Tressie McMillan Cottom, welcome
back to The Daily Show.
Welcome back to me, indeed.
It's a pleasure to be back.
TREVOR NOAH: Right, or do I say professor?
I would love to know what you prefer because you have
so many prestigious titles with New
York Times bestselling author, or it could be professor.
It could be MacArthur-- is it a Genius
Grant that they give you?
You can say that.
I think I'm not supposed to say that.
Oh.
The foundation would prefer not, but it's--
- Oh, that's interesting. - Yeah.
So they say you're a genius, but they're like, you're not
allowed to say it of yourself.
Exactly, kind of like your mother tells you some things
are best said about you by others.
I see.
Oh, you're amazing, but don't ever
think that about yourself.
Yeah.
That's-- well-- well, then I will say it to you--
the genius professor that is Tressie.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you very much.
[cheering]
What a time to have you on because there are
few people who I've enjoyed learning
from, engaging with, studying.
Because you're not just a professor.
You're a sociologist.
You're somebody who looks at the world.
You study what has happened, what is happening,
and how you think it will happen going forward.
And right now feels like an interesting time
of everything that's going on.
Let's start with one of our favorite platforms
that we chat on all the time, Twitter.
It's been a really interesting time on Twitter right now.
Yes, that's an understatement.
I try. I try.
- Yes. - I specialize in those.
[laughs]
I would love to know your opinion on Twitter itself
and how we see its role in our society.
There are some who say, because it is a business,
Elon can do whatever he wants.
He paid for it. He can take it.
He can he can do as he pleases.
On the other hand, there are people who are saying,
Elon taking over Twitter, which has become this public square,
only goes to show how dangerous it can be to have billionaires
defining what everybody else can speak
or what their speech might or may not be.
And all of those things are true.
They are not true, to my mind, in equal parts.
So I think the bigger story here
is that we outsourced the public square
to the private sector, right?
Twitter becomes or feels like the public square.
But it has never operated in practice as a public square.
It cannot.
It is not owned by the state or by the people.
And, in fact, one of the things that minority people,
queer people have said for years about Twitter
is that they could not participate the same way
that really powerful brands could participate
or politicians or--
TREVOR NOAH: Interesting.
--particularly especially trolls.
And so in a true public square, there
would be some way for people to talk back,
right, to the powers that be.
That's never been Twitter.
That's never been any social media platform.
That is the difference between a business and something
that is truly public.
So it is a business.
Elon Musk can buy it as he was eventually,
you know, forced to do.
[laughter]
He wrote a check, and then his behind had to cash it.
And that's how we find ourselves here.
That we have used it to try to express sort of people power.
TREVOR NOAH: Right, right, right.
--does not mean that the people own it
or have any authority over it.
What that says to me and what I think
it says to many other people is that there
should be a public space.
We are in an information society.
Information is power, and it is money.
Why don't we have a civic public square--
TREVOR NOAH: Interesting.
--that exists on the internet?
Elon Musk buying Twitter would not have mattered if the state
was competing with Twitter.
TREVOR NOAH: That's interesting.
[applause]
But do you think--
many of these ideas are sound except when
you add in that the state in question would be America.
- Yes. - You know?
That's right. [laughs]
No, and I mean this not because of America's ineptness
or anything, but rather because America
sees everything through the lens of left or right,
Democrat, Republican always.
It doesn't matter what the issue is.
And it feels like America itself would never
be able to create something like this
because both sides wouldn't agree on what the thing should
or shouldn't be.
Oh, no, absolutely.
I mean, we see this debate about everything that is
publicly governed, particularly our schools, right,
where we cannot agree on whether or not our schools are
indoctrinating our children or should be preparing them
for the economy of the future.
Somehow Americans want it to do both, right?
Don't teach my children anything, but make
sure that they can be competitive in the economy
of the future. TREVOR NOAH: [laughs]
But you know what?
That is the mess of Democratic participation.
It does not mean that we get it right.
It means that there is a way to get it right sometimes.
So we don't have to have the whole thing figured out for us
to invest in publicness.
So one of--
I teach at a public university in North Carolina.
And I teach a lot of students who
will go on to work in libraries and in the information sector.
You know, libraries are, to me, the shining
example on the hill of what a public space can be.
Are they perfect?
Absolutely not.
But do they welcome people into them
and meet people where they are?
Absolutely.
Can America do that?
Yes.
Now do we have to fight to do it every step of the way?
Absolutely.
But we can have that fight.
You can't have that fight when an entity is owned
by a single megalomaniac.
Huh.
[applause]
You know, when we talk about these spaces
and we talk about these ideas and we talk
about these conversations, there's
no denying that Twitter and many places
like it have benefited from the diverse array
of voices that have now been part of the platform,
you know?
You wouldn't know what was happening
on the ground in the same way in Iran
were it not for Twitter.
TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM: Exactly.
You know, you wouldn't know what was happening
on the ground in the same way in Charlottesville
were it not for Twitter.
It has become-- as you say, it has the illusion
at times of a public square.
But many people have used it to that effect.
I would love to know, from your perspective,
as somebody who has seen your own journey,
from general obscurity to now becoming somebody whose
voice is so respected and recognized--
you write for The New York Times as part of their op-ed.
You're shaping people's opinions.
How do you find the balance, or how do you
inspire people you teach to think
critically about the world that they're living in?
Because half of the things we know are taught to us.
And then at some point, we have to decipher between what we've
been taught is the truth and then what is the truth
or where the gray even exists.
How do you even begin that journey as a teacher
and as a learner because you're constantly learning?
Well, I think that is part of it.
I try to always be a learner.
It's really easy, I think, to develop and grow
in your career and forget how overwhelming
it is to learn something new for the first time.
So I try to be an idiot as much as humanly possible.
TREVOR NOAH: I love that. I love that.
I do that all the time. - Yes.
[laughter]
You know, I enroll in something.
I take up something that I'm just absolutely
horrible at doing because I want to feel how
vulnerable it feels to learn.
And it is a very vulnerable space.
TREVOR NOAH: Right.
So when I am feeling generous,
I think that there is a not insignificant part
of the American public that isn't
so much afraid of the other as they are of being ignorant.
And some people would rather be angry than stupid.
TREVOR NOAH: Interesting.
And so figuring it out is actually really hard.
This is something I've learned as I've taught people.
And so there's a certain amount of vulnerability, I think,
we have to share with each other
to say that just because I have achieved something
in one part of the world or in one profession
doesn't mean I know everything.
Now the challenge for us is that we have a culture that
absolutely likes to turn every success
story into a universal story of genius.
TREVOR NOAH: Yes.
Right?
So you founded Facebook, and now you
can solve world hunger, as if those have anything
to do with each other.
So that is a problem of the culture.
But I don't think it has to be that way.
And I actually think one of the good things about Twitter
has been how many people have been willing to model learning
in public so that other people could see that it doesn't have
to strip you of your status or your position,
that learning can happen without you flailing about.
I think I'll miss that about Twitter.
As in it's gone? You think it's--
No, it ends eventually. Listen.
Oh, OK.
All social media apps end.
Right.
There'll be something new, obviously.
But I don't know that anything else would
be able to capture-- that was one of the best
things about Twitter.
It was a space for people to see
different kinds of genius--
TREVOR NOAH: I like that.
--that you could be good in one domain,
still learning in another domain,
that you could risk it.
It is something that I enjoyed doing, personally.
And I think that it was never the app's intention-- listen,
people turned it into that.
That is not what it was designed to do.
TREVOR NOAH: You think that's because we innately want
to do that as human beings?
I do.
I have to believe that human beings
are fundamentally curious.
And social media is only popular because we're curious.
We go there because we want to see.
We're nosy.
[laughter]
We want to rubberneck the world, you know?
And so what it has done, it's made it profitable--
made our curiosity profitable.
TREVOR NOAH: Right.
And it has made our curiosity politically polarized.
But that doesn't mean that curiosity is bad.
I actually think it is a thing that separates
us from the rest of--
well, no, the animal kingdom.
I don't want to throw shade on animals.
Animals are good. [laughter]
TREVOR NOAH: They are pretty curious.
Yeah.
They actually are pretty curious.
Yeah.
I think we're apes if we're lucky.
Right.
You know?
But it does separate us, I think, from, like,
a brick wall. - It does, indeed.
It does, indeed.
Shade to all the bricks has been thrown.
That is correct. [laughs]
- The animals have been spared. - The animals are good.
I could talk to you for hours,
but that's why we have your books.
That's why we have some of your tweets.
Thank you again for joining me on the show.
Thank you for everything. - Always happy to see you.
Everything, I really appreciate you.
- Thank you. - Thank you so much.
One more time, Tressie McMillan Cottom, everybody.