Your Undivided Attention - Spotlight — A Bigger Picture on Elon & Twitter

Episode Date: April 26, 2022

If Elon Musk owns Twitter, what are the risks and what are the opportunities? In order for Twitter to support democracy — and Musk’s goal of becoming a multi-planetary civilization — we need a radical redesign that goes beyond free speech. Note: this conversation was recorded on April 21, 2022. That was 3 days prior to the official purchase announcement, which revealed that Elon Musk will buy Twitter for $44 billion. Clarification: In the episode, we talk about the creation of The Daily Show, featuring Jon Stewart. To be clear, The Daily Show was created by writer and producer Madeleine Smithberg and comedian and media personality Lizz Winstead — for comedian and host Craig Kilborn. Jon Stewart took over in 1999, which is when he had the conversation with executives that we reference in the episode, where he didn't want to see the viewership numbers.RECOMMENDED MEDIA Examining algorithmic amplification of political content on TwitterPolarization of Twitter (Knight Foundation)Pew Research on the political extremes drowning out centrist voices on TwitterChronological feed vs algorithm (Computational Journalism Lab)RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODESA Conversation with Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/42-a-conversation-with-facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugenHere’s Our Plan And We Don’t Know: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/46-heres-our-plan-and-we-dont-knowA Problem Well-Stated Is Half-Solved: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/a-problem-well-stated-is-half-solvedYour Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on Twitter: @HumaneTech_  

Hey, Eza. Hey, Tristan. So we're going to do a quick bonus episode of Your Undivided Attention to talk about what everyone's talking about, which is Elon Musk and Twitter. And obviously, you know, we can talk about the buyout and the board and all these things, but what we really wanted to do was just talk about what is this about? What could it mean? What is the problem with Twitter? And what are the opportunities if Elon Musk were to succeed in this endeavor? Because there's a decent chance that he could succeed. And even if he doesn't, I think it's important to have color on what are the real issues here?

Is it really about free speech or is there some more to this picture? Why does Twitter matter? Well, Twitter is different than Instagram or YouTube because Twitter really is like the place where politics and journalism live. Journalists construct the world, the media world that the rest of us live in. So if you influence Twitter, you influence the ink that fills the pages of the media more broad. including just Twitter itself. And that is our belief, right? The Center for Humane Technology is that the pen that is writing the history book,

the ink that fills that pen is filled by the algorithms of social media. I genuinely believe that tech by controlling what people are feeling, thinking, and believing controls the outcome of everyone's decisions and the elections that go. And we've seen lots of evidence of that in our podcast. And unlike other social media platforms, like Instagram is not a civil a civil war for profit machine. But Twitter is a fault line finding for profit machine. Fault line finding for profit equals doom scrolling for profit equals bad mental health for profit machine. It finds all the fault lines in society currently that are most engaging. It brings them

up to the top. And then it highlights them. So it's like turning up the contrast in an image. So when you see it that way, is it really about free speech? No, free speech matters. We should say that. We want to live in a world. We believe in free speech at the center of preemate technology too. we want a world where we have conscious evolution of the systems, which means especially people should be able to question the assumptions of the system that they're inside of. But we also want to question that in a productive way, not in a snarky, cynical, harassment, doxing, you know,

hate everybody kind of way. And right now you are currently paid in more likes and followers, the more clever you are at outgrouping your fellow countrymen, your fellow human. And, you know, Elon Musk, if he did by Twitter, would be in a position to radically change the design mandate of the company and the OKRs. I mean, so OKRs, that phrase in Silicon Valley means objectives and key results.

It's the way that Silicon Valley companies kind of measure quarter to quarter. What is our objective and what are key measurable results that we would have if we were to align with that objective? And right now, that usually looks something like we want to grow our user numbers by 30% over the next year. We want to grow engagement by 10%. And then literally you have engineers that say on their resumes, when they work at Twitter for two years, they say, hey, I grew engagement. by 3% in Saudi Arabia last year. That's my accomplishment. And then they go to the next tech company

and they tell people that's what I did. What we want to do is change the underlying currency of Twitter. And we've heard Elon Musk talk about his mission statement. He wants to make sure we don't extinguish the light of consciousness and we want to make sure that we have a future that we believe in that we're excited about. And that's what Tesla is about. That's what SpaceX is about.

We want to be excited about the future. And I agree that we should be excited about the futures that we're creating. But right now Twitter is the kind of one project in that portfolio that, you know, by revealing the kind of doom scrolling for profit the most engaging inflammatory fault line day and day out for everyone, you know, it's not really accomplishing that goal. And I think the deep opportunity is to be able to transform Twitter in a more radical way to be of deep service to humanity extending the light of consciousness and to enabling really constructive kinds of speech and back and forth that enabled them. democracies to out-compete China, right, and the other form of digital authoritarianism that's currently weighing on the world. Maybe this is the opportunity to prove that digital 21st-century democracies can out-compete 21st-century autocracies, digital autocracies like China and Russia. But to do that would take a much more dramatic redesign than simply enabling more free speech than existed

before. I think there'd be some pretty big changes, one of which would be a really big reduction in the amount of virality that the system would have and that would be challenging because of course who wants to give up the power they already have

yeah and if you spent the last 10 years and you spent a lot of time on Twitter to like get to that number like a lot of people like comedians or influencers or YouTube hosts or whatever you actually this is an economic engine for you right so the number of followers equals

kind of your economic well-being and if we suddenly said, we're going to live in a world where you're going to go from that one million followers or 500,000 followers that you worked for the last 10 years with your blood, sweat, and tears to get. And we're going to take that down to, hey, we're all not going to reach as many people because we all might say that thing isn't good for all of us as a society or for making democracies work better. You know, another thing that comes to my mind in a kind of redesign of Twitter is Tristan,

you were telling a story about John Stewart. And he was in the creation of The Daily Show that he went to his executives and said I am not going to be looking at our viewership numbers I am going to blind myself from knowing what my audience wants because I do not want to be captured by my audience and in that created the freedom

for him to do his authentic, brilliant, artistic form I think a very similar thing could happen on Twitter and of course it would be very hard But if you removed all the metrics so that you didn't see what people wanted, so you weren't bound by your audience, that would also be a very different kind of much more nonviolent Twitter. Totally. I love your ring at this point because I think it's very subtle, but, you know, you have this phrase is that that hill climbing might be the hill that we die on, which is to say that it's kind of a reference to machine learning. but you know there you are and you tweet something and you notice if you say it this way

you get like 10% or 20% more followers than if you said it this other way. So you start to like stretch the truth a little bit. You start to make it a little bit more salacious. And we are all optimizing. It's not just newspapers or Breitbart or New York Post or MSNBC or Fox News that are figuring out that Ben Shapiro obliterates person on the left

and you know, Russell Brand takes down Fox News or whatever the thing is. that language, why are we arriving at that language? Well, it's because everyone is A, B testing. They're testing it one way, A, testing it another way, B. They're hill climbing their way towards whatever gets the most attention. And, you know, a radical proposal you're making is, hey, what if we weren't judging ourselves by the short-term, immediate quantized performance of what we say, which is basically just like kind of literally like a summation of your nervous system lighting up?

Like, how much can I get your nervous system to light up? And that's just like not a thing that we want. And so how can we get everyone to make their inner daily show, their inner John Stewart, beautiful, brilliant thing that only they can do in the world? How can we incentivize that thing to exist? How can we give the creative space for people to be making the thing that they're uniquely gifted to do and not be governed by whether or not it was seen by the maximum number of people? Because we know that the things that will be seen by the maximum number of people

are simply just the most triggering statements. And to double down on this point on your making about John Stewart, There's another part of that episode. I think he's talking about what's broken with the news and the media. A lot of people often respond to us at the Center for Human Technology, and the Social Dilemma, they say, hold on a second. We had partisan radio and TV and partisan television, especially, Fox News, MSNBC, before all this stuff with social media.

But in his interviews, in John Stewart's interviews with some TV producers, in this case I think it was a Fox News producer, they talked about how those TV producers were living on Twitter to see what was resonating with the public. And so actually, there you have it right there, that what's resonating with the public as determined by a trending algorithm inside of Twitter is literally determining what goes on TV, right?

So it is quite simply the case that technology is upstream from media and culture and all these other things because it's setting up the basis of how everything else is judged. And, you know, the kind of proposals that we're talking about here are deeper redesigns than simply enabling just more speech or figuring out a different content moderation policy, it's like, what would the Twitter look like

that's making humanity a multi-planetary species? You know, there's this question of like, will we get off the planet, will we go to the stars, we'll become the Star Wars, Star Trek civilization? And, you know, let's just think about that. I've actually watched some of the Star Trek movies recently. And you just think to yourself, like, gosh,

how did they get to the 23rd century? What do they have to go through? What, you know, developmental trajectory, what inventions, what ways do they have to, to organize themselves socially, what social technologies, what new forms of money and then getting post money, like, how did they get to that place? How do they organize their information spaces to get to this point where they could kind of travel the universe and the stars? And, you know, I think that that's the question I would like Elon Musk asking. It's like, what's the information

system that helps us get to the stars? What is the purpose of free speech? Why do we even want free speech in the first place? What's challenging about free speech is that it's both an end and it's a means, right? An end because we all have a yearning to express ourselves. That's part of the hierarchy of needs, of self-actualization. And it's also a means to a bigger end, which is, you know, a well-functioning democracy. And, you know, if we're going to use an Elon phrase, perhaps it's even bigger than that. it's to extend the light of human consciousness.

So these things are intention because we are talking about individual rights and expressions and we're talking about the needs of the collective, of democracies. It is overly simplistic to say we can maximize for free speech in all contexts. And I would say that I think too often when people have a problem with Twitter censorship, they're talking about how it affects them individually,

which makes sense. Like, individuals want the ability to speak. I totally agree with that. We want to be able to create the ability for free speech. And there's this common aphorism that the solution to bad speech is more speech. The problem is that that's only true when it's good faith speech.

The solution to bad faith speech is not more bad faith speech. And right now, Twitter of kinds of speech to reward rewards bad faith speech ad nauseum. and more bad faith speech in response to bad faith speech. It wants to exponentiate bad faith speech. We want good faith speech, speech that increases faith in communication itself. That's from the Consilience Project.

And what would that look like? What would it look like for Twitter to actually be enabling the kind of good faith speech that actually enables us to become a multi-planetary civilization as opposed to become a cesspool of bad-faith speech that drags down and collapses civilization into never becoming multi-planetary. So there are totally ways to radically transform Twitter

to be a good faith speech engine, but it would need very deep and radical redesigns. Currently, we have a kind of noise and cacophony machine. What would it look like to have the listening machine, the machine that helps us listen to each other to actually be transformed by each other's ideas? Now, a lot of people are going to like that because, again, on the individual level,

people want to express themselves, and part of that expression is what we don't like about maybe how society is going or how our political tribe is going or how the other political tribe is going. And we want to be able to protect those virtues. But I would encourage us to zoom out to, you know, as we've said before in this podcast, right now we can notice that digital authoritarian societies like China are employing all of these technologies to make a stronger form of authoritarian society. And democracies, by contrast, are not consciously saying, what's all the technology we can use to make stronger democracies, to make stronger

21st century societies. Instead, currently, democracies are allowing private tech companies to profit from degrading democracies into these cacophony machines, these sort of fault line finding breakdown machines. Now, the opportunity is, actually, if Elon were to take the company private, would to make it no longer to beholden to these quarterly earnings reports and having to grow each quarter to the public market. You could actually change the new objective function. And those changes could occur if you were actually to able to take it the public market and do something, you know, with a deeper investment. But that might be the opportunity we're presented with here.

Your undivided attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Thank you for giving us your undivided attention. Thank you.