Is social media destroying society | Tristan Harris interviewed by Vikas Shah MBE

chord cool well yeah like i said and the questions that i sent over was more of a menu than an absolute but but first of all tristan thank you you know once again for for your time today and you know congratulations on the incredible um netflix peace and for all the work that you're doing and i guess um the starting point for me to know humanity's always had a relationship with technology but it seems that the relationship we have with technology right now has changed in in actually quite um quite a worrying way so in your view you know when did the ethics or the nature of our relationship with technology go wrong yeah uh well first thank you obviously for having me and it's great to do this with you what we mainly highlight in the film the social dilemma is i'm sure if others could identify other points in history where we had um you know sudden changes where we had to be much more conscious of the technology we made um you know the level of harm that we could create with the technologies that we have engineered whether they were bio weapons or nuclear technology or things like this in this case though i think where our relationship to personal technology that surrounds and infuses itself with our minds and our attention and our daily way of making sense of the world and our daily way of making choices literally our moment to moment behaviors and actions and habits um you know so technology infused itself in a very intimate level with how we form our identity with how we form our relationships with how we make sense of the world out there and how we make daily choices about where our time goes that's what's sort of new in this personal phase of social media and smartphones in our pockets if we're focusing on that and then specifically what went wrong there was technology starting to influence and manipulate human biases and weaknesses and overwhelm our limits our human psychological limits in ways that we weren't aware of and that was happened that's been happening both because of a business model that is entirely based on manipulating human weaknesses which is the advertising and engagement more specifically this engagement harvesting attention surveillance capitalism business model and then also accidentally through let's say email overwhelming our instincts for social obligation and reciprocity we feel like we have to get back to everyone so in both cases technology has both consciously and intentionally and also unconsciously manipulated human weaknesses and you can view most of the harms that we are now experiencing from addiction distraction mental health issues of teenagers depression isolation polarization conspiracy thinking deep fakes virtual influencers and the inability to know what's true as all each one of them examples of influencing a human weakness whereas if i go back in time and i say okay when we invented hammers um hammers didn't influence or manipulate yeah they didn't have a business model that built a voodoo doll avatar version of the hammer owner and tried to predict and manipulate and show you things that you should hammer with and show you videos of home construction and do-it-yourself home projects to get you to use your hammer every single day a hammer is just sitting there patiently waiting to be used as we say in the film so that's really i think the the new phase that we are now in and the most important thing to say is that the net cost of that if technology is systematically undermining human weaknesses both consciously and unconsciously it's degrading um the quality of how we live and make sense of the world form our identity our relationships and make choices in a time when we have very little time to make good choices like the urgency of the of our need to make really good effective choices with climate change timelines or dealing with racial injustice or dealing with inequality or fixing our economic paradigm we have less and less time to make increasingly consequential choices while technology is degrading the quality of sense-making that informs the choices we make wow and you know i was speaking with actually geron lanier says hello oh great i need to catch up with him yeah he was um they were on fire watch yesterday unfortunately but he he sends he sends his best um and and one of the things that he was talking about was almost the checks and balances and so i thought i'd i'd bring this up with you which is if we take an example from example you know the biotechnology industry when bio was going through this massive process of innovation and gene editing and so forth there appeared to be enough checks and balances in the industry and in policy to prevent agrarious uh problems from happening you know it seems that that hasn't been the case in technology why in your view were those checks and balances not there to prevent the kind of harm we're now seeing i honestly think it's just negligence it's it's um you know one decision made after another you know many of my friends i should say were early in the days of facebook i mean within the first 150 people uh many of my you know my friends in college started instagram um and others i knew were early at linkedin and at youtube and so i'm familiar with the culture of the people who were there at the time and the kinds of things i would hear when you had them over for dinner or saw them at a coffee shop and you just hear this sort of um slow um accrual of just minor decisions you know oh let's make a news feed work this way versus this way because twitter showed up and we have to compete with twitter that was facebook in 2009. let's um add a share button you know because this sort of retweet thing is going really wild let's make it so people can instant reshare because twitter did that and we want to compete with them and we need to get the same level of engagement as them um then pinterest and instagram show up and oh we should really focus on images and instagram stories and so it's just this slow set of decision you know rather they're fast decisions but we're they were being made according to competition and and market dominance uh and what would work as opposed to what would be good for us and there was no notion that we would need some kind of system of checks and balances to make sure that there is what now facebook calls responsible innovation and they have a team that works on that and i'm sure they're doing their best and i know the person who's running that team um who came from the world economic forum and that's all great but the problem is we're we're now 10 years into this mass warping of the human collective psyche because of the lack of checks and balances and so even as we start to correct those things what's i think more important and what scales to the challenge that we find ourselves in is the world collectively waking up from this mass delusion this mass warping of the human psyche that makes us really confused about who we are what we really believe and where we are in our trajectory as a civilization because technology claims to be showing us a mirror uh and just showing us what we already have in our society you already had those conspiracy theorists you already had those racists you already had those attention seeking kids in your society as opposed to technology was showing us a fun house mirror with a feedback loop that was showing us the most egregious parts of society because they were better at keeping our attention and then growing those parts over time because they kept working so the fun house here gets more and more warped and then we've mistaken that for an honest and neutral view of of who we are wow and do you think that there are mechanisms that can help to write our course of action because we're now at a stage where so much control of these platforms rests in the domino in transnational companies you know the biggest companies that have ever existed by most standards and even if we are to change policy and even if we are to engage in public education do you think that there is still room for hope in terms of being able to kind of pull some control back to humanity from from what's happening right now because it seems seems like an urgent public health and cultural and civic need well of course i agree it's existentially urgent the thing that has given me the most hope and i've been working on this i mean jaren and so many others doug rushkoff and you know so many other activists and thinkers in the field have been working on this for a long time and i think many of us probably feel burnt out from screaming from the rooftops for so many years but what gives me hope recently um is that netflix just released the numbers on the social dilemma film that more than 38 million households saw the film in the first 28 days it's incredible which and it was released in 190 countries in 30 languages was number one in india number one in canada number one in lebanon and lots of other you know countries yeah and so you know when you when you say okay the only way this would ever change is if the state binds the predatory forces of the market and the technology extractive sort of logic of surveillance capitalism and it's very hard to get the state to bind the market when you don't have a population a culture that understands why this is so harmful and for the first time literally as recently as the last month we now have a global culture that is much more aware that we need to actually check these companies and so we're starting to see that i think with the pressure that's existed and now the recent hearings um the anti-trust hearings and the hearings happening tomorrow in congress in the u.s and many other governments canada u.s australia in california that are starting to i think take these issues more urgently and you know i think one of the issues which is obviously very relevant this week and next and we've seen it ourselves on this side of the pond was around kind of the way that this isn't just affecting our you know our individual mental health which you know i don't want to downplay that's an extraordinarily serious uh issue but we're now at a stage where actually we're seeing state actors and other individuals seeking to actually you know destroy civil society you know and i don't think that's an exaggeration so how can we as a society as citizens as voters as a participants build resilience to this because in some ways the information that we're seeing as as you know lay people is very hard to distinguish from truth and untruth yeah um the best examples of this when we talk about foreign manipulation and foreign interference which by the way people always complete that phrase with foreign interference of elections we shouldn't talk about it that way as you said it's actual foreign interference in culture it's it's other adversaries coming into your country and deliberately provoking and exacerbating tensions that can drive culture wars and civil war we're seeing this across the african continent we're seeing this in the u.s we're seeing this in places in europe and some of the developing countries some of this is also happening organically like ethiopia and myanmar so it's it's it's incredibly worrying one metaphor we use first of all to describe the state of affairs is after world war ii the great powers couldn't launch any direct wars with each other right so you can't launch a direct war kinetic war with countries that have nukes and so you know that's no longer possible but you still have countries that are adversaries to each other and so they use other forms of warfare narrative warfare financial warfare economic warfare we're seeing that in the trade war with china and the u.s but then most recently the kind of warfare that's become popular is cultural or informational warfare where i don't have to attack your country because i could use your existing tensions in your society and play up both sides to the point where you hate each other and your entire society falls apart and i don't even it costs me far less this is a critical point the u.s can spend billions of dollars building a wall or spending a trillion dollars to reinvest in its nuclear arsenal that's like a bank higher spending a trillion dollars to hire the you know to surround their bank with physical body body guards the biggest buffest bodyguards you could ever have meanwhile exactly well meanwhile you install a computer system in the bank and you don't change the default password and everyone comes in and starts hacking you to death that's exactly where we find ourselves that you know while we've been obsessed with protecting our physical borders we left the digital border wide open and our society runs in a physic in a digital world so you know if russia or china try to fly a plane into the united states they'll be shot down by the department of defense and the f-35s we spent a trillion dollars to build um an event and meanwhile if they try to fly an information plane into the united states they're met with the facebook and google algorithm that runs an auction so they get the cheapest price to reach if you know the minority audience of african americans or something like that and it can and they're met with a white glove that takes them right to the target and as you said you know one of the differences is that instead of militaries fighting militaries we now have militaries uh or military motivated agents that are able to activate civilians in each other's countries to hate each other um you know recent examples we know from about a year ago russia targeted um u.s veteran groups um vietnam war veteran groups to stoke up anti-government sort of sentiments and make them more skeptical of government and so this is just going on you know around the world and it's incredibly dangerous and really is one of the understated points in the film is how as you said even though mental health and teenage you know depression issues are enormous and how it affects the mental health of everyone i think the biggest issue is really that this is a global national security threat and one that we're not even spending billions of dollars to protect against and do you think that we as humans as humans but do you think we as we a society need to change our views on how we hold truths and so and the reason i brought that up is you know so for example here there's been recently a lot of activity as there has been in the us around people saying well when the vaccine comes for covid am i gonna take it or not and and even people who people have built such entrenched positions now based on the infamous information they're seeing that they are not prepared to change their opinion because now that doesn't appear to be an arbiter of what is and isn't true you know what do you think we as individuals can do to help change that course of action because even if we were to be able to wave a magic wand today and create a new business model that was far more holistic and far better for humanity we still have several billion people with deeply entrenched and manipulated positions that we need to help yeah so i think um what you're what's really right about what you're pointing to is we often misplace the spotlight on we need really good access to information or truth as opposed to we need trust which is the highway upon which information comes to us because you can imagine a person having perfect access to libraries and high quality sources of objective information but as we know people don't if you don't trust the information because it disagrees with your worldview it doesn't matter how much perfect information you have access to and what technology has been deliberately doing and what foreign actors have been doing is been eroding our capacity to trust anything uh right before this conversation i was in a conversation with our team about the hypocrisy of apathy and distrust we say that oh i don't trust anyone or any of that information but then we or i say i don't trust any politicians but i'm still voting for my guy and it's sort of a hypocrisy because we say we don't trust any information but we're obviously not running tabula rasa you know i'll believe anything new when i see it when we say we don't trust information it means that we still trust some core set of beliefs that are inside of us i think that this is like the new manhattan project for trust that we really need wow yeah how do you rebuild trust in a world that has been deliberately in which that's been deliberately been attacked um and again it's it's a cultural foundation you know we talk about foreign actors um you know nuking or harming the each other's electricity grid so i can shut down your electricity grid but what what if i can shut down your trust grid you know that's we have to treat this as as critical um cultural infrastructure much like we trust much like we take the electricity grid as critical yes you know societal or physical infrastructure wow is it you know as you were saying that it made me remember and it's the same on us banknotes when you have the promissory statement on your banknote that says i will hold this this entitles the bearer to a hundred dollars and the only reason that that works is because we all collectively agree that that is true and if information is now the new currency rather than money arguably then who holds that promise now who is the arbiter of that promise and i think that that's a real challenge now do you also think that we can still can we still have a culture that delivers such innovation with appropriate business models because the argument always is you know you you know without these business models you would not have these amazing products but in some ways it's almost do we need these products because of the damage they're doing you know what's your view on whether or not a more humane model could hamper innovation yeah um [Music] let me think about that for a sec so the first point it's kind of like this claim that well how else would we be able to give so many people access to information and um it's so hard hearing that because it's sort of like coca-cola saying well what if you want us to take the sugar out of coca-cola how else would we feed the world diabetes right right now we have informational diabetes where we have found a business model where i mean we have just to be clear it's not just that we have access to these services is that facebook and google especially specifically facebook with its free basics and facebook operator solutions has literally gone gone in and digitally colonized countries under its infrastructure so they'll do a deal with a telco provider in kenya or in myanmar or in ethiopia which will crowd out competitors and so when you get a new phone it comes in with facebook and it's actually free to access facebook while it costs money to do the other things so now all the sort of and you have this going on in countries where let's say in ethiopia you have six major languages and sorry you have major languages online and i think 90 or something dialects in the country and you have a world where all the quote unquote information that's being provided is user-generated content because up until that time people didn't have any content online in their language so now the the largest source of content in your local dialect is actually on facebook so there is no fbi.gov there is no you know um uh what's another good source like you know public library version of the information you just have basically people asserting things with user-generated content where you have sort of the inmates are running the asylum and we have our own crazy biases being the basis of what other people believe in a world where hate has a home field advantage in the attention economy because the more outrage and incendiary sort of material that i post i get more rewarded and people mistake and trust things that are more rewarded as it must be more true if everyone's talking about it so in general we have a system that rewards kind of the worst aspects of our information society occurring in countries where again we were able to deliver this for free oh look at us look how great we are meanwhile you know i think we're going to look back at this and say we we gave them you know instead of free basics we gave them free blankets just like the settlers did and had invested with smallpox wow yeah and kind of and i'm kind of conscious of your time with ultrasound and and i realized we've you know this is an extraordinarily serious situation we've covered you know when you've eloquently covered many of the challenges that we face but are there also any beacons for hope that you're seeing in terms of you know so i'll just give you one practical example you know when i'm teaching at any of our universities here the generation coming through now seem much more cognitively equipped to deal with this which isn't great for us but it's great for them but are you seeing any beacons of hope as well that actually make you feel positive that we can resolve some of these tensions before you know the internet causes yet another genocide because frankly it's astonishing that that is actually the truth and has never really been accounted for yeah um there's a joke i believe within facebook that if you want to know which countries um will have a genocide in a couple of years just look at which ones have free basics um two years prior um because those are the countries in which again we grew up with the kind of inoculation the epidemic inoculation of i'm guessing you know you're about the same age as i am uh you used to get email chain letters from people that said you know this is this crazy belief and you know this this conspiracy theory and ten people first before they know and we went through all that we went through the sort of ways that people could hack and manipulate um email and things like that social media is new but when you go into these developing countries i mentioned ethiopia for a reason because many people are saying this is going to be genocide number two for facebook after myanmar um you know you have a situation in which user-generated content being the basis for for what people could even believe as as true or information at all is really really dangerous as a model and so to your question i think that there is hope we just have to actually recognize that viral user-generated content is not a safe way to operate the information environment of a society and we need a responsible and conscious and humane culture to actually run a bottom-up decentralized information society that involves changing certain things we have to recouple power with responsibility the clear example here is in general as we increase people's power and we hand each person a greater and greater amount of power into their hands we have to increase the amount of responsibility and safety that we also couple with that power the simplest example is i can go to the store and buy a pair of knives and i don't have to you know for my kitchen and i don't have to show an id or get a background check but if i go to buy a gun in the united states at least i have to get i have to show my background my id and get a background check if i want cruise missiles that are going to reach another country i have to go through west point and become part of the joint chiefs of staff so we have to increase the level of training wisdom and ethics the more power that we have when you take this to the information environment we're giving 15 year olds the power to broadcast to the same number of people as we had local television stations and local newspapers yeah but those 15 year olds aren't required to take media ethics classes to correct mistakes or to recognize the influence they have over the global society so we sort of decentralized yellow journalism so to fix that we have to recouple power with responsibility and we have to ask fundamental questions about does a a virality-based system where the premise is that anything you post could go viral to a billion people tomorrow if enough people reshare it is that actually safe is there a way to guarantee that that can work in a way that rewards um not just the good things but also on the bad side doesn't create and so so much fragility uh and harm into the social fabric that we that society is unsustainable and to do that we have to change the business models and i think the thing to your point i i do feel hopeful for the first time because with this film reaching again 38 million households which is incredible how big was the gay rights movement or the civil rights movement before they were able to get major laws you know we now have a coalition i think that has to be brought together and that's kind of what we're working on next at the center for humane technology wow thank you trista and i've got there's a lot of people in the kind of philanthropy community and people like that who read thought economics quite regularly and i'm really actually you know one of my real hopes is by publishing this interview you know i'd love it if we can get those philanthropists engaged with the center because frankly i think if you're a philanthropist and you want to make a positive impact on the next generation the work that you're doing is one of the most impactful ways of doing that so i'm hoping that that also channels more donations and funds towards your activity and i'm just extraordinarily grateful for you being able to spare the time today oh absolutely i really appreciate that i mean just to underline your point i think this is the problem beneath other problems because as a philanthropist if i care about inequality or racial justice or climate change all of those things depend on what are people thinking about and attending to uh and what do they believe about the world is there actually even a problem of racism in america yeah well if i just saw one side of the news i don't think there's a problem if i saw another side of the news feed i do think there's a problem yeah and and so this is the issue beneath other issues and i think if we can get the world to realize that we can all come together because no one wants a world where it's impossible to agree and democracies just fall apart and collapse well well the point you mentioned about ethiopia is quite relevant because so i you know thought economics is basically a hobby that went rogue i have a bunch of businesses and a foundation you know we one of the largest charity that we set up is called in place of war which is in 30 countries now working in conflict zones and you know if i examine root and branch approaches to the to the issues that we're seeing in conflict zones a lot of them are tied back to viral content that is what creates the um you know the the discrimination against disabled communities in uganda it's what's perpetuating the racism and gang violence we're seeing in our work in south africa it's what's allowing the gangs to continue to control communities in colombia and so if we're to be truthful about root and branch we have to fund the kind of work that you're doing and i think that's why it's so important and you know if we can separately to this if we can collaborate in any way i'd love to pick that up as a separate conversation as well tristan i really really appreciate that because and um you know one last thing just to confirm what you're saying so critical for people to get is the rohingya muslim minority in myanmar didn't have to be on facebook to be persecuted by those who were on facebook seeing the news that said we should go kill those rohingya the um muslims in india that were lynched because of whatsapp didn't have to be on whatsapp to have life or death consequences because of other people who are reading that on whatsapp and just like us in the united states those of us who may be reading this says well i don't use youtube or facebook or tick tock but you still live in a country in which your election will be decided by those who are using it and and then for all of us that um you know maybe i don't use facebook in brazil but if the entire country of brazil uses facebook and fake news causes bolsonaro to be elected and bolsonaro wipes out the lungs of the earth and the amazon which then shortens our timeline on climate change that affects everybody in the world whether or not we're on facebook or not so it's really important people see the interconnected consequences that this issue matters to you even if you don't even use these services yourself which is obviously a small number of people yeah and frankly it's better for the oppressors if you aren't on the platform because it avoids you being able to have a voice in the conversation in uganda we were in the north of uganda on the sudan border it was so it is i almost got bloke i almost got land mine trying to find a mango it was hilarious but anyway one of the most disturbing parts of that was the amount of chinese heavy engineering projects combined with the amount of anti-climate change content being fed through social networks there and the correlation between the two meaning that the chinese were able to effectively get cultural consent for environmental damage by proving by showing that climate change was wrong and we saw that all across the north of uganda because that's where the um heavy hydro and coal projects are would you send those examples are there examples online of that i would love to see yeah so what i'll do tristan is our chief execs called ruth daniel she's um i will get ruth to put together a few examples um yeah i'll get to email them to me and i'll send them on because i'm i you know i kind of get it third hand from the travels that i'm doing with her but she's at the coal face and i'll get her to give you those with any evidence that we have as well that would be so powerful you know i'm about to do a big interview with joe rogan and i'm trying to collect especially these climate examples and for people to understand the way that and this is a good example of manipulating it in a foreign context where people would be more okay with climate i'm sorry with uh chinese sort of energy projects and mining projects if they have climate disinformation sewn to them at the same time so that would be yeah yeah i will i will do that and also kudos on on joe rogan that's going to be pretty epic and and frankly um a wholesome dose of common sense after kanye was on j robin a couple of days ago which was frightening yeah so cool all good well thanks again trista i really enjoyed the conversation thank you that's really great yeah and i'll i'll be in touch on the in place of war stuff and as soon as the piece goes live i will be in touch and if there's anything you want changing on there i've got my team here so we can get that done within half an hour usually thank you so much that sounds great that sounds awesome i really appreciate it we covered really important topics for people and um thanks for doing the interview it's really great to meet you too likewise and i hope to meet you face to face at some point in the future i hope so too take care right have a great day thank you

Channel: Thought Economics

Views: 749

Keywords: Ethics, Technology ethics, Social media, Social media ethics, Technology, Google, Society, Psychology

Id: LyF5CRmbzFg

Length: 31min 59sec (1919 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 11 2021