Jack Dorsey's TED Interview and the End of an Era

[CousinIT]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/jack-dorseys-ted-interview-and-the-end-of-an-era

. . .Good things probably still happen on Twitter, from time to time, but the dominant narrative about the platform today focusses on coördinated harassment campaigns, incentivized outrage, and an inconsistently applied moderation policy. While some tech leaders, particularly those operating social networks, are beginning to acknowledge the downsides to what they’ve built, the unfortunate reality is that the tools are working exactly as designed. Social networks, like most tech products, are built for growth, engagement, and acceleration—and are optimized to generate returns for investors and capture as much market share as possible. The toxicity of Twitter is testament to the functionality of the underlying system. To truly reform the platform would require a rejection of the industry’s fundamental values. It would look something like an implosion.

Dorsey has been talking about fixing Twitter for more than a year. As is to be expected, he takes a technologist’s approach to social problems. At ted, he focussed on systems, rather than on the demands of ethics or social responsibility, and talked about leveraging machine learning for moderation. (Like many tech leaders, he speaks about machine learning in vague terms, as if it were magic—a cure-all whose technological underpinnings are far too complex to explain.) He acknowledged some of the implications of optimizing for the “health” of the conversation: doing so would require rejecting many of the engagement metrics that drive product development across the tech industry. Twitter has been working with Cortico, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the M.I.T. Media Lab, from which, it says, it is adopting four new metrics—“shared attention,” “shared reality,” “receptivity,” and “variety of opinion”—to gauge conversational health. “Implicit in all four is the understanding that, as they increase, the conversation gets healthier and healthier,” Dorsey said. And yet the metrics, as described by Dorsey, seem largely value-agnostic; the content of the conversation is left out of the analysis. The “shared reality” metric, for instance, captures “what percentage of the conversation shares the same facts,” Dorsey said, not “whether those facts are truthful.” At a time when conspiracy theories are gaining traction across social media, it seems naïve to embrace a standard of conversational health that allows for mutual delusion.

. . .

I watched Dorsey’s ted appearance on my computer at home, toggling between tabs: Dorsey, clean-shaven and preppy, in 2011, lecturing about “The Power of Curiosity and Inspiration” to Stanford students; Dorsey, at Code Conference, in 2016, chatting with DeRay Mckesson about Ferguson, Missouri, wearing a T-shirt that read “#StayWoke”; Dorsey, on the “Joe Rogan Experience”—twice—this year, discussing ideological bias. Listening to him speak at ted felt like witnessing the end of something: the end of the techno-utopian period when social-media architects could speak eagerly about democracy and openness, without also mentioning the potential for enabling authoritarianism. Perhaps, also, it is the end of the mythos of the young, brilliant, iconoclastic tech founder. As Dorsey pivoted from non-answer to non-answer, it was hard not to wonder whether, despite his appearance of media-savvy calm, he wasn’t in over his head. Since the 2016 election, it has grown increasingly clear that allowing young, mostly male technologists to build largely unregulated, proprietary, international networks might have been a large-scale, high-stakes error in judgment.

That Dorsey is now expected to find a solution to unprecedented and unforeseen problems, on a platform designed thirteen years ago for narrow and relatively innocent use cases, seems darkly comical at best—an instance of refusing to learn from our mistakes. “He’s dealing with a scale of a problem that doesn’t have a lot of precedent in human history,” a programmer friend of mine texted. “It’s actually kind of scary that he comes across as so unstudied. I think ‘conversational health’ is a dodge. Twitter, and Jack, want to avoid taking positions on who is doing harm. But they don’t have that luxury at this point, because Twitter is such a megaphone.” Change will need to happen on a systemic level, as Dorsey noted. The extent to which this is possible, when the systems are not only working as designed but being rewarded for it, depends on the willingness of a public company to bet against its own future.

This Tuesday, a week after Dorsey’s appearance at ted, Twitter released its first-quarter earnings report. It announced that, in the past year, the number of monetizable daily active users had increased by eleven per cent; there are now a hundred and thirty-four million active users on the platform. At the news, the company’s stock soared. That afternoon, Dorsey swapped his hoodie for a suit, removed his beanie, and sat down for a closed-door meeting in the Oval Office with Donald Trump, who, earlier that morning, had tweeted that the platform was “Very discriminatory” against Republicans. According to the Washington Post, the President’s primary concern in the meeting was his follower count. Dorsey also took the time that day to call Representative Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota, to discuss a tweet by Trump, sent earlier this month, that combined footage of the Twin Towers on September 11th with out-of-context excerpts from a speech Omar recently delivered on Islamophobia. After the tweet posted, Omar received a host of death threats; Twitter did not intervene. Dorsey explained to Omar that the President’s tweet had not violated his company’s rules.

[Blue_Tires]

1. kick!

[Caliman73]

2. Technology always outpaces ethics.

Throw in profit motive and you get the basis for most dystopian films about the future.

I would love to see Star Trek TNG but we seem more destined for Bladerunner.

[CousinIT]

3. Elysium. n/t