Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday
It's hard to get people on the internet to agree about anything like it's hard to get them to agree about
complicated subjects like how to pay for and deliver health care and also it's hard to get them to agree about
tiny things like whether to call a gif a jif.
But the one thing everybody on the internet seems to agree on at the moment is that the internet kind of sucks. Like Samuel
Ashworth wrote of Twitter "the thing about Twitter is that no one who uses it needs an explanation of why it is the worst?"
It is an endlessly self-renewing bonfire of outrage and confusion.
And I think that's true not only for Twitter, but also for YouTube and Facebook and reddit
and so on. It's hard to get reliable news online and the news cycle moves so quickly that it's difficult to follow
complicated stories over time and the architecture of the social Internet often seems to lift up the loudest and most
divisive voices over more cautious and nuanced ones. Also lots of undeserving creators and creations reach large audiences
And then the backlash to those creators and creations is so hyper
intense that it creates a backlash to the backlash and then a backlash to the backlash to the backlash ad infinitum. First
I think it's worth noting that a lot of this isn't new like the Internet has always sucked or at least
We've always felt like it sucked.
I mean way back in 1995 the very first joke I made on my very first web
site was that the internet was made out of narcissism cat pictures and pornography. The more things change--
but the point is whatever Golden Age of Internet discourse people harken back to is inevitably misremembered. There's a lot
I don't like about today's YouTube
but that was also true in 2007 and 2010 and
2012 when the running joke online was that the only place on the internet worse than Yahoo Answers was YouTube comments.
Admittedly it sometimes feels like YouTube comments
never really got better so much as the rest of the internet got worse
but still we shouldn't
idealize the past. There have always been powerful people who misuse that power and there have always been people who feel powerless and
vengeful and use the cloak of anonymity to attack others.
But none of that means we should have to accept an internet that sucks, look
this is a complicated problem, and I am NOT going to solve it in a YouTube video.
I do think however that we need to look at the differences between
our goals as a species and the goals of the private companies that hosts so much of our public discourse.
All right imagine you work at a zoo and someone comes up to you and says I'll give you a thousand dollars every time you
get that lion to roar, maybe at first you teach the lion that when it roars it gets extra food.
But then over time you start to notice that the lion roars whenever it sees something weird
so you start to show it lots of surprising information. You also might notice that Lions roar when they feel threatened
But they'd learned pretty quickly that your threats were empty, so you'd have to vary them up.
You'd have to find a million different ways to make the lines feel like their lives were in danger
or their families were about to be broken up or their territory was threatened. Twitter is not
structured to make us better informed or happier--
it is structured to keep us on Twitter. The same is true for
Facebook and Netflix and Hulu and YouTube and cable news all of these companies want as much of our attention as they can get because
that is how they make money, which is what they exist to do.
I don't buy the argument that this makes corporations or the people who work at them evil
but I do think we need to understand
what corporations want so that we can know how best to tell them what we want. They want our attention,
and it is very hard to turn down the feast that they lay before us.
But if we refuse to roar on cue they will notice and they will change.
Algorithms and the companies that control them are big and powerful
but in the end each of us still chooses what we watch and listen to and read.
Your attention is powerful and it is yours
Hank, I'll see you on Friday.