The Internet Will Die and So Will You | John West

23:48I think we're still much more at the whims of not just our fellow man, but of the kind of implacable forces of the world around us than we like to believe. I live in a small town. I live in Kingston, New York, just outside Kingston, New York. And it's a very small town. And I sometimes think about how it's all just people doing stuff here. I slipped on a walk and dislocated my kneecap and I wasn't able to move. And I was calling for help, but no one could hear me. And fortunately, I had my Apple Watch on and I was able to call for help. And the volunteer fire department came out and pulled me out on an ATV to the road where I was taken to a hospital.

24:23And it was, you know, it was a scary experience. It was a loss of control for sure. And I think about this volunteer fire department all the time as like this kind of remarkable institution that was built up to provide support in a world that is full of contingency that is sometimes, you know, doesn't treat us well. I think that like we build up institutions for two reasons. One is to offer real support. And then the other is I think to paper over the kind of horrifying and also a beautiful fact that we are all going to die. And when we are online and we have sanded away the edges of moving from place to place online or of reacting to someone online, I think we are, in essence, acting as though we are truly the masters of our lives and fortunes when we are very much not.

25:13Demetri Kofinas:How long has this been a subject that you've contemplated? My first book was called Lessons and Carols, Meditation on Recovery was the subtitle. And it was about my own struggles with mental health and addiction. And I think I was a pretty happy-go-lucky kid. I was not plagued by questions of existential dread. But I have really struggled with pretty severe mental illness that really changed my relationship to death. and I think it was an open question for a long time of whether or not I wanted to live and whether or not I was going to take steps to kill myself. It landed me in the psych ward more than once.

25:52I'm doing great now. I just want to like preface this kind of like, I'm doing very well. I'm quite happy. I feel very content in my life. But that struggle, I think, really changed my relationship to death because it opened the door. It became not something that, not a given, that life was the choice and became really hard to ignore that one way or the other, I am going to die. I think that that really changed how I thought about my life as I became more and more aware that one of the reasons that I struggled was that I believed that I had no limits, that I could continue to... I mean, I think I knew, obviously, I had to sleep, I had to do things, but it always frustrated me that I couldn't just keep going and keep creating and keep whatevering, you know, working or whatever the thing was.

26:40And I've developed a lot of unhealthy relationships to work into productivity because I thought I could just do it. And I think at a micro level, it's important to realize and recognize our own limitations. And, you know, I'm never going to run a marathon. I'm never going to, you know, there are all sorts of things that I'm just never going to do at this point in my life. And that's okay. And the biggest one of those is I am not going to live forever. I think that that is the one that stands behind all the others.

27:06Demetri Kofinas:What is the connection between depression and this realization or this desire to do everything? I think I wanted to prove, not just to myself, but to the world around me, that I was worthwhile or worthy. And in so doing, kind of like bolster my self-esteem. And when you peg your self-esteem to something outside of yourself like that, I think it's always risky. And especially so when you have kind of a melancholic mind to begin with. Also very common for a young, ambitious man. How old were you when this happened to you? When you first began to become depressed? It was in high school and I struggled with it off and on through my 20s and maybe into my 30s a little bit too, but it has changed.

27:49And I don't doubt, and I think part of knowing my limits is I don't doubt that I will suffer another depressive episode again. I like to believe that it will be less severe and more manageable and more weatherable as I've gotten better at doing things like sleeping and eating and drinking water and doing those life things. And then also meditating and praying and being in a relationship with people around me. All of those things help. But I also think that there is an element that is maybe unchangeable, some part of my DNA or brain chemistry that is just the way it is. But yeah, it was high school when I first got super depressed.

28:26And the first time I went to a psych ward was in high school and then again in college. And those experiences definitely, I didn't pick up that I had to slow down until my late 20s, but that was the start of that process.

28:40Demetri Kofinas:So I would love to ask you more questions about this, but we're here to talk about your latest book. So maybe another time. I found the portion of the book where you meditate on place and belonging to be relatable, both in the physical sense of home and in the digital sense. And this is where the internet comes back again into the conversation because it really does feel like a place to me, at least the internet that I grew up on with its AOL instant messenger and its clunky websites that would slowly render in front of me or the familiar sound of my dial-up modem. I mean, how important is place and one sense of belonging in the story?

29:18Demetri Kofinas:And is there a sense in which people can or could feel at home on the internet in some of its various spaces or places? I think part of the reason I view the web as place is because I am integrally involved in constructing parts of it, right? Like I made a homepage for myself. I made, I don't know, like I've made a million little websites that are really only for me and a few friends. And that's been such a wonderful experience. That's it. I know people have places online, whether it's Reddit or Facebook comments of groups. You know, my partner and I and some parenting groups that I've gotten pretty involved in.

29:55And it's been really wonderful to feel like that's a place, even if it's on this platform that I don't trust or whatever, right? I think it's been really wonderful to be on this Facebook community sometimes. And that can be a really generous place to be. And it can feel like a place in part because you go back and you see the same neighbors. You go back and you see the same norms and tropes replayed over and over again. And I think that there's something about the repetition of social norms that feels homey or home in some way.

30:22Demetri Kofinas:Well, so physical places change, right? I mean, I mentioned that I lived in New York City on and off since the year 2000, and I've seen at least four or five different phases in that city's life since I was a boy, and it's still changing, but it still has physical permanence in a way that the internet doesn't or can't. Is there something about our increasingly digital existence, and in particular, our time spent primarily on internet platforms and inside these walled gardens that leaves us more dispossessed and I guess homeless today? And is that especially relevant if we expand the conversation to include AI?

31:02Yeah. I think I've often struggled conceptually with gentrification. I am often a gentrifier in communities that I live in, whether in Kingston, New York, there's a housing crisis in Kingston, New York. I was in Boston before, not Brooklyn. But I think there's a lot of anger among people who have lived in Kingston for a long time, that there are all these people coming from the city in this post-pandemic moment, and they are buying up all the homes or renting all the homes. And that means that there's less space for other people. And I think about this loss of agency over the community that you are in as one of the hallmarks of, homelessness is a good word for it, right?

31:43Displacement, I think is another. And I think in some ways online, we are always at risk of displacement because we own, we do not own the communities that we are members of very often. You know, you, you see it in the sense of like the blogosphere is, was a different place in part because people ran their own blogs, although that went away pretty quick as blog spot and these other posting providers came into being. But I think there was this kind of moment that I really think about a lot when the place of the blogosphere was held down by a lot of small actors operating in community with each other and with the rules of the road set by open standards, which are kind of like the roads.

32:22RSS was Gretajav and 12th Street was the Google Reader. And then when Google Reader went away, they ripped up 12th Street and all of a sudden, the people who lived there had to find new digs. And I think that the displacement online that we feel is about a loss of agency. I think it comes back to that loss of agency. When we change our own communities, I think that feels really great. When we don't have a say at how those communities are changed, I think that's what feels like displacement.

32:49Demetri Kofinas:Yeah, I think that's spot on. I mean, I think that the early web was more empowering. And the early blogosphere felt very much like we each had our own little islands and we connected with each other. But the modern internet feels like one giant river and we're just all thrown into it. and oftentimes the sensation is one of drowning. So how do you feel like AI? So let me take a step back and say this. I feel like the golden age of the internet was post Google. Until Google, the internet was this rich Amazonian jungle with thousands of tribes living right next to each other that couldn't communicate with each other because they didn't speak the same language.

33:23Demetri Kofinas:They couldn't even find each other. They didn't even know they existed. Yeah. And then Google changed that because it made everything findable. But as Google evolved, so did its business model, and then social media came. And it, as you have said in the book, shifted the center of gravity on the internet. First of all, tell me what you meant by that when you talk about social media. How important was social media in particular and the advertising business model? And how important is that evolution for the nature of our online relationships and how the internet works today? Yeah. I think social media, which sometimes feels like an app name and sometimes doesn't.

33:58And I actually think that that conceptual rubberiness or slipperiness to the word is important in terms of how I think about it. You know, you had different epochs even within social media, the MySpace era, which felt very different than the News Feed Facebook era, which felt very different than TikTok, which people call social media. And yet the follower graph means very, very little on there. And so there's this like element of, I think social media, I guess what I'm trying to say is I think social media itself is a fuzzy term. And the shift that I think, if I could go back and edit my own book, I think a shift that I would want to draw a lot of attention to is the moment when it went from being about, I follow you and I see your posts to I follow you and an algorithm sits between you and me and decides which posts I see.

34:46And I think that that moment is when the center of gravity truly shifted. Although I will also say that the idea of an open follower graph remains something that I think would be a really wonderful and potentially generative way to experience the web. If instead of having it locked in place, it was a portable graph. To overcome the switching costs. Exactly, exactly. It's kind of one of those classic, like, you know, we think about markets. I think I am often predisposed to think poorly of markets and want to decommodify all sorts of things. But actually, I think that there's a useful thing that competition could offer on the web.

35:19And it would be wonderful if it were possible for other entrants to come into the market and try their hand at social media networks. But I think that switching cost that you just described just makes it really, really hard to overcome the inertia of Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever it is.

35:35Demetri Kofinas:How do you feel like the nature of that monetized intermediation has affected our sense-making abilities? I think so much. And I think it's interesting. I've been using or trying to use an RSS reader. I think it's called River. I can't remember exactly what it's called. But the idea is it kind of would choose your own algorithm for how it mediates your RSS feed. And you can set all sorts of very personalizable things about it. And you get back like, you know, this post from the drift, I'm going to read it first. This one from the random blog I still follow. I get that, you know, that one going to hang around longer on the feed or be upranked.

36:12And it's very powerful to have these algorithm recommended systems. But I also think that like they are the servants of two masters all too often. They're the servants of the users who have real desires, but they are really driving revenue for whatever company has built them. And that oftentimes is in tension with what I actually want.

36:32Demetri Kofinas:Well, I feel like that's also a powerful way of describing the shift that's happened in the last 20 or 30 years on the internet, which is it went from being one that was focused on servicing the users to being one that was focused on servicing the advertisers. And that the modern web works the way that it does because we are there as sheep to be sheared, as cows to be milked for these giant corporations. I mean, would you agree with that? I do think so. And does AI make that worse? I mean, in some ways, AI, I feel like AI holds the promise of improving the epistemic outcomes of the internet. Because social media is not there to inform you, it's there to engage you and to generate more engagement and more time spent on platform so that advertisers can milk you more, or so that they can milk the advertisers who sell their stuff to you.

37:20Demetri Kofinas:AI is judged on a completely separate, or from the user standpoint, is judged on a completely separate set of criteria, which is essentially like quality. What's one vector of it? Quality, predictability, accuracy of information. Is that a function of the technology or is that a function of the fact that we don't yet have a wrapper or a business model that's going to monetize it and monetize it according to whatever those incentives will be? just as social media started off being a social form of media and a social network and became basically a pipeline for advertising. Right. I think that we have not yet seen the, to use Cory Doctorow's word, which I think is a useful word in gentrification of AI in quite the same way that we have of the platform technologies, which are now have pivoted quite hard toward away from user interest.

38:09Although I will say, I think that they would argue that they are just revealing the preferences of their users in these kind of market system that they've set up, I would dispute that. But I think that that's what they would say. I do think that we have yet to see how AI is going to be monetized in this way. But I think AI is this wonderful, it can be a really wonderful technology. I mean, I'm very torn about a lot of AI, which maybe came through in the book. I don't know. But like - I think it did.

38:33Demetri Kofinas:I think it did actually. I think you did a great job of both highlighting its efficacy and its value, but also stating where it could be sort of problematic. I think where people often get caught up is they fall either or on the topic. Yeah. Yeah. And I think AI is never going to live up to the promises of its detractors or its proponents. I think it's probably true about it. I think we'll always be somewhere doing something weirder. That said, I think one of the things I'm most excited about AI for is the way it has empowered, I think, a more experimental and creative way of using the web. So I made this thing called MixTab, which I would have never made without AI.

39:12I vibe-coded quite a bit of it. I'm an experienced software engineer, but I don't have the time to make this. And what I made was a tiny social media site where my friends and I can have bookmarks, and we click a button, and it creates a new edition of a newspaper that we share and we can talk about in our own space online. I just made that in like a week, and I would have never done that. My friend, who's not a coder, made a little way of talking to me and to another friend about what he's watched. It's like a letterbox, but just for three people. And he just made it. Like, why not, right? And I think that there's this kind of like, well, why not just make it?

39:45A feeling that a lot of people are having right now that really, to me, feels a lot like the early web did. I shudder to think what will happen when some enterprising AI company decides that, well, what if we just tweak the model to hawk whatever the product is that we're advertising for in line with the recommendations that they give in a chatbot? Or what's going to happen when we actually have to pay the full token costs of what we're doing? I mean, I think it's going to be very expensive. That said, I have a pretty top-of-the-line MacBook, and I'm able to use local models quite effectively.

40:18I think there's something really beautiful about the idea of a vector space with all of our human knowledge that we have accumulated and put online for decades and decades being not just accessible, but queryable. I mean, it's an exciting time to be a technologist, even if it is a somewhat terrifying time to also be a technologist.

40:36Demetri Kofinas:How do you think this changes search and discovery on the internet? I hope search as we knew it isn't dead. Wasn't it already dying? It was already dying. I used to go on Google and get great search results. Now I just get a bunch of sponsored crap. And I always try to remember to scroll to the bottom of the page where the best results are rather than the top, which is how Google used to work. I think about the way that people have been appending Reddit to their search queries in an effort to get the Reddit results for things because that's more trusted oftentimes than the results that are just natively given back from Google.

41:10And I think that one of the reasons that that appeals to me is it gets at this idea that the internet is still a social place. and Google in offloading. I mean, we are way far away from PageRank, which was the algorithm that was written, I think, originally that kind of revolutionized Google's search results. We're pretty far away from that now. There's a lot more going on when you make a Google search. And I think that in some ways, the more social and authentically human you can peg things to, the better it'll be. I read a fantastic book by C.T. Nguyen about gamification. I can't remember exactly what it was called.

41:49The Score, I think it was called The Score. And it was all about how metrics and the kind of reductions we make when we metricize things and quantify things make it possible to have large-scale institutions because they make decisions portable from context to context. But then they also have the flip side, they have this horrible thing when they reduce everything down to numbers, which is itself really horrible. I think that in the best case scenario, the web could be a way to, and AI could actually help synthesize and make human scale conversation and meaning more portable. I think, unfortunately, that's probably not the way the AI companies are thinking about their products.

42:28I think they're thinking much more about how can we win or take all this whole thing. But I think that if I were going to append Reddit to the end of my search result to make it good again, the reason that that works is because I'm going to try to find what people are actually saying and not what an algorithm that is heavily gamified is going to tell me is the right thing to choose or look for.

42:48Demetri Kofinas:So speaking of meaning, what would you say is the difference between information or structured information and meaning? And what role do humans have to play in all of that? I think meaning is something we bring to the world. It is not an independent fact of the world outside of it. I think data or information maybe could be something that is external to us. There's information theory about what can be carried and things, but we make meaning. And I don't know that that's like a falsifiable distinction that I'm drawing. I don't know if there's a way that you could convince me that that's not true or a way that I can convince someone who holds the other position that that's true.

43:22But I do really think it's an important facet of what I think makes us essentially human, that we are the meaning makers.

43:29Demetri Kofinas:I feel like that's also central, though, to the debate of whether or not AI is conscious or AI is intelligent in the way that human beings are intelligent. Yeah. I think that there's a Wittgenstein quote that the questions, oh boy, I'm going to mess this one up, but it's like, you know, the questions which used to vex me, you know, he basically, I can't even remember the paraphrase quote that I was going to do, but basically Wittgenstein is saying, you're asking the wrong questions all too often. That like these philosophical problems that used to vex him, they're actually answered by not asking the question.

44:01I think that it is not a very useful question if AI will achieve super intelligence. I think it is a very useful question to wonder, Like, what are the specific capabilities of artificial intelligence systems going to look like? And, you know, Emily Bender wrote this book with someone else, I think, about, called the AI con. And one of the things that I took from that book, which I disagree with in parts, but one of the things I took from the book was AI is a set of technologies that has been rolled together and packaged kind of as artificial intelligence. And it's a bunch of very different capabilities, oftentimes not even in the same systems that we're talking about when we say artificial intelligence.

44:35I think it is very useful and generative to wonder and try to shape those capabilities. I don't know if it's actually a useful question in terms of actionable insight to wonder, is it super intelligent? In fact, I think it might be a category error. And a lot of the fights that we have over, is it a person or is it not, are kind of missing the point. And maybe I'm just revealing my own bias against it being a person, but are kind of missing the point of, well, what is it actually going to do? and what are its capabilities actually.

45:08Demetri Kofinas:Well, I felt like I found also your musing on this topic to be relatable in the book, which is why I brought it up. I have one more question that brings us back to the conversation we're having about social media, because you wondered openly in the book what the run up to the Iraq war would have been like if we had the modern internet media ecosystem that we have today. Now we're not exactly dealing with the precisely same analogy with Iran, at least not yet. So I don't know if it would be good to use this as an example. If we had today's internet in 2003, or in 2002 in the run-up to the war, or in 2001 with the 9-11 attacks, even better, honestly, to use that example, what do you think that would have looked like and how would that have manifested in consensus reality?

45:56man i i'm glad that we did not have the distribution method for the conspiracy theories that we have now under 9-11 i mean 9-11 truthers were a thing i remember them and i'm sure they're still a thing but the kind of grime of that experience you know i i would go places and i would see people you know jet fuel can't met steel beams was the refrain and i it And it was young enough that I was like, oh, that's kind of weird. But now I think it would be a lot more dangerous. I think we would see that spread farther and faster and stranger than before. I thought about a lot in the book, which I think I didn't pin down as much as I wanted to.

46:34I don't think I still haven't gotten there where I can pin it down. Is this idea that one of the reasons technologies are not as destructive as they're oftentimes advertised as, you think about whether it's the novel, which was going to ruin society television, which was going to, you know, every technology comes with this promise of, oh no, what's it going to do? Writing. Plato famously said, we're going to all forget everything, which we did, kind of did, but like that didn't matter, you know? Anyway, I think like one of the reasons that technologies are oftentimes less damaging than we first think is that we have time to develop social norms around their use and how they're deployed.

47:13And I think that the internet and AI and social media all moves so much faster than our norms are capable of keeping up with. And I think that's one of the things that makes them somewhat different than, say, television, where we had more time, or definitely the novel, or definitely writing, which took a lot longer to be deployed.

47:29Demetri Kofinas:But you also did a good job in the book of highlighting why people are susceptible to conspiracies, in part because while they may get the facts wrong, they get the feelings right, to quote Naomi Klein in her book, Doppelganger. And there's also an institutional factor, which is that when people are being regularly gaslit by the official purveyors of truth, or even more consequentially, when their longstanding beliefs about the world, things that they held to be unshakably true, are suddenly, as was the case during the 2008 financial crisis or COVID, revealed to be untrue, or even worse, to be outright lies, they become highly susceptible to being reprogrammed, into believing an entirely new reality that is just as, if not more absurd or otherwise unbelievable, simply because they need something to hold on to.

48:23Demetri Kofinas:And I think this is because people in the end cannot live in a perpetual state of uncertainty. They need to believe in something that's concrete, even if it's not true. And part of the challenge, I think, of the modern world is that it reveals that truth is far less concrete than many thought it was. That it isn't as easily definable as we told ourselves that it was. Yeah. I think about how hard it is at the journal to say only true things and not even imply false things. And how much work goes into every article I write and every article that I'm even touching, where it's like, I want to say only true things in this article.

49:02I don't want to imply anything false. It is so hard. And I think it's an underappreciated fact that knowledge production is not easy and that it is thorny and that there are oftentimes, not value judgments exactly, but like there are oftentimes judgment calls made about like, can we get that far? Can we say that thing that we think is true, but we're not positive yet, you know? And that knowledge construction being a tenuous human thing that we have to do, I think like I oftentimes, I look at like the AI company, like there's every so often I see a thing that's like, oh, you know, we're going to solve journalism with AI and we're going to have the AI, which doesn't have these biases, like supposedly doesn't have these biases, solve journalism in some meaningful way by being more truthful and more whatever.

49:49And I think you have to be an embodied person with other embodied people at some level. And you have to be in the muck trying your best to produce real knowledge from that. And that is a really, really, really hard task. And I think it's underappreciated just how hard it is. And something I underappreciated until I got into journalism was just how challenging it was to say true things. And I think that you're right, that people need something that they can hold on to. And for me, it is much more about process and less about outcome. So I tend to be much more trusting of, like I try to trust not that the people who are saying the thing are right, but I try to trust that the people are, when they are doing a process, that is more often right than not.

50:30I mean, that makes sense.

50:31Demetri Kofinas:Of course that makes sense. I mean, that's the key insight, right? Like, that's why you can develop a protocol for assessing credibility that isn't contingent on your having prior knowledge about a given topic. Of course, having prior knowledge about the topic is helpful, but the process is what matters. And the better you are at assessing that process and the protocol that someone else is bringing to the conversation, the better you are at assessing out who is a good faith thinker and who isn't. Yeah. In the years leading up to the pandemic and during the pandemic, there was a part of the American left that became sort of epistemically tyrannical.

51:11Demetri Kofinas:They were heavily invested in proselytizing what they viewed as being certain canonical truths and everyone had to accept them. And if you didn't accept them or you were skeptical about them, you could be slandered, you could be canceled, you'd be called a conspiracy theorist, take your pick. And in response to that, it feels like a big portion of what we now think of as the American right has gone in the opposite direction. If something is officially true, it must be false. Everything feels like a conspiracy and everything is an opportunity to slaughter one sacred cow or another. And there's a kind of what feels like a catalyzing force and an unraveling energy at the center of society and in the sort of organizing mythologies of the modern world.

51:56Demetri Kofinas:I don't know how much of that is really technological or how much of it is just made worse by technology and the platforms that we've been speaking about today. And I don't know if you've seen Christopher Nolan's recent depiction of the Odyssey. I haven't, but I did watch a thoughtful analysis of it by Ezra Klein on his podcast recently. You're nodding, so maybe you did. What did you think of it? And how does what he had to say connect to this, do you feel? It's funny. I actually listened to that, the podcast episode where I think he read his, I think it was an op-ed. I don't know. I listened to the episode about the Odyssey from Ezra Klein this morning when I was making breakfast.

52:35So it's funny that you bring that up today. I think, I do think that there's a certain nihilism at the heart of a lot of digital communities right now. Agreed. And I don't know if it's actually, I don't think it's exclusive to some of the actors on the right or on the left for that matter who hold this kind of like, To me, it's like a dead-eyed view of the world that is very sad. And I don't think it's, I mean, I think it is oftentimes right-coded, but I don't know if it's actually, I think it can be kind of an apolitical phenomenon in a lot of ways. I think about some reporting that some colleagues did that I was able to help out with a little bit, which was about these pro-anorexia online communities that encourage young girls, especially to lean into their anorexia.

53:15and thinking about that as like, just I was in some ways more horrified by that than any political actor I'd seen before. But I think it's the same impulse in some ways that is like lean into the things that society has for so long told us are like good. You know, the idea that like you should be healthy and they're saying, no, you should not be healthy. It's not saying actually it's healthier to not eat. It's oftentimes saying, no, you should not be healthy. Like it is a virtue to not be healthy. I think about the term vice signaling, which I always thought was an interesting term, that there was this idea on the left that people were virtue signaling.

53:52And now you have this kind of weird inverse of it where people actually gain credibility by saying increasingly distressing things that even they might not think are okay, right? That they don't believe. But then maybe they do end up believing them at some point down the road. I mean, that is a thing that I definitely see online a lot of, is this kind of inversion, where it used to be you would say the right thing and maybe you wouldn't believe it. And I actually think that that is the lesser of those two sins by quite a bit. To say something you don't believe, but you think it's a good thing to say, versus say something that you don't believe, but you think it's a bad thing to say.

54:25I would much rather have virtue than vice.

54:27Demetri Kofinas:So that's also a really great point. I actually heard an episode a long time ago on a podcast where they talked about the virtues of hypocrisy for exactly this reason. And I feel like this is also instructive because so much of the complaint that has produced the current moment in our politics is a result of the outrage over the hypocrisy displayed for decades by people in power, be that Nancy Pelosi going maskless at a hair salon at the same time as she was lecturing us about lockdowns or numerous other examples of official corruption by politicians in the US and Europe. And as a result, many people have been drawn to this strongman archetype who doesn't give a shit and is open about his corruption, as has been the case with Trump, because at least we didn't have to put up with both the corruption and the lecturing.

55:18Demetri Kofinas:But in the case of Trump, that corruption has gone so far beyond anything that persisted under previous administrations that we've swung from a condition whereby hypocrisy was necessary to hide malfeasance to one where corruption is totalizing and might makes right. And it's really all about power and who has more of it and who wields it, which I don't know that that's really relevant to the larger conversation about the digital world. But I do think that the inability to arrive at consensus truths and observations about epistemic reality and the important role that internet platforms and their business models have played in enabling this are an important part of the answer for why we are here.

56:06I agree. And I agree, especially the idea that the internet... Well, I think the internet has enabled some of this vice signaling, for lack of a better word. And I think that the idea that power is the coin of the realm and that there aren't other ways of thinking about how we should act. I think that that is in part the destruction of societal norms around goodness and virtue, I think have been driven in part by the internet. And I don't know if it's the case that it's the internet would always have been this way, or if it's the particulars of the internet we have now? Like, is it the case that we're just too connected and that when we are this connected and able to create sub-communities and sub-communities of sub-communities and sub-communities of sub-communities independent of location that we're going to get these kinds of like extreme reactions?

56:59Is it a driver of extremism that we have this fracturing world online? Or is it the case that like the particulars of the internet we have now have driven it this way? I mean, I don't know. I don't know what it means that, look, like I haven't done a rigorous analysis of this, but I see a lot more antisemitism on X now than I did on Twitter before. And I don't know if that contingency of like, had Elon Musk not bought this platform and had not dismantled some of the content moderation and would I see that phenomenon? And again, I haven't done a rigorous analysis. Oh, it's not just on X. It's everywhere.

57:33Yeah. It's everywhere. Yeah.

57:34Demetri Kofinas:And that's because it's good for engagement. It just appears Morgan will bring on people like Nick Fuentes or someone recently who wrote... And I'm not saying that he shouldn't bring them on, if he's going to challenge them. That's not my point. My point is just to say that these kind of explosive topics are good for engagement. And that's what drives the modern internet. Yeah. And the engagement algorithm as... I made this kind of pointless thing called leaves of grass talk, which was Leaves of Grass, the famous one by Wildwood Men. And I took it stanza by stanza and I embedded each stanza with a AI model.

58:06And then I made a little engagement algorithm. So the longer I spent, I dwelled on each stanza, the more stanzas I would get like that. And I thought it was just a dumb exercise that was not going to work. And it actually kept me engaged. I mean, it was remarkable that like, we have this almost content neutral way of understanding the world, but it has content ramifications for the content we have. And I think that that like, and the power of it, the way it exercised control over my psyche, even on something that was not at all, it was, it was like a poem from the 19th century. Like, I don't know, It works.

58:38It's very powerful.

58:39Demetri Kofinas:That's why the framing of free speech versus censorship was always such a bad framing. And it's gotten so much play, but it just never applied to the digital world. Certainly not to the one we live in today of one of platform economics and mediated conversations, because everything you say is ultimately amplified or suppressed based on the economics and other sort of decisions of the platforms and their algorithms. Yeah, the idea that there is a neutral algorithm that we are tweaking to produce results that we want or don't want, right? Like, it's crazy. Like, it is not the case that there is a neutral algorithm that would equally amplify voices on the left and the right.

59:17That is a desire you might have. Like, you might want to, like, create an algorithm that does that, but that is not the default state of an algorithm. An algorithm is going to have biases one way or the other, whether it's towards engagement or towards your friends or toward your, you know, like, there are going to be ways that the construction of an algorithm, which is a constructed thing, will, by dint of how it's constructed, impact some voices more than others. And that is just the truth. And so I've always found it interesting. I think there are examples of free speech infringement on the internet.

59:47I'm not trying to say that that does not exist as a category. But I think platform-level manipulation of algorithms, I would not call, it's not like a censorship thing. It's something else. And I don't think we have good words or good frameworks for it yet.

1:00:00Demetri Kofinas:It's about values, though. So I, If we had the internet that I would prefer, it would be one that would elevate truth, let's say. That would be one of the core metrics of success. How truthy is this statement? For some people, that's not important or that's not what they value. So it's really a reflection of values. And the modern internet and the modern state of discourse on social media reflects the values of our society embedded in the algorithms that promote or suppress the voices of the people that use the platforms. John, this was a great conversation. I really enjoyed reading this book.

1:00:33Demetri Kofinas:Again, I emailed you when I first started reading it because as I said to you in the beginning, I was brought in under false pretenses. I thought this was going to be a book about the internet. It wasn't exactly about the internet, but I also kind of was. So if people are interested in reading it, again, the title of the book is The Internet Will Die and So Will You. The book publishes when? September 10th. Okay. So they can pre-order it when this episode comes out. Also, if they're interested in learning more about your previous book. That one is titled Lessons and Carols, A Meditation on Recovery.

1:01:02Demetri Kofinas:If people want to follow you, read your other work, you're also a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. How can they do that? I'm active on Blue Sky and LinkedIn and Instagram, sort of. I'm John West at all of those places. Well, thank you so much for coming on, John. Thank you. If you enjoyed listening to today's episode and want to join in on the conversation by becoming a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q &A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events and dinners. You can do that at hiddenforces.io subscribe. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to info at hiddenforces.io and I or someone from our team will get right back to you.

1:01:48Demetri Kofinas:Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at Kofinas, and you can email me at info at hiddenforces.io. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.