Attention platforms could fund alternatives to engagement

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 2:00:00

   literally, this is the history of all of law. So like I could kill you and steal your stuff and just take your money, but I'd prefer to live in and everyone could do that. And that'd be a faster way to like get money. It's like just everybody kills everybody, grabs their money, but that would create a society that's chaos. So instead I sacrifice some of my abilities, like I can't kill people. And instead we have law that we, we all sort of notch down some of our individual capability so that we get to live in a society that we actually want to live in. And that's what this would do so in 2013 if mark zuckerberg had said i'm going to convene you know uh musically which was before tiktok um twitter and the other ones and we're like okay look it is so obvious we're in this arms race for attention just like public utilities which by the way if like

2. 2:00:44

   in california it'd be pg and e in texas what's your electricity provider it's like oh fuck knows i don't know i have no idea i have no idea what my electricity okay well technically energy companies have an incentive to maximize revenue so theoretically they're like leave the lights on leave the stove on like do the water 24 7 and because we make more money when we do that but because public utilities rely on a scarce resource called energy that has environmental uh um emissions that that are that are we have to deal with there's a decoupling of revenue from um their incentive so for example in california you're charged a base rate for like the initial energy you use and then once you're hitting kind of the capacity that would be straining the system We start to charge you more, but that extra revenue doesn't go just into PG&E, the energy

3. 2:01:31

   company's pocket. It goes into a fund to have more clean energy to offset it and create more energy capacity. So with attention, you could say instead of companies maximizing attention and driving revenue, you get to make money from the initial tier one of attention that you're getting. And then after that, the resources go into a common pool that's investing in the research, the X prizes, the design solutions that research and show that there's different ways of doing news feeds. There's different ways that we can have news feeds that are all about directing you back towards community. You live in Austin, Texas. Austin has, at least my friends, there's a lot of community events happening here. But you can imagine a world where the default news feeds that govern our world were spending like 30 to 40% of what you saw was other events that your

4. 2:02:15

   friends and other people that you knew adjacent to you were doing. You can imagine a world where instead of dating apps profiting off of keeping you in a slot machine loneliness thing where you message someone and never get back to them in this like new world all the dating apps would be forced probably because of some lawsuit in the against engagement model to fund physical events in every city that they operated in, where every single week there was actually a physical venue where lots of people were put in the same room with lots of other people they matched with who are maximally overlapping. And now instead of feeling scarcity and loneliness, there's a sense of abundant access to community and soft dating and soft friend making environments. So you're dealing with a loneliness crisis. You're dealing

5. 2:02:53

   with the dating problem. When you solve that, then it turns out 30% of the polarization online goes down because it turns out that a lot of polarization was just people being lonely and depressed from not having connection. It's all manufactured because people are caught in the doom swirling loop. So it's like, again, we can have a better world if we deal with the upstream causes of these problems. We can also have more innovation. Peter Thiel was talking about, we need more innovation. We need more scientific development. We would have stagnation if we didn't have AI. Well, how about you regulate the brain rot economy that's currently degrading all the innovation, causing people to be not productive and creative and innovative members of our society and instead incentivize entrepreneurs and again, social groups and community. So people are

6. 2:03:32

   actually making things. So the point is, I'm a tech, I'm a different kind of technology optimist, which is a humane technology optimist. If you design technology that is humane to an understanding of the substrates of society that upon which everything else depends, you can have a technology environment that is conducive to the things that we want our society to do. But it requires different design principles, different incentives, different rules, and some coordination.