Translator: Jim Taylor Reviewer: Denise RQ
Are we living in a post-fact society?
Sometimes it seems like we're never going to agree
not only on all the problems that we face in this world
but even on whether they exist.
Think about all those arguments
over climate change and crime statistics.
I think this inability to establish facts
stems from the divisiveness of social media
which whether we like it or not
has become the most important forum we have for public debate,
and it has changed mass media forever.
The constant trolling, those endless online arguments -
they impede our ability to reach consensus,
and without consensus, society can't co-create knowledge.
I say co-create
because knowledge has always been the outcome
of a communal process, of dialogue, and constructive debate,
but it requires an openness to new ideas,
a willingness to consider opinions that are different from our own.
Knowledge needs empathy and humanism.
I guess that's what's bothering me most about this current moment.
I feel as if we are on the verge of losing our humanism.
If that's the case,
we just allow those in power to dictate what the facts are.
I'm reminded of my time
living and working as a journalist in Argentina,
and this guy, the late Néstor Kirchner was in power.
He wasn't happy because the National Statistics Agency, INDEC,
was reporting rapidly rising inflation, so he took swift decisive action.
He sacked the senior staff, the upper echelons of INDEC,
and installed a team of loyalists to write in lower numbers.
Voila! Inflation problem solved.
Of course, anybody walking into a supermarket could tell
that prices were continuing to rise.
Private economists were estimating the inflation was running at 25%,
but INDEC kept insisting it was 8%.
And this may be uncomfortable as a journalist
because every time I reported the government's facts or numbers,
I felt like I was complicit in the propagation of these lies.
My headlines on Dow Jones Newswires came out looking like this.
But for all I cared, I might as well have just said this.
Néstor Kirchner it's not the first nor the last leader
to disseminate dubious information.
American journalists are grappling with a very similar problem right now,
but Argentina's experience
provides a stern warning of what's at stake.
Kirchner's wanton disregard for the truth
destroyed all confidence in the Argentine economy
so much so that inflation got worse.
Now, ten years later,
the new government is confronting rates as high as 45%.
It's a stark reminder
of the lasting damage that gets done to society
when governments abandon empirical sources of information
and instead, peddle in alternative facts.
But what is a fact in the social media era?
In the old era, mainstream media played a filtering role.
It would dictate and determine
the narrow range of ideas that were acceptable
for public discourse and knowledge creation,
so if you were an extreme right-wing white supremacist, for example,
or maybe an extreme left-wing Marxist revolutionary,
your views typically didn't get heard.
Now no one's in charge; everyone has a voice.
Anyone can claim anything is news,
and anyone can claim anything they disagree with is fake news.
So now it's up to us, the general public,
and not mainstream media
to decide what to believe and who to trust.
I think this new chaotic online society needs
for its culture to evolve.
Offline, civilization had millennia
with which to develop its norms and mores,
when to say 'please' and 'thank you, ' when to speak, when to listen,
which words are appropriate and which ones are so offensive
that they kill all prospect of constructive dialogue.
If we want this new society to move forward in the 21st century,
I think we need
a similar process of evolution to occur - albeit more rapidly -
within this new online society in culture.
But if we can do that,
if we can build positive feedback loops of open-mindedness and respect,
I think that social media can be a powerful force
for freedom of thought, innovation, and prosperity.
How do we get there?
The answers may lie
in the fields of digital currencies and blockchain technology
which is the field I happen to work in now.
There, the research focuses
on how we might use software algorithms and incentives
to guide communities toward consensus,
and the hope is that with that, maybe one day,
we'll create some algorithmic system
where social media is fairer, more democratic, and more open.
But let's face it;
no single technology alone can build a better society.
This is a human problem.
It's up to you and me to fix this.
So where do we start?
One of the right things to think about starting off
is how much this new system of mass communication
is fundamentally different from the previous one.
In fact, I would say social media is the most disruptive change
in our system of sharing information since Gutenberg's bible.
Just think about what the previous industry system was
when traditional news organizations would distribute information.
They would use physical infrastructure, printing presses, TVs, radio stations,
cables, satellite dishes, that sort of thing.
Now distribution is all about psychological connections.
If you want your social media messages to reach a wide audience,
you not only have to have a large social network
you have to craft your messages in such a way
they make an emotional connection with those people
so that they will retweet, reshare them, reblog them.
The pathways of which information now travels are built upon
an intricate fabric of synapses,
emotional connections, and biochemical triggers.
It's a completely different media architecture.
We just need to understand it.
It's a massive amorphous network.
There's no editor-in-chief in charge
dictating which content should go where at any given time.
There's a billion autonomous actors
deciding on what to do with each other signals,
and in the process,
producing new messages, new pathways, new signals, and so forth.
It's really difficult to visualize this system,
it's also really difficult to master it.
Yet, some people have mastered this new system,
it's just that if we were to choose
which people we want to lead us as we are braving these new worlds,
these people wouldn't necessarily be it.
If the number of Twitter followers you have
is the gauge of your power and influence in the world,
then perhaps the most important person in the world right now is Katy Perry.
She has 97 million Twitter followers.
That's more than the population of Germany.
Meanwhile, the rest of us congregate
in these echo chambers of like-minded views,
we share each other's opinions and confirm and reaffirm all these views,
but we don't converse with those outside of our group,
and as a result, we're not co-creating knowledge.
But I do believe this platform can be a situation
in which everyone gets a seat at the table,
in which we, the majority,
get to drown out power mongers like Néstor Kirchner.
It can also be a very powerful driver of innovation.
I like to think of social media as a giant global bazaar of ideas,
each of them competing for our attention.
The British author Matt Ridley likes to say
that when ideas come together like this
they have sex and produce interesting new offspring.
We're actually seeing this now in the open-source software world
where computer engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs
are tapping this large global pool of brains
to come up with new ideas and scientific breakthroughs
at a pace we've never seen before.
The biotech futurist Andrew Hessel formed something he called
the Pink Army Cooperative
which is a global volunteer network of genetic engineers
who are collaboratively codifying a new open-source cure for breast cancer.
The possibilities are incredible here when we tap into this innovative pool,
but the key is to figuring out
how this information travels, and changes, and moves around
in this really complex leaderless system.
Where is the order in all this chaos?
It turns out the best template we have
for understanding things like this in a leaderless complex system
is that of the most important leaderless complex system we have:
nature itself.
When Oliver Luckett and I
looked at the seven basic biological laws of nature
that living things have a cellular structure,
absorb nutrients, respond to stimuli, maintain homeostasis,
grow, adapt, and evolve,
we discover there are
some remarkable similarities with social media.
In fact, these laws can show us
how information grows, how networks expand,
and how this online community that we're forming
is behaving like a living organism, a social organism.
One of the key lessons that we took from this
was that we must resist the temptation
to censor content that we find distasteful.
So we can think of our culture a little bit like the body's immune system
which needs to be confronted with harmful bacteria and viruses
if it is to learn
how to recognize them as a threat, develop antibodies, and then repel them.
The same thing can be said for society.
We need exposure to a full range of ideas -
even really bad ones like xenophobia and racism.
In fact, I would say
that if we are to block out the bigots, censor them,
they'll just come back stronger like those antibiotic resistant superbugs;
but it's really hard to resist this temptation to censor.
This was evident last year during this huge Twitter fight
between Leslie Jones, an African-American actor and comedian,
and Milo Yiannopoulos, this alt-right provocateur.
Jones was subjected to the most horrible torrent of abuse
from 300,000 of the Yiannopoulos's rabid supporters on Twitter.
The language and the things that was said to her was so horrible
that she quit Twitter that day with this message.
If you are like me, you too would have been left wondering
what it means to be human in the wake of an episode like that,
and you might also have applauded
when Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter because of this.
But that act of censorship backfired.
Shortly thereafter, a 'freemilo' hashtag began trending.
He became a martyr, a free speech cause celebrity.
He even got a 250,000 dollar book deal from Simon and Schuster.
It's as if sexism and racism had won the day.
If you are like me, this is really difficult to accept.
So what are we supposed to do,
those of us who want openness, tolerance, and diversity
in our online world
so that we can build this huge pool of wonderful ideas?
Do we just have to sit back passively and wait for a culture to catch up?
No.
There are proactive things
that we can do - in fact, we must do -
to help build a healthier online culture.
We need to learn how to use this interconnected emotional system
to promote pro-social ideas around diversity and tolerance
so that they can compete with their anti-social rivals
in the marketplace of ideas.
We need to build empathy machines.
What do I mean by that?
Let me close by telling you about my favorite social media site,
one that means a lot to somebody
who spends a great deal of time in the wonderful city of New York.
"Humans of New York" is a Facebook page
that's made of a compendium of photos of ordinary people,
each accompanied by text in which the subject talks about
their life's loves, victories, failures, hopes, and fears,
and each item is typically met
by thousands of comments from people all around the world,
complete strangers wishing that person goodwill and support.
HONY as it's known, has 18 million followers.
That's what I mean by an empathy machine.
Brandon Stanton, the founder of HONY is your kind of everyman hero.
Why?
Because he's not exactly the sort of person you'd expect to do this.
He was formerly a bond trader on Wall Street,
and when he lost his job in the financial crisis,
that big dehumanizing global event,
this is what he decided to do.
Society needs to figure out
how to absorb new ideas again and co-create knowledge,
it needs many more empathy builders like Brandon Stanton.
So consider this an appeal to all of you:
each of us has a responsibility to be a humanist.
We must be agents of change.
We need to build empathy in our world, in the digital world, in social media.
And the time to start doing that is now.
Thank you.
(Applause)