraft hunts. Print took a long time before we developed the institutions to assure through editing and publishing quality and artistry and authority.

It's going to take time I think to figure out how to do that in this current wave but I'm very happy that I can hear voices who I couldn't hear before. Corey, net negative or positive? Oh, I think a net positive, but also that we are in a moment where things are changing very quickly and up for grabs. So, you know, to Jeff's point, I don't think that I or the people who are in my orbit underestimated how bad it could be if the internet were co-opted as a system of control, a system of censorship, a system of surveillance.

You know, people don't get involved with nonprofits like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I've worked for 23 years, because they think everything's just going to be fine. You have to, on the one hand, be quite hopeful about where things could go, but also quite fearful about where they could go if they don't go well. In the last five, six years, we've seen this global wave of anti-corporate regulation, antitrust law, competition law, Canada got a new competition law last year. And it's quite wild in light of the political science truism, that if there's

something billionaires want, and the people don't want, or vice versa, there's something that everyone wants and billionaires don't want, that the people never get their way. This is the first time in my memory, that something that people wanted and billionaires didn't want actually started to come true. And I think a lot of that has been driven by our frustration with what happened to social media, which after all, we all got on because we quite enjoyed it. We liked having those forums where we could be with people we enjoyed, our friends and

people halfway around the world who entertained us or made us think. Vass, I wonder if those three words on the shirt that you are wearing are an indication of how you would answer this question. I do. OK. Here we go. So I am wearing my internet is overrated t-shirt. But I might go net negative.

So able to celebrate all the kind of excellent elements that have been brought up. It's certainly some of these social media tools have helped me build my own career and get to know people and come across excellent research and kind of expand horizons. But when I think about the design, the addictive design of the endless scroll and what it's doing kind of to our brains writ large, and I think of the crisis of literacy, and I think of the recent news that we are making reading sections of the SAT in the US kind of shorter and bite-sized, kind of in a reaction

to people having trouble with more sustained, dedicated reading. I have to implicate social media in some of these tools in just how it's rewiring our brains and kind of what that means for our ability to think, to think critically, and also to connect. Douglas, how about you? Negative or positive?

Well, it depends where we're talking about. I mean, in America and other great white-ish, Western, wealthy nations, I mean, suicides and health concerns and commercialization and value erosion and political chaos are obviously negative. You look in India or Africa where social media is being used to create small businesses, to educate people who hadn't been educated before, even crypto is a net positive in India or Africa, where it's being used differently. It depends where. Well, it depends where in Africa, Corey, you know.

No, it can be. No, it can be. No, no, no. There are places where it's being used positively. And you can say nowhere. No, never. But I'll give you some example. Okay.

Well, we're not going to do a show on crypto folks. Let's move on. It's hard to make a global net positive, net negative analysis. I'd say so far, I'd probably say net negative because we are under capitalism and under our current global institutions, we're so brittle that the kind of radical changes being fomented by social media may prove intolerable. But I feel like if we can make it through this, the end result, or the longer term impact of a social medium, like the internet could be,

would be very positive. Jeff, have you come to a conclusion in your own mind definitively as to whether or not you believe social media have, I guess, become a means of allowing voices not previously heard to communicate political anger as opposed to being the cause of that political anger. In the United States, we too simplistically look at this as if we were all fine and all normal until this internet came along and the country turned into a bunch of racist misogynist pigs

We were racist misogynist pigs before it brought it out And there's a lot of myths about how the internet operates as if it's it's the hubris of the present tense as if we're different And I don't think we are we've had these as a society, and now we can perhaps see them better and perhaps know them better. But no, I don't think it's a cause. Even the arguments about filter bubbles and echo chambers. A researcher named Michael Bong-Peterson in Denmark said that the echo chamber we live in

is the echo chamber in our real lives. And what the internet did counterintuitively was it punctured those bubbles. And it exposed people to those they weren't exposed to, that they feared, that they were made to fear. And it brought out a whole stock of spitballs to throw. And so I think we have to recognize that technological determinism of our problems

or our solutions is simplistic. We have huge underlying problems in this society, in this country, sorry to you Canada, for what's going on to you right now from us, that we've got to grapple with and are not. You're the 6,222nd person who has apologized for, anyway, that's another... Usually it's you guys who apologize,

but it's our turn. Right, right, right. Vass, how about it? The issue of whether or not this is just the means of communicating political anger as opposed to creating it. I mean, studies also show that more polarizing content gets amplified and kind of shown or is kind of more tantalizing. The monetization models, as has been alluded to, you know, change some of the incentives,

right? So the bargain for us, and back to that kind of early, like, what was exciting or kind of cool, that premise of what it was maybe for you and I and all of us connecting online was different than the kind of undercurrent that underpins the companies, right? So there's always been a divergence there in terms of what we're paying for with our time and our attention, or if you're for a blue blue check or something on Twitter, which I have trouble calling X, but I can if I need to. Yeah, that's sort of what I come back to there. And don't forget saying sorry to Canada.

I mean, Metta's not saying sorry to Canada. Metta turned off news, formal news for Canada some years ago now because they're so resistant to regulation. And people still access what they consider to be news information there, and it tends to be slanted towards from right-wing outlets that have a very particular intention. So I would say that's not part of positives happening in Canada. Corey, your take on that. So I think we created a system where when these platforms changed in ways that we didn't like, we were at their mercy. So back in 2010, when James Moore and Tony Clement were ministers in Stephen Harper's government,

they did a consultation on a law that basically the US trade representative had insisted on. It copies and pastes an American law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And over 6,000 Canadians wrote in and said, this is a terrible idea. We shouldn't have it because it banned Canadians from changing how American technology worked, from making plugins or ad blockers or, you know, independent repair tools for tractors. Anytime there was a digital lock, we couldn't unlock it. So over 6,000 Canadians No, no, no, we should if like we use something or if it belongs to us, if Facebook shuts off the news, we should be able to change the app or we should be

able to change the device so that it responds to our needs. 53 Canadians responded to that consultation, saying they like the idea. James Moore resolved this problem. He went to the International Chamber of Commerce meeting in Toronto. And he said, those 6,000 plus Canadians who disagree with me, they are quote, babyish radical extremists. And, uh, I'm going to throw out everything they said. And, uh, Stephen Harper's whip,

whipped his caucus and they passed bill C 11 in 2012. And so now it's a crime to modify anything from the Facebook app so that it shows you a newsfeed, to modify your printer so you can use generic ink in it, to modify your tractor so you can fix it, to modify the Medtronic ventilators our hospitals all use so that during the lockdown independent med techs could fix it in the hospital rather than have non-existent Medtronic service technicians come out. And so all of that basically meant that these companies, we were at their mercy.

You may remember when Lily Tomlin used to do these ads on Saturday Night Live for the Bell System, she pretended to be an operator and she finished them. She'd say, we don't care, we don't have to. We're the phone company, right? We think of these companies as too big to care. And I think that's right. It's not just that they're too big to fail and too big to jail. They can make changes and unless we're willing to endure the cost of

leaving behind all the people who are there, who love each other more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg, and who have this coordination problem of agreeing to leave and go somewhere else, we get stuck there. And so I don't think we should be surprised that these, you know, flawed, terrible people, when we set them loose and turned their users into hostages, decided to squeeze us to make their shareholders richer. But, you know, that's not the mystic great forces of history or the iron laws of economics making those services bad. That's a specific name policy choice made by a named individual in living memory who was told what the consequences would be and those consequences have come true and nobody is holding

those individuals to account. Let's move to a different subject now and that is the attention economy. All social media companies have one thing in common and that is they want our attention. Our ability to pay attention right now seems to be dramatically affected by social media. Absolutely. All because they've managed to convince us that we have to have these things in our hands.

You were on your phone too during the episode but I think it was for the show. I don't think you were on social. I was not returning emails. In fact, this is, I can tell you, this is how the control room communicates with me. I totally believe you. Sorry. This is how the control, I'm not looking up the score of the Red Sox team last night.

This is how the control room communicates with me during the course of the program. I get text messages through them. But it's, you're right. I mean, this is an increasingly massive part of where our attention goes nowadays. And maybe, can I pivot over to Douglas on this? This can't be a good thing that social media has somehow managed to convince all of us to carry these devices in our pocket so they can have control over our brains. You know, it's funny.

I mean, the internet used to be something, we had this term, we called it's funny. Uh, I mean, the internet used to be something we, we had this term, we called it going online and going online meant you were going to go to your computer and plug in the modem and dial up into a thing and download a conversation, then read it offline and type your response and then upload it. It was kind of like chess by mail. And it happened so slowly and deliberately that the internet was actually a place where people sounded smarter than they did in real life.

You were afraid to meet the people you had spoken to online because then they were gonna see how you really spoke and it's like, you're not that brilliant. I mean, it's odd and I remember, but by the time we got to like 2011 and social media, this kind of always on media, it was strapped to your body and have it ping you and vibrate

every time that somebody has anything that they want to interrupt you with, it puts you in this state of confusion. And I remember in 2011, I wrote an article that I was going to be leaving social media. I'm going to leave Facebook. I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to sell my friends. And I got all these emails from people saying, how are you going to live without the internet? As if all of the other internet applications, like email and texting and, and, and the BBS is and all that, as if those somehow went away if you stop using this one commercial

website is what facebook what it was a website and that was really that's the attorney of social media is that we think that these commercial you know that sort of little technical feudal empires are the internet and there's a whole lot of ways to use this that are not news feeds of algorithmically devised content to get you to think in weird ways and buy stupid stuff. Corey, you've got to admit it's brilliant of the social media companies, for good and for ill, I guess, that they've managed to convince all of us that we can't live without these devices in our pockets and therefore we have become attention deficit slaves to their whatever, to their brilliance, to their malfeasance, all of the above.

So look, I don't like these companies and I don't like their products. I've been a Zucker vegan since the mid 2000s. I don't have any Facebook products. Let's touch Mark Zuckerberg. She'll never touch mine. But I also am keenly aware that we have been talking about the impact of media on our attention spans for a very long time. You have Socrates, possibly apocryphally complaining that

once we learned how to read, we stopped memorizing things and that we didn't pay attention the way we used to, you know, you have Thoreau complaining that once we complete the telegraph to the United Kingdom from from America, that all we'll hear is tittle tattle and gossip, the fact that Princess Anne has the whooping cough. And you know, these companies, they they like these myths, right? The idea that they are dopamine hacking wizards helps them sell advertising, right? If they

can go out there and say, like, why should you pay a 40% premium for advertising on Facebook? Well, look, you don't have to take my word for it. My critics will tell you I'm an evil wizard. I can sell anything to anyone. My products work extraordinarily well. But everyone who's ever claimed to have a mind control ray was either kidding themselves or all of us, right? Mesmer, Rasputin, MK Ultra, sad pickup artists, you know, neuro-linguistic programming weirdos, right? They're all full of it and the evidence for dopamine hacking is very thin, but the evidence for Facebook being part of a trend of or exemplifying institutional collapse, right?

Why we shouldn't trust our institutions because they don't defend us from predatory conduct. I think that evidence is very strong. I think when someone comes along and says, yeah, yeah, I don't trust the institutions because our health authorities let the opioid companies kill a million Americans and counting and never held anyone to account.

So I'm not gonna trust the vaccines either that we need to have an answer for them that's better than no, no, no, the authorities are right and they're not corrupt and failing. Now look, you know, I'm vaccinated so many times I glow in the dark, but like, not because I think the institutions are good. And, you know, I think that like, when we locate the harms of what they've done, we should locate those harms in ways that actually undermine the material circumstances, the companies that hurt their share prices. We should go after the things that they do that are making them and our class enemies money. So, you know, holding our friends hostage, that's a big one.

Or you know, the harms of surveillance that are real and material, not dopamine hacking. But you know, right now the Competition Bureau in Canada has opened an inquiry into surveillance pricing. The fact that companies are using their surveillance data to figure out how much you'll accept as a wage or how much you'll pay for things, and they're changing the prices in real time. And if our mediocre billionaires like Galen Weston are willing to do the most, you know, lay his ass LARP and gouge us on the price of bread, imagine what they're doing now that they have all the data from social media. You know, American contract nurses are now being bid out shift labor at a price dependent on their recent credit history.

And nurses that owe more credit card debt are offered a lower wage, right? Those are the harms of surveillance, right? That if you are in debt, they pay you less because you're more desperate. It's not, you know, a kind of manipulation. If people are believing in conspiracies, it's because we live amid conspiracies by rich people to destroy our lives, which makes the conspiracies plausible. And rather than running around and telling them they shouldn't be conspiratorial, maybe we should fix the institutions so that the conspiracy theory is itself less plausible. Corey, you were on a roll there, channeling your NDP candidate, Gore Doctor O'Father, there for a real burn.

Wow, that was impressive. Okay. And he was also a TVO tech commentator. He used to be on Bits and Bytes. My dad. Very good. Very good. Just before, Jeff, I get you to weigh on this,

let's play a clip here from MIT psychologist and author Sherry Turkle, who was on this program 10 years ago and weighed in on the issue of, with all of the attention this thing is now sucking out of us and demanding from us in some respects, how do we deal with being alone? Sheldon, roll it if you would. If you don't teach your children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely.

In other words, if you don't achieve the capacity for being alone, for being content within yourself. What you risk is that when you face other people, you kind of project onto them who you need them to be rather than who they really are, and you never really get into a true conversation with them. Now we have an alternative to never having to face that moment of, whoa, you know, I'm alone. I have to just reach within myself rather than be stimulated from the outside. Jeff, have social media made us lonelier? To the contrary.

I get to talk to people around the world now in ways that I couldn't before. You know, there's a kind of a digital puritanism here that media wants to disapprove of what billions of people are choosing to do for their own reasons. And yes, we might look at cat videos. I like cats. They're cute. We also do other things. I'm finding out about the demonstrations in the United States right now, not through

mainstream media, but through social media. I find great comfort in the movements that have been created through Black Twitter. And Black Twitter is still on Twitter in spite of Musk, because it's a place where they built community in spite of itself. They used its affordances for their own ends. There are lessons there about how

to use these tools for what we want to do with them. And what we want to do with them is to connect to other people. And so I get to see Cory Doctorow on my podcast once in a while when he's not too busy, thanks to this internet thing. I get to follow his books and see what he does and interact with them and promote his books because of this. And so what we have to do, I think, is to find the positive in this and use it for our own ends, even if it's not designed that way.

We've been following Corey for a very long time on this television station, and in fact, before the agenda, we used to do a program here called Studio Two, and almost 20 years ago, he was on that program talking about the growth of this new thing that was pretty new at the time. I think it was called the Internet. Sheldon, roll it if you would. This is the thing you hear about it, is that this thing is, you know, anarchic, unregulated, totally democratic. Unregulatable.

Unregulatable. It's technologically infeasible to do something as basic as determine how many computers are connected to the Internet. In a situation like that, it becomes very difficult to block access from or to a specific computer. A government's nightmare then, right? You can't control it. Yeah, if you want to take that sort of... If this were a movie starring Sylvester Stallone, the internet would be the means by which the

underground threw off the yoke of their oppressors. It is, in some senses, an anarchic environment in which it is very difficult to keep track of who does what, and when, and how. Well, clearly, the takeaway there is that I'm dressing better, and Corey, you're looking way better. So that's the number one takeaway. I think I look like Corey in the past, actually.

Well, OK. That hairdo, Corey. That hairdo, the flat top. Talk about a fist-bending youth. When I was a kid, that hairdo, Corey, that hairdo, that's my top. Talk about a fist-bending youth. I hope that went out when I was a kid. That was something else. That was amazing. What about anarchic unregulatable back then?

How about now? Well, different levers of regulation, right? Of course, we see different efforts across the world trying to use tools that we have or create new pieces of legislation where we think we need new tools. There's also self-regulation which I think we're having a conversation where we're all like pretty good or decent at at regulating our own use of these tools and kind of that type of moderation. You think we're pretty good at that? I think overall yeah I'm being generous and then and then there's also a layer of regulation that we're seeing more kind of at the scholastic level, right?

Where we're seeing school boards ban telephones or try to have these tools outside of these learning settings during a time where brains are particularly susceptible and growing and that people are having trouble in the classroom with that learning. So I think you're seeing what feels like at times a full-court press, but back to Corey's earlier points, sometimes leaves people disappointed, right? If it feels like the state doesn't have our back and can't intervene appropriately,

then that really leaves people hanging. Conversely, Douglas, I noticed that some people now go on what they call digital detoxes. Yeah, I remember back in 1999, I published a piece called The Sabbath Revolt. And what I was arguing was that people take a digital Sabbath, they take one seventh of their time. If it was good enough for the Israelites, maybe it would be good enough for us to have one day where you don't produce and consume, you don't use screens just so you can kind of recalibrate your nervous system and I mean I'm glad that what is this 25 years later now people are

finally saying hey maybe we should you know take one day off a week from social media but in some ways the fact that we're having this conversation reminds me that social media is not the thing. I mean, artificial intelligence is the thing. As we were watching Sherry Turkle talk about people being lonely, it's like, there's a, you know, we have a solution for that. We have an app for that. You know, if you're lonely online,

then the app can be your friend. And I really think that we're currently in it. The fact that we're having the social media conversation kind of means that we're onto the next battle, which I think will be with these more intelligent agents and the way that they interact with us more than the way we react with each other's media on social media.

I mean, that would really be my answer to what Jeff was talking about. I don't know that social media is connecting us to other people so much as to other people's media. And what we're losing is the ability to actually connect in real time, real spaces with other people's bodies socially, psychologically, systematically. I do wonder though, Jeff, whether or not, as we do today, we look back at, say, 25 or 50 years ago and think, you actually allowed smoking in elevators?

You actually allowed people to smoke in planes? Or in movie theaters? I mean, we think it's ridiculous now that anybody would have allowed that. I wonder if 25 or 50 years from now, we're gonna look back and say, you guys actually obsessed on these social media platforms for as many hours a day as you did.

I don't know. What do you think? With respect, it's kind of a Canadian regulatory reflex here that we're going to regulate behavior. People are going to do what they're going to do. Witnesses in my country right now, they do stupid stuff. They say stupid things. They're following stupid leaders. And it's really hard to imagine how we can regulate them out of that. What we need to do is educate them out of that. And that's why there is an attack on education in this country right now, and on science, and on medicine, and on the institutions that we need. There's a weird flip that's occurred in the world of late, where

conservatives, so-called, used to be those who conserved institutions, who protected them from change. Progressives tried to change them. And now we've turned around where it's the conservatives, so-called, of this country, who were trying to destroy them with bunker-busting bombs, and it's the progressives who are in the position of trying to protect those institutions. Well, the best way to protect them is to change them, is to bring them forward. And the best way to change the populace is to educate them in spite of what these so-called conservatives are doing. No wonder I'm so confused these days.

Everything is bass-ackwards the way you just described it. So OK, I get it now. Let's spend our remaining moments here just given that none of us, I suspect, well, few of us would have anticipated where we are today 25 years ago, you just couldn't imagine what was coming next, Vass, is it even possible to imagine what any of this is going to look like

10, 20, 25 years down the road? It's possible to imagine, I think for better or for worse. I think Corey often brings sort of science fiction forward to us as ways to imagine possible futures, both good and bad. We've anchored a lot of our conversation I think on text and visual based media through social media but really the dominant form of news that people are receiving is now video, right, and that kind of endless scroll. So is the future of videos produced by AI and AI friendships

and AI text messages because we can't bring more humans to these platforms is that really a future that we want and that will serve us well? Probably not but for companies that want to grow and grow and grow and can create fake people and fake ideas that seems kind of useful for them. Yikes. Okay, 30 seconds to Douglas, 30 seconds to Corey. Go ahead, Douglas. I don't know even what to answer here. Exactly.

Yeah. I mean, we're in a rapidly changing world where social media, AI, all of these media are really calling on us to retrieve what it means to be human, what it means to be social, what it means to be political. Whenever there's something that destabilizes us, we're going to have lots of reactionary forces coming to try to, how do we figure out how to enforce corporatism or the extraction of capital from people in this new environment. But that wobble is also an opportunity for people to re-socialize, for people to discover each other in new ways. I always look at times of instability as opportunities for people to reclaim the world in which we live and to start using our tools in ways that we find pro-social,

pro-educational and distribute it. Corey, last word to you. So look, if we're going to be doing anything in 30 years apart from, you know, digging for rubble, looking for canned goods while the wildfires rage around us, it's going to have to be a massive program of climate remediation, which is going to be very hard to coordinate without digital tools because it's a global issue. So, you know, in 30 years, maybe we'll be using tools to figure out how to relocate our coastal cities, five or 10 kilometers inland, how to deal with more zoonotic plagues as we have habitat loss. You know, all of that stuff may sound dystopian, but it's dystopian only in the sense that if we don't rise to the challenge, it will be not just a disaster, but a catastrophe to

make it a mere disaster that we live through something that you know, 40 years after we'll look back the way Britons think about the blitz spirit, it's going to have to be something that we all pull together. And you know, as someone who spent well, back when I was on that last video, I was spending my nights with a bicycle riding around Toronto with a bucket of wheat paste and a bunch of flyers trying to get people to go out to protests. You know, if you think we're going to do mass mobilizations without digital tools, I've

got a bucket of wheat paste I want you to try for a week or two and then come back and tell me how you really feel. Wheat paste are two words that in 19 years have never been uttered on this program. So thank you for that, Corey. I want to thank, there's the nice four shot I was looking for, Corey Doctorow, Douglas Rushkoff, Jeff Jarvis, Bass Bedner. It's been so great to talk to all of you and get to know you better and your thoughts over the years and we're really grateful you could be on this last week of The Agenda here on

TVO. Thanks so much, you four. Thank you. Thank you for all of the years of The Agendas, Steve.