Mixtapes: a Lightweight Plan to Save the Internet – ØF

Deep Future

Pablos: People are pissed off about social media all the time. They think that Facebook is making people vote for the wrong person.

It's still very difficult to find somebody who thinks they voted for the wrong person because of Facebook, but they think everyone else did. Never mind that, there's this kind of, uh, very popular sensibility, which is to blame Facebook for all the problems in the world. They're doing fake news, they're doing, disinformation they're doing , every possible thing that could be wrong.

Everybody wants to blame Facebook for getting wrong or Twitter or, any of the other social platforms. So if you think about it, in one sense, , yeah, Facebook got everybody together. I'm just going to use them as the example, we can extrapolate. They got everybody together.

They, ended up getting too much content. you and your friends are posting too much shit. Nobody has time to see all of it. So you need the magical algorithm, which you should do like triple air quotes every time I say algorithm. They're like, the algorithm is supposed to figure out, okay, of all the shit that's supposed to be showing up on your feed, what's the coolest, or what's the stuff that you're gonna like the most?

That's the job of the algorithm. And of course, we all believe the algorithm is tainted. And so, it's not really trying to find the things I care about the most or like the most. It's just gonna find the things that piss me off the most so that I get my, outrage, dopamine hit and keep coming back. So, which may all be true.

We don't know. But, the point is, there's a fundamental problem, which is you cannot see everything that gets posted from all the people you follow. So, there does have to be some ranking. And then the second, thing is that you want that ranking to be tuned for you.

And I think the thing that people, are missing about this is that you've got to have, a situation where it is very personalized because, not everybody's the same. Even if you and I followed the same thousand people, it doesn't mean we have identical interests.

There are other factors that need to play into determining like what I want to see and what you want to see. And then I think that there's a whole bunch of things that, are classified as societal evils, that Facebook has to decide are not okay for anybody to follow. So if you have posts about Hitler, nobody should get to see those.

Even if you're a World War II historian, nope, you don't get to see it. So there's a kind of, problem here, which is that all of this flies in the face of actual diversity, actual multiculturalism, we have 190 countries in the world. We have a lot of different peoples, different cultures, you and I just had a huge conversation about, different cultures and how they drive, we don't agree about these things. We have different ideas in different places in the world, even whole societies have different ideas about what's okay, and what's not okay, and that is the definition of Culture that is the definition of multiculturalism is valuing that that exists and letting everybody have their own ideas And and make let these different people operate in the way that suits them And when you travel, you get beaten over the head with that because, I can appreciate that people drive like this in Bangkok.

That's not how I want to do it , that's kind of the fundamental point here. So anyway, what I'm trying to get at is you cannot create one set of rules for the entire world. That is not okay.

Ash: 100%

Pablos: And so what Facebook has chosen to do is try to create one set of rules for the entire world, at least the two billion people that are on Facebook.

Ash: But then you become the government of Facebook